Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5hr ago
I am not sure where you got the idea I was claiming to be neutral on the existence of angels. I am not neutral. I do not believe in angels. Of course that is going to be my baseline.
So if we talk about angels and you tell me angels exist, what do you want me to say? The most respectful and charitable thing I can say is "I believe you believe." I mean, sure, I might be interested in why you believe. I would listen with what I think is an open mind. But open minded doesn't mean I'm starting with the premise that maybe they exist and maybe they don't. What else would you ask of me? I
I did not say anything like"I'm going to trigger your over-sensitive fragile little ego.' If you took that approach towards me, well, I'd assume you weren't really trying to discuss anything.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7hr ago
You were just unwilling to consider the Fallujah Dog Rape Thought Experiment.
I did consider it. I answered it. I pointed out why your thought experiment was not applicable because you were falsely equating one thing with a different thing. You of course did not refute this, just ignored it and now pretend it wasn't answered.
The problem with your farcical debate tactics is that "thought experiments" is all you have. Not facts. Not logic. Not historical understanding. Not nuance. Just thought experiments, rhetorical devices, and arguments as soldiers.
I note you have not responded to a single other point anyone makes when rebutting you, as usual. Do you actually know anything about Palestinians and Muslim culture besides what you have gleaned from the Internet about dogs and "honor culture"? No, you do not. Do you have an explanation for why these dog rapes are being publicized, if they are so devastating to morale and recruitment? No. Do you have evidence that Hamas recruitment is down and would-be fedayeen are now staying home for fear of Israeli rape dogs? No. Are you able to explain why you find Israeli rape dogs credible, but the Holocaust and Hamas rapes are not credible? You cannot, because the answer would give the game away.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
8hr ago
I'm not trying to fight! But what am I supposed to say to 'you're logical chopping there with "I believe you believe you experienced that"?
Let's say you say you saw an angel. I can:
- Believe you.
- Assume you're lying or delusional.
- More charitably, assume you experienced something that you can't explain or prove but which you believe was an angel.
It seems only (1) will not offend you. Problem: I don't believe in angels. You cannot convince me angels exist. What do you want from a non-believer that doesn't get your back up?
Love is at least a relatable experience. And we know humans experience emotions because even sociopaths do. Love can be explained as an evolutionary adaption in our neurology, but that doesn't make it not real.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
10hr ago
But that's it in a nutshell right there: not real. By what metric? Science, which tells us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen, so it's not real and here's the real explanation.
Science doesn't "tell us that gods and spiritual experiences are not things that happen." Science provides a methodology that tests the nature of observable reality.
If you tell me there is a God that exists that is outside any means of testing his existence, and you have spiritual experiences that no one who is not you can verify, science doesn't, strictly speaking, say "That's not real." It says "There is no way to verify that."
People can of course choose to believe in things that cannot be verified. I imagine if I had a spiritual experience that I was convinced was real, I would believe it was real regardless of whether it could be detected by anyone else.
Since I don't, however, and since such experiences fall outside anything explainable with what we know about the universe using observable and testable criteria, you can get offended that I disbelieve, but why should I believe?
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
11hr ago
You seem to be attacking straw New Atheists who mostly aren't actually here.
I have a lot of reasons to disbelieve in a Holy Spirit even while believing you and my mother are sincere (and not crazy) when you claim to have experienced it. I don't need a "scientific" explanation to debunk every single supposed miracle in the Bible. I can just accept that every culture has these stories and lots of people experience things that are, IMO, either misunderstood or not real.
Also, STEM and religion aren't automatically mutually exclusive.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
11hr ago
Well, if you are not unhappy, you are not unhappy. What you describe seems like a pretty joyless existence to me, but there have always been loners who genuinely don't like socializing with anyone. I don't anyone here is going to try to persuade you that you must make friends and must have a relationship to make your life worth living.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
11hr ago
If the the criterion has predictive value then it’s a good reasoning tool. You appear to not want to provide an argument as to why it’s not predictive.
I have already pointed out that your "criterion" is merely a restatement of the obvious principle that people are less likely to lie in a way that makes them look bad. I have also pointed out why a "predictive tool" is at best a piece of evidence, a p-value, and that there are other factors to consider, e.g., when judging the likelihood of Hamas lying about dog-rape. I have provided arguments, you are just engaging in your usual performance of hyper-focusing on a few words and ignoring all the other words.
Because men all over the world
So you have no evidence. You have no evidence that it is happening, only what you assume must be true (but you don't actually, you are just constructing arguments as soldiers, so let's say, what you are presenting as a self-evident truth) based on axioms you also assume.
Why should this be the first case in history of atrocity propaganda where the alleged victims — from a fierce honor culture nonetheless — stand to gain only immense social humiliation, losing all morale?
They aren't Klingons. They aren't going to "lose all morale" from the world believing Israelis raped some of their men with dogs.
How would you have felt today if you didn’t have breakfast?
You will not like getting into an IQ dick-measuring contest with me. Don't do this.
Is it your opinion that Israelis have not previously committed evil acts?
Are you aware that that there are numbers between 0 and 1? And other numbers besides? Don't ask straw man questions either.
If they already raped Palestinian prisoners, and the chief lawyer of the IDF had to leak the video to try to bring the soldiers to justice, and then they dropped the charges, then I’m not sure why you’d think it is beyond the Israelis to rape prisoners with dogs.
Why do you think it is beyond the Palestinians to lie?
I don't think it is beyond the Israelis to rape prisoners with dogs. I have not said it is impossible that this ever has or is happening. I am very skeptical given the evidence so far, I note the obvious motivated reasoning apparent in who immediately seizes on the story as true despite a level of evidence they would not accept in less ideologically compatible cases, and I question the pervasiveness and the simple logistics necessary for it to be something that is happening as is being reported now. Right now, the evidence of Israeli rape-dogs is considerably less than the evidence for, say, the Holocaust, or Hamas rapes on October 7. Curiously, you are utterly convinced of the first while extremely skeptical of the latter two. Why ever could that be?
But I pretty much believe this, except for the demoralization part.
This I actually believe, because I do think you have a distorted model of the world.
This is actually a good argument toward my view I hadn’t even realized: unfathomably evil torture facilities have existed in recent memory.
Unfathomably evil torture facilities have always existed. Most people know atrocities happen, in peacetime and in war. Some people believe only Those People do those kinds of things.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
19hr ago
If literally all we have is one side saying "It happened this way," historians do not take the claim at face value, they also look at supporting evidence. Yes, both sides agreeing that side A won a battle would be taken as evidence that there was probably a battle that side A won, but the equivalent here is that one side is claiming a battle occurred, which they lost, and the other side says the battle never happened. Historians would not in that case say "Well, the battle must have happened because who would admit to losing a fictional battle?"
It is easy to bend hypotheticals around a made-up rule, less easy to apply them in the real world.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
19hr ago
For this to be the case, there would need to be a lot of cases in history where someone lied about something which would lead to overwhelming personal and familial shame. Do you think that’s true?
You are intentionally avoiding the point. It's clearly true that people are more likely to lie in ways that benefit them and less likely to lie in ways that do not benefit them, but even for Crucifixion, the "Criterion of Embarrassment" is based on a lot of assumptions and convenient omissions. It's a rhetorical tactic, not a historical reasoning tool. Would someone admitting to being raped by dogs experience shame? No doubt, but you are quite capable of reasoning for yourself why they'd lie about it. I also note that I am unable to find any actual named witnesses, just anonymous ones. It's a lot easier to claim multiple accounts by a bunch of names we can't actually put a name or face to.)
That’s exactly how it is.
Really? Do you have some deep insight into the Palestinian mindset? Do you have any evidence that fear of being raped by Israeli dogs is actually impacting their morale? As someone who's been studying Palestinians longer and more deeply than you have (you only care about them because of who they are fighting, not because you have an actual interest or understanding of their culture, history, and language), I am very, very doubtful that these atrocity stories would do anything but inflame them more.
Your hypothetical "What if you could save your comrades by being raped by a dog?" is ridiculous and, of course, dishonest. No one asked a Palestinian to get raped by a dog for Hamas.
If you really want to pose analogies, the equivalent would not be "Volunteer to be raped by a dog" but "Volunteer to claim you were raped by a dog," or if you believe the dog-rape really happened, "Volunteer to fight an evil enemy who might rape you with dogs if you are captured."
And this explains the Israeli motive, given that destroying all of their dwellings and starving their children did not significantly curtail their morale. It makes sense why Israel would use dogs for rape because nothing else has reduced Palestinian morale.)
It explains their motive if you think "reducing their morale" is an Israeli objective, if you think rape-dogs would actually do this, and if you think they have failed to achieve their objective. You are, as usual, just imagining an fantastical "Evil Israelis who do Evil Things because Evil (Jews)." Sitting in their Headquarters of Evil, they say to themselves, "Well, we've reduced Gaza to rubble but those brave Palestinians still haven't surrendered" (what would this even look like, at this point?). "Let's start raping them with dogs- surely this will break their spirit!" (And... what? They will stop fighting? Stop resisting? Throw out Hamas? What is the endgame you imagine the Israelis imagining in this scenario?)
It's pure made-up atrocity porn. Even if rape-by-dog has ever happened in an Israeli prison, it's like claiming Abu Ghraib was part of a systematic plan by US forces to demoralize Iraqis and make them stop resisting. Maybe you believe this was the case, but then you have to believe that from the top on down, the entire US chain of command was not just sadistically evil but extraordinarily stupid.
How much more important is the “dog” element compared to the previous, evidenced cases of rape in Israeli prisons? Does the “dog” element move the needle?
For the Palestinians? Not much. For Westerners? Certainly adds more outrage. Everyone kind of understands/accepts that prisoner rape will happen, whether or not you think it's pervasive and institutionally approved. But rape by dogs? Only evil Jews would do something like that!
This is 100% true, but you will not find a case of atrocity propaganda in history where a man writes publicly “yes, it was I who was raped by the German Hun when they took Belgium! It was my backside which suffered!”
Where is the Palestinian who has done this? From what I can tell, the accounts are all anonymous.
I note this is similar to the situation regarding the gang rapes that supposedly happened on October 7. There are numerous accounts of it happening, claims of footage existing, but because you can't find an individual, named Israeli woman who will go on camera and describe what was done to her, people who hate Jews will claim it's atrocity porn, while simultaneously finding anonymized Palestinian accounts of rape by dogs credible.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
If a claim is highly embarrassing to the claimant, then it’s more likely to be true, as normally people are unwilling to lie when they stand to gain only shame, humiliation, and loss of status.
That is not the case here and you are misapplying a very niche concept and trying to sell it as some sort of bayesian reasoning tool.
The Criterion of Embarrassment is mostly used for Biblical apologetics to justify believing in the Crucifixion. It has very limited usefulness elsewhere; it's not some kind of general rule that historians use to evaluate the plausibility of historical narratives.
"This is more likely to be true because it makes the narrator look bad" has a certain amount of general truthiness to it, but it still needs to be balanced against other factors, like plausibility and how the teller stands to gain from it even if it does cast them in a negative light.
There is a very obvious benefit to Hamas lying about Israelis raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs. It is extremely unlikely to decrease morale or enrollment of new recruits--what, they're not afraid of being imprisoned or bombed or run over by tanks, but the rape-dogs will terrify them? Come now. Atrocity propaganda almost always serves to increase morale and recruitment by representing the enemy as unspeakable monsters. Lying about it also serves the very valuable function of generating more propaganda to be repeated by people who hate Jews.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
You know the saying about "Be at least two of Truthful, Useful, and Kind"?
Even if your armchair psychologizing is accurate (dubious), you still fail 2 out of 3 and seem to have posted this only to be nasty.
I'm only letting you out of the new user filter to give you a temp ban since this isn't actually your first post. You've been around, kind of, for a while. Obviously a sockpuppet though, probably a ban evader. So next time maybe I just don't let you out of the filter.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
So, uh, what do you want?
You put it as a problem in need of a solution, yet by your own description you seem more or less happy (for some value of "happy") with your life.
By the fact that you are asking, I guess you aren't entirely happy. Is it just because you look around and see other people doing things you aren't and wonder what's wrong with you? Or do you vaguely sense something missing in your life?
Tbh with your religious beliefs and temperament I'd half-seriously suggest checking out convents.
Assuming that's off the table, well... You sound like you may be depressed. I think you have some conception of depression as being miserable and hating life all the time, but it can be just a gray blah that prevents you from enjoying life.
A lack of friends is very sad. Friendships don't have to be all transactional.
A lack of hobbies is also very sad. I mean, what the fuck does one do with one's life, aside from working, if you don't have a family? It's never too late to take an interest in... something.
You sound like what you lack is a purpose. If you have no purpose in life other than to get up every morning and do it all again, that would be pretty depressing to me.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
Well, it's more merciful than "Burn in hell forever" but still seems to me pretty arbitrary to decide how long someone suffers based on whether they chose the right menu item.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Atrocity propaganda happens in every conflict, but this is so over-the-top it's like something someone would make up for an edgy Internet story.
Can I believe Israelis torture Palestinian prisoners? Yes. Can I believe they might even rape Palestinian prisoners? I'm very skeptical that it's SOP or approved, but I believe it happens. But raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs?
If you spend any time thinking about the mechanics (gods know nobody wants to, but here we are), you'd realize that even a large dog would have trouble mounting an unwilling person, who would have to be pretty thoroughly tied up, and then you'd have to think about how you'd train a dog to do that (yes, a dog will hump anything but you can't generally get them to hump in a particular way on command), and it just gets extremely unlikely. At most, I can imagine them getting a dog to jump on a bound Palestinian prisoner and laughing about it. A whole squad of trained rape-dogs? Come the fuck on.
Dogs are considered particularly unclean by Muslims, so this sounds like either something the Israelis made up as a story to scare Palestinians, or something Palestinians made up as a story about how depraved and evil Israelis are, or both.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
I am surprised that you are surprised. Freddie has always been able to look reality in the face but only up to a certain point. It's easy to forget sometimes, but he really is a literal Marxist, and that informs everything he writes. In the redistributionist world of his dreams, these inequalities would not exist because no one would have the option of selfishly providing a better education for their own children by removing them from environments with disruptive students and taking resources away from those students.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
I don't think we have "moved past it" in the sense that humans are substantially different from Bronze age humans. So when I speak of Bronze age morality - slaughtering your enemies and taking their women and not feeling bad about it, doing all the things that KulakRevolt says we should be doing - I'm well aware that that's still with us and only a missed meal away for a lot of people. You may think I am being disparaging, but it's actually rather impressive how the God of the Bible has become a God who now exhorts his followers not to act like that, and it's mostly stuck. Kind of.
I don't think this can only happen with Christianity. Other religions mostly preach not acting like Bronze age barbarians too (Islam, the "religion of peace", tries to sell it too but seems to have been much less successful so far).
How and why Christianity has been more successful at turning the jealous wrathful genocidal god of the Old Testament into the Prince of Peace is a story with many explanations, and obviously a believing Christian's explanation is going to be different than mine. But from an atheist's point of view, it's pretty clearly a neat hat trick. I was not expressing some sneering dismissal of Christianity as worship of a Bronze age god we should have moved past, but I do think Christians, as I said to @SubstantialFrivolity, reason themselves into "This is bad " and then rationalize that their god says "This is bad " when their god clearly does not think this is bad (at least, if you wanted to be a Christian who also believes in slaughtering your enemies and taking their women and not feeling bad about it, there is plenty of Biblical support for that too).
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
If we suppose there exists a religion that is actually true, then presumably a few people have actually found it. But if not, or even if so, then most people, however sincere they are about the reasoning process they used to get there, have convinced themselves of something that is not true, and humans in general are amazingly good at rationalization.
Of course the same would be true of me, if I am in fact wrong about God not existing or your church being false. I think I got here by reason and being open to being convinced, but I know from experience you will have numerous arguments to explain why I have either failed to see the truth or am in denial about it.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
For what it's worth, that is not what I do. Not on this topic, nor any other topic concerning faith.
No one thinks they do.
I don't think anyone consciously does this. Everyone says they are earnestly seeking the truth and open to being persuaded. All religious believers are rational truth-seekers who genuinely weighed all competing theologies and independently arrived at the most correct one (which just happens to be, 90% of the time, the one they grew up with). I'm sorry, I'm not trying to snark at you, but that's just literally what I hear from every single religious convert, from the Bible-thumping exclusive salvationist to the niqabbed Muslim girl going to an Islamic university.
But without fail, God's personality always reflects the personality of the believer. I've never met an angry, resentful Christian who believed God wanted him to embrace the people he hated in brotherly love- at best he might admit that he has a problem with anger and needs to learn how to forgive (but those fuckers are still gonna burn in hell). I've never met a kind-hearted, forgiving and gentle Christian who was very sad about how God was going to throw his non-Christian neighbors into the Lake of Fire to burn for all eternity, but was nonetheless convinced this was their just reward for denying Christ. God is always cruel or kind in proportion to his followers.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
I admit I find atheists who convert fascinating in a kind of horrified way. I even understand the impulse, to want to believe. Short of having a personal revelation convincing enough to make me believe (and not convince me I am hallucinating or losing my mind), though, I cannot see how I would ever become religious again. I am completely convinced in a materialistic universe, and while the universe is vast and obviously we cannot know everything and God could be hiding in innumerable unfalsifiable ways, nothing, no apologetics, no personal testimonies, no inductive reasoning, has ever been plausible enough to make me abandon the evidence of my senses and my reason.
I am well familiar with the debate over universalism versus infernalism, as you put it, though. It was one of my greatest concerns in my Christian days, and it is the thing I argue with Christians about most often, on the rare occasions I do argue with them now.
From my perspective, universalism is the "nice" and comforting version of salvation that kind Christians who cannot stomach the thought of friends and loved ones burning in hell convince themselves of. Damnation is what those who are either Biblical literalists believe in (and they go through all sorts of mental contortions to convince themselves that it is both a just fate and something they could be at peace with, watching from heaven as their former friends and loved ones scream in hell for eternity), or the unkind Christians who just like the idea of their not-friends getting what's coming to them.
Religious believers, in my experience, choose a priori what they want to believe (whether it is that their enemies will burn, or no one will burn) and fit scripture to match it.
That's not an indictment of you. You're nice and don't want to believe people could burn in hell for eternity, so you found a Biblical interpretation that makes that not true. I've got friends and family who do the same. And to be honest, when I was a believer, my thinking was similar to yours. If I did believe in God, I would not be capable of believing in a supposedly benevolent deity who judges that any mortal, no matter how awful they were in one short mortal lifetime, could possibly deserve to be tortured for all of eternity. Especially if that could be a punishment not just for being evil, but simply for choosing the wrong religion.
But honestly, I don't think your scriptural interpretation is necessarily sounder than that of the infernalists.
You cited a number of verses and Church doctrines used to justify eternal damnation and did your best to explain them away, but it's no less rationalizing than the exclusive salvationists who rationalize in the other direction. I note you did not address John 14:6: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me." This is the verse most often used by fundamentalists to argue for the exclusive salvationist position, that all who do not accept Jesus will go to hell. Of course universalists have a response to that too. But it's all just special pleading.
@rae was a little harsh, but I basically believe the same thing: the God of the Bible is a vengeful Bronze age deity who talks about doing Bronze age god shit to His enemies in the Old Testament, and then comes in with forgiveness and mercy for his enemies in the New Testament, and you have to go through a lot of mental gymnastics to convince yourself they are the same god.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
4d ago
Reported for violating rule:
You know what, we don't mod people for reporting posts, no matter how stupid and baseless the report (I have asked @ZorbaTHut, and his position is that we should not under any circumstances make people afraid to use the report button), so this is not an official mod warning. But I'm just going to tell you directly: stop being a jerk. Do not abuse the report button.
"Proactively provide evidence" is an excuse often used to report posts that the reporter strongly disagrees with. Positions or beliefs you strongly disagree with are not inherently "inflammatory" just because you don't like them, and in particular, belief in gods is not "partisan" in a culture war sense or the sense in which we discourage people from making inflammatory, evidence-free, partisan claims. This forum is an offshoot of an offshoot of rationalist forums, but it is not by charter a rationalist or atheist forum.
If someone started preaching that other people are going to go to hell if they don't accept Jesus, or that only Catholics will go to heaven and everyone else is damned, or that Catholics are damned because they worship the Pope, or that the fire awaits all who do not accept Allah and his Prophet, we'd probably mod them for being obnoxious and using the forum for soapboxing. But a post talking about theology or belief in God is not against forum rules.
This is coming from an atheist: don't be That Kind of Atheist. If you can't stand to engage with religious people at all, just scroll on by.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
What is this contributing to the discussion?
Make your point without the performative snark.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5d ago
Oh, by the way I have another question for you: Do you dislike Jewish people?
You need to stop this repeated bulverism. I don't even think you're wrong that most people stanning for Iran are motivated by Jew-hatred, but it's still irrelevant to the object-level discussion, and repeatedly asking people "By the way, do you hate Jews?" is not actually productive. Your entire argumentative style is obnoxious and calibrated to snark and antagonism. The purpose of discussions here is not to score points and "win" even if many people forget that.
Since you've blocked me, you won't be able to read this, so you're getting a 1-day ban to get your attention because we've told you several times now to stop doing this. Your bans will increase in length if you continue ignoring mod warnings.
Okay. This is no different than your being offended that I don't believe in angels. Sure, a lot of people might be upset to hear love described as nothing more than a physiological process.
So what? It's true or it's not true. If it's not true, then it does you no harm that I believe it. If it is true, it's true whether or not that upsets you.
Believing love is just a product of evolution doesn't make it not important or real.
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