I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
In high school, I was pro-death penalty. As part of a class on politics, I was randomly assigned the anti-death penalty position to research and debate on. I very quickly changed my opinion when I learned about the systemic racism involved. Now I’m an anarchist
That escalated randomly.
Death penalty carceral state - carceral state - state -
state
I think I’m starting to lean that way as well, I definitely understand society and norms are an illusion of structure, but I used to think it was good, productive, now I think that theater is hurting us.
When people stop working towards the structure and begin to exploit it instead…
yep exactly. I really am just wondering how much this is recent failures or has it just always been this fucked up and we were sold lies growing up.
I used to be anti-death. Now I am in the pro-death camp. This is because if a 2nd American War is concluded, we will be left with many living MAGA in our prisons. Do we really want to house members of ICE in our prisons for life, or allow them to once again walk the streets they terrorized? Members of the Trump Regime willfully given up their humanity in all the ways.
I cannot help but feel that executing them all will allow us to allocate more resources towards the people who matter: children, immigrants, and others who still have their humanity.
I feel that but also recoginize the inherent dark irony.
It is called the tolerance paradox. If you want a truly tolerant society you can’t tolerate intolerance.
Yeah. It is problematic: On one paw, it is definitely evil to kill people. On the other, it is also evil to allow rapists, thieves, and murderers to have a high chance of doing so again.
It sucks. 😞
we will be left with many living MAGA in our prisons
Conveniently they’ve been building tons of prisons that could be put to use for this
No. Those aren’t fit for human habitation in the first place.
Don’t worry, when you graduate high school you’ll drop the anarchist bit, too.
Because grown ups are capitalists ?
Obviously, it varies, but a thing often happens where as you’re exposed to the details of how the world works (in person) you start to realise the generations who came before and made it weren’t total idiots.
Thinking it all makes sense isn’t where that goes, but “a monopoly on the use of force is probably necessary” or “markets are more airtight than people think” can be.
Speak for yourself. All kinds of groups from conservatives to liberals to fascists to communists (although let’s be honest, it’s mostly the conservatives and liberals and ‘enlightened centrists’) love to arrogantly imply that their current worldview is the mature, rational conclusion that any intelligent person should reach in adulthood, and any other is just childish, naive, and poorly conceived. The people who do this aren’t speaking to anything concrete about the world, they’re just high on their own farts and confident in their ignorance.
And it’s the anarchists who catch the bulk of the sneering insults from these types, who will often demonstrate their own ignorance as they dismiss them as naive and uninformed. You did this yourself by extolling the virtues of markets as a defense of capitalism, apparently not knowing that markets are not exclusive to capitalism.
Oh? Which ideology on that list the push for, then? I’m in the picture, I used to agree with OP on a lot and now I agree on less, but can you even guess how?
Nothing is being sold here, I literally just listed a couple anarchist things OP believes. Learning as you get older is a real phenomenon, at least for most people. And, there’s no shortage of older people who have more complex, less absolute ideas about any number of things than they did when they were younger.
You did this yourself by extolling the virtues of markets as a defense of capitalism, apparently not knowing that markets are not exclusive to capitalism.
I used a different word on purpose, because capitalism doesn’t really have a consistent definition. According to Hexbear, China isn’t capitalist despite having all the associated features, for example.
Alright, I’ll have a go at guessing your ideology since you asked. Given your status quo preference (“the generations before us aren’t stupid and things are the way they are for a good reason”), you’re not a radical so that leaves conservative, liberal, or centrist. Given you’ve implied that you used to have some anarchist beliefs it’s unlikely you went from that to conservative, so most likely you’re some flavor of liberal, like a social democrat. You’re vaguely sympathetic to some socialist and anarchist ideas but think you’re too smart to commit to them because the world is “just more complicated than that.” Capitalist realism has pulled you back from becoming a radical as you’ve gotten older.
Actually, you pretty much nailed it, nice. TBF that makes it kind of a trick question, since it’s not neatly in any of the categories.
Do you think the world isn’t complicated? Even anarchists usually do. If anything, you see the argument that the world is too complicated to be reduced to numbers and laws.
Nah, it’s just that eventually you realize there is more to life that questioning your parents and wearing black.
Edit: Don’t worry, you can still circle your As.
oh look, it’s someone who doesn’t know what anarchism is
I know what anarchism is and I think it a utopian thought experiment.
Like every single political ideology you rube
I mean, other ideologies, support them or hate them, have at least existed in the real world at a mass scale.
So you’re saying human civilization always operated under a hierarchical body politic without decentralized decision making?
Serious ahistorical claim.
By the way “anarchy” in the sense of childish movie plot stuff is not what any adherent of the ideology is about. Anarchy is a spectrum and set of guiding principles (like any political belief system), and one can argue that forms of what I might identify as anarchistic political structures have and do exist in many political systems. Just like socialism exists in neoconservative governments, and fascism in democracy ect…
Anarchism can run a small commune but not modern societies like China or the USA. Let real leftists build movements that actually succeed in reality and not at the scale of like a couple hundred people.
Let me guess, you use Linux?
what gave it away, the website I’m on or the posts I made?
I didn’t even look at your post history. It’s just that Linux users and defenders of Anarchism as a true system of power have a very narrow Venn diagram.
whatever. I’m not interested in discussing anything with someone this caustic. I didn’t say “humanity must become anarchists” I said “you don’t know what anarchy is”
And I’m not interested in having a conversation with someone who can’t even pick a side of the fence to argue from. I hear the Libertarians are recruiting, maybe they are more your flavor.
You’re in wrong neighborhood pal lol
I only became an anarchist in my 30s. Before that I was authleft.
Israel was justified in their (initial) retaliation for October 7.
Gone so far in the other direction that I now firmly believe Israel should be wiped off the fucking map. Decades of propaganda convinced me they weren’t violent colonizers.
Fuck Israel. From the river to the sea.
That people are smart.
Most people are abject morons who still believe in Iron Age mythology.
Before using AI for the first time: “Holy shit this is gonna be dope!”
Aftwr using AI: “Yo wtf? This is bullshit.”
Itd be fine if it was just useless slop that sat there. But then it gets shoved I to every last possible device, burning up water, and taking up valuable land resources to enrich billionaires, oh and outright stealing the works of others while telling us plebs “it’s illegal to do that!” Thats the issues I have. If it was all locally ran, open source, trained in public data only, I’d maybe be OK with it being used for research or data purposes only (nothing to do with art or surveillance) but we will never have that.
Did you ever play with the pre-NN chatbots?
Shout out for “tech wont save us” podcast. It kinda crystalised my thoughts around this - tech indeed will not save us.
that people as a whole are inherently good
nope. nope nope nope. people are inherently selfish
half the population of the world seemingly needs to believe in fairy tales and a magic book to give them a moral code. people will, time and time again, do things for their own convenience or desires at a greater direct and immediate expense to somebody else, i.e. knocking somebody over to spill $10 out of their pockets and only steal $2 and run away.
fuck people. people will get respect when they earn respect. everybody else gets basic decency and nothing more, until they prove they’re not an asshole. and the moment they prove that they are an asshole, they get treated like one.
I used to joke about eating two animals for every one a vegetarian didn’t eat. I’ve been vegan for over a decade now, pulled a bit of an uno reverse in my early twenties.
Oh great. Now I gotta eat four animals. I’m never gonna finish lunch.
You can switch to crickets, I think that’s your best murder per Kg ratio.
I’m not eating the bugs.
Larvae or maggot-based dishes would be my go-to. Or maybe edible mite gulls, which IIRC is a thing. You go too small and at some point you end up with questions about if the critters are so simple they’re actually vegetarian, though.
Go to Wendy’s and get a 4 for $4 add bacon. bacon cheeseburger, nuggets and fries. That counds as three.
From what animal are fries made?
IIRC some restaurants were flavoring their oil with horse tallow.
That’s a fair point.
Yeah we all go through a stage where we haven’t mentally matured yet and have this tween-like rebellion reaction to any idea about changing for the better. Some grow out of it at a younger age, some at a normal age, and some not at all. I remember a bunch of examples I’ve seen happen through the decades;
“You say i shouldn’t eat meat, well i say nuh uh! Now I’m gonna eat twice as much!”
“You say i shouldn’t smoke cigarettes, well i say nuh uh! Now I’m gonna smoke cigars too!”
“You say i shouldn’t be racist, well i say nuh uh! Now I’m gonna be even more outrageously racist!”
It’s just a non-thinking reactionary response to the idea that you aren’t perfect.
I think it’s funny that there have been a bunch of stories about how genZ is smoking again because it’s some kind of nihilist counterculture and I’m just like… Yeah I didn’t quit smoking because the priest gave me a very stern lecture. I quit because I got tired of hacking up half a lung every morning.
I quit smoking because I actually want to live beyond 55 - I still remember my neighbour-woman smoking a ciggy, while standing outside with her chemo-drip… Absolutely haunting.
How do you get your protein? I’ve been doing the plants - and eating beans a lot - but this last week I ate some meatballs in my soups and boy - I really crave the meat.
edit - not sure why it quotes irrelevant text in these replies
I eat a lot of tofu, soy curls, and chickpeas,mostly. I haven’t had much issue.
Here’s sort of a strange question. Not too strange though ;-)
Let’s say you had a basic rice and beans meal - garlic … onions … root vegetables … blackbeans and redbeans … then kale roots and final kale leafs … salt pepper
What spices do you use? What are your favorites?
For that kind of a meal I usually season simply with salt and pepper, but then make up a dressing or sauce to go over it, something like a pesto or maybe a carrot ginger dressing.
Thanks. I’ll try that.
I used to be anti-nuclear energy until I learned a bunch of science and engineering behind it. Turns out things are less scary when you know more about them.
Edit: I also learned that it’s okay, and usually preferable, to not have a strong opinion about things that you don’t know about.
Israel.
I thought it was complicated but they had a right to the land because of the holocaust, that countries around them should learn to get along with Israel
Now I know founding Israel was a mistake. Explicitly saying it’s a Jewish state will inevitably lead to other groups being suppressed, i.e. Apartheid if not outright genocide. And they are not hated in the region because Muslims and Jews cannot get along, but because Israel was built entirely on stolen land, and they are still in the process of stealing more and genocide those who stand in their way
Eating meat. I used to vaguely mock vegans when I was in college (UK, so 16-18 years old). I used to say shit like “don’t you just miss bacon though” and “the animals already dead, you might as well eat it now or it goes to waste”. I’ve since done a 180 and I’m close to 10 years of veganism. Best decision I ever made for both my health and mental wellbeing.
math is hard, annoying, useless
then found shaders, procedural art, freya holmer.
so math is hard, annoying, beautiful. well not exactly 180 then.
I was raised conservative, back-country compound with apocalypse preppers, homeschooling, israel prophecy, the whole nine yards. I was raised with The 700 Club and Rush Limbaugh playing every day and night.
I read science books that distant family members managed to smuggle to me in gift boxes alongside other “safe” books like Kid’s bibles, I learned more and more about the world around me, I started collecting my own book collection and just read and read and read, and the doubts started to grow, uneasy, shameful, scary-as-fuck doubts.
But the big turn happened when I got out of there, and America started one it’s many wars and I was watching FOX news cover it. A humvee passes a civilian box truck and shredded it to pieces with an automatic grenade launcher. Probably a family trying to escape the city… cut to the host, smiling and praising America’s might, and that’s when it hit me: We’re the bad guys.
A few more things really sealed it, when I had friends start to come back from these conflicts in boxes, or a couple guys I knew who blew their own brains out after coming home. I still despair at these horrific wastes of life and I can’t figure out why more people don’t see life as precious. How fucking stupid do you have to be to justify war, murder and causing destruction to society.
Conservatism. Used to be a conservative around being 18-20. Then I left it after I saw what giving 2/3rd of the seats to Orbán did in my country. Now I’m not only an anti-fascist, but I also actively oppose conservatism.
When we thought fascism would never come back, we had to learn fascism was just conservatism at its logical extremes.
Hanlon’s razor
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
Evil does exist, and it wears the mask of imbecility
I used to believe the centrist idea that America needs a strong Republican Party and a strong Democratic Party.
The GOP actively calls all democrats and liberals enemies, demons, terrorists, etcetera while giving the billionaires all on our public wealth, tax breaks and subsidies.
America does not need the GOP at all.
One issue with this is both are right of center.
And exist in a system that can only support two parties, which means that the most effective strategy is not to convince voters that your pictures are superior but to convince them not to vote for the other party. Cue a race to the bottom.
You’re basically down to 0 strong parties. And really 2 is a minimum, since if there’s more, the other parties can just go around any one or two that are being dumb.
The GOP put itself on the fascist downward spiral when the Federalist society took over.
The Democrats started their slow decline when they put Truman as FDR’s VP. Pushing out the left wing part of the party that gave it massive electoral power for a generation.
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot. Being religious doesn’t make you a bigot and being atheist doesn’t mean you aren’t one either.
I had a similar 180 though, I used to be an atheist but in the last year or so I pivoted into druidism. Turns out following a religion that focuses on spending time in nature helps to get you out of the house when you’re going though a depressive episode.
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot
The main issue is that the cohort of people with megaphones broadcasting their spirituality is virtually entirely comprised of profiteers.
Like all such parasites they follow the pattern of establishing out groups for you to despise, simply because it drives engagement better. Same reason all major social media now attempts to shape you into a being of hatred and impulse. It keeps you stressed and activated so you jump at the opportunity when they offer to let you spend money to blow off some of the steam.
Bigotry as a phenomenon has many origins, but wherever it springs from it ultimately doubles as an inherently appealing strategy for those who wish wring dry their community.
At any rate, as we all sit here dying around the same poisoned watering hole, we see these profiteers dressing just like us while actively dumping the poison in. Ashamed, we feel compelled to proclaim, “I am not them! They only wear my clothes!”
Spirituality is an incredibly comfortable and practical “clothing” for many people. You’re absolutely correct in drawing attention to how bad it sucks that the people who embrace that comfort now feel pained to differentiate themselves from the abusers who pervert their fashion
Yeah, I had a world-shaking 180 for spirituality after I read about Zen Buddhism.
I was a really proud atheist and thought all religions were just believing in something supernatural. Until I actually gave an intellectually honest try at understanding them. Most theistic religions I couldn’t get on board with but after I read Three Pillars of Zen, something just clicked and I joined my local sangha. Also begun to understand a bit more about religiosity in general after, though I’m still not a fan of Abrahamic religions in particular.
You say you were “intellectually honest” so I’m curious what it was about Zen that appealed to that kind of approach?
The way I was introduce to it framed it specifically as not believing in anything you can’t verify in your own direct experience. The book I read ( https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89766/the-three-pillars-of-zen-by-roshi-philip-kapleau/ ) was actually pretty mercilessly pointing out how much of what I thought to be obviously true was actually just a belief. Meaning what I think is the average westerner experience of the world as explained by science. It didn’t offer me a set of ideas to believe in, it offered me a way of disbelieving anything I couldn’t know for myself to be true.
Like I said it was pretty world shattering. I realized there is a world BEFORE any thought and that is definitely more real than anything I can think about. I joined the local sangha because things got a little weird for me for a time and my friends kinda thought I was going crazy haha but in my perspective they were the ones alarmingly missing something incredibly important. And I still kinda think they are but it’s not my place to try to “convert” them. Since there’s no point. You need to have the active desire to actually understand.
But aren’t there things that you can objectively know to be true? Wouldn’t this just lead to believing whatever you want to believe?
I feel a little timid about trying to answer this because at this point, I know that people can talk about these things intellectually forever and it just won’t… click. It’s so hard to write about too because if I tried to write in a way that very perfectly reflects my experience, the text becomes weird and cumbersome ( and then when I don’t, people try some gotchas like “ahaa but you refer yourself as “I”, doesn’t that mean you still believe in an individual self”, no but writing more precisely gets in the way of the message ).
First, believing whatever I want to believe is definitely a danger and actually you see this a lot in spiritual discourse that leans towards Buddhism, especially via New Age stuff and “McMindfulness”. Many people happily discard the mainstream beliefs but then they get hooked on their idea of what is true. But the merciless approach that Zen Buddhism has is that nothing you think about is totally true. It’s more like a reflection in a mirror ( Interestingly Plato was also alluding to this in his Allegory of The Cave, so this realization isn’t unique to Zen ).
That includes the concept of “objectivity”. Objectivity relies on the idea that there is some external third party to human experience. But once I looked, or more like was forced to face it, I realized that there is no such thing. I can exchange ideas with what appear to be other people and have an agreement. Like we can probably both agree that we’re looking at a screen now. I anticipate an objection here on the “other people”. I don’t know if “other people” exist outside of me but I know that I don’t have control over anything that appears in my mind. Something that I can call “other people” appears, and they have their likes and dislikes and it can be painful if I’m not respectful of that. This is where compassion teachings come in.
Oh and I’m not anti-science at all. Science is great at revealing patterns in the way things appear. Happy to go get my vaccinations and all that.
Tell me you had a certain experience without telling me you had a certain experience.
Were you taught to not talk in certain terms about how your world “shattered”? Because I was.
I was, yes. I think even if I wasn’t I probably wouldn’t use those terms anyway since in online discourse it never looks good.
Okay, thank you for explaining.
I admit I don’t get it, but maybe I’ll consider reading that book. It seems I had a mistaken idea about Buddhism. Or at least Zen Buddhism.
What they describe is similar to the discourse in western philosophy about the mind and the objective reality. There is no way to prove or disprove that the reality exists outside of the mind of the observer, i.e. that solipsism is true or false. But it also follows that solipsism is practically useless. So we must agree that we probably have a shared experience with other people, which we’ll call ‘reality’. Then the question is, how close the experience of one observer is to that of other people. This is where stuff like qualia comes in, which posits that it’s impossible to qualify immediate perceptual experiences, because each person only refers to what they themselves have experienced. It could easily be that one person’s sensory experience and perception of the world is wholly different from that of another person. It seems, though, that in practice we have a shared vocabulary for our perceptions and use that to build our knowledge of the world.
@SenK@lemmy.ca does this sound like an accurate interpretation of your concept?
I had something similar. I grew up catholic and was very devout until I learned some stuff about myself that made me step away for a while. I expected to come back like a year later and join the episcopalians or something, but I wound up an atheist for several years. During that time I was kinda insufferable about it for a while. Then I started exploring pantheism, earth worship, and ancestor devotion because I’d felt I was missing something without religion and lighting candles to talk to my mom helped me cope with how much of my life she doesn’t get to be there for. Later an acid trip and some exploration would help me delve deeper and find the goddess I primarily pray to these days. Somewhere later I started using the Wiccan holidays because they’re really convenient for solar and seasonal observance and meditation. They also help make it so I don’t wonder where the hell the year went.
So yeah, catholic to atheist to pagan. There are many paths up the mountain, find the path that is best for you and makes you better.
There are LGBT friendly churches run by LGBT Christians. Are they conveniently ignoring certain parts of the Bible? Sure but all Christians do that
Idk why we’ve reached the point where anyone saying they’re anything but an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot
Most “spiritual” people adhere to one of the big organized religions, and those kinda suck in general and are rarely content to leave nonbelievers in peace.
The biggest organised religion is realism.
If we’re free to redefine “religion” as we see fit, I declare breathing a religion.
I think some people can be overly smug about their lack of belief, but I don’t think that means it’s akin to a religion
Realism isn’t about lack of belief. Solipsism is about lack of belief. Realism is about an unshakeable faith in the existence of an external world beyond the senses. Soulism is about making the best of the world within one’s senses. Out of the three main approaches to reality, the realists have the most belief, and are most easily cut down by Occam’s razor. That a world beyond our senses exists is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. It is nothing to base one’s life around. It is better to work to improve the malleable world within our senses, than to strive for Plato’s world of forms.
The biggest organized religion is breathing
We don’t live in a society that persecutes people for not breathing, but we do live in a society that persecutes people for not believing in reality. Genocides have been committed in the name of reality.
A genocide for not believing in reality?
Yep. Aboriginal folks don’t tend to teach their kids the white idea of reality. I’ve heard from some Indigenous people that their culture (keep in mind, there are many Aboriginal cultures) doesn’t believe in reality at all.
So the white people took Aboriginal kids away from their families and put them in white institutions and with white parents. Took away their language, their culture, their land, and gave them white patriarchal realism instead. And there was a hell of a lot of abuse. Beatings and rape. They called it “civilising” the children.
It was an attempt to exterminate Aboriginal cultures. I call that genocide.
idea of reality
Let me stop you right there bud. Reality is or isn’t. There is no idea about it.
What you’re talking about is racism.
How can you not believe in reality? Do they think we live in the Matrix?
The biggest organized religion is breathing
so I pivoted into druidism
I think we need a secular form of spirituality (be it heathenism, druidism, paganism, etc), so people can still be spiritually fulfilled, while not following some large-ass church that gets corrupted over time, every damn time.
It helps that most people in “the west” are becoming more and more secular (as far as I can tell).
an atheist has to specify that they aren’t a bigot
Being religious doesn’t make you a bigot
Looking at the entire history of (a) faith-based religion, versus (b) evidence-based science
I have to say:
- learn history
- fuck you, you ignorant evil-enabling asshat
There’s no denying that most of the major religions are rooted in racism, and many still promote hate against certain people.
That being said, “fuck you, you ignorant evil enabling asshat” sure sounds like you are making assumptions and vilifying someone you’ve never met based on one trait that you do not agree with.
Sorry, bro, but you’ve become the monster you’re trying to fight.
Certain units of the Japanese Army conducted a lot of inhumane scientific experiments on human subjects they racially discriminated against during WWII, and the evidence collected was retained by the USA.
I want to note that none of this was valid science, the results were worthless because they prioritized torture and didn’t document their “experiments” and their results properly. Same for medical Nazi “research”.
Though it’s true that you don’t need religion to do evil acts.
Maybe the Japanese Empire didn’t, but the Nazis were explicitly Christian.
the Nazis were explicitly Christian.
Eh, publicly Christian 100%, but there were plenty of anti-Christian views from Goebbels, and then there’s the Occultism in Nazism as well.
That being said, Positive Christianity was 100% a tool to manipulate the people into doing the State’s will, trying to eject Catholicism from Germany.
Not really. They were certainly white supremacists and hated Jews, but Christianity didn’t really play a big role in their ideology. They spent a lot more time supressing local churches than going on about how christian they are, and many of them were very interested in pagan religions.
This is revisionist bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_Nazi_Germany#Accommodation_to_Nazism
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-of-clergy-and-church-leaders
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state
the us thought they were getting a deal from the japanese when they conducting biological experiments on chinese people, but they were getting all fluff results
evidence based science conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Let’s infect black people with syphilis and see what happens! They aren’t really people, so are like monkeys so if they die from untreated diseases it’s not a big deal!
scientific practice both past and present is often rife with racism.
but don’t let the facts of the world get in the way of your worship of science as a religion.
Guaranteed that was run by Christian White Racists
Arguing for faith is literally saying “I will believe anything on no evidence, and I think the following…”
Sorry, I stopped listening when you told me you don’t know how to think as an adult
right, anyone who says anything that disproves you is wrong and bad.
clearly throwing tantrums and calling people names is a thing only very mature adults too. toddlers don’t do that… ever
