If vaccines work as advertised (figuratively speaking; I don't watch broadcast television, and thus have no recent basis for comparisons) then people should, for the most part, be happy enough to get them. If, on the other hand, the "science" behind vaccines is predominantly the result of inter-industry peer pressure or the career equivalent, and pro-vaccine propaganda, like other capitalist propaganda, is designed to conflate an ideal with a product or service and the reality of vaccine technology is more akin to snake oil than a miracle drug, one would think that even still a majority of plebes would rather err on the side of caution and allow themselves whatever necessary measurement of blind faith, in order to lay claim to whatever tenuous peace of mind might be gleaned from mindless obsequience. "Should" people get a covid vaccine? If they want to. Should the remainder be forced into getting vaccinated? Absolutely not.

Force, and threat of force, is, for the most part, the only tool in government's tool box. If we're going to force people to be vaccinated, why not force them to work, force them to contribute to the "greater good", or force them to live a certain way in order to achieve some lofty, universal goal? Where is the line drawn? Why pressure your neighbor to be vaccinated if your vaccine is so great? If a vaccine requires majority consensus before it can be possitively effective, then why even bother making it?

It looks to me as though covid is just the new terrorism. Eventually it will be a new boogeyman to scare us all into submission and have us fighting amongst ourselves to establish some new standard of safety, of course at the cost of merely a few pesky freedoms, another pinch of liberty, and perhaps the last layer of our collective sanity.

Seems a rather trivial distinction to make.

I find the notion absurd, that any particular state of morality might require a specific acquiescence of reason. While religious indoctrination does indeed seem to be more prolific (and successful) amongst populations of the more intellectually disadvantaged, and disadvantaged in general, the variety of contributing factors that help determine how well religious indoctrination "sticks" is a bit more complex than is asserted in the OP.

I was fortunate, having been raised by an ultra-religious mother amongst her ultra-religious family (grandpa was a preacher at one point, for just one example), and having been embarrassingly indigent for almost all of the time before I got my first job (thanks Pizza Hut), there was nearly every possible contributing factor in place for me to follow suit; and yet, here I am, decades later with a well-developed synthesis of atheism and agnosticism. Now, I'm not saying that organized religion is appealing to stupid people because they dread having to search for answers to philosophical, abstract, and complex problems and issues on their own, but I'm not not saying that either.

Just deleted a paragraph. I recognize that my loquacious comment here is veering off into monologue territory.

I wouldn't classify my interest in humanity's future as "care", so much as a distinct curiosity.

My perception of physical reality is little more than just that, a perception. Has it not been well established that physical matter is mostly empty space? Or, that no physical objects actually touch one other (outside of particle accelerators, for example), but rather that the charge of their constituent electrons repel one another in such a way that we perceive the objects as having contacted one another?

If science is to be believed, then we live more in a world of perceptual illusion than physical matter. Although, while I have had some acutely strange experiences with reality, I am not immune to willfully forgetting about the nature of reality as I have come to understand it. Why wrestle with such worrying implications when it's so much easier to just get high and act as though everything is as it should be?

I don't contemplate whether or not the things that I perceive have any basis in an objective reality, to me, it doesn't matter. There is only my perception available to me, and when my perceptions prove unreliable, I adjust my perspective and move on.

That's a fairly long thread, and I have neither the time nor inclination to read through it completely. Somebody mentioned something about trying to "find an explanation for atheism". I chuckled at that. People are, by default, atheists. You'd have an easier time looking for an explanation for theism.

In this particular permutation of reality? Not likely. In a multiverse of parallel and not-so-parallel realities, where every conceivable possibility (and perhaps some inconceivable too)is played out across innumerable iterations, it has likely already transpired, and certainly will if it hasn't yet.

If we're dealing only with a single reality, or a cluster of them so alike they can hardly be distinguished from one another, then no. But, in an infinite (or near-infinite) multiverse, if we go far enough out on the right branch of realities, where the requisite differences have already made it conceivably possible, then it is assured.

So I guess the question is really, how many realities are there, and how much could they possibly differ? If, in fact, this is a simulation of some sort, it stands to reason that there are multiple versions being run concurrently, to what end I wouldn't bother to speculate though.

Because it is possible, it is inevitable.

TL;DR: upon close inspection of the biblical god, it quickly becomes apparent it was fashioned after Man's lesser-desirable traits, making the worship thereof foolish at best.

I was raised to be a christian, dragged to more than a few churches. Eventually, as a teenager, I got bored enough to actually read the bible, not selectively, but cover to cover. It was interesting, so much so that I was compelled to concurrently read multiple versions/iterations of the bible, so as to compare and contrast the language used, with the hope of gleaning a more accurate understanding.

Being full of teenage hormones and a strong natural sense of justice/fairness, I was more than taken aback by the plethora of blatant contradictions I found in the bible, not to mention the horrific behavior of the main and ancillary characters. I knew there were some in there (contradictions) , I'd encountered a few previously, but in my quest to better comprehend the literary work and thus the derivative ideologies, I had gone about it with as open and objective a mind as I could manage. Suffice it to say that the end result was my complete and total atheism, at least in regard to the Abrahamic/biblical "god".

It wasn't merely the contradictions, the imperfect nature of what should've been the perfect work of a perfect entity, that drove me so far from belief, but more so the childish and disgusting, outright repulsive personality of this god thing.

Do I hope that your terrible magic sky daddy doesn't exist? Obviously, but not actively or often, I so very rarely to never think about it. If you've actually read the bible, in its entirety, in as short a period of time as you can manage, you would be insane to wish for such an entity to have any basis in reality, unless of course, you were some sort of immoral masochistic sociopath.

Sorry to break it to you champ, but humans ARE animals.

Morality is, for the most part, social leverage which seeks to control or confine behavior and thinking. Without the presence of others, say you had the planet all to yourself, where would morality or ethics manifest itself in your life?

I read the question more as "why should I conform to external expectations in regard to my interactions with others", which begs the question: what is it that you wish to achieve in your social interactions? How does one wish to be percieved? Morality and ethics are learned parameters, not entirely unlike the concept of indebtedness or "owing" something to somebody. What you owe to your neighbors, family, colleagues, friends and strangers as far as your behavior and attitude is surely determined by not only your desire to be perceived a certain way, but perhaps equally as much as how you wish to conduct your business and assert your will with as few obstacles as possible.

The average person doesn't want to be exposed as having been so thoroughly and easily fooled into changing their behavior, and thus will grasp wildly at any and all means to justify their behavior. People need to see themselves as "the good guy", and will gladly and eagerly demonize anyone else whose behavior deviates enough from their own, especially when they've been handed the tools to do so by institutions that they still see as being credible and trustworthy.

The idea that human life is so precious and simply must be preserved at any cost is absurd. If human life is so precious, why has America been in armed conflict for such a high percentage of its existence? Why then can I walk into any store and buy a case of alcoholic beverages and a carton of cigarettes? Why can I break a bone and subsequently become hopelessly addicted to painkillers? If human life is so damned precious, why then are my kids so much more likely to be killed by police than a so-called-terrorist?

I think the real issue here isn't so much that our lives must be protected from the newest boogeyman, as much as people want to abdicate personal responsibility in exchange for a (false) sense of security. It's like a game, people aren't winning unless they've discovered new and interesting ways to play "us versus them". For all the whining about inclusivity and tolerance, the definition of what is and is not acceptable sure does seem to narrow more and more each year.

Lockdowns are exercises in control, more useful in reshaping the minds of docile and malleable people than actually preventing harm.

I do not accept that free will is real. I accept that my perception of having free will is real, however, the perception of a thing and the thing itself are exactly the same when?

All these words to answer such a simple question. No, none of it matters, unless it matters to you, in which case its importance (whatever it is) is isolated locally with you. Unless the perception of separation of self from other is but an illusion, in which case I guess you could argue that everything matters to everyone. Personally, I like the idea that all this absurdity, all this suffering, everything, is for no purpose, means nothing, and ultimately doesn't matter.

If I don't experience emotion, or do so at a markedly diminished capacity from what is accepted as normal, would that increase my ability to discern objectivity from subjectivity? If I experience a phenomenon without having any emotional involvement or preconceptions of the phenomenon, do my previous experiences and supposed knowledge of reality skew that perception or introduce some bias merely by being perceived through such a perspective?

The percentage of reality that we are able to experience, our sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, seems miniscule, if the objectivity of scientific instrumentation is accepted. If we can accept that our universe is significantly more complex than we are able to perceive, what else about objective reality might we be missing? If we're unable to answer that, how can we then be certain that our agreed upon reality and objectivity is as we claim it to be?

You asked "does perception require some assumption?", to which I would say that conscious, intentional observation and perception itself is an assumption or requires as much.

Light hits an apple, the material properties of the object alter the wavelength that is bounced off it. That particular wavelength hits the cells in the back of your eyes, beginning a process by which your brain ultimately interprets the data recieved and you experience the sight of the apple. All of that takes time, every step of it, even if only very short periods of time. So as to part of your post, yes, everything you experience is not in "real time", it's pretty close, but to split hairs, it's certainly not instantaneous.

But the human perception of time is just that, a perception, something our minds utilize to help us navigate reality, such as it may be. All kinds of assumptions can be made about the nature of time, and likewise the nature of human perception in relation to time, however, I wouldn't go so far as to declare with any degree of certainty that time only flows in the direction which we perceive. The universe is truly vast, and for all we know, there might be an infinite number of infinitely vast universes, a multiverse if you will. Does it matter how time conducts itself if we can't do anything about it? Perhaps in the relatively near future, some technology will afford us new and valuable insight into time and our perceptions thereof, but as far as I know, how we experience the linear progression of time is fundamentally subjective.

The title of this post, (to be precise, the idea behind the title) is predicated on the assumption that the human perception of the linear progression of time is inherently correct and trustworthy. Who has not been deceived by their own eyes? Who would claim that their subjective experience is objective reality? We can no more rightly claim that time exists only as we experience it than we can assert that we can see gravity through our experience of it. Using the human perception of time to argue a Primary Cause outside of time is...it seems, from my perspective, nonsense.

Why would our experience of time be any more trustworthy than our sight, and if our visual perception is so limited, so easily tricked, then why would you assume that your experience of the progression of time is inherently true and infallible? Cause is caused by a cause that exists outside of time? I'm bored of this already, but I haven't read every comment under the post, and I would, but I don't have time.