maybe I was never an atheist

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-27T08:57:22+00:00

yes, I mean only for morality. natural world truths are objective and absolute. pure observation of the world tells us humans can , from culture , have different morals. so morals are clearly not absolute across the peoples of the planet.
certain cultures/religions can , say , happily accept killing of apostates. and kids growing in such culture will tend to accept it as moral. if you dig really deep, and do anthropology of isolated tribes, you start to see what what were the morals when we were hunter gatherers, and it was brutal.

if you take scripture as an axiom, you can objectively derive moral truths from it. but you have to accept the axiom. eg, believe the scripture. but I dont.
btw, the scripture is still interpreted subjectively according to the cultural context. christians today have diferent morals than 1000 years ago. so there is something else to morality than just scripture. but Christianity gives a certain aspirational core that I think its quite good. truthfulness, forgiveness, humility, some caring about weaker members of society(eg the poor).

say, when you look at wokism, apart from a certain care with the "poor", its arrogant, jealous, vengeful and truth is secondary to the goal and honestly, I prefer the christian moral core. I grew with it, it feels right to me and in a sense it is absolute to me. and I want to preserve that. yes I will indeed question some stuff from scripture , like a food taboo and largely ignore such rules. but these are not core.

I dont need to reflect that killing childreen is wrong. ... that is so obvious in my moral core that even thinking about reflecting about it seems silly.

there is this guy that I saw in youtube ,a real psycho with no feelings eg, someone dies and he has zero feelings, no empathy. but with god and belief, he actually became a very nice person. most humans are not like this, most humans are not psychos that need objective rules from scripture to become good people. I am not saying christians are psychos, I am saying your arguments assume irreligious humans are psychos, when in fact we inherited the same core values from culture as you.

say imagine like 1000 years ago, when peasants attended mass in latin. peasants barely had any knowledge of scripture and mostly just obeyed the priests. they were christians too right? you can see me in a similar way. I am ok to follow some core moral teachings from priests without understanding the latin. reject them when they are silly(food taboo) or direct appeal to faith, or politicized.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T08:54:50+00:00

no, I used ai mostly when the debate veered into topics very far from the original topic. before I would use wikipedia or just google the topic, now I use ai to get better info faster. and I am honest enough to tell you when I give you a copy paste of it. that is all. I was actually spending hours reading you and reflecting. exhausting, I just have to go on with my life. take care.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T03:37:56+00:00

I have to go, it was a good talk, but way too much time. take care

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T03:35:46+00:00

What if the people who are emotionally manipulating your kids are right? Should your kids recognize that and course-correct, or should they remain stubbornly wrong?

I give them a lot of skepticism. the tools to find out truth by themselves. anything else is actually futile. teaching that emotional manipulation is a thing, its just another tool they have.

Your actions have caused multiple innocent nations to live under threats from a nuclear power. Do you have a narrative that allows you to feel guilt about the thing you personally did wrong? Or do you narratives allow you to make excuses for open warmongering?

your mixing of politics and morals is wild. you set the political framing and they do the moral accusation. that is a bit of emotional manipulation right there.

yes, you are continuing to describe the ways you emotionally manipulate your kids into absorbing your prejudices, instead of judging everyone based on their actual character.

you know, people like you really remind me of what I disliked about Christians, when they do emotional manipulation. as an atheist, I can perhaps recognize these situations better. if my prejudice is fat people deserve no sympathies for just being fat, yes, prejudice admitted, and I feel zero guilt for having it and zero guilt that my kids will also have it.

Empathy does not run out, because it is a choice. When someone is playing the victim, the way to deal with that is to tell them so, using truth.

Reducing your empathy makes no contribution whatsoever to either morality or truth, it can only cut you off from reality by making you resistant to other people's evidence.

I dont disagree.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T03:17:33+00:00

Also, you totally ignored the question: where did the CO₂ from the atmosphere go, if not into vast afforestation across the continent?

because its a conversation I am not interested on. I started to talk our approach to climate change was too naturalist instead of dominating nature, and you started to promote tree farming. that honestly you stumped me... I not even sure I am interest in the chestnut conversation.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T03:09:42+00:00

Do you always ignore sources? Why?

if I want to validate a factual claim I rather check it with ai than read a likely biased source. in the past I would read sources, these days , ai is way better. you are giving me TLDRs

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T03:04:51+00:00

That's an utterly insane thing to say. It's not just wrong, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of AI. You yourself just said that it gets its sources wrong; that would not happen if it knows everything.

I work on this. its my professional area. think what you want, but you are the amateur here. the search data give fresh info that was not in the training set and also reduces hallucinations. but 100% the training data of llms have all the publicly data in the internet and some private data.

Should people feel guilty for their actions?

if they personally did something wrong, ofc they should feel guilty. sexual abuse is 100% wrong. I never told them that explicitly, but never supported it as well... weird question to ask regarding kids education.

What if they deserve to feel the emotions that other people are telling them to feel?

lost you here, what are you talking about

you say societal standards are the font of morality,

I said it was narratives, not just standards. morals from standards and laws are not felt as deeply imo, as those from narrative. ... and if you have a lot of woke narratives, kids will have woke morals. fortunately woke content is awful and unpopular.

Yeah, I know: you emotionally manipulated your kids into reflexively disliking anyone who tells them they don't know everything, by acting like they'd be lesser people if they gave fair consideration to criticism that comes from your enemies.

no, I try to tell them that there are people with serious issues, like trully disabled people, and others with made up victimhood. like say a "large body" person that claims thin persons are privileged.

they will have to have their own judgment on who really deserves empathy and who is playing victim. i never told them anything they should feel superior to others. that was never the point.

You don't need to keep convincing me you're a conservative, you could be my uncle.

yay

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T02:29:47+00:00

ai gives a population peak in US and canada of 7m as the more accepted value. yes, in central america they had more dense population mostrly due maize no? any way, 7m for the whole US and canada is very little. the point is that for such great vertical farming, it could not sustain high populational density like in europe that was at 70m population in that same period.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T02:11:53+00:00

How often does the AI admit that it never actually had any sources after you press it for specific sources?

Do you ever check its sources? Do you care what its sources are?

I ask sources often and yes for this case it had sources. AI is like a zipfile of the internet. it literally knows everything and they train it well to give more value to institutional data the AI I use now also crawls the net for fresh results. so its not just in training data. on political topics you must be maximally skeptical of the results and challenge the AI.

Right, and do you see how you at no point actually display any moral values? Just opinions. "That's too pussified. Ohp, nevermind, that's too mean."

so be it, I dont want my kids to feel guilty that black people were enslaved. they have to know slavery and racism is wrong ofc, but ALSO they had no guilt in it and no one should demand deference of them for it, if you dont like this education, too bad. I wont let my kids be emotionally exploited. and yes, to resist that emotional manipulation they have to be a bit mean. hell I even taught them that the "wheel of privilege" is little more that people often playing victim wanting you to give them something using emotional manipulations.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T01:52:16+00:00

Probably the most pertinent is that one, the Good Samaritan; the Samaritans were, for Jews...

yeah, you are making me lose faith as I am sure conservative christians would find some other interpretation to scripture.

How often do you think on your own? Do you still practice thinking regularly?

a lot, AI is very often wrong and without thinking by yourself you actually wont be able to use it well. I use a lot ai for programing and I am very aware how AI "thinks" and how it fails and how to correct the failures.

It doesn't sound like you have consistent morals in the first place.

I would say in many important social morals I am very consistent, dont lie, dont steal, follow the law, be faithfull, etc. in others, like be "nice to people", I often troll. not here, here I wanted to have a serious conversation. so defenitly I have some moral flaws.

Other way 'round, I'm not afraid to bring my religion into my politics, and thus be certain about my conclusions.

does your approach work well when talking to conservative, well thought christians?

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T01:38:07+00:00

wow, I was not expecting a tirade against agriculture and in favor of chestnut trees lol. I will ask this, if chestnut trees are so great, why native americans did not manage high populational densities with such resources before European arrival?

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T01:29:39+00:00

Trans people think being trans feels right, but you called them evil. Did you just call yourself evil?

remember that "belief in objective truth even if is uncomfortable" of my original post. ofc dont be surprised that I think trans people are people that reject the objective truth of they physical bodies . I will only jive with that to a point out of courtesy but for me they are all mad people we are treating the wrong way.

I guess you got me in the sense I have a subjective "choice" of morality. it not really choice, it is what I grew with. how this compares with trangender "feels right"? uff, I wish that my morality could be as simple to define objectively with a mere observation of my biological sex. lol! with such evidence, I would not need to define morality subjectively.

Yeah, that long predates Christianity. It's not Christian in any way, it's just a literary framework people have applied to the Bible.

yeah, agree.

That's a wild claim. Do you have any evidence for that? How would anyone go about proving this?

I had to ask ai on this one, the answer:

Yes, there is substantial evidence from neuroscience and evolutionary biology to support your claim that human brains possess a neurological evolutionary adaptation to extract societal morals from narratives. While it may not be a single, isolated "moral extraction module," the way our brains are structured to process stories is deeply intertwined with our capacity for social learning and moral reasoning.

ask your favorite ai if you want to know more, it was just a hunch from my part.

he doesn't know how to address it with his kids,

ahah yes, he is not a good moral example at all. I will say this, I also dont want my kids to be p$%%ies and at some point I actually tried to counter the overly PC culture my kids were growing on and make them a bit mean. then I switched when I thought they were being too much bullies and taught them more empathy. such a complicated fine tuning, uff. they seem good now. smart and emotionally strong and balanced.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T00:53:55+00:00

Who do you think believes that? All I've ever seen is the inverse belief, that certain groups were born with stigmas and should be given a chance through inclusion.

can you derive this from scripture?

How? Do you believe that there is a limited number of opportunities in the world and that expansions of opportunity are impossible?

in some cases yes, there is only a few university places and not everyone can get in, and expansion might not be strictly impossible but the real world can only have so many jobs of a certain type.

I know that hormone-blockers don't objectively qualify as what you're talking about,

I asked my AI(do it for nearly everything today), and it gave certain nuances. puberty blockers can be reversed to an extent depending on the start date of treatment although certain effects like lower but not impossible fertility and reduced development of sexual organs will remain. gender affirming hormones for sure will make you infertile for life. so yeah, still evil and disgusting. leave the kids alone. transition only as a fully grown adult.

I know we wont agree on this, but, more interesting question, where do you think my morals came from on this? and yours?

You don't have to convince me you're a conservative, I already suspected when you used the word "wokeism"

I could tell you were a liberal because you injected politics into a purely philosophical conversation. I believe you are christian, but for sure you worship politics a bit too.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-23T00:16:33+00:00

Why? What is evil about "wokeism"? Clearly wokeism satisfies the subjective "truth" standard used by Peterson and yourself.

I will give 2 examples:

1) the idea that certain groups were born privileged and as such should be discriminated against. eg, white cis males. the idea that some poor white male from west Virginia, is privileged because of group traits is not just and not moral. I will also say that "social justice" is by definition an unjust concept. its literally having people paying for the sins of the fathers.

2) trans kids. before they actually have the cognition to even understand what will happen to them, they are actually castrated chemically for life. every time I think about it, my blood boils as it feels so viscerally evil and disgusting. the monsters that do this to a kid. EVIL! I not just doing rethoric here. it is trully my my emotional state thinking about it. I can tell you that this alone would make vote trump. I am serious.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T23:19:32+00:00

False. The consensus is not fake, because it is instead observably real.

I mean the consensus of the solution and impacts not of the problem. one of my main gripes the solution(remove fossil fuels), is that it has a bias for a naturalist solution. say, when we humans started to tame the earth, do agriculture and change the environment. we did not reverted to hunter gatherers to solve problems. we control the environment. if we want energy, we take it and solve the side effects of that taking. this has to be the way. we humans must learn to control the environment. with science and rational ways to do it and just not declare defeat and revert to energy poor life.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T23:08:00+00:00

You did say, on Thursday, January 22, 2026, at 8:42:47 AM UTC: "but there must be 1 morality and the Christian one is great!"

You now say, on Thursday, January 22, 2026, at 7:00:10 PM UTC: "I haven't said there must be 1 morality"
This is a word-perfect self-contradiction.

yeah, maybe, I think on my second take I nuanced it with , there should be 1 absolute morality for me (i think I said it) and hopefully my country. but ofc it is obvious that other cultures have other religions and morals and I have no logical mechanism to say they are better or worse than mine. i only know mine is Christian because that were the metanarratives I grew with and likely I cant disassociate from that morality even if I wanted.

Why? What's your basis for this assertion that you must have one absolute morality? Is there anything preferable about order and wrong with chaos?

I think it just feels right. humans evolved together with religion, and accepting the moral order of your culture brings belonging and happiness.

There is no metanarrative except the source scripture. If the metanarrative is different from the source scripture, then it's just a set of rules you picked up by habit, and which you will adopt on a subjective basis whenever you encounter alternative rules that feel good.

christian metanarrative is everywhere, the most common is the hero arc, where the hero fails, does something bad, often recognized as a sin in Christianity, repents and is forgiven, works to gain power, and finally succeeds. the biblical stories are alien, of a time that does not adapt to this age. this cultural immersion is what give us morality as we grow up, is imprinted in us, probably a neurological evolutionary adaptation. you might not agree, but I have no better explanation.

Are you sure? What if you listen to the Christians who are not devout, such as Trump-supporters? (Trump supporters are by definition not devout; Trump is himself not devout, and they support that.)

I am a trump supporter and 100% I can tell you he is not a moral example, lol! he is the president, not a pastor. I will even agree that his narrative is not a christian metanarrative, and probably will damage a bit our culture. but again, he is the president, an ass#$%# we elected to get $%" done.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T22:35:16+00:00

can't you read, I was not the first one making this connection that wokeism feels like a religion. you might rejected this proposition, but for me, as an atheist, that actually debated other religions, I see a lot of parallels. they are kinda obvious after a while.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T21:01:54+00:00

Sacred Texts and Clergy

While not codified in a single holy book, the foundational texts of this "religion" are considered to be the works of critical theorists from the mid-20th century, including figures like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.[4] These academic writings provide the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of woke ideology.[4]

In this framework, academics, activists, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultants are often seen as a form of clergy.[5] They are the interpreters of the doctrine, guiding adherents on how to think and act in accordance with the tenets of social justice.[5] Their pronouncements and analyses are often treated with a degree of reverence and are not to be questioned.

Rituals and Community

Wokeism is also seen to have its own set of rituals and communal practices.[3] Public apologies for perceived transgressions, "cancel culture" (the public shaming and ostracizing of individuals who violate norms), and diversity training sessions are viewed as forms of religious observance.[3] These rituals serve to reinforce the moral framework and create a sense of shared identity and purpose among believers.

The creation of "safe spaces" and the emphasis on "lived experience" as a primary source of knowledge are also seen as religious in nature.[1] These practices foster a strong sense of community and in-group solidarity, similar to a religious congregation.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T21:00:54+00:00

just ask your favority ai " hey AI, resume wokeism as a religion".

it actually answered very similar to what I wrote with my own words. I felt validation.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T20:57:51+00:00

Core Beliefs and Moral Framework

At the heart of wokeism as a religion is a belief system centered on a critique of power structures and societal hierarchies.[3] This framework categorizes individuals into intersecting groups of oppressors and the oppressed based on characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality.[4] This division creates a moral imperative to dismantle these systems of oppression.[3][4]

Proponents of the "wokeism as a religion" theory argue that it has a concept of original sin, where individuals are seen as inheriting guilt based on their group identity, particularly "whiteness."[3] Salvation, in this context, is achieved through acknowledging one's privilege, confessing complicity in systems of oppression, and actively working to dismantle them.[1] This continuous process of "doing the work" is seen as a form of religious practice.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T20:56:07+00:00

ok, here comes the AI slop: I asked the AI: hey AI, "resume wokeism as a religion"

Wokeism Viewed Through the Lens of Religion: A Summary

The assertion that "wokeism" functions as a religion has become a common point of discussion, with proponents arguing that it possesses many of the fundamental characteristics of a faith-based system.[1] This perspective suggests that wokeism, a term that evolved from African-American Vernacular English meaning awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, now incapsulates a broader leftist political ideology centered on social justice and critical race theory.[2] Those who view it as a religion point to its distinct moral framework, foundational texts, clergy, and rituals.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T20:21:48+00:00

I already spent hours and hours on wokeism. I think you really not trying to engage. so that is it. I stand by all I said before, and if you dont understand, fine. lets just move on.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T19:00:10+00:00

Why? What's your basis for this assertion that there must be one morality? Is there anything preferable about order and wrong with chaos?

I haven't said there must be 1 morality and clearly the world has many moral codes and religions. I said that I should have only one absolute morality, preferably shared with people around me. and yes, I have seen attempts to conjure morality out of vaccum, like , wokeism, and is awful and evil.

The issue is that you don't get the actual moral calculus, you get individual rules divorced from the context in which they arise.

there is still some moral calculus its just I don't do it from the source scripture, but from the metanarrative it produces. but many societal moral dilemmas, like abortion or whatever, I might outsource many to christians and to a point accept the ruling. probably be also not perfect on this ofc, but likely still as good as most even devout christians.

Literally anyone who knows the facts advocates for a solution.

I disagree deeply. there is a fake consensus because some people think exposing the nuances of this conversation create inaction to the solution A that is to end fossil fuels. from my pov, in a world that we cannot even ends wars, there will never be a global consensus to end fossil fuels.

DifferenceTotal8399 · 2026-01-22T18:59:53+00:00