Torah teaches that God created human beings with both good and evil impulses. Human beings uniquely have knowledge of our drives and impulses and can learn to master them. The same needs that drive us to consume can lead us to overconsume or do so unethically. Our animal drive for safety and security can also lead us to attack perceived threats.

According to this philosophy, evil comes from people misdirecting divinely given attributes.

The idea of good and evil as absolute “powers” independent of human choices is foreign to many philosophies and theologies.

I think it’s fair to say not all AI is AI slop.

This is a user, not a community. They are downvoting across communities, including stalking people across communities to downvote all of their posts and comments, following communities just to downvote every post and comment, etc.

They downvote over 99% of the posts they see. Why seek out content you don’t like? It’s mildly infuriating. To me at least.

How you have voted for others

When I was a kid, we had whole educational units on this. Like with a special demonstration clock and worksheets and everything.

How are kids supposed to learn if schools don’t teach them?

I’ve shared several peer reviewed papers that show the opposite.

Science doesn’t take anecdotes.

Most food pantries and beds for the homeless in the USA are faith based. Here are the scientific papers that show it.

A descriptive analysis of food pantries in twelve American states: hours of operation, faith-based affiliation, and location

Assessing the Faith-Based Response to Homelessness in America: Findings from Eleven Cities

People claim money actually exists, too. It’s not an inherent property of human existence. It’s just an organizing principle that helps us coordinate resources.

It would be stupid if the main argument we had about money was whether on not it “exists.” By “stupid” I mean that it is counterproductive to the goals of bettering humanity. We don’t get anywhere with that discussion. Instead, we talk about how we should use use money as a tool to better organize our society. We talk about equity and advancement and poverty.

It’s the same with religion. It’s been well studied that religion offers social benefits:

Association between spirituality/religiousness and quality of life 2021

Assessing the Faith-Based Response to Homelessness in America

63.2% food pantries are identified as being faith-based food pantries

With this being Lemmy, I don’t have to highlight the negative consequences of religion.

The point is that we should be advancing beyond the kindergarten level discussion about what’s real and what’s make-believe. Intelligent people should instead be engaging on how we can ensure religious beliefs are fostering social trust, or how to recognize and combat religious extremism.

On other people’s stuff

Thanks. Fixed.

Mastodon reminds me when I do that, but I should remember on Lemmy too.

Personally, I agree (we would never do this in a large community for the record). But yes, there are people who think that they can “kill” a small community with downvotes because they don’t like the topic.

The sad thing is, it’s true. In a community where most posts have under 5 or so votes, one person coming in and systematically downvoting every post will keep people from seeing it who may be interested. If someone doesn’t like a topic, they can block the community, but when they take steps to prevent others from seeing it, that’s toxic. It’s bad for the health of the platform.

Nothing against downvoting in general, but some people are extremely toxic about it. I don’t get the point.

Please don’t do a witch hunt - it was censored for a reason. Sorry I didn’t do it thoroughly enough.

Oh weird

You have to select “user” and enter the format exactly as shown. There are some servers that don’t work though. Yours should.

Why make an ideological argument against ideologies?

Science also led to eugenics and atom bombs. Religion also builds food pantries, wells, and hospitals. It is not about the tool but how we choose to use it.

Turns out the world is ending, just not ours. But lots of others.

Now that’s a shower thought! I love it.

What a stupid premise to begin with. God is at least as real as money, love, or America.

All of these are useful ideas to describe things that cannot be “proven” with objective evidence, but still have a meaningful impact on the reality of our lives.

Arguing about the objective existence of God is a red herring. I wish we spent as much time talking about the very well studied social benefits and harms of religion. Then we could start talking about meaningful reforms.

True, I’m just looking at it linguistically. We’ve had a thing called “pizza” in continuous use since 997 according to Wikipedia (I was unable to locate the source cited, but I don’t think it’s a contentious issue, so Wikipedia is probably correct).

Weird thought - pizza dates to 997 CE, that’s over 500 years before tomatoes were introduced in Italy. Most of the existence of pizza has been without tomato.