Ironicwarcriminal posted:

There is no way you could relate declining birthrates with environmental degradation. Well maybe if you concede that carbon emissions are pollution, but we all know how you feel about that

People have less children as they gain more wealth and education, more wealth and education leads to more consumerism in an ever-increasing quest to differentiate yourself from others in new and ecologically damaging ways, from buying enough quinoa to destabilize the andes to buying enough gadgets to prompt another world war in east central Africa.

When couples don’t have kids they go on more holidays which even apart from carbon emissions causes huge amounts of social and environmental displacement.

Look at Russia: drastically shrinking population and one of the worst ecological basketcases in the world.

If you don’t have kids you care about the future in an abstract way, if you DO then there is a biological motivation for actually wanting your children to be able to survive.

What are most affulent childless retirees going to spend their excess money on: worthy, long term constructive causes or holidays and consumer items?

You just argued increased wealth is related to environmental degradation, not birth rates. Yeah fertility is probably negatively correlated with environmental damage, for what it's worth. I'd be surprised though if the Gulf Monarchies, which have somehow avoided the collapse in birthrates and religious faith suffered by other wealthy states, cause significantly less environmental damage than other states with similar wealth. Indeed as far as carbon emissions go they are much worse than normal

This is all somewhat abstract in any case as describing environmental degradation in general terms is pretty useless, except as a way of determining who adheres to the modern Green pseudo religion. By many indicators the environment has significantly improved in the wealthiest states over the last 30-40 years, admittedly in part by displacing that harm onto poorer areas.

NoFreeWill posted:

now that they can marry (in some states) gays are concerned with no longer being queer enough (gay assimilation)

tpaine posted:

is that gay-ass imilation or gay ass-immolation?

Superabound posted:

there will be (and have been) societies without religion, but there will never be a society without shared delusion

not with that attitude

tpaine posted:

ok now you're stretching the definition of a religion beyond usefulness. just like i'm stretching this can of old english 800 beyond usefulness...there's no more in there

ta

Edited by prohairesis (May 6, 2013 17:32:34)

roseweird posted:

DeleuzerAndRetardi posted:

roseweird posted:

enayeneh posted:

yo roseweird hella digging ur shit keep it homes Fuck these Athiests...

oh hey thanks man

atheists are cool and important, i just want them to acknowledge their position as a religious one so that we can include them in a fuller discussion of religion. secular space is very important for relations between religious traditions as well as for people without religious affiliations, i think if we acknowledge this directly then religious and secular society can enrich rather than antagonize each other


um wow. they will always antagonize each other. dialectic??? hello???? yeesh

it is more complicated than a dialectic... secular is not the same as atheist, and atheist is not the same as irreligious/antireligious. the attempt to collapse all of these into a single religious/atheist dialectic is reductive liberal navel-gazing (picture a petty little war between christians and atheists with some islamophobes ranting on the sidelines and all the episcopalians off getting high somewhere)

I just pictured that and i came

roseweird posted:

it is a mistake to identify all religion with delusioniacs who love religion. religion properly is an inner tool by which the mind generates depth of value, and closes the gap between belief and action. the loss of religion itself represents the loss of deep symbolic thought, one of the primary deficiencies of thought in capitalist society—symbols hover at the surface because, not trusting any elements of our culture, we cannot allow any element to reach our core—and one that cannot be replaced with politics or television or industry or any other form of earthly striving.

depth of value, belief, representations of loss, symbolic thought, capitalist society, trust, culture, politics, television, earthly striving...almost every noun in this post is itself a kind of delusion. "mind generates" is little more than a shorthand definition of delusion. but keep in mind that this is not a value judgement. its simply an acknowledgment that the basis of society itself is a form of shared delusion. my earlier post was axiomatic

roseweird posted:

sort of, however i tend to run with marx's drug analogy and reflect on the situational usefulness of drugs rather than mourn the state that necessitated them. sometimes religious belief is useful and appropriate, other times doubt is appropriate—each addresses a different form of uncertainty. the call to abolish religious belief represents the initiation of a movement of doubt, but a world without religion is possible only if utopia is truly possible, and it is at this point that the distinction between political ideology and religious eschatology becomes very blurry

religion doesnt simply persist in the absence of the call to abolish it, its the contrary--atheism naturally exists in the absence of the call to worship

religion must be actively and coercively maintained in order to survive. it relies almost entirely on violent expansion, forcible conversion, reputational mores, and generational continuity. you only see it as a default position because you and everyone around you is mired in modernity