• nifty@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The great thing about rhetoric is that any smart enough person can do any number of mental gymnastics to create a semi-plausible argument. But as a society we need to move away from things which aren’t grounded in reality

      • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Honestly there’s innumerable works of fiction that’d be better for deriving meaning, morals, and advice for navigating life’s complexities.
        The key is to embrace that it’s fiction. it doesn’t need to be literally true for a piece of writing to be used that way.

        I learned this in 8th grade when my teacher had us read the book The Hatchet and treat it like the bible… which was to interpret the text and find life lessons in it. Great teacher. I still use what I learned from her class.

      • nifty@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Agreed, it’s only problematic if fans of a Marvel movie decide that public policy should be shaped by the ideas of character in that movie

    • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
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      4 months ago

      this is part of what moved me from agnostic 50/50 to athiest decimal to 99decimal. Its like yeah you can rationalize and tinker and whatnot no matter what the base stuff you start with is. Granted though most of the change for me was qanon.

        • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
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          4 months ago

          well so extreme agnostics like I was, real fence sitter types, tend to have, or at least I had. This idea of there must be something to religion even if its really skewed or such. The idea is that common folks can’t possibly be believing some bs and then live their whole lives around it and pass it down generations. And its easy to think that way when the origins are all lost in time. Seeing straight out examples of it in real time. wow. it opened my eyes.