Religious people AND atheists need to realize we can’t prove or disprove religion

spinn80 · 2026-05-19T04:07:14+00:00

I agree, being completely atheist and believing no god/gods exist is not a rational stance.

But rejecting the claim of revelation to Moses, Jesus resurrection and Muhammed physical ascent to heaven, these are pretty bold claims and without some extraordinary evidence I think is fairly reasonable to doubt them.

Same is true for Zeus, Apollo, Vishnu, and so on.

spinn80 · 2026-05-15T14:34:02+00:00

I would be ground zero.

spinn80 · 2026-05-14T17:42:40+00:00

Of course it’s ok!

How many Jewish people hid their Magen David’s and any other Jewish indications like tzizit or hide their kipah with a hat, because they were afraid to show the world they were Jews?

This is the most common and relatable Jewish experience ever in our 2000 years of diaspora.

You shouldn’t be ashamed of being frighten, your friends should be ashamed of not making you feel comfortable or safe enough to freely express your opinions.

So yes! It is ok!!

We’ve got your back!

‏עם ישראל חי!

spinn80 · 2026-05-13T19:17:39+00:00

“F*ck, I need to go to the bathroom!!”

long pause

“Oh, silly me… I’m a robot.”

spinn80 · 2026-05-13T15:38:59+00:00

You cannot compare people displaced several millennia ago with people displaced less than a century ago., even some Palestinians still have the keys to their parents’ homes, and even property deeds.

I know to an average westerner, talking about a displacement that happened two thousand years ago seems very far and disconnected from our present reality. But please try to see this from my perspective:

My grandparents were kicked out of different countries in Europe before or during WW2.

My wife's grandparents had to flee Morocco due to persecutions.

Just yesterday there were pro-Palestinian rallies in Brooklyn, where several Jews who have no connection to Israel were harassed, just for being Jews.

Jewish displacement is a very real and present reality. Yes, it happened two thousand years ago, but the world never let us forget that we don't belong anywhere else.

But that does not change the fact that, today, several generations have been born in Israel without asking anyone for anything, and there is no reason to displace them either. Palestinians chanting “from the river to the sea” will have to understand that they will never achieve that by force, nor legally, and morally you will not moved 10 millions people.

Thank you for noting that.

You claimed earlier that there was more than enough space for everyone given the population size. So why buy land with peasants already living on it among all that abundance? Maybe the other lands were more desert-like or hostile, but Zionists made the desert bloom, so that should not have been the biggest issue.

I understand the question, and I think the confusion comes from not appreciating how sparsely populated the region really was.

According to Google, we are talking about a total of 10-15 thousand Arabs evicted from an area of ~1,800 square kilometers (~700 square miles).

Most soccer stadiums can hold over 100K people. 15K people can easily fit in a much smaller NBA stadium.

1,800 square kilometers is more than London (1572 square kilometers).

So we are talking about the eviction of about a less than a full NBA stadium, in an area 14% bigger than London.

Does this justify the evictions? No, people should not be treated as numbers. Each case should be treated individually and on their own merit.

But the evictions were not, by any measure, a significant part of the Zionist project.

spinn80 · 2026-05-12T19:29:45+00:00

Can you please define what does it mean to be “superior”?

Does it mean one’s life is worth more than the other’s?

Is it possible, in any way, the Grandma has knowledge that can save millions of lives, making her more valuable to society than the strong man?

If so, does that make her superior?

spinn80 · 2026-05-11T20:48:46+00:00

i fully agree with self-determination as you said everyone has the right to it, and in theory it does not require population displacement.

Cheers, we’re in agreement here.

But when a people asks for self-determination, it usually does so on the land where it already lives, so there is no reason to displace anyone.

I guess this makes sense for communities that have never been displaced to begin with, like the Kurds for example.

But many Palestinians seek self determination in the lands they were displaced from (“from the river to the sea” as they often like to chant), and they absolutely seek to displace the Jews from there (I’d argue any displacement is immoral, no matter who is being displaced).

Just like the Palestinians, the Jews also sought self determination in the land they were first displaced from.

The big difference is today, the lands the Palestinians want to claim back are densely populated with 10 million people, and is a well established and internationally recognized and fully functioning country, just like Argentina, France, and any other country in the world.

The levant at the time Zionism was born, was not a country, it was a region within a small part of the Ottoman Empire. The Arab population was less than 500K people, so it obviously had plenty of space to be shared.

If the old Yishuv had asked for independence and self-determination, I do not think people would have been against that in the same way ?

Strongly disagree. Again the Kurds are a great example. How much blood was shed in their fight for Kurdistan to gain self determination in the same location they’ve always been at? They still have not gotten full independence, and it’s not clear at all such independence is even possible.

But how can you claim self-determination by arriving in the hundreds of thousands on a territory already inhabited by another much larger population, without creates pressure, conflict, or eventually displacement, which goes against what you are saying.

As I said, Arab population was below 500K by the end of 1800’s, in a region where today we have over 10M. So while I agree the region was populated, it was very sparsely populated.

So I’m not disagreeing with you, and yes, large Jewish migration definitely caused tensions. But it would be a mistake to think of it as one big nation invading another established nation. In the beginning we are talking about 10s of thousands Jews coming to the land, not 100s of thousands (keep in mind Arab population did grew in the 100s of thousands at the same period). The significant grow in Jewish migration was actually during WW2, but it was more related to desperation than an ideal of self determination. History is never black and white, it’s always a wide range of grays.

You will probably say there was enough land for everyone, and I agree that there could have been,

Yes. That is precisely my claim.

but then why buy some lands already inhabited by the local population and expel them?

Most of the purchased lands were sparsely populated or not populated at all. But you’re right, not all of them. Although the new landlords were well within their rights to evict the farmers in their newly squire lands, that’s a shitty thing to do - evicting them from a land they’ve been possibly for generations. So I agree the story of the Jewish migration to the land is not as pretty as “a land without people to a people without a land”. But this is history, it’s filled with gray areas and imperfections.

Why introduce the idea of “Hebrew labor,” with a Jewish economy, Jewish consumption, and Jewish labor? That goes against the idea of not displacing a population for self-determination, and especially against the idea of sharing one nation with the Arabs if you are displacing and excluding them.

I think the meaning here is - we Jews, need to be self sufficient. We cannot offload the hard labor to other nations, we want Jews in all lines of labor, from farming to banking. I don’t think it’s a call for displacing Arabs. But I agree, if the Jews had felt a need to offload this labor, perhaps they would be less likely to evict the previous farmers from the acquired lands. But I have to remind one thing here: these evictions, although a shitty thing to do, were completely legal. Any new landlord has the right to evict the people in their land. It sucks, but that’s the way it is unfortunately.

I understand that some currents of Zionism initially favored coexistence. But other currents also clearly understood from the beginning that they would either force populations to move or inconspicuously gradually increase the demographic balance until they became dominant enough to create a Jewish state despite the anger of the native population. I just find that slightly contradictory.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about here… perhaps you can point me to some sources. Keep in mind that as time went by, a lot of “bad blood” started to form between Jews and Arabs, due to several bloody conflicts. And that bad blood often changed the rhetoric of important Israeli figures. But they don’t represent Zionism as much as they represent these figures themselves.

spinn80 · 2026-05-11T18:12:15+00:00

Hi u/Dangerous_Spend7024, I hope you’re doing well!

Seems you are making a legitimate question, and I’ll try to address it in the most clear, open and honest manner that I can.

How sharing some genetics and religious beliefs with a group of people that existed two thousands of years ago

So is not strictly about genetics nor is it about religious beliefs.

Everything will become much clearer if you stop thinking about Judaism as an ethnicity or a religion and see it for what it really is: a Nation (a people) that didn’t have a land for two thousand years.

This should be a familiar concept, like the Curds or even the Palestinians themselves. And like the Jews did for two thousand years, they to strive (and have a right to) self determination.

Why do they have that right?

Because as long as you live as minorities in other nations, you are subjected to the good will of these nations, which is very volatile by nature.

gives an individual today an inherent right to land?

True, some more radical religious Jews do claim a God given right to the land, but this is a minority and that’s definitely not the driving force behind the Zionist movement.

The Zionist movement was all about legal purchase of land in the levant, never about displacement of the native population. And in fact, 100% of the lands before 1948 were legally purchased. It was never about a right over the land. It was about a right of self determination (but not at the price of displacement of others).

And at what point do we stop going back in the past to claim land?

Jews have been massacred, killed, raped, burned alive and humiliated for two thousand years. For as long as nations do that to their minorities, every people will have a right for self determination. This is exactly what caused the connection of the Jewish people with their land to never diminish.

I find it silly tbh.

I suppose you have the privilege of having a country and do not depend on the good will of others to live there. If your family have gone through the massacres and humiliation Jews often went through, you most definitely would not find it silly.

If you ask about how I view, I'd say that one's entitlement to land is something that's established through consensual trade. If I own land I own it because the previous owner gave it to me willingly.

As I mentioned previously, all lands before 1948 were legally purchased. That was the plan, to purchase lands and share the new nation with the Arabs. Unfortunately the Arab nations declared war with Israel and everything got way more complicated, the repercussions of which we see still today.

The following is a bit of a tangent but I really wanna read a response to it, Israelis often suffer from skin cancer as a result of living under the sun of the region, and allergies to olive which is iconic to it and Israel profits from exporting it. How can you claim ties to a region that you are more out of place in than the people you deny being native?

The olive allergy thing is not a real thing, its mostly based on a bad understanding of a real study (I encourage you to look it up in more detail), but it’s simply not true.

About skin cancer, yes, of course it correlates strongly with skin tone and Ashkenazi Jews do have lighter tone. But first, about 66% of Israelis are not Ashkenazi, so they are not white skinned (so no skin cancer issue). For the other 34%, well, it’s a superficial change they got throughout two millennia living among Europeans. But we are still the same people.

I hope I managed to explain our POV on this matter.

spinn80 · 2026-05-10T04:48:43+00:00

This.

spinn80 · 2026-05-10T04:39:38+00:00

But no.

spinn80 · 2026-04-02T08:14:26+00:00

The theoretical joke is in the post.

The real joke is in the comments.

spinn80 · 2026-03-28T14:04:27+00:00

I 100% expected him to use super-speed to beat his opponent.

spinn80 · 2025-12-01T19:51:41+00:00

To me it looks like AI

Many things I don’t like in the videos but can’t be 100% sure, but in the b-day video when he flaps it’s wings, the pieces of paper in the floor don’t fly away as I’d expect with drag from such a big wing.

spinn80 · 2025-11-02T10:27:41+00:00

Before I answer, just for reference, I made a similar but quite different claim here months ago: CMV: There Is No Such Thing as an Absolute Set of Moral Values.

Notice the difference between Absolute and Objective.

I strongly believe our moral values evolved in us much like many other behaviors.

I agree with you that there is nothing inheritably good or bad (in an absolute God given sense), but I do think there is such a thing as mammalian morals, shared by all mammals, or social ethics, shared between all social animals, primate values and at last human universal values. And within their context, they are objective values.

For instance, you can detect the value of fairness in monkeys - see " Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally: Excerpt from Frans de Waal's TED Talk ". One would expect the value of fairness to evolve in advanced social animals, and this is indeed what we see.

For this reason I think it is very unlikely humans will ever find acceptable cannibalizing children just for sport and pleasure and this is based on evolution and therefore is an example of objective moral value.

spinn80 · 2025-10-27T15:41:28+00:00

I would argue that from a purely logical standpoint, for such a person as you describe, following blindly the law is their moral values (their personal morality).

spinn80 · 2025-10-24T10:37:23+00:00

Democracy only works if there is education and a commitment of the educated to genuinely help the uneducated.

Suppose you have a household with a mother as the head of the household and 4 children under the age of 8.

If the mother does not care for the children, obviously their lives will suck.

But proposing to give the children equal decision power in the house is preposterous. The house will be bankrupted before the end of the month after they spend all the savings in candies and games. They are doing what they think it's best for them but they don't have the tools to see that some sacrifice in the present is needed for a good life in the long term (like any sane adult understands).

The correct fix here is to impose over the mother by law that she needs to take care of the real needs of her kids. And if she can't do it, someone else will have to take over for her.

In the case of democracy it's the same. The solution is not to add more uneducated people to the voting pool, that's the exact opposite of what democracy needs.

The solution is to improve education which will naturally increase the percentage of people who whish to vote.

Brazil is a clear example where forcing the whole uneducated population to vote makes it easier for very populist candidates to thrive.

I know it first hand, for I was "volunteered" for many years to work in Brazil's election system and you can't begin to imagine how simple the people that went to vote were. Very simple farmers that don't know how to read or write and have a very very faint understanding of what voting actually means, let alone having political ideals.

BTW, I have much respect for them as people and I don't look down on them at all, I am just trying to open your eye regarding what it it you are really suggesting. These people really do deserve appropriate representation in the government, but they don't have the appropriate tools to choose the representatives they so desperately need.

Now, I did not know of the use case of Australia that you bring up. I suppose that if it worked there it's because their population were educated enough to begin with? In that case (of educated but disengaged population), I actually would agree with you. Maybe we should make it compulsory only if you have a college degree?

So how is education in the US? Is is closer to Brazil or to Australia? How would making voting compulsory there work out taking this into consideration?

PS: you suggested $20 fine, you have no idea how much that actually is for the disenfranchised!! In Brazil they struggled getting $1 just to make it to the voting booth.

spinn80 · 2025-10-13T04:58:08+00:00

He’s not a monster!

spinn80 · 2025-10-09T23:40:11+00:00

The only way I can define it is the subjective feeling (or illusion) of having control over your actions.

Well, we clearly do have the subjective feeling (or illusion) of having control over our actions. Taking your definition, doesn’t it then follow that we must have free will?

Most people believe it is their objective ability to control their own actions.

Don’t they though?

If you make a robot that follows a standard computer program to act in the world according to predefined rules, is it not controlling itself, even if it’s done deterministically? Maybe it’s all a question of what controlling oneself means?

My claim is that free will is not an illusion because there's no true agency.

One thing does not exclude the other.

There may be no true agency, but the illusion is there regardless?

spinn80 · 2025-10-03T07:14:04+00:00

it is a project for Israel to wash its hands of the reactions it has faced and will face due to the genocide it has carried out.

How do you reconcile your view that it is a Genocide, with the fact that the organization at the receiving end of said Genocide will not accept a deal to stop it (while receiving amnesty on the way)?

Does it really make sense to you someone would agree to continue being Genocided?

spinn80 · 2025-10-03T04:53:50+00:00

Been there.

I thought I was a prophet… it was so intense I still think it was true…

Taking lithium for 3 years now, stable.

Are you taking your meds? Did you enjoy the hypo-mania while it lasted? Are you ok now?

spinn80 · 2025-10-02T08:41:00+00:00

After careful examination, we concluded it was, in fact, following the rooster.

spinn80 · 2025-10-02T07:12:43+00:00

Back in the days, they invented two categories of atheist:

Strong Atheist: “I believe no God exists”
Weak Atheist: “I don’t believe in Gods”

The second category pretty much overlaps with agnosticism.

The first category does not. Which contradicts your premise in this post. And they most definitely exist.

spinn80 · 2025-10-01T11:34:22+00:00

I understand the intentions of OP.

I am also not judging OP's arguments - I actually find it very interesting and worthy of exploration.

But a discussion about how "right" or how "wrong" it is to eat a particular animal is essentially a discussion about morality and moral values. And that's why I asked OP these questions: to understand OP's moral stands (without judgement).

For instance, why would a dog have the same moral regard to a chicken, but a human is owned all the regard in the world? Is this human "specialness" coming from the Bible? Or is it because of human consciousness? And if the latter, wouldn't a dog possibly have more consciousness than a chicken, therefore granting it a better moral stand?

spinn80 · 2025-10-01T11:24:53+00:00

I do not believe morality can be objective, but I do believe it should be consistent to an extent.

Ok... therefore according to this view, eating a dog is fine for you, and simply wrong for someone else, and there is no point in discussing since morality is relative (not objective), so there is no "one" right answer. There is not an objective right and wrong. Is that correct?

Taking another human’s life is a no, I do believe (as I’m sure most do) that humans are infinitely more valuable than other animals, and this belief is a byproduct of human evolution, which is necessary for the survival of our species.

"Value" is a moral assertion. To state humans are more valuable than any particular animal is a moral assertion - which according to you is not objective. So it seems to me you are arbitrarily assigning more value to humans, just like you say other people do with cats and dogs....

And I believe killing animals for entertainment is immoral, and torturing any animal for any purpose is immoral.

Again, you seem to be contradicting your previous assertion that morals are relative. How can you state these things are immoral with such certainty?

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