While I agree that Flagg is cunning, he’s also almost… Instinctual in doing whatever damage he can do. It’s like he finds a way to worm his way into whatever position he can to do the most damage. Like Trump. Though I could definitely agree to him being more akin to FElon or someone else with a bit more string pull.

Donald Trump is Randal Flagg confirmed?

Absolutely bamboozled

Okay that sounds a lot less insane than the mental picture I had. I was like, “mines? Some weird construction…? Snow piercer?” But it sounds like just regular level younger people doing obsessive things to the point of resembling self-harm.

If you don’t mind me asking, what was the environment? That sounds miserable.

I’d love a single giant lady to finger…

What were we talking about again?

That’s fine. Any effort to perfectly categorize everything based on some kind of ruleset tends to fail. Most real world things don’t really fall neatly into boxes like we want them to. Looking at species and gender as the two obvious examples.

We have yet to settle on an actual definition for “species” that works in every case. It was originally “can produce reproductively viable offspring” but a myriad of species break this rule. Then there’s dogs. Every pet dog belongs to the species Canis Familiaris. It takes one look at a beagle and a great dane, for instance, to see where that doesn’t exactly feel right.

Gender (or sex, even) is another example where categorization fails. For the longest time, we had two of each, and anything else was aberrant. Then we saw that there were enough odd cases that a third “intersex” category was added and wildly accepted. Today, we see so many different expressions of gender and sex that the categories of “male” and “female” have largely lost the meaning they have. They’re just not useful descriptors of what we actually see.

Almost every attempt at categorization will end up with edge cases where we just have to make an arbitrary distinction. If you want that to be the nail in the coffin to say “religion’s don’t exist” then fine. Neither do music genres. Gender. Species. Or we can have an actual discussion on these topics, settle on a functional meaning for this conversation (as I tried to do multiple times) and actually exchange ideas, learn, and grow.

That’s fine. Drag can believe it to be a religion. Still not one relevant at all to the views I stated above.

There’s a reason I said “ostensibly”. Cults co-opt the religious umbrella in order to manipulate. They rely on the same kinds of psychology that religions do, often touch on the same kinds of topics. Trumpism is more a cult of personality than a proper religious cult.

Either way, to equate any kind of spiritually and religion with one of the most obvious examples of someone heading a cult is at BEST disingenuous. I’m not here to talk about cults. Cults suck, they’re the opposite of what I described earlier. Intensely external, entirely about control.

Right. All cults are, ostensibly, religions. That doesn’t mean that it works in the other way. Not all religions are cults.

That’s really more a cult than a religion. As much as “hahah all religions are cults LoL”, there is a distinct difference between them.

When boiled down, religions are essentially just a way of coping with the unknowable. The exact specifics of our origin, what happens to the thing we call “ourselves” after death, and usually an idea of how to be a better person. These themes are pretty consistent across everything we’d colloquial agree is a “religion”.

The issues only really arise when someone insists that these unknowable, unquantifiable things that they believe in MUST be the only way, and anyone who doesn’t believe the same way is somehow a threat. I believe that ones beliefs with regard to these unknowable things are deeply personal. They’re arrived at by understanding one’s self, and a LOT of introspection. It’d be weird if any two people managed to arrive at an agreement on everything, and that’s okay because the beliefs are built on internal factors rather than external.

Organized religion, then, is bullshit, yeah. Anyone pushing answers for questions unanswerable is pushing an agenda. I doubt anything approaching the level of group think that is modern abrahamic religions could ever exist without some kind of power struggle.

Want a rabbit hole of apocryphal knowledge, start digging into gnosticism. It’s like more internally consistent Christianity. Also depending on which flavor and particular interpretation, you could arrive at such truths as: Satan runs the church. God(old testament) is an asshole and a fool. Jesus (specifically the divine aspect Christ) is on a rescue mission to save God’s mom, Sophia, from the prison world that is earth, that God made specifically to trap her. Judas is a tragic hero who has to kill his friend, Jesus, so that Christ can escape the prison world.

It’s wild, it’s a more interesting story than Christianity, and I can ABSOLUTELY see why most of these books were branded heresy.

Why does anyone go to a community they don’t necessarily agree with? Either to start shit or to convert. If your goal is to get other people to see the world your way, or even just to have an argument with someone who doesn’t agree with you, first you have to be where people don’t agree with you. I think this is probably a far sight better than people living in echo chambers, personally.

Alternatively, most people pick the least friction option, it’s only us weird, passionate people who go through the added inconvenience to be on a platform that more aligns with our ideals.

We use oil and gas because it’s the option that has been made most available to us. This isn’t an individual problem. As long as the alternatives are prohibitively expensive for the average person, in terms of time, money, availability, etc, then we’re going to always have the bulk of people choosing the easiest option.

We all have so much to worry about each day, trying to fit biking to my job a 45 minute drive away just isn’t feasible. The options for changing that are either we go fuckin full on anarchy, burn the system down, and start anew, or slowly, systematically. Set an easily achievable baseline the average person can work to adopt, encourage it via subsidization and education, and give it time.