Always probing how much we can take, too

If you don’t let them in they just break in and claim they own the place

Regardless of what you or I believe, most workers and even many comrades are still religious and the last thing we want is to be push them away, as long as they accept a materialist framework for organizing society and we work together to progressively reduce religious harm over time they can pray all they want imo. The only reason why reactionary religion is so powerful is because capitalists have overfunded them for decades, and even then you have examples of anti-colonial resistance led by priests and imams. We can and should work together as much as we can, of course without compromising analysis or praxis.

The narrative of Galileo vs the Church is misrepresented to push a specific narrative, the whole thing is obviously very nuanced, but to keep it short he was in disagreement with the Church, but he was a Catholic himself who happened to live in a period where the Church was on edge due to the tension with Protestantism. The fight wasn’t on science vs religion, but on who had the religious authority, individuals or the Church.

Galileo is portrayed as a proto-skeptic later on because it was useful to present the European enlightenment as a rupture with the old world, nevermind that Europeans pushed racism as a science while claiming to be purely rational, you can see this kind of misrepresentation of many early scientists as well such as Newton, who’s obsession with esoterism is rarely discussed, and even when promoting a grand narrative of the West as the cradle of reason people like to ignore that as far as we know Pythagoras was a weird religious dude with a cult, you don’t need to be rational in all spheres to be rational in some, and if we want to highlight the diversity of western thought as a good thing (which I believe it is) we can also find examples of early skeptics way before the enlightenment. Cicero literally wrote a skeptic as one of his characters to express his ideas, and while he’s clearly trying to promote stoicism instead, the fact that he includes a skeptic shows that there were already skeptics in society even back in Rome. And again, in my opinion this is a good thing, we generally need more skepticism, not less, but let’s not reinforce narratives that are just false and used to whitewash the horrendous crimes of colonialism to this day.

While building more is obviously necessary, there’s still more than enough houses in the US to house all the homeless, but it’s less profitable, and in a profit driven system this is just the cost of doing business. Like, sure, people normally want to live in more urban places, but I don’t think many would want to stay homeless if offered an empty house elsewhere. Building more under neoliberal capitalism won’t do anything to fix homelessness, unfortunately.

Read communist leaders rather than accept whatever a school book that whitewashes colonialism and ignores Churchill’s genocide in Bengal tells you. You may disagree with them but you’ll notice most of them were fairly literate and understood dialectical materialism.

there is literally no way to use logic to infer existence of god.

Agreed

people believe in religion because they were brainwashed to it

It’s way more complicated than that. First, most people normally absorb religion from our immediate environment. The biggest predictor for if you’ll grow up to be your parents’ religion is whether your parents displayed religious behavior, especially some that came at some kind of cost to them and you could perceive as a sacrifice (for example, if your religion says you shouldn’t drink, but your father drinks, you probably won’t find anything else convincing, but if you know your dad would otherwise drink, and that all his friends drink, seeing him drink water or soda when surrounded by drinkers is powerful).

Second, it’s true that people who are already religious tend to tell themselves that they believe out of logic, and some of them eventually try to be intellectually honest and wrestle with these questions, but belief is only the biggest aspect of religion in some branches of Christianity.

In most religions out there, you can be agnostic and still practice religion, and the belief based model is extremely inaccurate at understanding and explaining those other religions, because unlike mainstream Protestant Christianity, which takes the belief in Jesus and the Bible as the one thing that separates a Christian from a non Christian, in other communities it can be more important whether you participate in holidays (like festivals with animal sacrifices in pre-Christian Europe; you can find evidence of Romans who didn’t believe in their Gods back in the day, but unless they refused to engage in festivities people generally didn’t care). There are also religions where belief is important but practice is equally important, like most of Islam.

I had religious trauma growing up and it’s shit, and although I’m aware of people who had it way, way worse than me, to this day I still struggle with purity culture over a decade after formally leaving the church.

All of this is to say, brainwashing rarely works to make people stick around, people who stay due to coercion, often do because their religion functions as a high control group (such as Mormons and other branches of Christianity that isolate you from everyone who doesn’t belong to your exact same religion), not because they were taught wrong information. There are exceptions, like people who are terrified of hellfire, but again, that’s more often than not due to lots of abuse rather than just being told hell is real (even being told that as a child is fucked up, especially if you have OCD or intrusive thoughts in general).

So yeah, it’s complicated.

Ah, the free market

Yeah, if it weren’t for organizations adapting all their workflows and processes to involve as much LLM as possible it probably wouldn’t be as costly to eventually switch back to minimizing its usage to specific, more useful stuff (like debugging)

Yeah they’re particularly bad with games (like responding the wrong question) and scholarship

So it’s almost like there’s a tendency for the rate of profit to fall

I add a query parameter to go to web search, rather than the default search, so no slop here

How do you realistically prevent corporate donors from being a thing when the whole government is compromised and they won’t legislate their privileges and bribes away?

The foot is actually symbolic for the devs stepping all over you with their opinionated design and no choices

Oopsie, I shouldn’t have run that and destroyed production, I’m sorry

You see, there’s this thing called NUANCE /s

We don’t know as much about the historical Jesus as we’d like. The gospels were written a whole generation after Jesus’ death at the earliest and they’re also (obviously) not unbiased sources. Whatever conclusions we make on the historical Jesus will necessarily include many assumptions that we can’t check with evidence of any type.

Regardless, if you’re a Christian (I’m not) and you believe this truly happened as described in the gospels due to your personal faith and conviction, I find the argument for Jesus being racist very shaky anyway. He was far more religious than what modern day leftists tend to be, absolutely, but his message wasn’t conservative by any means, he was clearly some kind of revolutionary, so much so that he was killed by the Romans. Assuming that we can generally trust the gospels to record his beliefs and actions more or less faithfully, miracles aside, he seems to fall under apocalyptic Judaism. But if we can relate him to modern political movements, I’d say the closest is the religious folks in anti-colonial struggle, and now people following liberation theology.

The one and only

Do you also have Shrek

Thanks, I was so out of the loop