Need a plate of generic, insipid platitudes with a giant helping of bad science and misogyny?
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
1360 points (91.9% liked)
Memes
44134 readers
2309 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Richard Dawkins has a pretty fun comment about that https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NvzMJqkZV74
I just want to note that Dawkins has almost certainly taken LSD.
That might be, but I think he at least claimed on that podcast that he hadn't.
It did make me raise an eyebrow when Rogan got him to admit he was afraid of the possibility of Heaven being real, due to it also being eternal.
Bruh, if you really don't believe in something, why fear it? Do you know how scared I am of the possibility that Jason Vorhees is real? Not at all! I'm also not scared of the idea that Outworld is real and will take over our realm if we lose another tournament..
So shouldn't the concept of Heaven be just as powerless to his sense of fear?
I'm not making a statement or trying to imply anything, I'm not sold on an afterlife of any kind (I think it's a lovely idea, but, I also think it literally raining chocolate is a lovely idea), I just found that confusing is all.
Because claiming you have all the knowledge is even dumber than believing in religion.
The risk about being wrong about heaven, although infinitesimally unlikely, is very grave because it is forever - over time, being wrong about this would outweigh every other poor decision you've ever made.
And yet, of course, this alone is not a reason to believe in it. Even if you were to do so, which version do you pick to have faith in when there is no hard evidence for any of them?
It's a bit like Roko's Basilisk, come to think of it. We can all be quite sure it isn't real. But (the way it works out in this case), why needlessly take the gamble even if there is no evidence? Infinitely unlikely risk, but with infinitely large consequence.
Praise the Basilisk, please don't kill me Basilisk
Even if we assume he somehow made it through the hippy era as a PhD holder without trying it, there's no way no one has hooked him up in the past ten years.
Idk would you want to be near him when he trips? He doesn’t seem like a fun person to do a substance that can cause experiences of religion with.
I would absolutely want to be there for Dawkins on acid.
As an agnostic atheist that favors materialism, I found it to be very fun and exciting to do pretty massive doses of psychedelics, especially ones that frequently spur thoughts of "higher powers." 2C-E, in particular is known for bringing about thoughts about the divine, and that was a lot of fun (I just played around on Universe Sandbox while I came up, put on some good music, then laid on the floor in a blanket and thought about the universe for a few hours).
Dawkins on acid would be a hell of a time
God I gotta trip shrooms this weekend, that one time where I saw myself as a squid outside of my body playing with it and being judged by a stream of squids for refusing to "Stop playing with that thing and move on to embrace your truest self, a being beyond physicality, a being that can take any form or shape it wants, something far great than a human being."
Was awesome...
God I hate being human. I'd demand to be freed from this flesh prison, but I'm not sure there's anything to actually let out... That I may actually BE the flesh prison.
I feel like I'm in this weird camp of "I Don't Want To Be An Atheist!"
Not because I fear Hell or anything, I just find the concept of a cold purely material universe where no greater force than Entropy exists scarier than any interpretation of Tartarus!
Ego death is a hell of a thing...
I don't think it's that unusual. Most people are just pretty good at pretending that they believe in a higher power and repressing that fear that maybe this is all we get.
At least personally there was a period of about a year where I went through every apologetics argument I could find in order to try and hang onto the religion I grew up with, followed by another year where I called myself a deist before I confronted the possibility that there was really no evidence for anything more than materialism. I wound up reaching the conclusion that unless we find more evidence, most religions and supernatural beliefs are just wishful thinking. And given my personality, I couldn't really ignore that conclusion once I got there.
It is a bit overwhelming. I tend to fall back on acknowledging that I am part of the universe rather than in opposition to it as a way of confronting that existential dread. Plus, entropy is actually not as scary as it seems at first since space and time are really, really big compared to the scales we perceive and think in. That leaves lots of places where order can appear without violating the second law of thermodynamics, and our species is very unlikely to ever really reach that point where the heat death of the universe affects us personally.
So I just file "the cold indifference of the universe" away in the same area as knowing the sun will one day expand and consume Earth: it's interesting to know how it all works, a little scary, but very unlikely to ever significantly affect this little pocket of the universe I perceive as my self.
I... I want to hug you, I feel like I've actually found someone who gets it, instead of another edgelord mocking me for "Trying to cling to sky daddy faerie tales"
I'm sorry I can't... I can't accept a world where death is the final answer for us all.. It's it's too much...
Internet hugs Any time, friend. People shouting too loudly about how strongly they disbelieve and mocking others are just covering up their own fears and are still unwilling to give up their own idea of absolute truth, IMO (and I say this as a pretty strong anti-theist, myself). Give them a few years (or decades) to come to grips with their own mortality and they'll be far more open to "live and let live."
It's certainly uncomfortable and very...well, final, I guess. But personally, there are two ideas of materialistic afterlife that really comfort me:
I like the idea of my physical body going on to become other things. There's a growing movement where people more or less have their bodies composted and turned into soil by a service, and the soil is then returned to the family and loved ones. It's comforting to me to think that even when my consciousness is gone, my atoms can return to other living beings. It might seem a bit weird to some, but I love the idea than my great-grandchildren might hang a swing in a tree that grew in the material that was once my body, or that bees might make honey from the pollen of wildflowers that grew in that soil.
I've also always liked the idea of two deaths: the first being the death of a person's physical body and the second being the last time anyone speaks their name or remembers them as a person. It helps me to avoid hopeless nihilism and hedonism to remember that my actions will have consequences that go far beyond my physical lifetime, whether I am able to see them or not. And in that way, anything that you dedicate time to, and anyone that you impact with your words or actions (positively or negatively) carries a piece of you forward.
But hey, at the end of the day, none of us really have the first clue about what awaits us. Plus, there's the old Mark Twain quote: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." So go out and make the most of the time we've got! I, for one, need to get back to preparing to teach a new batch of students and trying to fix my furnace before fall really sets in. But any time you feel like talking through anything like this, you know where to find me, and clearly, I don't mind the conversation ;)
My discord is hawlsera if you don't mind speaking more one on one on this
Yeah I just worry he might do what I did and find Gaia. Us earth worshippers are annoying enough without Dawkins among us. Though I’ll acknowledge I already had a foot in the door to pantheism at the time
I think Dawkins would simply acknowledge it as a hallucination brought on by cultural concepts.
Eh, I think he's too stubborn and too good at defining his terms to go that route. I love the idea of Spinoza's pantheistic view of the universe, but I would never tell the average person that because I don't want to end up in the same box as Einstein, where just because I use the word "God," people assume I'm religious.
Personally, I think Dawkins would wind up going the same route as Sagan, defining mystical experiences related to the universe as "numinous" rather than "religious" for precisely that reason: because it's really obnoxious when people take your words out of context, so stick to using very specific words that don't carry the baggage of religion.
I don’t know why it is necessary to accuse Dawkins of taking a drug he has stated he hadent taken and them make conjectured comments about his sexual life
That's hilarious! I had no idea there was more to this. Thanks for sharing.
Now I gotta track down Rogan and Peterson talking about Dawkins.
If you're a fan of extreme cringe, Jordan Peterson's podcast episode with Richard Dawkins is the source for all that. But the double helix thing was probably the most entertaining one.
Here it is: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000574664589
Holy crap, I just listened to it, it's a monologue by Peterson. He's just talking at Dawkins, it's incredible. Completely oblivious.
20 minutes of rambling builds up to Jordan Peterson saying he thinks people can comprehend DNA by moving their consciousness down to the micro level. Dawkins just repeats that back baffled. Then before he can even give a proper response, Peterson says: "I have have taken extremely high doses of psilocybin."
The best cringe.
How the fuck do you "move consciousness" and what is the "micro level",
I understand all of these words, but they are meaningless in this order!
Of course Dawkins and Peterson are rubbing elbows, I mean Peterson is basically the top person on Harris' speed dial.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/shorts/NvzMJqkZV74
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Isn't Richard Dawkins a bigger transphobe than Peterson, having literally compared being trans to wearing blackface?
Because Dawkins shouldn't get a prize for being merely "Not as insane as the other bigot!"
What's your understanding? Because he literally had humanitarian awards for basically being the biggest piece of shit ever when it came to women and transpeople, especially if they were both!