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   obscurestar (obscurestar@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 21-Dec-2025 02:57:50 JST obscurestar

   • Mr. Bill

   @bmacDonald94 I'd describe it more as an exploit than a disease. I also may not be it's target audience. I've heard numerous religious people claim without fear of God humans couldn't be moral. To me, that's projection. They're saying that without fear of punishment, they'd rape, murder, lie and steal as much as they could. It's possible the deeply religious are trying to use their fear to quell their impulses much like recovering alcoholics often need to avoid tempting environments.

   • Mr. Bill repeated this.
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     obscurestar (obscurestar@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 21-Dec-2025 02:45:28 JST obscurestar

     • Mr. Bill

     @bmacDonald94 It is also the gambling debt in Pascal's wager. If you're better off believing in God, then you're also better off not following any religion. You should instead aggregate the rules from them all of them and keep only the common rules which is basically, 'Be kind", which is so easy an atheist can do it.

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     Shane Celis (shanecelis@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Sunday, 21-Dec-2025 03:23:13 JST Shane Celis

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bill

     @obscurestar @bmacDonald94 Extrinsic motivators often substitute intrinsic motivators, and religion is full of extrinsic motivators. I agree it’s projection from someone who had their intrinsic motivations to be kind substituted. When they talk about it, it sounds psychotic to those who haven’t substituted their intrinsic motivations to be kind.

     Mr. Bill repeated this.
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     Pino Carafa (rozeboosje@masto.ai)'s status on Sunday, 21-Dec-2025 03:24:57 JST Pino Carafa

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bill

     @obscurestar @bmacDonald94 as Penn Jilette points out: without a "god" thing watching us and judging us we atheists can indeed murder, rape and pillage as much as we want. And the amount we actually want to do such things is 0. To raise that as an argument against atheism is extraordinarily self damning.

     Mr. Bill repeated this.
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     Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon (thebratdragon@mastodon.scot)'s status on Sunday, 21-Dec-2025 03:27:48 JST Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon

     in reply to

     • Pino Carafa
     • Mr. Bill

     @rozeboosje @obscurestar @bmacDonald94

     If the only thing stopping you doing those things is "god" you are not a moral person, you are just on a leash.

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     LionelB (lionelb@expressional.social)'s status on Sunday, 21-Dec-2025 03:55:08 JST LionelB

     • Mr. Bill

     @bmacDonald94

     If reward (a bribe) or punishment (fear) are involved, how is that moral? Looks tainted.

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     obscurestar (obscurestar@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 22-Dec-2025 01:30:22 JST obscurestar

     • Mr. Bill

     @bmacDonald94 Thanks BTW. I've been working on the language of trying to describe the flaw in Pascal's Wager for a while as I've wanted to turn it into an animated short. In responding to your post, something clicked and I was able to condense a couple paragraphs of explanation into what is nearly a soundbyte, which means I can finally generate that message.

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     obscurestar (obscurestar@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 22-Dec-2025 01:31:03 JST obscurestar

     in reply to

     • Mr. Bill
     • Shane Celis

     @shanecelis @bmacDonald94 Pretty good way to describe it. Or at least matches my own observations. I would not that the extrinsic kind are rarely as good as cultivating intrinsic.