Was our man high on shrooms when he wrote this back in 2012? I find it...fascinating that Carrier (or at least his 2012 incarnation) has found a kind of logical proof for what Buddhists would surely call samsara, including superhuman "gods", naturalistic paradises and ditto hells. Some of the "gods" even appear in spacetime purely by chance, like gigantic Boltzmann brains?!
Probably true. And scary as fuck. Where is the escape pod???
And then we have this again...
This actually makes the Buddhist view of karma more logical, despite looking superficially "disturbing". The idea is that good karma makes people rich and powerful...but in most cases also turns them into assholes! Conversely, the poor and downtrodden have mostly bad karma. The idea, obviously, is that we have to break free from karma altogether, since all karma is really part of samsara and hence ultimately a trap, a lure of Mara (the "devil" in Buddhist mythology). And while good karma *might* take us closer to the ultimate goal of enlightenment, it´s much more likely that we will be mesmerized by our wealth or success, and become corrupted.
Buddhism has a strange "two tier" system, in which the monks pursue liberation, while the lay people attempt to accumulate as much good karma as possible, to get a better rebirth, perhaps even in a paradise world as a "god". So why on earth should a lay person become a monk?! Here, we have an explanation: even good actions contain the seeds of their opposite, since (surprise) everything is suffering...
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| Credit: Crimfants |
Swedish media right now, when realizing that Joe Biden is just as corrupted as they imagine Trump to be.
Joe, say it aint so. So Dark Brandon pardoned his prodigal son Hunter. We are monitoring the situation.
The Syrian Civil War rekindles, and is even more complex than before. The article below is from a Ukrainian newspaper. It states that Ukraine´s intelligence services have been training the rebel forces (many of whom are Islamists) fighting the Syrian army in Aleppo. The Syrian military and the Assad regime are backed by Russia.
But note that the rebels are also sponsored by Turkey, usually seen as an almost-ally of Russia in other theatres! So in Syria, Russia and Turkey are enemies...while Turkey and Ukraine are friends?! To make the situation even more complex, the "SDF" (really the Kurdish YPG or PKK) have attacked Aleppo from the east. But the SDF are anti-Turkish...
Oh, and both Hamas (pro-Turkish/pro-rebel) and Hizbollah (anti-Turkish/pro-Assad) are sponsored by Iran against Israel and the United States.
I wish Marco Rubio and Jared Kushner good luck at their new jobs.
Ukrainian trained, Turkish sponsored Syrian rebels lead assault on Aleppo
Arla (the Scandinavian dairy company) is threatened by a boycott in the UK due to cows getting a mysterious new feed which makes them fart less and hence "produce" less methane, which is a green house gass. The feed is associated with Bill Gates, who is prominently featured in various conspiracy theories... and off we go. Arla, for their part, blame "disinformation".
Personally, I wonder if the people who want to boycott Arla over this think that modern milk is entirely "organic" to begin with? Why do they buy their dairy products from Arla rather than from some semi-illegal biodynamic farm run by Anthroposophists? Duh!
Arla says boycott calls over methane-cutting feed additive based on "misinformation"
Another atheist extravaganza from Richard Carrier, this time arguing against what he believes are two relatively competent Christian apologists on YouTube who use various philosophical arguments to prove theism.
Needless to say, Carrier isn´t impressed by their arguments anyway, at one point exclaiming "Their erudition has driven them mad"!
Make of this material what ye wish.
Richard Carrier´s atheist-materialist hypothesis about qualia. There is nothing mysterious about subjective experience, it´s just an inevitable outcome of a purely material computation. All senses are thus computations and they all evolved from touch, as suggested by scientific research into invertebrates, and so on.
Oh, and "quale" is apparently singular for "qualia".
Touch, all the way down: Qualia as computational discrimination
Richard Carrier again. Is Christianity a kind of conspiracy theory? Aren´t conspiracy theories involving supernatural agents by definition less probable than naturalistic conspiracy theories, no matter how convoluted? Indeed, could Jesus have been a space alien rather than the Son of God?
I suppose that depends on what kind of supernatural agents you think are out there...muh-hah-hah!
Christianity is a conspiracy theory
