NoneOfUrBusiness

Relevant SCP.

Bluish white.

I’m not sure if it 100% counts, but probably this. It’s the kind of religious wish fulfillment I usually can’t tolerate, but the rhythm is too good. It’s in my playlist, but I absolutely wouldn’t listen to it in front of anyone who can understand the lyrics.

This doesn’t even make sense as pedantry because the “that” in their comment wouldn’t make sense unless it was the latter.

First, eat shit you imperialist ghoul. Second, yes, because Iran being a democracy sure stopped them the first time around.

I mean the Judeo-Christian god is also omniscient so he did so knowing they wouldn’t, meaning them eating the apple was the point in the first place. Otherwise he just wouldn’t have created the tree.

PS: I’m Muslim and this story is a bit different in Islam but I’m pretty sure I got it right.

Data theft? Data should be a public good where authors are guaranteed a dignified life (decoupled from the sale of their labor).

I’ve seen it said somewhere that, with the advent of AI, society has to embrace UBI or perish, and while that’s an exaggeration it does basically get the point across.

Nah those guys hate (gen)AI because it’s (gen)AI, or for other reasons that are ultimately intrinsic to the tech such as the intellectual property aspect.

AFAIK Lemvotes runs a private instance with a bot (???) as an admin which it uses to collect downvote information (as others have explained, the information is already there, it’s just private on the client side on most Fediverse platforms).

You’d be basically revolting against the capitalist ruling class, so organize and go on strike is a tried and true tactic.

No, primarily because of human rights, but also because they don’t really work as marketed. As seen from this map, plenty of places with much less draconian laws are doing comparably or straight up better to the Asian countries you’re talking about. The lowest drug use rates in the world are in fact in Sub Saharan Africa, followed by the Indian Peninsula and the Middle East and the rest of the Global South. East Asia isn’t high by any means, but it’s not low either.

Waste it doing random shit. If I was in your position I’d start getting through my watch and read list. Oh and learn a new language, that never hurts.

I don’t call anyone by their family relation except my grandparents, everyone else (including my parents) gets called by their name. That said this is absolutely not normal where I live and nobody does it other than me and my immediate-ish family. I think it’s because I didn’t grow up with, say, mom calling dad “dad” or anything of the sort.

/Middle Eastern

Guess again.

Yeah because those aren’t Western.

The word is “Western.” You’re asking about non-Western content, and the answer is: It is if you have more than like three members of your target audience, but that tends to be a tall ask around here.

Um… [Citation needed]?

Not a direct answer to your question, but people misspeak all the time, so there’s no reason that wouldn’t apply to their children. However, hurtful things are still hurtful, so “I didn’t mean it” is more of a statement of fact than a get out of jail free card.

A scam requires someone to make money (or some other benefit) off someone else. That’s the case with modern Christianity, sure, but generalizing that to all religion comes with a hefty [citation needed].

I’m much more familiar with the Christian version which presents god as perfect in an absolute sense.

Islam does too, but with less emphasis on the idea of benevolence. Most relevantly, Islam states that life is a test by God and therefore suffering is an inherent part of it, which is kind of my framework here (though I don’t assume that in my argument below).

Step on a Lego > hurts > not evil. Stick a knife in someone or like commit genocide > very clearly evil.

My point is that that’s logically inconsistent. A genocide killing thousands of people and an earthquake or famine killing thousands of people both leave thousands of people dead. Hell, even letting people die at all is suffering. Back to our postulates, pillar 2 states “his will is our reality.” When you get down to it, the only kind of world that would not run afoul of the Epicurean paradox would be a no-scarcity paradise with only 100% happy thoughts, and at that point we’d be looking at robots (or I suppose angels, if there’s a material difference), not humans. Worse, when you get down to it in such a world people would either lose the ability to even conceive of evil, or be prevented from committing it by an external force. Imagine if at the mall you always had an angel making you return your shopping cart, now multiply that by ten thousand times. Essentially we’re looking at a world of lobotomized robots, which to me doesn’t sound all that appealing.

is god not capable of creating free will without evil?

It might be possible in some outlandish alternate universe, but restricting the discussion to things we can conceive of, evil is baked into the concept of free will. As I argued above, take away the capacity to commit evil and you remove almost the whole breadth of human emotion and activity, by definition running afoul of free will. Perhaps most importantly, though

a god that’s aware of evil and has the power to stop it, but chooses not to, is himself some degree of evil.

at the core of this is the assumption that suffering is ontologically evil. This is very egotistical, but it also betrays a fundamental instability in the whole thing: Without objective morality (which immediately follows from the lack of belief in a creator), how can there be good and evil? This application of the Epicurean paradox assumes that evil can exist independent of a higher authority able to determine good and evil, so it’s a case of circular reasoning more than anything else. The Epicurean paradox can only be used to reject complete benevolence (which, well yes), not complete goodness.