Did this community just whiff /r/selfawarewolves
The same could be said of literally every single product that magically became way more expensive post pandemic for no justifiable reason.
As one who has never burned a book to the best of my recollection, I'm flummoxed by the pleading for respect of dogma.
It's one thing to be respectful of other human beings, in adherence to the social contract. It's quite another to demand respect for an arbitrary thing, such as a point of view.
For example, I refuse to knowingly use Apple products in my house and, by extension of the same principle, my family chooses to use products on offer by companies who respect the rights conferred by ownership rather than effectively leasing a device to me with provisions. If I am vocal about my distaste for the way Apple does business, and you happen to be an Apple user, I expect that you understand that I mean no disrespect to you, the individual. I don't care one whit what you use privately, provided it doesn't perturb my rights to act differently from you. Anyone who has had this conversation from either perspective knows that being an Apple user is practically a religion on its own, so I think the comparison is apt.
And yet, nobody is going to put up a serious problem if I smash an iPhone. People understand that destroying a physical object in protest is not meant as a personal affront.
Meanwhile, religions throughout history have committed no small number of human rights violations and atrocities that pale in comparison to burning a book. Nobody has ever caused harm to another human being by setting fire to a book in protest, unless they then threw that book at someone wearing flammable pajamas.
We need to start asserting something like Bibliocism, wherein all books are holy, and burning any of them should be condemned. There is no reason that my kid's early reader "Pat and Meg" should be treated with one iota less reverence than "The Quran."
As unfortunate as it is, there is almost certainly no such thing as hell, either. Sometimes, people who behave abhorrently get to live out their entire lives being hateful and influencing others to be the same way for the sake of superstition and fear, and then they die peacefully in their beds. Some excellent people get abducted and murdered. Innocent children are trafficked, starve to death, and die of causes that have been treatable for a hundred years.
There's no rationality to it, no fairness. It's just how it is. Armed with rationality, unclouded by paranoia and cult worship, maybe we can help a handful of others around us to see the mess for what it is and they can get some social comeuppance while they're alive to experience it.
I don't mean to yuck your yum, but this is a community supporting atheism, not supernatural revenge theory :)
They need to be convicted in trial and immediately shot in the back of the head, and then we can string them up above a bridge so the public can see the consequences of that kind of wickedness. There should be no excuse to not put these people to death.
I'm not sure there's any ambiguity about what he means, unless his words are to be interpreted the same way apologists interpret "The Bible."
Also, gods would first have to exist for anyone to belong to them, so I think we can assume that he belongs to none, just like the rest of us. Just a plain old, smooth-brained, garden variety, bigoted asshole.
Using Connect right now. What I really care about is a Frontpage widget like RIF. I'm holding open real estate on the main screen of my Android. Basically the first dev to have that and a decently usable interface (bonus points for a "black" mode) gets the space :)
I've been in IT a long time and building PCs for longer, but my debugging skills degrade in direct proportion to how frustrated I am by the problem. That usually starts off very high and gets higher as obvious things get checked off the list.
Evidently I still have some kind of problem, because the GPU just fell off the bus again... but I haven't had any frame rate issues in the last hour, so I think it's a coincident problem and maybe not related to the moth. I did just update a BIOS, so I dunno. Too late to worry about it tonight.
Rational thought has a lot going against it. Mostly an organized culture of fear with plenty of history and money.
I used to take immodium for multi-day concerts where I expected to be drinking a lot of beer. Last time I did so, it worked so well that I didn't shit for two weeks and stopped being able to sleep. Had to get to the doctor for a powerful laxative cocktail that really messed up my guts for another two weeks during which I still could barely sleep for different reasons. I'm not getting that month back.
Not sure whether I'm more tickled by the fact that the pieces had names or that you looked at the manual :)
Look forward to talking to you!