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Joined 6 days ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • I disagree with the whole premise of this post as well, but yeah the early history of the spread of Buddhism actually does contain a lot of this. The emperor Ashoka, who ruled most of India at one point, spread Buddhism across his empire by force, which was a major factor early on in its trajectory. Buddhism and Christianity actually have pretty similar early histories, complete with councils to determine doctrine, early spread among lower classes, and eventual adoption as state religions of powerful states. Even today there is still a lot of sectarian violence committed by Buddhists, particularly in the Myanmar/Burma civil war.

    A lot of atheists in the west think of Buddhism as being more of a moral philosophy than a religion but that’s not really true. Buddhism has gods and demons and heavens and hells, and rules one has to follow. It is often said that Buddhism doesn’t believe in “God” but this is kind of misleading because there are definitely beings pretty much everyone would agree are gods even if they are technically mortal or are seen differently, such as the Buddhas.





  • I specifically chose a fee that was higher than the actual cost so dumbasses wouldn’t nitpick about greed and profits and yet you still somehow did it, so I’ll take the bait- please explain to me how a business can operate selling an item at $10 when they have $100 in guaranteed costs? Do you understand that this means they lose at least $90 on every transaction at that price? I get that companies are greedy and skim more off the top but this is pure idiocy to make this argument in this hypothetical.


  • The dumb thing is that it doesn’t matter who pays the tariff, it still will get passed to the consumer. Consider a scenario where the government starts taxing Amazon $100 per order no matter what’s in it. If you buy a $10 item on Amazon, how are they going to pay the $100 tax on that? Amazon will just add a $100 tax fee to your order because they can’t keep running a business if that cost isn’t baked into the final price. It doesn’t matter who actually delivers money to the government, the tax gets paid by all parties involved.

    FYI, sales tax is already done this way. Sales tax is collected from businesses, not customers, but customers still pay sales tax because that’s just how economics works.






  • Lmao your case sounds very similar to me except I haven’t been banned, but apparently mostly because I just lurk most of the time because reddit sucks more and more every day. The last straw was them getting rid of messages and not giving a good old.reddit alternative which made me realize they’re going to kill old reddit soon, and I refuse to use their shitty new UI. I’ve been on there for like 13 years and I feel like it’s gotten way worse way faster in the past year than it has in a long time.






  • It’s more complicated than that since I do believe God exists but in a way that is incomprehensible to humans, and, according to all evidence, doesn’t “intervene” with the universe. I say “intervene” because God, as classically described, is simultaneously incapable of intervening and incapable of not intervening. If we define God as “an omnipotent being”(which, for the record, I do not), then He is necessarily also all knowing and exists outside of the limitations of time and space. Such a being would be perfectly optimized as well, and so it would be impossible for anything to occur without its express permission and cause. Therefore, under classical theism, it seems impossible for God to say, answer prayers, because this would imply that He could possibly change His mind or that what was happening wasn’t already what He wants to begin with.


  • It kind of fell apart when Trump lost in 2020 and Q (a.k.a. Ron Watkins) stopped posting after Jan 6. QAnon style beliefs are pretty mainstream in conservative circles now, but QAnon as an organized set of beliefs kind of fell apart without continuous revelation from Q himself. It’s kind of funny, Q actually posted again a couple years after and nobody really cared because they had sort of moved on. The QAA podcast (formerly QAnon Anonymous) put forth a theory that QAnon arose as a way to explain why Trump wasn’t actually making America great again even though he was president, and so it’s possible that it will come back in the second president. I think it’s definitely possible.


  • Eh. I could care less about downvotes and I understand that the idea of practicing Christianity for reasons beyond personal faith in it is going to be controversial to Christians and atheists alike. If someone made a chill Atheist/agnostic “church” where there was singing and discussions on moral philosophy, and a community of people devoted to helping each other and their community I’d probably be doing that but as it stands religion is the only game in town for such things and I think that it’s good to do something like this. Plus I don’t know, it’s kind of cool to be a part of rituals people have been doing for thousands of years.


  • It’s complicated but I used to be essentially atheist but now believe that there is something one might as well call “God” after studying philosophy. Essentially everything has a cause and something must be at the end of that chain, and we might as well call that “God.” I also practice Christianity because I feel that it is good to have the community and structure that a religion can provide but I don’t think that “God” necessarily exists in the way Christianity typically presents it.