bloup

I really don’t feel like we’re on the same page right now so let me just ask you some questions and focus on what I believe to be a serious misconception you have about what metaphysics is:

Do you understand that when two quantum physicists are arguing about what the “correct” interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics is, that they’re literally arguing about metaphysics? Do you understand that when Albert Einstein figured out general relativity, he did it literally by reconsidering the metaphysical assumptions that were implicit in Newtonian physics? And if you do understand those things, do you think that Isaac Newton and that Albert Einstein (both of whom thought a great deal about religion, more broadly too, in particular about what their work suggests about the world we live in) were just like liars and fools or something?

I really think you should look into what constitutes a metaphysical assumption if you think that you can escape making them

I feel like you didn’t actually try to understand any of what I just said. I hate to break it to you, but it’s literally just a fact that there are religions that make metaphysical assumptions that are literally equivalent to secular humanism. If you think that they’re actually contradictory, it just means that you probably actually haven’t tried to study the history of religious thought from an actually critical perspective where you didn’t just presume that you already had it all figured out.

So like I used to be anti-religion. But when I studied the history of religious thought, it seemed like every criticism I had of religion I was able to find a religious tradition which explicitly accounted for that criticism, and it made me realize a lot of the essential beliefs that I had about religion in general were simply untrue. Like there are religious traditions that literally deny institutionalization (so you can’t even associate religion in general with organized religion), there are literally religions that explicitly reject the existence of any kind of deity (so you can’t even identify religion with a belief in some kind of a god). In general, it seemed like the only thing that literally all religions had in common was that they represented a set of metaphysical beliefs that an individual has attached themself to for whatever reason. And I realized that it’s kind of impossible to never make any metaphysical assumptions about the world we live in. And I started to ask myself questions like “is it even possible to reject the entire category of religious thought in a meaningful way while still retaining the ability to reason about the world?” And “is there actually a good reason why I don’t want to think of my own humanist ideas about the world as religious in nature, or does it just make me feel kind of funny because I had already prejudiced myself so heavily against the concept of religious thought?”

I think it’s possible that the flyers were not planted. I don’t really know why it never crosses anyone’s mind that maybe he just stole a bunch of these flyers because he wanted to limit people‘s awareness of the protest.

When I was a child, I wanted everything. But by the time I had become an adult, I had realized along the way that having lots of things actually means having lots of burdens and the only way to have lots of stuff without it actually making you unhappy is if you find a way to make your problems everybody else’s problems too, and get them to take care of it for you. This is why I think that we need to cultivate a new social norm where anybody who is perceived as being interested in acquiring great wealth is seen as nothing more than a baby-minded individual that wants to turn the entire world into their mommy because they can’t even wipe their own ass

I definitely don’t have it all figured out, but I wanna know do you ever think about stuff like what it took for the civil rights movement of the 1960s to succeed? Do you think it was a matter of pandering to the interests of centrist liberals or do you think that a big part of it was criticizing status quo liberalism and refusing to settle? I really think that you should read theletter from Birmingham jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because the archetype that he addresses in that work is replayed out every single time somebody ever deigns to criticize the Democrats for their political strategy.

You know it’s pretty outrageous to insist that you know what I think better than I do, especially after exchanging only a few sentences

Take a marketing class. If you think that politics is about pandering and not about convincing people, then you’ve lost the game already

Do you wanna explain to me where you’re seeing me “advocating against a united left and democracy“?

Can we stop pretending like voting for the Democrats as they exist now stops the Republicans from winning? It only makes them win more slowly. It is literally why everyone is so disillusioned and why the Democrats were unable to sell their message to enough people. And can we also take for granted that me saying this doesn’t mean that I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris?

I don’t wanna blame anybody. I want to criticize the people that I think have the best chance of actually being influenced to do the things we need them to do. And guess who that is?