LadyLikesSpiders

I mean, that’s fair, and super fucked up. I have a lot of issues with that, including the cultural ramifications

Still, it seems a different caliber to being actively hostile to players in the game design department. Nintendo games aren’t the ones using psychological manipulation to give me a gambling addiction

That’s fair, though. It’s hella fucked up, and I’ve been wary of Nintendo’s approach to this stuff since way back when AM2R was coming out

I get that corporations are all ultimately after your money and nothing else, but I’m curious why Nintendo is on here. As far as game companies, the only thing I really see from them that’s kind of ass is their hyperprotectiveness of their own IPs. It sucks, but I don’t need a battlepass to get the full experience of the next Mario game. Zelda doesn’t require an always online connection. Metroid Prime 4 is actually gonna be finished on release instead of just shipping it in a terrible state

Used to be reddit. I’m here now because I can’t be on reddit anymore, but this place (maybe thankfully) just isn’t the abyss to suck me into, so now, my online time is mostly on discord

I’m not counting videogames. Though I do play some online stuff, I don’t consider it the same as something like browsing a website. It’s a different activity. If you do count it, then yeah, it’s games. My computer time is largely games

The game that spend 10 years removing things from AC Black Flag

As someone who has written songs… We get them, and I don’t think it’s particularly ironic

I suspect a whole lot of atheists were brought up religious. The heavy religiosity is the push they need to even think on the subject. I think a lot of people who are what I’d call passively religious (non-practicing, don’t really care, but might say say they believe in god if asked) don’t have to engage with the material critically, so it’s not as much a part of their world. For sure there are atheists out there who have a dogmatic approach to atheism because of their former belief systems

But even beyond that, I think it runs deeper. Christianity, if you’re in the west, is foundational to our culture, even in secular nations. It still informs traditions and morals and perspectives that can trace themselves to a Christian origin, and that underlying religiosity in our cultures does inform the way in which we view the world. I concluded this when a friend pointed out to me the language we use in evolution

We describe evolved adaptations as serving a purpose. We’ll say things like “we evolved opposable digits to better grasp things”, and yeah, we all know that’s not strictly true, but language informs our perspective and reflects it. We didn’t evolve thumbs to hold things; We just got thumbs, and were able to hold things with them. These are not the same, and the former still has that kernel of creationism in it, some subconscious belief in a greater purpose

That said, I generally agree that an atheist might be made more militant if he had a particularly religious upbringing. Really, though, I suspect it’s also a lot to do with insecurities. I grew up in a passively religious household, and was sent to a catholic extracurricular just so that I could choose for myself what to believe, and in that brief time, I actually became easily the most religious person in my house. Religion spoke to my insecurities and fears. I was bullied a lot at the time, and the thought that my righteousness would be rewarded and my bullies wickedness would be punished was wonderful. In turning atheist after that, it didn’t undo the bullying. Instead, the self-righteous idea of “I’m smarter than you dumb Christians” was the new salve for insecurties

I’m way more tolerant now. Maybe the issue is just age. Maybe most of those awful ones are just obnoxious teens and young adults who would be obnoxious either way, and they’ll grow out of it. If they don’t, they get to become Ricky Gervais without the money or fame. Kinda rambled more than I meant to, but yeah, just throwing out some perspectives

I believe that my consciousness is a thing I can point to as being my essence. You could maybe call that a soul, or you could maybe not. Either way, my consciousness is the collective consciousness of countless single-celled organisms all working to make my singular self function. You could maybe call the manifestation of all these processes into a greater thinking singularity as a “soul”, more akin to the way in which a city might have a “soul” made up by the people that live in it. I don’t believe I have a ghost, and I believe that my consciousness is conditional, derived from my biology, but consciousness itself is as good as anything to call a soul

So I guess, in short, no XD

I think it’s really cool that you think we need more random kindness. I agree ^^

I think we’re stereotyped often as the militant and belligerent atheists quite a lot. We have been painted as unsympathetic assholes who like to talk down to religious people to make us feel better about ourselves, not to mention a weird overlap with some parts of the far-right, usually by way of transphobia, homophobia, racism, social darwinism and the enforcement of poorly understood or straight up incorrect “science”

Eugenecists inhabit this space, as well as people who might call themselves “race realists”, as well as people who think their middle-school-level understanding of genetics and sex encapsulates the entirety of gender and sexuality. It’s those atheists who claim to love science, hate ignorance, but remain ignorant of science. They give us a bad name, and their loudness makes it seem like they represent us

Would rather die by the lightning. Not only more dignified, but straight up bad-ass