Are you fuckin serious? So the cure for mass shootings is...everyone needs to respect god more?

Well, I think sin is the root cause of anything bad and that won’t get fixed until this world as we know it is done and over with. But I think we are only making things worse for ourselves by rejecting God.

All right. At the (pretty high) risk of derailing, I would argue that this is an expression of a vague and unfalsifiable position.

"Honoring God" means what? My guess is you mean believing in God (granting, somehow, that this is a matter of choice), praying, going to places of worship, trying to emulate the praiseworthy qualities of Jesus (with his example - whatever one takes this to be - explicitly or implicitly in mind), and perhaps trying to persuade others to similarly identify with Christianity. These are pretty concrete behaviors, meaning it's mostly easy to decide what does and doesn't count as instances of them.

(I'll pass over the difficulties involved in the phrase "dependent on Him." E.g., "dependence" may, if a creator/conserver God exists, refer to a relation we in fact cannot help but be in, any more than one can cease to be the offspring of one's parents. Alternatively, if "dependence" refers to an obedient, self-denying surrender to God's will, then (a) how does one know God's will, (b) how is it at all possible to choose against or irrespective of one's own will, and (c) how would it be praiseworthy, or even socially healthy, to deprioritize one's "merely human" values? I'm just stating these incidentally; in-depth discussion would most likely be out of place here.)

Anyway, with that clarification in the background, your belief is that people "function ideally and thrive" (for brevity, f) as a consequence of their "remain[ing] most honoring to and dependent on" God (h). Put it this way: "If h, then f"; and you add, "If not-h, then not-f."

I think it would be difficult to attempt to clarify f. Just assume it's about as concretely definable as h (again, omitting all the business regarding "dependence"). Then, the problem I see lies in the way you handle counterexamples to these claims. You say, in effect, that violence is an example of not-f that follows from not-h - but you qualify this with words like "could" and "oftentimes": So, some but not all instances of not-h result in violence. This is vague, unless you indicate which instances and why. You also admit that a person's life could bear all the appearances of f, while actually being the opposite; and you indicate no way of ascertaining which is the case. All this would do is permit you to believe - despite appearances (i.e., against or irrespective of evidence) - that anything you please counts as support for your position, with no conceivable counterexample.

These may not be insuperable difficulties, but it would take a lot of thought and words to address them. In the meantime, you've seen a few arguments here to the effect that gun violence has little if anything to do with rejecting God. And the religious statements quoted above, which are, if I'm correct, vague and unfalsifiable, don't do much in my opinion to legitimize your position.



No, they appear (and stick around) from time to time. They're obviously a minority. I think most posters here would say: Just don't be ridiculous about it, and you'll be fine.

You've been asked to back up your claim (about "rejection of god" causing violence) but only keep re-phrasing what you believe, never backing it up. Characteristic of a preacher-troll rather than someone who genuinely believes the extraordinary claims he's writing online.

And also there has to be a "Him" in the first place for it to even be possible to reject "Him". You're on very deep waters if you're gonna ascribe causality to something for which it so far seems to be impossible to even provide good reason to believe exists. Or would you say all non-Hindus are "rejecting" the gods of Hinduism? All-non believers in visits from intelligent space-aliens are "rejecting aliens"?

And it would be interesting to see you adress stuff I mentioned earlier:

No, but I'm pretty sure you're the only Original Sin Moral Causalist.


If that's true, then your god is a narcissistic tyrant.


This tanget is a frustrating, ridiculous distraction. Talking about how religion plays into this parade of tom-fuckery is one thing. Discussing the inscrutable intentions of someone's pet celestial ego maniac is useless.


edit -- However, there is at least one point of connection. Talking reason to Trump supporters about the mercurial chicanery and self-serving power ploys of their POTUS is about as likely to bear the fruit of enlightenment as talking to Kerrick about similar behavior exhibited by his god. When the results of disbelief are either (in the case of Trump) the collapse of America or (in the case of God) an eternal atomic bomb, revelatory conversion is not going to happen. They have to suddenly come to the conclusion that their icon is a piece of deliberate marketing and their identity has been formed around a lie. No amount of patience or logic is going to make a dent in that conviction. They are riveted to their beliefs.

If we're really going to go down the route of debating whether secularization leads to higher violent crime (and I'm not suggesting that's an argument worth clogging the thread with), you can certainly find countries more secular than the US with higher crime rates, though that's arguably a moot point since lower gun ownership in those countries typically makes the crimes less lethal. And in any case, Kerrick would have to explain how much of Latin America can have crime rates that dwarf the US while simultaneously being very religious (specifically Catholic).

I've grown to understand that most of the time gun control debates aren't about facts for any side (or even guns, really) and have increasingly tuned out when they come about, as I expect omnipartisan obstinacy with a hefty dose of bumper sticker slogans supported by dumb argumentation. But I have to admit I wasn't expecting this particular gun control debate to evolve (devolve?) into an argument about there being too much or too little Jesus in the US.

More evidence that Christianity rots the brain. How can people be so fucking stupid and brainwashed, urgh. I was hoping to be at least safe from this nonsense on a metal forum, but I guess not.


Indeed. Let's stop this absurd, non-evidence-based "debate" right now.

More importantly, causality wouldn't be shown by such an example since factors like economy and other social features would still have to be considered.

Out of curiosity, what countries more secular than the US would be examples of that (higher crime rate)? And the discussion, as I interpreted it, was about violent crime rather than crime in general.

Understood. I'll refrain from more. (I'm quite busy at work and need to focus on that anyways, hence the sporadic responses.)

It's the same with A LOT of "debates" involving cultural norms/traditions. I read an article recently about trying to convince parents that spanking/hitting children as a form of punishment was counterproductive to their development, and how evidence supporting that was totally ineffective in changing the parents' behavior. Basically, the parents saw disobedience as the child's attempt at upsetting the social/moral hierarchy, and spanking/hitting them was a way of reasserting that hierarchy. When they got right down to it, the punishment had nothing to do with the child's development and everything to do with power and tradition.

I strongly suspect it's very much the same with gun ownership, which is why statistical arguments regarding gun crime and safety have been so ineffective in changing peoples' minds. Asking people to give up their guns, in their minds, is the same as asking them to give up power and accept a lower place in the social/moral hierarchy. Never mind that guns don't actually give anyone power over the government and are more likely to cause harm to their owners or owners' loved ones than any perceived enemies.

I was going more for a tribalism argument. Statistics about gun crimes don't really convince gun owners any more or less than statistics about defensive gun use convince people opposed to gun ownership. It isn't about facts, it's about differing principles, it's about the type of world the two different sides want to live in. For most people, arguments derived from fact are not really sufficient to move the needle much on their personal individualism-communitarianism barometer. Beyond that, there's less philosophical reasons, like gun owners thinking it's fun or (as Empyreal himself demonstrated) non-gun owners thinking guns are repulsive. It's part of a tribal association.

Sure, but tribal beliefs and traditions are exactly where the social/moral hierarchies come from.

I can't attest to what it's like in other parts of the world, but here in Korea where it's impossible for regular folk to have a handgun and having a long gun requires keeping it at a police station to be checked in an out for specific purposes and is incredibly rare, people view American gun ownership and gun violence as incredibly barbaric. They just assume every American owns guns, totes them around and that the U.S. is basically the Wild West still, where people just get into shootouts or whatever on a regular basis. The defensive American in me always wants to jump up and say, "yes but that's not true at all! I don't own a gun and many people I know don't own them, either! And it's very safe!" but then...I realize that that's basically just not true. There *is* a lot more gun violence, no way to argue otherwise.

I mean, I really doubt most pro-gun people really give a shit about how America's obsession with guns impacts our global image, but I think it is something that should be talked about more in the gun debate.

Personally, I've wondered if any amount of criminal behavior has some element of mental disturbance to it. Why would someone who isn't in some way fucked in the head break into someone's house, for instance? As Penn Jillette has said, "I've killed and raped all the people I want to, and that number is zero" as an argument for why there is more to crimes and shit behavior than making something illegal. This bleeds over into a larger conversation of "making something illegal doesn't stop it," and yes, we have certain things illegal so they can be punished when they do occur. But it's when people think criminalizing something will make it go away.

So I get your point and share that general view. To note, I wasn't saying you're one of those garbagey right-wingers desperate to spin the gun problem off into an arena that just avoids the problem. Without clarification, this is an area easy to muddy when "mental issues" are mentioned.

I think people fall through the cracks of society everywhere. I grew up in a small farming communities, and it happened there, too. The difference is that in those communities, those people could be noticed by someone, and then talked about in hushed voices. I think every small community like that has its "creep farm" or "creep house" somewhere. You know, that place that inspires Texas Chainsaw legends. We had one a couple miles from where I grew up with rumors that they'd shoot at anyone who drove by their property. There was an entire "disappeared" town between where I grew up and our county seat. A non-town called Haydenville that still existed on some maps, but was nothing more than a series of badly run-down buildings with rumors of "gross bearded women" living there. And it goes one.

I do think it might be easier to fall through the cracks in cities due to the, shall we say, cold and impersonal feel of the concrete jungle. Might make for a separate interesting conversation, actually--a discussion on all of this stuff. I've noticed a deliberate effort to avert attention on many people. Maybe I'm just bizarre in that I look at many people I walk by, but most people seem to avoid eye contact, especially women (which does not say positive things about our society).

In my own hypothesizing, I'd go with a combination of society, media, internet, narcissism (as mentioned above), a feeling of worthlessness, and then easy access to guns as complex set of triggers to these things. And under that, there is that degree of mental instability. You mentioned Elliott Rodger, who is a fascinating case. "All women are stupid fucking sluts for not seeing how great I would be to them." Fuckin' smooth. I've seen and read up on him and it's fascinating to me that he was not self-aware enough of how horrible he really was. Rodger spent a ton of time on really ludicrous "red pill" websites, he was generally a loner, and he felt worthless and powerless. All this shit rolled around in his head until he decided the option left was seemingly random retaliation.

That all noted, we live in a society where our media is gun-heavy and every fucking problem is solved by violence. Look at Star Wars. Literally every single problem in that family-friendly space-magic universe is solved through violence, force, killing, and explosions. That's "family friendly" entertainment to us. So there is something just beyond a gun culture--there is a general violence culture. This is one of the reasons I so loved Star Trek before it was hijacked by Abrams and turned into lowest-common-denominator entertainment. Yes, it had its share of violence, but understanding, conversation, and compromise were the biggest strengths of the series. It dons on me that this is also one of the strengths of the Stargate SG-1 series--the high number of times that the solution to their problem came through conversation and brains over violence is actually quite refreshing.

Sorry about the mobius strip post. I had a lot of ground to cover that ultimately just fell back on "these issues are way more complex than the media likes to spin it."

Just saw this and... well, we all knew how scummy and hypocritical Fox News are, but seeing it all compiled like this, it almost hurts the soul.

https://streamable.com/y5aqx

Overhearing white boomers talk about Trump isn't normally worth a damn, but being unable to avoid doing so during breakfast the other day (while doing my damndest to read 'Modernism' by Peter Gay) yielded the fact that Bill Moyers's team has compiled an ongoing list of the Russia/Trump timeline. It starts with the introduction of Roger Stone to Donald Trump in 1979.

http://billmoyers.com/story/the-trump-r ... ent-trump/

I legit only made it about a minute into that video Morrigan posted before I shut it off in anger and disgust. It's absolutely astounding how fucking hypocritical every single person in that video has been since Trump came to power. It's a terrible and depressing reminder at just how much those fools did over the 8 years of Barack Obama's presidency helped foster the culture of hatred and bigotry and intolerance that led to Trump's presidency. They, possibly more than anyone else, are responsible for all of this.

And this is the only "news" network my grandparents watch because, and I quote verbatim here, "It's the only one that actually speaks the TRUTH!"

Even though, as studies over several years have shown, watching only Fox News makes you less informed than watching no news at all.

Well, it's definitely worked for my grandparents, since they're dumber than ever these days. A couple years ago they tried to convince me the end of the world was nigh (which they proved via a very convincing inkjet-on-copypaper leaflet), and told me further signs were that "the homosexuals have marriage" and "a satanic statue has been erected in a courthouse!" And I promise all of this was learned exclusively through the lens of FOX News.

FOX gaslights more than a diesel truck with a broken fuel gauge. Though I have to say that I rather like Shepard Smith, I think he's a sweetheart and has been the voice of reason on more than one occasion.

So, Trump's lawyer needs a lawyer. His personal attorney hired his own legal counsel.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/16/politics/ ... index.html



This is like a Coen brothers movie. If Phillip Seymour Hoffman wasn't dead he'd be a perfect Steve Bannon.

Shepard Smith has consistently been the only credible person on Fox News ever since he started with them. How he doesn't have a gig anchoring a major network news show is absolutely beyond me.

It shouldn't be confusing for a non-interventionist and capitalist like Ron Paul to oppose sanctions; it restricts trade, diminishes economic opportunity for denizens of both the affected nation and nation(s) no longer (legally) able to trade in the good(s) or service(s) spelled out in the sanction. Typically, sanctions also harm relations between nations, and can create heightened animosity. Sanctions are also frequently used as an escalatory action which may end in a shooting war.

Rand Paul is less strident on the issue than his father - he supported sending weapons to the Ukrainians in response to Putin/Crimea, has voted occasionally to sanction Iran, and as recently as December 2015 supported creating a Kurdish state - but he's closer to that position than he is to the Washington consensus on foreign policy.

This is chillingly true. Although I wouldn't be surprised if Bannon himself were some kind of revenant.

There is literally a documentary on how Fox News fucks with your brain.

Granted, there are documentaries on everything these days, and all documentaries should be taken with a grain of salt due to the objectives driving the creation of the film, but Fox News seems to be an actual problem.

I am somewhat late into this discussion, but on the statistic-like things on inmates in the USA...

I actually believe a sizable part of those refusing to give their religious affiliations are not religious. Not necessarily atheists, since that takes quite a bit of thought to arrive at, but people who do not really think about supernatural things at all.

The reason: you know the cliche scene in a prison movies, with the inmate in a parole hearing telling the board that he has finally understood what he did wrong, has redeemed himself, and found God. I tried to make a quick Google search on the matter, and sure, there's nothing official to immediately find on the matter. But I believe that since parole boards are made up individuals, and those individuals have their own views of the world, often heavily christian, it's not a bad wager to say you're a religious person when trying to convince them to let you out of prison. It's a highly modified version of Pascal's Wager, only one that might actually work. If I was in prison, and I knew that lying a bit and owning a bible would mean an expected return of six months less jail time out of a decade long sentence, I'd do it, and keep my atheism under wraps until I got out. Thus there might be a very good reason not to publicly identify as an atheist in US prisons, and therefore, the statistics are highly questionable.

I forgot to reply to Resident Hazard earlier about the gun thing... if you want to continue that, R_H, I can shoot you a message with my reply.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to- ... 09e842df28

Just more makin' America great again...

Spicy's gone! D: D: D:

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/ar ... -secretary

This is a dark day for the administration--who will hide in the bushes now?!

Good riddance. Sean "The Holocaust wasn't that big of a deal" Spicer. Fuck him.

(He was also really good at sticking the administration's foot directly in its mouth, bee tee dubs.)

For those who have me on Facebook, the real reason Shadow Trump has more or less stopped is because I preemptively killed off Gundam Spicer after his "Even Hitler didn't use chemical weapons" comment because I was so sure that was going to be the end of him, but reality defied me and I was left with an obvious plot hole I was too embarrassed to fill.

(actually it's because just so much shit happens and I have so much less time that it's hard to keep up and that led to writer's block but hey, let's blame Spicy)

American media seems surprisingly quiet about that poor Muslim teenager who recently got kidnapped and then bludgeoned to death by a white guy. Wonder why that is.

The Castile acquittal, the Cosby de-facto acquittal, the shooting of US legislators, the shooting in San Francisco (I think?), the car-ramming in London, and the car-ramming in Paris all happened within a few days of each other. In that context, I'm surprised I managed to read anything about a kidnapping.

I saw plenty of news about that girl who was killed. There just isn't much to report yet as it's still being investigated what the motive was, last I read.

When I read "Muslim teenager who recently got kidnapped and then bludgeoned to death by a white guy", the motive is kinda obvious.

Also, NBC's Twitter says that the suspect was, in fact, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador.

https://twitter.com/nbcwashington/statu ... 0992447488

Yeah but now you are just trying to grand stand to make me look bad. Obviously it's most likely some kind of hate crime. But you never know when a case like this will turn out to be someone's disgruntled ex boyfriend just snapping one day. It would be irresponsible for the media to say anything until there's some conclusive way to tell. They're doing their jobs fine.

Yeah I mean flip the script and it's the exact same thing that right wingers get yelled at for whenever a muslim attacks somebody/someplace. Always take it slow no matter how obvious it looks.

It's disturbing how both political extremes tend to get sexually aroused whenever something confirms their bias: "Anti-Trump Black people beat up a mentally challenged white kid; PROOF THAT BLM IS A HATE MOVEMENT!" This kidnapping/murder is not much different I'm afraid.

You people are right. Sorry. I just... This shit is fucking revolting. I should probably stay away from the news for a couple of days. It isn't helping my already overworked mind a single bit.

Ha, no worries. I may have forgotten where I was going on it. Not that I wouldn't want to get your point on it, it's more that I wasn't here a few days and forgot where I was on it.




To add to the links you and Empyreal posted, it's not just SNL's latest golden era going away, but a staggering problem encompassing the White House as a whole. Trump has appointed only 43 top government positions thus far. By comparison, over the same period of time, Obama had appointed 151, and George W. Bush, 130. Why? People are avoiding working with the administration at all costs, while at the same time, others are abandoning it already.

It's frankly amazing to me that anyone ever thought this jackass would or could ever be a good president.