Might be underwiring they need, instead.

Yeah, I agree. I was just trying to clarify the intent of the comment.

But also I think that’s the point of that line of debate. It is an attempt to show a religious stance from an atheist perspective in which belief is a while load of possible strange things accepted as true. It’s not really much use other than when you’re faced with someone who things your lack of theism is the opposite of their particular brand of religion and frames the discussion around which bits you have issue with, as if they might prove to you that you’re wrong. Or to show that their belief that their religion is correct and all the others, including atheism, are the wrong ones, isn’t really the other side of what an atheist thinks.

More a thought experiment than meant to characterise the entirety of atheism.

I quite like them. And I don’t mind Jehovah’s witnesses. I can ignore or politely send them away without much hassle. But I think it’s nice that they believe they can save people and actively try to do so. If I believed, I hope I would be a good enough person to try to save everyone else, too.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to people who are trying to force people or demand poor treatment of people with different beliefs. It really depends where it comes from.

That’s what they’re saying. An atheist believes in 0 of the total options for gods and religions that you get if you add them all up. A believer believes in 1 or a few of them. So really, the religious are also non-believers when it comes to most gods and religions.

He has a wife, you know…

(Next server name: Incontinentia Buttocks)

As long as there’s a system, I think they’re useful. You can argue they weight things incorrectly but it’s useful to have some way to see how a country does against the same evaluation for rest of the world. I don’t know if this is the best data, but I don’t see anything that pops out as particularly odd.

At the bottom, it’s not much between NK and the two below. But the two below are Myanmar and Afghanistan, which I don’t think is too crazy.

I certainly never intended to silence discussion. I’d have said I was opening up the discussion, if anything, by poi ting out that there’s some data available that suggests the USA is far from the most democratic nation. Which, as I read it, was a tongue in cheek statement in the comment I replied to.

But, now it is being discussed, I’m interested in the view that monarchy should have a paeticylarly large negative weight on the ranking. I’m not a royalist and think any monarchy with even a hint of power means less than absolute democracy. But I don’t think many of the monarchies in those high ranking countries have as much of a negative impact as other factors that can reduce the input of a population to the democratic process. The big one for me would be how individual voting gets weighted.

Most democratic country is Norway.

USA is at position 26.

https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/most-democratic-countries/

I think if you found the shop magically disappeared the next day after selling only the things people were looking for, no matter how random, it would make more sense.

Maybe they only sold drugs because someone wanted some.

From the researcher: … more than happy to share the outcomes on the community. There is also in the questionnaire opt in to be notified about any results as well, but the plan is to do a ADHD-friendly report once it’s analysed and that will be shared.