Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 2 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If you’re asking for money to fix bugs, that incentivises writing code with bugs, as if you write perfect code first time nobody will pay you to fix it

    There’s certainly potential for that to be a problem. But it’s not necessarily insurmountable. For starters, I think the idea is you’re not paying to have your thing fixed, you’re paying to have your thing prioritised. The same amount of work is getting done either way, but bugs reported by people who paid will be prioritised over bugs reported by people who don’t pay. If there are no bugs reported by paid users, then unpaid bugs will still be worked on.




  • Yeah, the average person gets a pass on this sort of thing because I generally assume they haven’t thought much about it. But it’s particularly galling when biblical scholars do it.

    I saw one biblical scholar whose schtick was debunking things evangelicals believe about the bible. He would happily admit it’s written by a collection of authors over a long period of time, who were doing so not literally but in rhetorical styles popular in their day. Things like that.

    Once, I saw him describe how the early Israelites did not believe in the three omnis. They may not have even believed in a monotheistic god, but it was certainly not omniscient and omnibenevolent. Then he went on to say that despite that—despite the fact that the authors of the religious text and the society that invented this god not believing in three omnis—he nevertheless did believe god was omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Wtf?



  • Not sure that’s true. Free will doesn’t mean anyone can do anything. It means any decisions a person makes are truly decided by them, and they actually could have made a different decision.

    People who don’t believe in free will believe that the physical laws of the universe are deterministic. That leptons and quarks behave in ways determined by their state. That this is true even inside your brain, and thus decisions you make are actually just the result of particles interacting. Even quantum effects, though random, are not consciously decided and thus do not affect free will.

    The circumstances you are in change the inputs to those equations, but they don’t change the fact that the equations exist.


  • I’m upvoting because I thought this was done good engagement with the premise and you don’t deserve to be downvoted for it.

    But fundamentally, you’ve missed a pretty big step. What if god just…didn’t create a situation where children get diseases that can only be cured with one rare tree?

    Or, more importantly, what about diseases that cannot be cured? What about natural disasters? Yes, some types of natural disasters have gotten more common and worse as a result of human action, but they still happened before climate change, and if anything were more disruptive to people before we had modern building practices.

    We’re talking about a god that is literally capable of anything. It could just wave its hand and delete all disease from existence. It chooses not to.



  • What shits me is Christians (and Jews and Muslims, but it’s mainly Christians who do this) who just handwave away the problem of evil. Like fine, I can accept that some evils might arise as a result of human decisions and free will. Things like wars and genocides are done by people. It’s difficult to swallow even that much with the idea of a god who supposedly knows all, is capable of doing anything, and is “all good”, but fine, maybe free will ultimately supplants all that.

    But what I absolutely cannot accept is any claim that tries to square the idea of a god with the triple-omnis with the fact that natural disasters happen. That children die of cancer. You try telling the parents of a child slowly dying of a painful incurable disease that someone could fix it if they wanted, and they completely know about it, but that they won’t. And then try telling them that person is “all good”. See how they react.

    I find religious people who believe in the three omnis after having given it any amount of serious consideration to be absolutely disgusting and immoral people.