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@freemo @Ponygirl @ryan

Agnostics can be further divided into at least:

1) soft agnostic - I don't personally know if there is a God or not, but I'm not ruling out the possibility of knowing.

2) hard agnostic - it is impossible in principle to know if there is a God or not. Those who think they do are wrong.

@freemo What I kept hearing with your original joke were the countless Batman sitcom episodes I watched as a child, and Robin would exclaim: "Holy ____ Batman!" Fill in the blank with some especially ludicrous aspect of the story.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/spenceralthouse/the-definitive-ranking-of-robins-exclamations-from-batma

@freemo "holy" means "set apart". So unless you have set a particular moley apart for religious purposes - it is an ordinary moley. A moley becomes sacrilegious when a holy (set apart) moley is desecrated, or an ordinary moley is used to mock holy moleys.

@freemo In the G. K. Chesterton novel "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", the king of England in the future is chosen by random selection from a pool of all eligible citizens.

@freemo I have limbo proximaly everything.

@freemo @stux Ironically, a similar provision was made for the Jews when Haman obtained a decree allowing their extermination. Esther 8

"By these letters the king permitted the Jews in each and every city the right to assemble and defend themselves, to destroy, kill, and annihilate all the forces of any people or province hostile to them, including women and children, and to plunder their possessions. The single day appointed throughout all the provinces of King Xerxes was the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, the month of Adar."

The decree to allow their extermination could not be revoked. But the additional decree gave official permission for the Jews to arm and defend themselves.

@freemo Defunding *local* police, but increasing funding and staffing for Federal police. (IRS, FBI, etc)

@freemo @mapto @avlcharlie "Lay not up for yourselves treasure on earth - where moth and rust doth corrupt, and thieves break through and steal, [and inflation doth devalue]."

Investing in people is also a thing:

For the sons of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the sons of light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to make friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings. Whoever is faithful with very little will also be faithful with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.

@freemo The Christian claim is not that atheists in particular can't be moral, but that NO ONE is good.

"They have all gone astray. They have all together become corrupt. There is no one that does good. Not even one."

Religion just washes the outside. The result is what Jesus called "whitewashed sepulchers, full of dead men's bones".

@freemo I run my own email. What I mean is the spam coming from gmail.com domain is the worst. So I need to block them by default.

Or maybe that's what you meant.

@freemo It get a lot of fake invoices like that. Seriously considering making gmail.com whitelist only.

@freemo Disciples: "We have two swords." Jesus: "It is enough."

IMO, the point in this case (where Jesus was knowingly going as a lamb to the slaughter as a sacrifice for the whole world) was to make it clear that Jesus and his disciples were NOT SLAVES. Slaves were not allowed to carry a sword.

@freemo Where does positronium exist? Those are massive forces to keep positrons together in any kind of (atomically) close proximity!

@freemo You can never be 100% certain that what you see is a physical reality. It might be an optical illusion. But if you run around refusing to believe the evidence of your own lyin’ eyes, you might be a leftist.

It is quite possible to make a mistake in math too. That doesn’t change the underlying (abstract in the case of math) reality. It just means having the humility to admit when you are wrong.

@freemo Part of an involuntary bot net to crack pubkeys? Or maybe a voluntary one you forgot about? I don't have fancy GPUs, but can't you track which processes are using the GPU?

@freemo In your meme, they are destroying the money by burning it (not spending it). They are literally and irreversibly reducing the money supply, and hence inflation.

@freemo This is the Platonist vs Nominalist controversy. Do categories like "horse" exist in reality? Or are there only individual organisms we arbitrarily categorize as "horse"/"equine"?

In Medieval times, this debate focused on theology: Is God objectively "good", or do we just arbitrarily declare whatever God does as "good"?

In Modern times, Nominalism is getting ridiculous as it dismisses categories like "male", "female", and even "human".

I'm going to agree with the Medievalists, and declare Nominalism a "heresy".

@freemo That's one way to reduce inflation.

@freemo House cats in the wild or feral pick a top predator (like a bear), pick an optimal time (not hungry), and rub and purr and make friends with the top predator - just like with humans. As with humans, the cat maintains independence from the predator, but will return regularly to maintain the relationship, and take refuge with them when threatened.

@freemo

1. "sentient" means "feeling", this would include mammals, which feel like us, and even plants, which undergo hormonal responses analogous to mammalian emotions.

2. "intelligent" means "choosing between". This is presumably what is meant by "will". Intelligence (free will) is incompatible with a materialist universe - where every event stems from a chain of causation.

3. "suffering" - this is the primary means of human and animal learning. Parents, government, dog trainers, all inflict measured suffering ("chastisement") to attempt to curb destructive behaviours.

4. This is a nice objective criterion - but not exactly a moral argument. It does imply a moral argument from authority. In Genesis 1, God puts mankind in authority over the rest of creation. Even while tending your garden, you end some plant life to enhance other plant life. In Genesis 9, this authority is extended to include ending an animal's life for food, and ending a human life for murder ("whoso sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed").