• shalafi@lemmy.world
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      56 minutes ago

      Racism will never die as we evolved to be tribal. Best we can do as a society is make it unacceptable. Which was happening when I grew up in 70s/80s America. Now we’ve backtracked and gone all-in with dog whistles.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      48 minutes ago

      What’s weird is the young Earth thing is relatively new. Before the 1850s or so, you would be laughed out of the room. As ignorant as we were, naturalists were having a hard time trying to figure a world that was millions, or 10s of millions, of years old. Churches, of any stripe, sure as hell wasn’t preaching it.

      And here we are, with the flat Earth idea being even newer.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Young earth creationism

      What I hate so much about that, is all the “evidence” just points to some near extinction level event that humans worldwide suffered.

      And obviously for that to have happened, it means there had to be a lot more people.

      Like, entire cities/tribes/whatever were wiped out everywhere, but some had individuals survive. Which explains how “the last two people” could have kids who just happen to later have spouses and kids of their own without any explanation for where the new people came from.

      They were just outside of walking distance.

      Over the 300,000 plus years anatomically modern humans have been on Earth, that’s probably happened a bunch. Hell, we’ve had 2-3 actual ice ages over that span.

      We don’t know shit about 250k of those years.

      • -RJ-@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        From what I understand (and as a Christian), it’s those Christians that take a literal reading of the Bible, not understanding that those parts of the Bible aren’t meant to be read literally but are about the WHY of creation rather than the HOW. It’s about WHO God is rather than how He did things.

        • Krafty Kactus@sopuli.xyz
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          3 hours ago

          Either that or Genesis is just an explanation made up by a people group that had little to no idea how anything in the natural world works lol

          • shalafi@lemmy.world
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            41 minutes ago

            If you squint real hard, Genesis is a tale of stellar and planetary formation. Then comes evolution. Give the first bits a read! Yeah, evolution is mixed up a little, still surprisingly on point for a bunch of Bronze Age sheep herders.

            Then there’s a second tale, in the same short book. What a clusterfuck. But I can still see some real history in it. If I squint real hard.

        • shalafi@lemmy.world
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          40 minutes ago

          Wow! Nailed it! I had thought that as a young Christian, didn’t know there was a verse for it. Lost my religion long ago BTW.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      52 minutes ago

      Easy to say, but I’d argue it’s baked in.

      “Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

      ― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

    • iii@mander.xyz
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      5 hours ago

      I kinda get it. Everyone needs something to look forwards too. Sadly, for some, there’s only the idea of afterlife for that.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        51 minutes ago

        No, it is directly a problem. Believing in bullshit because someone in a higher position than you said it with zero fucking evidence is how MANY of humanity’s ills have come about and persist. Religion feeds that idiocy.

        No, it’s not the only route, but it is a HUGE component of people believing things without evidence. That is, unequivocally, an actual, literal, direct problem.

      • flabbergast@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        All religion is baseless bullshit, so yes, it is problematic in itself.
        It is divisive by nature/design.
        And it is made worse by people abusing it for power over others or discrimination.

      • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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        4 hours ago

        at best its a waste of human energy and maybe good for those that require that emotional crutch

        your argument is the same for guns, which we as a species should also mature out of

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    In the USA: complicated tax returns that require tax software and/or professional help. It’s a rent-seeking scam.

    • stinerman@midwest.social
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      4 hours ago

      The complication is mostly determining what actually counts as income and the insane amount of deductions and credits you might be eligible for.

      For most people a simple standard deduction is very easy to file, and can be done on paper in 15-30 minutes. But I agree that this is still too complicated.

    • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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      48 minutes ago

      I’d extend that to conservatism in general.

      If there was ever strong evidence of humans generally being just as fucking stupid as the rest of the animals on this planet… It’s conservatism (the political ideology, not the act of conservation).

  • Zak@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    I thought phone numbers and traditional telephone service would be dead by now. Instead, purely internet-based communication services often use them as an identifier.

    • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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      5 hours ago

      telephony only uses a subset of internet things so building just telephone lines is cheaper, which matters especially in the global south

      • Zak@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        I’m no expert on the subject, but it’s my understanding that mobile networks are being deployed much more widely in the global south than wired telephone lines, and they’re usually internet-capable.

        • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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          3 hours ago

          wait, you’re right. not sure what i was thinking of… then i guess it’s an easy way to get a unique human-readable subscriber identifier?