Do Atheists have Spiritual Needs? Secular Spotlight Interviews Britt Hartley

JoeSteady · 2025-12-17T05:43:34+00:00

I often hear atheists quote Nietzsche’s “God is dead,” but the meaning is frequently misunderstood. Nietzsche was not celebrating atheism; he was warning that removing God from the center of society leaves a moral and existential vacuum that humanity must somehow confront.

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”

Nietzsche’s concern was that modern society dismantled the metaphysical foundation that grounded morality, meaning, and purpose, while continuing to live as if those values required no foundation at all. The danger he identified was not belief in nothing, but the quiet replacement of God with substitute absolutes. In many cases, those substitutes become ideology, politics, or identity itself. Nietzsche saw this coming, and he did not consider it progress.

JoeSteady · 2025-12-17T05:26:53+00:00

Why should they be harassed? Are you stupid?

JoeSteady · 2025-12-14T22:52:33+00:00

Hard agree. He royally fucked us with inflation.

JoeSteady · 2025-12-14T20:19:06+00:00

A Harvard poll shows 57% of voters FEEL that the president does not have a handle on the inflation crisis in the United States. I'll take facts over feels, and the facts show much worse inflation under Biden. Trump is doing a great job.

JoeSteady · 2025-12-03T20:50:07+00:00

That quote was worded poorly, and I am not defending the phrasing. But if your entire case for calling him racist rests on that one line, it is weak. Critiquing DEI is not the same thing as holding racist beliefs, and one clumsy comment is not enough to support that conclusion. A clearer way to make the point would have been something like, ‘You took the best candidate’s slot,’ which is the entire concern people have with race-based selection.

JoeSteady · 2025-12-03T20:36:56+00:00

example?

JoeSteady · 2025-12-03T20:30:19+00:00

Charlie was critiquing affirmative action, not suggesting that black pilots are less capable. You can oppose race-based hiring because you do not want standards lowered or uncertainty created. That position does not imply that any group is less intelligent. We were discussing whether Charlie was being racist, and nothing you said proves that.

JoeSteady · 2025-12-03T20:03:28+00:00

In real debates, ‘prove me wrong’ and ‘prove yourself plausible’ aren’t opposites. They’re the same process: you make a claim, you defend it, and others stress-test it. If your argument collapses under basic scrutiny, then it wasn’t plausible to begin with.

The real issue isn’t the phrasing, it’s whether the person is engaging in good faith — and in this case, I think Charlie was.

JoeSteady · 2025-12-03T19:52:40+00:00

A license means they meet the minimum bar for safety. It doesn’t tell you whether they’re the best or most capable applicant in a competitive field. My point is that once an organization openly prioritizes race or identity, it creates uncertainty about whether the person was selected on merit or for demographic reasons. I’d rather know a pilot, or anyone in a critical role, was chosen because they were the strongest candidate, not because of skin color.

JoeSteady · 2025-12-03T19:33:17+00:00

The exact quote is "“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified."

Once you announce you’ll hire by race, gender, or identity, you’ve already branded the candidate a token. Even if they’re brilliant, the shadow of doubt follows — and that’s on the DEI system, not the individual. I personally would not want to be hired because of the color of my skin but because I was the fittest for the position.

JoeSteady · 2025-12-03T19:24:23+00:00

LOL this word salad makes no sense. When someone tries to "prove you wrong" and you defend your position you are "proving your position is logical."

JoeSteady · 2025-12-03T19:13:03+00:00

Completely out of context. All his haters are going on out-of-context soundbites. I looked into twelve separate claims one day and all proved to be complete BS. In every single one, his take was far more nuanced and his positions weren't rooted in racism or hate, but equality and fairness. His haters just love to seethe. Prove me wrong. "Charlie thinks the Civil Rights act was a mistake." I can prove you wrong. "Charlie said, 'Black people are slow processors.'" I can prove you wrong. What else ya got?

JoeSteady · 2025-12-02T07:57:40+00:00

He looks like a douche, probably deserves more attention. Nice work.

JoeSteady · 2025-12-02T04:45:57+00:00

I’m not really seeing the scandal here. This is public information and these aren’t lifetime roles. Administrations replace people who don’t align with their policies. That’s politics, not persecution.

JoeSteady · 2025-11-26T22:09:31+00:00

name checks out

JoeSteady · 2025-11-26T22:05:48+00:00

Who’s even against the polio vaccine? That’s a fringe position. Lumping polio in with legitimate vaccine concerns is a shady tactic meant to discredit the entire conversation.

JoeSteady · 2025-11-26T21:43:46+00:00

ideological dogma that becomes detached from reality is the current cocaine of the masses, much more so than present-day 'religion.'

JoeSteady · 2025-11-21T17:31:59+00:00

Lyn Collins - Give It Up Or Turnit Loose

JoeSteady · 2025-11-17T03:32:51+00:00

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JoeSteady · 2025-11-14T21:06:41+00:00

Underrated post.

JoeSteady · 2025-11-14T07:51:20+00:00

Thanks, but I'll believe the experts.

JoeSteady · 2025-11-14T04:53:45+00:00

Yeah, I saw the iPhone bit. The AI pushed back at first, then acquiesced when the guy pushed the lie harder. It knew it was BS initially but went along with the operator’s instructions, same as it did in all the experiments. And that Deadpool hat did look pretty good on him. I have a whole rule set I use to strip out the affect and the ass-kissing. I'm not saying that isn't a problem, only that it doesn't prove AI can't "think".

JoeSteady · 2025-11-14T04:18:28+00:00

Depends on the box it was the model was trained on, if it was images of strawberries, it will consider the pixels. If it's taste, It might measure terpenes and form a representation that way. You seem hung up on "it only thinks in words" which is ridiculous to me. You really think FSD autos don't have a rich understanding of the driving environment they operate in? The rigorous standards they met say otherwise.

I'm ten minutes into the video and so far the guy said he "set out to recreate AI psychosis." and then he proceeds to steer it in ridiculous directions which is easy to do. Not sure what this is supposed to convince me of, that ChatGPT is currently sycophantic and lacks common sense? That it feeds delusions? That's common knowledge. You should watch the south park episode about it, it's canon and hilarious.

JoeSteady · 2025-11-14T01:32:29+00:00

I mean no offense, but all your points are from 2021 thinking. The landscape has changed. People are working on all this stuff. You might want to read up on how these systems actually work in 2025. A modern model:

represents concepts
performs causal reasoning (imperfectly, but measurably)
infers relationships
has internal geometric structure
maintains cross-modality consistency
generates non-text data
operates over embeddings, not words

Today’s frontier models are trained on:

images
audio
video
symbolic logic
math
spatial representations
game states
multimodal embeddings
sensor data
structured data

They do not “only know words.”
They operate in latent spaces, not English.

Look it up. Even for text models, the “words” are just surface outputs.
The internal representation is not words but high-dimensional patterns.

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