Dalthnock: Indeed we can. Here's historical evidence.

Emob78: I'm not a religious person at all, but after many years I have accepted the idea that if you remove God or the concept of God from people's lives, then it becomes necessary for something to replace it. Social movements, cliques, military discipline, class warfare, something of meaning, something to belong to, something to strive for. When we abandon the inner, we embellish the outer. And ultimately we abandon all, for everything we've built to replace God has been inferior to the genesis of creation outside of our own limited minds and imagination.

Tower of Babel, indeed. Endless attempts. Endless failures.

Emob78: I'm not a religious person at all, but after many years I have accepted the idea that if you remove God or the concept of God from people's lives, then it becomes necessary for something to replace it. Social movements, cliques, military discipline, class warfare, something of meaning, something to belong to, something to strive for. When we abandon the inner, we embellish the outer. And ultimately we abandon all, for everything we've built to replace God has been inferior to the genesis of creation outside of our own limited minds and imagination.

Tower of Babel, indeed. Endless attempts. Endless failures.

Emob78: I'm not a religious person at all, but after many years I have accepted the idea that if you remove God or the concept of God from people's lives, then it becomes necessary for something to replace it. Social movements, cliques, military discipline, class warfare, something of meaning, something to belong to, something to strive for. When we abandon the inner, we embellish the outer. And ultimately we abandon all, for everything we've built to replace God has been inferior to the genesis of creation outside of our own limited minds and imagination.

Tower of Babel, indeed. Endless attempts. Endless failures.

kohlrak: Marcus!?

Dalthnock: I reached that conclusion, too. I used to make fun of religious people, but now i regret it. Deeply.

Most people NEED religion in their lives. Otherwise they will only fill that void with something else. Something worse.

Dalthnock: Who?

kohlrak: Marcus!?

kohlrak: If that were the case, why aren't there rallying cries behind Stefan Molyneux's book "Universally Preferable Behavior: A Case for Secular Ethics"? No, at the end of the day, it's neglect. During World War II, women had to work factories as men fought in war, essentially making stay-at-home-motherhood pretty unpopular. Prior to that, human evolution favored constant access to attention. We never recovered, and with the push for equal rights, you would imagine that stay-at-home-fathers would become a socially acceptable replacement, but they have not. As a result, parents who do stay at home feel the freedom to neglect their children, and parents who do work can't watch over their children. This is a form of abuse, although it's not tenable to avoid in today's world, but it does lead to forms of abuse that ultimately are avoidable.

And, mind you, i came to this conclusion even though i'm religious. Perhaps i'm just biased because i, and most others i talk to who were sexually molested as children, were ultimately molested by people our families knew and trusted, since they were unable or unwilling (like my stay-at-home, SSI bumming mother) to be there just to be safe.

ReynardFox: Everyone who caves to the mob, dies by the mob. Get woke, Go broke is not just a meme, it's a demonstrable truth. The vast majority of these people don't buy games, comics, movies etc. in any genuine capacity either, they just want to complain about anything they feel goes against their warped ideology. Pandering to the outrage crowd ultimately gets you nothing.

The kind of people who usually take offense to jokes like "did you assume x's gender", are the kind of petulant, perpetually offended snowflakes who have made something as ultimately unimportant as gender/race/orientation the central point of their entire existance, and pretty much deserve to be offended by it.

Also, PSA: Nothing is so sacred it can't be joked about or criticized, nothing, at all. The day you can't joke about something is the day that thing ultimately controls you. The contents of your pants are not a personality, differing opinions and jokes you don't like are not automatically hate speech, learn to deal with your own emotions and differing world views instead of flailing and trying to crybully everyone else into conforming to you.

I will end with a quote from the legendary Stephen Fry:

“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."

kohlrak: Count Dankula: he's been bugged almost every stream now over the "traps aren't gay" thing.

Enebias: Can we please axe these threads? Elcook? Employees? Someone?
Please, unmercifully butcher the first page of the general discussion, in this state it is indecent.

Emob78: I'm not a religious person at all, but after many years I have accepted the idea that if you remove God or the concept of God from people's lives, then it becomes necessary for something to replace it. Social movements, cliques, military discipline, class warfare, something of meaning, something to belong to, something to strive for. When we abandon the inner, we embellish the outer. And ultimately we abandon all, for everything we've built to replace God has been inferior to the genesis of creation outside of our own limited minds and imagination.

Tower of Babel, indeed. Endless attempts. Endless failures.

fortune_p_dawg: dude, that was deep af.

Dalthnock: I reached that conclusion, too. I used to make fun of religious people, but now i regret it. Deeply.

Most people NEED religion in their lives. Otherwise they will only fill that void with something else. Something worse.

kohlrak: You'll like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XvI6Y5Yq8o

richlind33: I think philosophy is vastly superior, as it encourages critical thinking; religion, on the other hand, stifles critical thinking.

Emob78: I've read some of John Locke, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, and others who have debated the concepts of secular ethics. Not an easy answer. Hell, our English forefathers were arguing over that some 800 years ago, even after passing the Magna Carta, the harbinger of modern common law and a guidebook for what sensible men might consider truthful morality.

I think it's from the darkness that we cause. Abuse in the home, war, all the things you mentioned. It's brutal, but it's also brutally simple when you think about it. Man is constantly trying to find ways to justify or add dignity to his own inequities. I'm not sure if we have or even ever will complete that attempt. I'm not sure we're meant to.

Achieving God-hood might seem a noble enterprise, but it's doomed from the start. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, they could all do with a little humbling. Man was never meant to play as God, and trying to define order in a preset universe of chaos can and always will fail. This is part of human geometry, something the gnostics understood, perhaps the Greeks and ancient Sumerians. But for some reason not modern man. We've removed our thinking brains and replaced it with a Google search engine. Not a good idea.