My question is....are there any stupid questions?? — Gingethinkerrr

Yes, there are. I think you know which they are, and also that you can formulate intelligent ones.

What interests you? What's burning a hole in your imagination? It doesn't matter if something's been discussed before - some of us are old and forget things; some like to rehash old arguments; almost everyone is up for a new perspective on popular subjects, and if somebody's not interested, they don't have to respond.

So - fire away!

That's the peril, Vera, our devices are too convenient. — ssu

Oh, I know that. And there is a far deeper down-side to convenience: they [somebody, some agency, some commercial interest - you don't know who] can keep track of you all the time. Know what you like, what your weaknesses are, what you'll probably buy - and they keep offering you the same kind of thing, so you may never - inconveniently - discover anything different, hear any dissenting voices, be confronted by uncomfortable ideas.

Books offer no positive reinforcement; they don't balk at making the reader cringe or cry or search his soul.

It happens that I do have a Kindle, though I can't take it to places where I have to wait because it doesn't hold a charge. On it, I have a couple of novels I haven't read yet and a reference book I dip into from time to time. They were a lot cheaper than hard copies+postage. For the same reason, we put all the books we write and publish in e-format before we get any hard copies. It's convenient and it's inexpensive. Money is a huge factor.

Health care is not a bad gig, with the population growing older and sicker by the day. But who knows whether these old people will be able to afford treatments or get insurance coverage; who knows whether inflation will eat their pensions; who knows whether Congress foreclose on medicaid....
better for young people to find apprenticeships in home improvement and retrofitting trades or munitions factories. But, of course, by the time the 16-year-olds of today get there, all those slots will be filled, and all the minimum wage service jobs will be automated.

Yeah, expectation, economic forecast...
When i was in high school, guidance counsellors were steering anyone with decent grades in math into engineering degree courses - about six years before the engineering jobs were all filled. When my kids were in high school, computing was the most promising career - about six years before programming jobs were outsourced to India and dropped to minimum wage.

Whatever we do to keep ourselves happy, are we doing it to mitigate the suffering that is life? — Arnie

I have. I hope you do.

I would prefer if Congress would pass a law to have high income earners fund college costs. — fishfry

Well, who wouldn't? But Congress and Senate are protecting high earners - perhaps because they themselves are high earners?

Both the Senate and the House have now passed a bill to block President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, which promises to cancel up to $20,000 of debt for millions of borrowers but has been held up by courts. CNN

So you'll probably get your wish: no matter how poor they are, educated people will be crippled with debt before they even get started.

A debt-driven economy has to grow or die. So it does both: grows and grows and grows for about 30 years and then crashes, redistributing wealth from the entrenched elite to opportunists, and then a big war bails out industry, kills off a lot of otherwise unemployed men, and then it starts growing again.
Zero growth would mean a stable economy with no investment, credit buying or surplus value in production; people simply exchanging value for value.
There is no reason for a population to keep growing, if birth control is available and women are free to control their own lives and bodies. There is no rational reason for a society to demand more and more beyond what its members need for healthy living. People could work less, waste less and worry less.
Zero growth in the economy might mean significant growth in personal fulfillment.

$559 billion transferred from student borrowers to the taxpayers. — fishfry

Student borrowers are taxpayers. The question is, which taxpayers are having to pay more? You say the working class; I say the high earners.
Would it be so very terrible if people making over $400,000 a year (many of whom are in the money-lending business) had to pay a little more so that the children of orderlies and fish-packers could get an education?

Kudos for taking the trouble; welcome to the rewards.

Ah yes, clear. Well, I get the gist, anyway.

No need to bring up martyrdom here — BitconnectCarlos

Or pogroms, or crusades, or conquests or inquisitions, or the wars between Protestant and Catholic monarchs, or capital punishment.... Of course not. Suicide for selfish reasons is the only issue regarding the sanctity of life.

"Fear" of what? — 180 Proof

Damnation by the god doing themselves in for selfish reasons; for escaping the nastiness he had planned for them.

Martyrs usually possess an overpowering "sense of purpose" which allows (causes) them annihilate themselves (and often others too) "in the name of" their tribal / sectarian faiths. — 180 Proof

I don't think Martyrs consider themselves suicides so much as warriors in the cause, whom their deity is calling to himself.

The distinction is clear enough to the faithful.

through fear

But maybe it's all wrong and it should be ignored and that in reality the idea that human life has value is really just a fiction — BitconnectCarlos

It surely seems so, if the behaviour of people who profess a religion is anything to go by.

So, no Christians or Muslims or Jews killed anyone, ever.

In the Netherlands today they are allowing a healthy woman to euthanize herself because is depressed. — BitconnectCarlos

But all the time the majority of the people believed in God, nobody committed suicide?
Or if they tried, did some god-fearing busy-body stop them and lock them up in an institution to suffer until god was ready to take them?
I knew of one such woman, institutionalized for years, making desperate attempts to die and being stopped each time, until she finally succeeded by stuffing her bed-sheet down her throat until she choked to death.
But nobody allowed her to euthanize herself, because life - as long as it's not the enemy's or an apostate's or a heretics, or a pagan's or criminal's or a beggar's - even the most wretched life, is sacred.
Can't fault the logic!

And they'll write better stories.

it seems you lack the intellect that others don't to even make a valid contribution to this. — Barkon

If anyone can parse the sentences above or below

well if that's word salad to you others of the less intellectual of this obviously-perfect world feel the need to make a statement in disagreement with me again, try not to base it on promiscuity of history of like-minded people, because that would obviously be a foolish debate, and I'd probably ignore you. — Barkon

they're more than welcome to it.

I don't agree with you — Barkon

That was always a given.

it seems you lack the intellect that others don't to even make a valid contribution to this. — Barkon

Another side order of word salad.

Wanting a game of cards to work so you use human intervention. — Barkon

Pragmatic; not mystical in the least degree.

Does mysticism really mean lesser than true? — Barkon

No. Mysticism isn't about truth or falsehood, fact or fiction, reason or logic. It's an emotional response to Nature, and has nothing whatever to do shuffling cards or theorizing, which in turn have nothing to do with each other. IOW, word salad.

Remove God and life can lose its sanctity quickly. — BitconnectCarlos

That right? All the time the majority of the people believed in God, none of them killed any other?

that's fine, as long as he's not making a profit.

This was a question that was asked during an interview. I had to answer immediately. "Yes," I replied, "For the greater good, it would seem the logical thing to do." — Arnie

So, you automatically assume that whatever humans need is 'greater' than what any other species needs. That's a normal anthropocentric response.
It's the kind of automatic response which condones clear-cutting of forests, strip-mining, dumping nuclear waste in the wilderness and spilling crude oil in all the oceans. For the greater good.
If you form your moral structure around what humans want, you can end up supporting a whole lot of damage to humans, both directly and indirectly.

Why should dogs have to die to save human beings? I know we are talking in the hypothetical, — Arnie

There is nothing hypothetical about it. Dogs have been killed and tortured for hundreds of years to promote humans' medical knowledge and research. But if that's okay, why not bull-baiting and dog-fights? Blood sports give humans pleasure. Is that also the greater good?
We do these things because we want to and we can.

If animals were produced specifically to create vaccines that would save humanity, perhaps that could be the slightly better take to it? — Arnie

They are. Not just vaccines; all research. The rodents bred in a factory have no other purpose or life than to be used for scientific experimentation. They never see the outside of a cage, for a hundred generations, expect to be injected or grafted or x-rayed.
Pretty much like the production of meat for the greater good [to be consumed by humans].

Is there even a "correct" answer to this? — Arnie

In the anthropocentric and Old Testament view, it's perfectly fine: all the world is ours to subdue, plunder and trash.
In some world-views, it's quite wrong.
You have to make up your own mind, but first it's a good idea to learn more.

Forum content on a database can be worth a lot. — Shawn

To whom? What for? I've never heard of this before. If you know more, please tell.

You convinced me. Let's transfer the legally contracted debt of people who signed for it, to those who never took out that debt, never saw any of the money, and are busy working while the kids are partying it up in school. — fishfry

That's not happening and nobody's planning it.

Fred has no job or money. He's a low earner. — fishfry

Well, at least he's not "vastly outearning" the hard-working people who will not have to take up the tax burden! Did he recently graduate from college, try to repay his student loan but didn't earn enough to cover the accumulated interest? In that case, he may be eligible for relief from some of the accumulated interest. On vacation, not.

Everyone can claim to be oppressed, especially if being oppressed gets them nice benefits in your communist paradise. — fishfry

Does that mean I shouldn't be on the workers' side after all?

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. — fishfry

That's what communism actually means - nothing to do with Stalin or Mao.

Don't hold your breath for human nature to change. That's the problem with communism. Humans. — fishfry

Well, that's the problem with every ideal.

Swathes of pains are beneficial for various reasons. — AmadeusD

Can be this, can be that... are not valid reasons for a loving god to torture the innocent.

The excuses come long after the fact and put into a different context from the indictment.
Pain may have the benefit of warning us that something is wrong with the body - but a clever creator might have devised a less unpleasant warning sign. Some pain can be necessary in order to prevent greater harm, but that is not why Jehovah invented trichinosis. Nor does being nibbled to death by piranhas cleanse a cow of anything but her flesh. Rapid growth of bones may cause pain, but it's not the pain that causes growth. Neither does drowning all the creatures in the world - even the little flat world of the OT - cause the tiny remnant of humanity to become virtuous: one of the first things Noah did after landing was get drunk and curse his son for catching a glimpse of his junk.

Then you can always fall back on "He's too big for us to understand."
Okay. In that case, he's too big and inscrutable to give us coherent standards of moral behaviour.

Do you think that other people with different experiences might be capable of forming such a concept? — Pantagruel

It's theoretically possible, but I have not encountered it in god-related literature.

Perhaps you lack the relevant experiences or abilities? — Pantagruel

Well, I dropped some acid in my youth, but all I saw was the Void looking back at me.

The point isn't even that you're finished by the time you're seven. Your brain's not even done yet. But you're set on your way and given the wherewithal to develop into something complete. What that will be depends on what happens to you, and of course on the choices you make, but how you make those choices is guided by what happened in those first years. — Srap Tasmaner

How does that give anyone a purpose?

Are we born and remain autonomous free agents? — Srap Tasmaner

No and no.

Rationally, I suppose, choosing our values and so forth, decade after decade? -- I presume that's a caricature of your view, so what's the real view? We are formed — Srap Tasmaner

The real view? At about age 2, children begin to assert their character (Their temperament is already evident at two months.) They test the limits of autonomy, dependency and external constraint. By 7, understand about truth and falsehood, justice and injustice; manipulation and control; power dynamics. Their personality is roughly formed and they know who they are (that's usually the age at which a child recognizes if they've been assigned the wrong gender) but they don't know very much about the world.

In the next 10 or so years, they learn about the environment, other people, their society and culture, their own status in that social environment and their aspirations. Somewhere between 15 and 20, they question the beliefs, assumptions and values of their elders, and set out their own philosophy. (This is why censors are so adamant to deny them access to literature that doesn't support the status quo.) Not all adolescents are articulate; they don't all write down their thoughts - many are and do. The less intellectually inclined act out their doubts and opposition. The opportunistic keep their assessment to themselves and watch for opportunities to take advantage of its weaknesses. The meek accept the prevailing system and go along. The most fragile egos escape into materialism, fantasy or chemical placebos.

but what's the nature of these — Srap Tasmaner

The 'nature' of moment-to-moment decisions? See problem, work out solution, make a plan, act on plan. See desired objective, work out path to desired object, make a plan, act on plan.

What's their origin? — Srap Tasmaner

The brain.

Do you freely choose what you notice? — Srap Tasmaner

You notice what affects you.

Do you choose what ideas occur to you? — Srap Tasmaner

You choose from the ideas that occur to you. (Must be a home invasion. Just a burglar. My teenage son sneaking in past curfew. The next door neighbor, drunk and come to the wrong door again. Shoot him! Just threaten to shoot him. Run away! Hide and watch. Wait till he comes up the stairs and push him off. Hit him with a vase.)

If you are moved by something you observe, something that changes your worldview or your values, did you choose to be so moved? — Srap Tasmaner

No, but you have a pretty good idea by age 20 what kind of something would move you and what kind would not.

Cherry picking teachers is misleading. A quick Google search on "how much to college graduates earn?" said that they make $50k their first year. "Average college graduate salary" yielded $67,786. — fishfry

Which is quite reasonable. Plumbers make about $60,000; a welder's average is $47,000. Still not vast, and they don't start out $50,000 in the hole.
If their graduate kids make a little more, they can buy their old parents a cruise of something.

Can you try to focus on the conversation? — fishfry

It's not been easy. But I learned some things.

What do Biden's tax cuts have to do with his illegal student loan forgiveness? — fishfry

Student loaninterest forgiveness for low earners.
Only that no tax burden of the kind you've been ranting about is being placed on the working class.

But still, you said you're a communist. Aren't communists supposed to be on the side of the workers? — fishfry

So long as the workers are being oppressed. Once social justice and balance are established, there are no sides and classes. Everybody shares the resources and contributes to the community. That means, every child has the opportunity to learn as much as he or she is able to and wants to, without penalties. A just society would have no such thing as student debts, or any other kind of debt-load that keeps growing, even while you're paying. A just society would outlaw compound interest and 90% of the other financial legerdemain on Wall street.

You're make a big show of defending the workers - represented by a skilled occupation, the holder of which probably considers himself middle class, anyway - while assuming that the working class is a static, unchangeable entity: nobody in, nobody out, beleaguered forever by white collar workers.
That's as gross a misrepresentation as that of NY crime and that of Biden's policies.

We don't actually have much capitalism anymore, we have an oligarchy causing unsustainable inequality leading to a revolution or a cyber totalitarian nightmare. — fishfry

That is the inevitable outcome, every cycle. Boom, growth, consolidation, wealth concentration, political corruption, bust, depression, protest, repression or revolution.

Maybe it's our job to elevate it. — BitconnectCarlos

We've done a bang-up job so far!

Would it be better for them to die slowly of old age? — BitconnectCarlos

That's what I'm doing and I consider myself lucky, so YES. Have you ever drowned?

Some pain can be cleansing. Some pain can be justice. Some can be necessary. Some can be for growth. — BitconnectCarlos

Bull. Shit.

It is him taking life - murder, right? — BitconnectCarlos

By whose definition? Are you at all familiar with criminal codes?

How do we judge the giver and taker of life according to human standards who operates outside of nature? — BitconnectCarlos

By rejecting him.

So are you rejecting the concept of god that you perceive as being advocated in the world around you, or are you rejecting the most reasonable concept of god that you yourself have been able to formulate? — Pantagruel

I am rejecting the concepts of gods.
Some that I've read about are less gruesome than others; some are even attractive in their way, but none are credible - and I've read a fair amount of mythology. The guy in the Bible was pretty awful in the OT, but he was at least in some kind of acceptable proportion to the people he harassed. Once the Roman-European Christians raised him way above his level of incompetence, he became both grotesque and absurd.
I have not formulated a reasonable concept of god, since that's an oxymoron, but I've both encountered and depicted some tame versions of the Christian one in fiction.

Do we also consciously decide which ideals to hold, and how passionately? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. Not all at once; over time, one observation, idea, judgment and commitment at a time.

"Give me the child till the age of five-- " you know the rest. — Srap Tasmaner

I do. Aristotle apparently said “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the foundations of the man”. Now that could mean he would observe how a child behaved between infancy and the age of seven to predict what kind of man that child would become. Or it could mean that in seven years, he could teach a child how to be the right kind of man.
Loyola perverted that to "give us a child till he's 7 and we'll have him for life", meaning that if they had control of very young children, they could program them to Jesuitism. (just boy-chidren, mind; neither of them knew a damn thing about girls).

Almost everything that matters happens when you are a child. — Srap Tasmaner

Then there's no point living past puberty, right?

Yes, that's a car -- not a human. We don't say that about someone who is deaf or blind. — BitconnectCarlos

No, we say that about a world full of blindness, leukemia and leeches.

How much life do they deserve? Should such a life also be pain free? — BitconnectCarlos

It's not about quantity. It's about punishing them for the perceived iniquity of one tribe of humans.

That is faith for you. — BitconnectCarlos

No, not for me! Pain cannot be the most wonderful thing to happen to any feeling entity. Faith may be able to find an excuse for any amount of cruelty; reason cannot.

Nor can God be judged by human standards. — BitconnectCarlos

What other standards are there? If somebody wants my admiration, they have to earn it.

He could, but maybe the suffering is for a purpose. — BitconnectCarlos

Faith can find an excuse for any amount of cruelty; reason cannot.

With this simple sentence, you've put yourself in the "God" position. You've now judged God and thus assumed the role that you know better about how run the universe. — BitconnectCarlos

No, just the tiny corner of it that we can see and experience. When your car stalls and you have to pull off to the shoulder, you can't help knowing that's not supposed to happen, even though you're not qualified to design car engines.

et's just start with the flood. God presumably kills a large portion of humanity. Was he wrong to do that? — BitconnectCarlos

The people, probably. The animals, definitely.

Religious people say God will give and take life as he does. — BitconnectCarlos

God does whatever he bloody well likes. That doesn't make it right by human standards. And it's the humans are expected to do all the praising and adoring. Can they, in good conscience?

So how much life should everyone have? — BitconnectCarlos

Killing willy-nilly is the least serious indictment. It's all the suffering inflicted on innocents who know nothing of good and evil that I can't forgive any sentient entity who did it. The bigger picture doesn't come into it: if the god is omnipotent, he has the power to reduce the horror in each pixel.

You don't really make choices about your blind spots, for instance. — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe not, but if it's not of supreme importance, we leave wiggle-room for them.

But it's up to us whether to call such stubbornness "principle" or "prejudice" — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think it is. We may have a theoretical grasp of the situation, but I, personally, can't understand it well enough to judge.

Exactly how to hold people accountable for prejudices they
grew up with, and may only dimly be aware of, is rather hotly debated these days. — Srap Tasmaner

When it comes to absolute commitment, dimly understood childhood conditioning is not a major factor. This kind of all-or-nothing decision is made consciously, with a head full of passionately held ideals.
I'm not particularly interested in praising or blaming, except when it's about causing harm to others.

We may firmly believe that some course of action would be "the right thing to do" and still not do it. Why? Who knows. — Srap Tasmaner

Lots of reasons. It's too difficult. It's too costly. It's frightening. We might fail and be humiliated.
Sometimes we opt for a compromise: do only some of it and then turn back; support the people who do it, while we stay in the background; do the next best thing; do three other good things to make up for bailing on that one....

So what appears to be principle or prejudice may be neither, but merely an inability to act otherwise, whether accompanied by an ability to think or choose otherwise or not. — Srap Tasmaner

Okay. But are all commitments like that? Just habit or coercive circumstance?

In the computer learning scenario you describe above, people read things mostly just once and have to work with that, — baker

Why? Once you've downloaded something, it's available all the time. You can go back to it, or parts of it, as often as you need to.

Which is the same thing that happens in oral culture -- one has one chance to hear something and has to make the most of it. — baker

Not so. A lay or ballad would be sung over and over; a legend would be told around the campfire on many nights; people tell their children the same story many times. Don't you have any young children? They demand the favourite stories, familiar stories, again and again. There may be minor changes from from one telling to the next, but stories from several thousand years ago are still being told.

The idea that has permeated the public school system for the last hundred years or so (depending on the country) was that all children should get the same basic education. Which meant that all children, regardless of their socioeconomic background, should read Homer and Shakespeare etc., study history in detail, mathematics to considerable intricacy etc., ie. the classical educational canon. — baker

I haven't seen much of that. Usually, the complexity and sophistication of the material is graded: basic levels of every subject in the early grades; heavier subject matter and more choice in the later ones. It's actually okay for the plebes to read Shakespeare - that's the audience he was writing for.

This has led to the plebeification of education and culture — baker

I can live with that. Actually, I can manage without patricians altogether.

Quite a lot of the reading people used to do was for entertainment, rather than learning. Reading a book is a private, solitary pursuit. It's possible we have less quiet, solitary time than we used. (I only read books in bed anymore, before falling asleep. Nearly all of my research is done on the internet. Since the advent of Covid, I haven't been inside a library.)
The pervasiveness of televised entertainments simply make it easier to be enjoy passively, in a way that leaves one's hands free to eat, or do tasks that don't require much mental effort. It's also a medium that people can share, comment on and discuss, having seen the same show at the same time. Even since television, there have times when one has free time, but "there's nothing on". Streaming gives us flexibility to watch a prime time show of our choice whenever in the day we have a free hour or half hour. Books are not always convenient; electronic devices are.

I didn't understand most of that, especially the part about a game.

For an individual, how do you make a commitment to yourself you can't back out of? — Srap Tasmaner

Jumping off a tall building would do it.
For lesser commitments, you don't; there is always the possibility of failing, chickening out or changing your mind.

How is this kind of commitment different from other choices we make and why do we do it? — Srap Tasmaner

I think maybe, to prove our resolution - to the authority (human or divine), to our fellow acolytes, and to ourselves. An absolute commitment is unconditional; if you want to be sure and to demonstrate that you won't renege, you have to make sure that you can't renege. Once the steering wheel is off, all further decisions are out of you hands; no longer your responsibility.

The botched and imperfect world we live in, full of design flaws and disease also seems to indicate sloppy work. And the fact that a god would design an animal kingdom where predation, torment and suffering are a constant necessity for most species to eat, suggests a love of cruelty or more sloppy work. — Tom Storm

That's the second reason not to believe in gods. Whether they're as powerful as the believers claim or not, they're not worthy of praise. I can't worship anyone who fails to meet my standard of morality.
The first reason was the stories believers tell about their gods.

I do not believe in gods. This is all it takes to be an atheist. — Tom Storm

Exactly!
The word was not coined by atheists, who were perfectly fine going about their business without a load of guilt or fear and without a label. The label was stuck on them by believers as an accusation - or a brand. So they said, what the hay, the shoe fits close enough.

As for gods punishing... Do you suppose they also exchange prisoners?

If you put it that way, that is the way it's put. (But it's still just living.)