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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • I think you’re wrong about religion. You’re trying to say that religion is used as justification afterwards, but we know that real numbers of religious nuts will endorse horrible things because of their religious beliefs.

    In other words, would there be less violence occurring in that region if nobody had any religious beliefs? I think the answer has to be “probably yes”. We know this by talking to people, by looking at religious zealots throughout history. But even if our logic is correct, we cannot accurately guess how much less violence would be occurring if the region were full of atheists.

    And in some sense our counterfactual thought experiment doesn’t even matter because the reality is that region is of great religious significance and you can’t really write that off as being irrelevant when several millennia prove that it is.









  • That’s how it starts, but it ends in the same hell. Once you decide your country stands for something, you inevitably stop seeing how it has failed at doing that thing for centuries.

    For example, consider freedom and equality. The US had widespread slavery until the late 1800s, and even now the prison industrial slavery complex provides 100% slave labor, and most of the slaves are minorities. So when people talk about freedom and equality as a U.S. value, when they talk about the melting point, they have to pretend the slaves don’t exist.

    Another way of looking at it is, “You might say your country stands for this ideal, but when we find massive examples of it failing, then you’re arguing with reality. You might wish your country stood for it, but it doesn’t, at least not now. Quit lying to yourself.”