ja2

Human beings only think in terms of all things having a beginning because in our limited frame of reference everything we know always has.

True! I guess some people specialize in lying about being liars.

Facts.

First, let's consider that up until fairly recently in human society, writing has been the domain of the wealthy and not entirely accessible to everyone. The rich could write whatever they want or patronize those who could write what they wanted for them. The rarity - relative to the greatest developments of proliferation being chiefly the printing press and recently the internet - of written works, demanded that anything someone bothered to put into physical written form must have considerable innate value to someone. If they didn't, nobody would have bothered with the effort or expense.

I no longer have access to the reference for a citation and am having trouble digging it up, but I saw (probably on a blog about AI) some figures recently describing the amount of written "material" produced by humanity on a daily basis (or some other comically short time) in 2023 being comparable to the amount produced in the ~five thousand preceding years since the written word is thought to have been invented.

With as much "writing" being produced, most of it being spam or low-effort shitposting, the signal to noise ratio is unbelievably high. Regardless of the profundity of the thought being born and described, the chance of having anything written today - randomly on the internet - recognized for its quality is infinitesimally small.

I believe that there IS a fantastic amount of truly remarkable writing being done every day all over the internet. Nearly all of it will be retained on some form of media basically forever, even until the media is woefully obsolete / destroyed / the heat death of the universe. Most of it will never be set upon by human eyes again after this weekend.

Today, like hundreds of years ago, what rises to the surface does so due to commercial pressures. If you are awesome and impress a publisher with deep pockets, your words could be preserved in a form that will be read in 2434. Of course, it will have to continue to be impressive long after most of the books selected by Oprah's Book Club.

Again I find myself agreeing with you 100%, so I'm not really sure what the disconnect is here. Maybe you're finding something in the subtext of the article that I'm too stupid or ignorant to see. I don't know the politics of the author - I still don't - and honestly I found the content pretty innocuous and unrevealing, but if it leads to discourse, that's the point I guess.

Ok, cool. I think your attitude is all piss and vinegar.

First of all, it's not "my" article. Now if you'd like to start over, you can extrapolate on why you feel the way you do. Otherwise, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

I find this problematic.

One of my buddies at work is christian. I respect him on one level, but I have no respect for his superstitious ideology, inherently or in any other way. As much as I'd like the ideology to go away, I'm a little troubled by the phrase "...dealing with the individuals..."

I agree with you on all points.

In the linked article, I don't find any suggestion that reprehensible ideologies deserve respect. Only references to how individuals are treated.

Are you seeing something different?

So we're clear, I am not conservative by any means. Reviewing the article for hints, I don't see anything that I would call "thinly-veiled conservative propaganda" at all. The same words in the same order could be written anyone with any political perspective. Maybe my skeptic muscle isn't working right now. Please point out what you mean.

That said, the content doesn't have anything specific to do with atheism or religious bias. Tangentially, the right is fueled in large part by religion, which fuels the hatred being mentioned. I don't think that's too much of a stretch.

I posted the link because it's on a prominent atheist blogroll. I subscribe to many of them and collect the articles here, because Lemmy is a link aggregation website. It's pretty typical for people in a community of perspectives with one specifically in common to share many (not all) similar values and interest in similar topics, so I thought that a topic of interest for the author in question would be appreciated by enough of our community to be worth sharing.

To be sure, am not rooting around the web looking for articles about natural disasters and puppy mills and topics completely unrelated to philosophical discourse and superstitious belief. My posts will, at least, be humanities focused. Often, I find the propensity for humans to seek out and find - or create - differences to compartmentalize each other into rival groups of particular interest and relevance here.

Hmm?

This is exactly what I needed to see today.

I agree that intent is more important than words. It's incredibly easy to be disingenuous, and impossible to prove. Influential people take that to the bank.