Oh thanks, I’m cured! /s

Desperately clinging to the illusion that USA good

You are either being dishonest or have bad reading comprehension. The OP clearly labels Trump as part of the problem, alongside Netanyahu and Khameini. They also blame Israel for escalating with Iran when talks were still ongoing. They are not saying what you claim they are.

How do we improve society, if all societies are equal? It’s nonsense!!!

By evaluating individual stats, not entire societies, and by letting societies determine what they value.

No those are stats EVERYBODY should value

You don’t need to share other people’s values. But you have no right to determine what other people should value. Big colonizer energy from you.

How would you tally up the score of “development”?

If the score depends, essentially, on racist ideas of how human societies should look, valorizing old people who can read as the epitome of human achievement, then I think it should be dismissed.

And more than that, I think the entire game of defining a single consolidated “development score” is laughable at best. We can measure stats individually, and consider them in their own right. Any attempt to weight the individual scores to contribute to a total score is going to depend heavily on the judge’s personal values. There is no value-neutral way to do it.

You may feel strongly that certain cultures are more developed than others, but that is based on the stats that you value. Even if you base it on data in some way, you are basing it on the data that states have bothered to gather, which almost always captures metrics that align with their priorities and views.

One obvious measure would be literacy, another would be life expectancy.

The idea that literacy and life-expectancy are signs of a more “developed” country is essentially just racist colonialist propaganda.

Many cultures worldwide have traditionally transmitted knowledge orally, and their societies were built around this, with lots of in-person meetings to disseminate information. If a person speaks their traditional language and is well-versed in their traditional culture, but does not read or write (because they don’t need to), then by the standard of literacy they will be deemed as less “developed” than some 4-chan troglodyte.

Likewise, life expectancy past a certain age is kind of a ridiculous metric. People seriously believe that the longer you can stay geriatric, the more “developed” your country is.

Meanwhile, metrics like knowledge of botanical medicine or percentage of communal land ownership are often left out of these scoreboards of “development”. Things that can materially improve people’s lives are only seen as having value when non-Indigenous people do them. It is racism through and through.

Actually, looking at history, no language will survive. Modern English is only 400 years old. >In a few hundred years, all languages will be very different from what they are now. Different enough to be considered a different language. It is normal.

This is a completely different process than what’s outlined in the article. The article is about outright language death, like if Old English had died so that it never became Modern English.

Language change is normal. Language death is, in our world, largely a result of colonialism, racism, and anti-Indigenous policies.

I don’t get why people are up in arms over lost languages or lost cultures, unless of course if it’s due to genocide.

Which it often is, as I’m sure you know. We are in an awful situation for Indigenous languages.

Regarding culture, people don’t lose their culture in general, they adopt other cultures over time.

These are the same thing. People don’t just lose their culture and become cultureless. They lose their culture as they adopt another culture, but this process is largely driven by colonialism.

Just like people have evolved biologically over time, so do we also evolve culturally, but the cultural evolution is much much faster.

“Evolve”? Do you think European culture is superior to Indigenous cultures? We are destroying the planet in record time, and you are talking about “cultural evolution”? This is the language of 19th century racists who were blind to the nuances of culture. Different cultures are different ways of being in the world, each with its own pros and cons.

And it’s fucking great that cultures evolve, because that’s the way to get rid of religion and other traits of our cultures that are detrimental to in general.

Unfortunately, the cultures that have replaced Indigenous cultures around the world have largely been bigoted Christian cultures. Language loss is not caused by cultures becoming healthier – it is caused by unhealthy cultures killing other cultures.

there’s likely a good reason most of them are disappearing.

This belief is called the “just world fallacy”. Sadly, the world is not just.

Most of these languages are disappearing due to colonialism. People’s traditional ways of living have been forcibly upended by capitalists and state governments, who have seized the commons around the world, and by colonialist policies such as residential schools. No longer able to support themselves using their traditional ways of living, people have been mde into wage slaves who must compete on the market to survive. That means using English or another widely-spoken language. Indigenous languages are much less useful to capitalists, and so gradually they wither and die.

We are at risk of killing 95% of the world’s languages, on top of the incalculable cultural damage that goes along with all of this, just to prop up a single way of being: liberal nation states. It is reprehensible beyond words.

Gurl the world’s population has been growing for hundreds of years and is still growing 🤦‍♂️ It is expected to peak at around 10 billion people.

The loss of human languages is a direct result of colonialism + nationalism, which go hand in hand. People that want to unite a region under one government push for only a single language to be used in that region. Italy and China are prominent examples of this. The natural linguistic diversity of the region is decimated to grow a monoculture.

Language loss is largely unrelated to people dying. Indigenous people live on, just without their languages, as they adopt the languages of their colonizers. This is very common across the world.

When a language dies in a community, the transmission of that community’s culture is heavily impacted. Monolingual elders can no longer communicate (or communicate well) with younger generations, and the words in other languages do not capture the same nuances and connections as the words in their native language. The death of a language quickens the death of a culture, and that in turn quickens the death of indigenous knowledge systems.

The different languages of humanity – our different ways of speaking, thinking, and being human – are treasures. They show us other ways of treating each other, other ways of organizing society, other ways of experiencing beauty and fear and anger. They show us that the world is broader than our narrow lens. We can never really escape the lens of our native language and culture, but we can step out of it for a while. And in doing so, we gain a greater perspective on what it means to be human.

Why is the government mandating how many applications you submit? Was this in order to be eligible for unemployment pay?

A lot of people are saying to learn to cook, but things aren’t that simple. Many people know how to cook perfectly well but order out anyway, either because they’re busy or because they have mental health conditions that make cooking incredibly stressful.

We need to change our economic system so that CEO bonuses aren’t inflating the prices of people’s food. This would make it easier for people to eat out more often if they feel they need to. It shouldn’t break the bank to get simple meals at a restaurant.

Let’s stop debating the details of a stupid plan. Trump deserves total, unreserved opposition, not submissive "well, actually…"s.

Well, it’s not so simple for gaming. People who don’t already own a gaming PC will need to drop a lot of money to buy one, and then get used to gaming on Linux (which can be janky, as I’m sure you know).

But, it’s worth it. Our convenience shouldn’t cost us our humanity.

To be fair, variety makes groups more resilient. If Signal were to ever become compromised somehow, people who use other apps like Session will be okay.

It’s not a zero-sum game, either – people can use Signal and other apps.

As an aside, people who are bothered by my arguments should consider watching Contrapoints’ recent video on conspiracism. The points I am making in this thread are the same points she makes against conspiracy theories.

Atheists like the OP suggest (ironically) that religion is an intentionalist, evil force, but a basic survey of the history of religion easily disproves this type of thinking. Intentionalism and binarism are cankers on the pursuit of truth. Like politics, religion is nuanced; it is not a grand conspiracy, even if there are groups in it who conspire. Atheists would do well to be wary of conspiracism, lest they place their hatred of religion over their pursuit of truth.

basically it’s not that religion has aided studies, but rather studies have made it despite religion

In some cases, sure, and in other cases, no. For example, Buddhism is supported by nine other fields of knowledge – the vidyasthanas – including such things as grammar and logic. Religious teachers draw examples and ideas from these fields when giving religious teachings. One must study these other fields to become a “learned one” (pandita/mkhas pa).

This is a living tradition that continues to the present day. For example, the Dalai Lama has heavily promoted education in modern science among Buddhists, and has co-authored several books on the connection between the two.

The idea that religion is just some anti-educational brainrot is, ironically, anti-educational brainrot. Religion definitely can function that way, but it cannot be reduced to it.

Not to be Muslim-phobic, I am aware if the rich history of debate and science in the Middle East, but the material conditions have changed now, conservatism has been on the rise since the 70s.

Yes, we seem to agree here. And if you acknowledge that material conditions influence how religion plays out, then you must acknowledge that it is not really intellectually honest to reduce religion to one form or another. Religion isn’t inherently either intellectual or ignorant, it is subject to the material conditions that it appears in.

You speak of mahaviharas, but Buddhists I have met are just as conservative as the average religious person when it comes to women’s rights, feminism and gay rights.

Yes, most old religions have unfortunately inherited prejudice and closed-mindedness from broader society. Although, I think you must also acknowledge that educated people can be bigoted, and we see this among non-religious people too.

Mansoor al-Hallaj was executed for saying ‘Ann-al-Haq’

A religious person being executed on religious grounds for challenging the religious state isn’t exactly an indictment of religion – both sides were religious. It is an indictment of religious ideology being enforced by the state.

I don’t believe that religion is unique in this regard – states also use capitalism, liberalism, and other ideologies to repress proponents of competing economic + political systems. This doesn’t make economics + politics bad, and it doesn’t make religion bad either.

That rational thought survived when people were religious is hardly to the credit of religion

This is not true. In a Buddhist context, rational thought was taught by Buddhists like Dignaga and Dharmakirti. They studied and promoted logic + reasoning specifically for religious reasons.

such things happened anyway and under the sanction of religion

Yes, as I’ve said, religion includes both sides. You cannot erase the religiosity of the people that the state was trying to repress.

As long as religion is under an institution, it is the nature of institutions to cling to power and hence, suppress dissent.

I agree, with the exception of more decentralized and countercultural religious groups. When religious groups accrue great power, it’s a dark day for everyone. But I don’t think this problem is unique to religion. I think it’s a problem with having power over others.

[Buddhism] is intended to justify existing, generational, disparities in wealth, power, and property.

Uh, no, this simply isn’t true. In South Asia, these disparities are instantiated in the hereditary varna system (usually translated as “caste”, though conservative Hindus will object to this), in which the highest social class is the Vedic clergy called the “brahmins”. Brahmin supremacy has been a constant feature of South Asian society going back millennia, and it is still widespread today.

As the Buddha said in the Vasala Sutta, “Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a brahman. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a brahman.”

This runs counter to the idea of generational class, which was the general attitude of brahminical society and was how brahmins maintained their power over others.

The Buddha elaborates on this idea in the Vasettha Sutta:

While the differences between these species

are defined by birth,

the differences between humans

are not defined by birth.

Not by hair nor by head,

not by ear nor by eye,

not by mouth nor by nose,

not by lips nor by eyebrow,

not by shoulder nor by neck,

not by belly nor by back,

not by buttocks nor by breast,

not by groin nor by genitals,

not by hands nor by feet,

not by fingers nor by nails,

not by knees nor by thighs,

not by color nor by voice:

none of these are defined by birth

as it is for other species.

In individual human bodies

you can’t find such distinctions.

The distinctions among humans

are spoken of by convention.

This is essentially an early version of social constructionism.

The Buddha goes on to criticize the various things that brahmins do, saying that e.g. doing sacrifices makes you a sacrificer, not a brahmin. He ultimately says that only people who are virtuous, detached from pleasures and free from disturbing emotions are really “brahmins”. So, the Buddha actually taught a countercultural criticism of hereditary class.

Plenty of educated religious people are converts. I was raised atheist and converted to Buddhism in my late teens. The same was true of many of the other students in my university’s religious studies department.

The fact is, being religious doesn’t depend on lack of education or childhood indoctrination. People will still be religious in the absence of those things.

Religion is “built” by the actions of countless religious people. There is not a single cohesive force shaping its development. Religion has also been used for education, political liberation, charity, and emotional healing. Reality is complex.