Sunday School
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Sunday School February 1st 2026
This topic contains 48 replies, has 5 voices, and was last updated by 
jakelafort 6 hours, 32 minutes ago.
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February 1, 2026 at 2:06 pm #59747
No Hijab Day, 1 February: Confronting Misogyny.
Charting Americans’ religious beliefs and practices if the U.S. had 100 people.
American Atheists urges Senate to rein in unconstitutional, unaccountable DHS.
Extent of global ‘blasphemy’ laws revealed in report.
World of Woo: The World Health Organization on Traditional Medicine.
Environment: The Doomsday Clock ticks closer to midnight. Does anyone care?
Wake Up, Europe. The continent must take charge of its own fate.
Wake Up America. The world is watching Minnesota once again.
How defending your opinion changes your confidence.
Crunchy Moms are only asking questions.
Long Reads:
Why Ideology, not Faith, drives the Culture War.
Is time a fundamental part of reality? The article is broadly compatible with the block-universe idea we discussed recently. But saying “Time advances” smuggles “time flow” back in or saying that “spacetime records the past” is wrong.
The student behind a phishing empire.
TikTok USA is censoring you and tracking you. Delete it.
Anger is an energy.
Sunday Book Club: A Short History of America: From Tea Party to Trump.
Some photographs taken last week. Some travel photos.
While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……
Coffee Break Videos: The Fine-Tuning Argument is terrible – Sean Carroll. The mind-bending reality of quantum mechanics – with Jim Al Khalili. Why no one is standing up for Iranians. Inside, the Valley Sings. An honest conversation on AI and Humanity – Yuval Noah Harari.
February 1, 2026 at 2:06 pm #59749Have a great week!!
February 1, 2026 at 5:25 pm #59750Reg:
Crunchy Moms are only asking questions.
I think I found the methodology that RFK Jr. and the Crunchies use:
They post The Healing Web poster on the wall, then throw noodly appendages of The Flying Spaghetti Monster against the poster to see what sticks.
The Healing Web
Is time a fundamental part of reality? The article is broadly compatible with the block-universe idea we discussed recently. But saying “Time advances” smuggles “time flow” back in or saying that “spacetime records the past” is wrong.
Does time denial include denial of events over time?
There are plenty of people–Tucker Carlson guests, as well as leaders in The Catholic Church, The Southern Baptist Convention, The Latter Day Saints, and habitués of Epstein Island–who all have a notion of time and it’s events that gives a hairy eyeball reaction.
February 1, 2026 at 9:31 pm #59752Yikes, here I am, late to the party!
Thanks, Reg!!
February 5, 2026 at 1:32 pm #59771Why Ideology, not Faith, drives the Culture War.
This article is super-interesting. I know you’ve got to be clever to do all that statistics stuff. Evangelicals are conservative and have conservative (i.e., highly patriarchal) views. Non-religious are mainly liberal and have liberal views. That makes a lot of sense. It’s telling how there’s nothing about these issues in the New Testament, to my knowledge (abortion, homosexuality, trans rights, same-sex marriage). So they pulled these views out of their asses.
February 5, 2026 at 4:27 pm #59772Yes, it is all in the data but but the truth is likely more nuanced. States with higher percentages of evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists tend to have higher overall frequencies of Google searches for the term “porn.”
Similar work connecting religiosity and web searches found a link between state-level religiosity and searches for explicit content like “porn” and “sex.” Ever hear a story about a pastor caught with drugs or involved in child abuse?
Other studies find little or no consistent difference across ideological regions. Some recent research suggests that overall pornography usage rates don’t differ significantly between “red” and “blue” states once broader survey data are considered.
Humans have an evolved sex drive. This is not controversial in psychology. It mirrors what happens with hunger, sleep, or social contact when artificially restricted. It’s not a social invention, not a moral choice, and not something you can switch off with ideology or religion. Enforced celibacy is deviant behavior. It can and does contribute to deviant or maladaptive sexual behavior. Repression doesn’t erase desire. It pushes it underground, where it becomes harder to integrate with identity and self-control. The Catholic Church is the obvious example of this.
February 5, 2026 at 8:57 pm #59773States with higher percentages of evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists tend to have higher overall frequencies of Google searches for the term “porn.”
Similar work connecting religiosity and web searches found a link between state-level religiosity and searches for explicit content like “porn” and “sex.”
Ah, so what they say and what they do are two different things. Or maybe they only look at “married porn”.
It’s not a social invention, not a moral choice, and not something you can switch off with ideology or religion. Enforced celibacy is deviant behavior. It can and does contribute to deviant or maladaptive sexual behavior. Repression doesn’t erase desire. It pushes it underground, where it becomes harder to integrate with identity and self-control. The Catholic Church is the obvious example of this.
This is very true. Repressed sexuality can make it unconscious and therefore unknown to the individual, which can be dangerous. What about the Muslim shooter who shot up the gay nightclub, because he couldn’t handle being gay himself? What about that massive gayboy, Andrew Tate?
I find that people whose survival was threatened as children, end up with a huge sex drive as adults. There’s nothing someone can do about that.
February 5, 2026 at 9:36 pm #59774Don’t knock sexual repression. It is great for creating teenage and early twenties suicide bombers.
February 6, 2026 at 3:55 am #59775This just in.
Donald Trump was caught telling the truth. Shock to his central nervous system has resulted in his placement in intensive care. Is expected to make a full recovery and resume his mendacious cant.
February 6, 2026 at 8:10 am #59776Don’t knock sexual repression. It is great for creating teenage and early twenties suicide bombers.
It’s worst in highly patriarchal countries, where the rich men hoover up all the wives, and the poorest men are left with no-one to marry.
February 6, 2026 at 9:59 am #59777The fox guarding the henhouse and the Great Writ. Yeah, a Republic if you can keep it…..
The paramilitary murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti is exactly what arbitrary force without effective oversight looks like in practice.
February 6, 2026 at 6:24 pm #59781Writ of habeas corpus.
Corpus Christ.
It hangs in the balance. Ideas that central figures must honor or else!
February 8, 2026 at 6:08 am #59787As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
You’d be thoreau.ing it away. Every moment is precious. Not if it is blocked. Locked and loaded or blocked and unloaded, loaded and fired.
If there is no fundamental particle, irreducible and finite, no fixed location, no absolute measurement, no beginning and no end it follows there is no reality as we intuit. Even so we shall get through it. Can’t undoit. You know it and knew it and will know it again.
February 8, 2026 at 10:32 am #59791As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
A moment isn’t precious because it will be gone. It’s precious because it is what it is. In the Block Universe, time and eternity are not “things” that can be harmed.
“If there is no fundamental particle… no beginning and no end… there is no reality as we intuit.”
Yes, correct. That is exactly my point. Reality is not as we intuit.
“Even so we shall get through it. Can’t undoit.”
Our brains, i.e. our cognitive architecture, has evolved to model the world as 3D + change because it was adaptive to our survival. That is why we experience Time as “flowing”. But the flow isn’t inferred from physics. It is how the human interface interprets what it experiences. Our 3D interfaced experiences make us “intuit” that the Universe is ”out there” (outside our human “Plato’s Cave”). But that is not to say that we exist in 4D spacetime. The “reality” is that we are spacetime structures. The “t” in spacetime is just a co-ordinate.
Even if intuition fails, the structure remains coherent. I’m not trying to kill time. I’m trying to stop mistaking a psychological interface for an ontological feature. Moments don’t lose meaning because we perceive them to coexist in a “passage of time” chain. They only lose meaning if we insist value must come from their disappearance.
In short, the human experience of the passage of time is not fundamental to existence. Once we remove our evolved usage of time passing from our grammar it becomes clearer.
February 8, 2026 at 10:34 am #59792I dropped the above last paragraph into an LLM. It returned this:
Here is a revised version that preserves your intent and tone, but sharpens the ontology and removes the last smuggled metaphors of time having “flow”:
The idea of temporal change is an evolved intuition. Human cognitive architecture developed to model the world as three spatial dimensions plus change because that model was adaptive for survival. This is why time is experienced as “flowing”. But that flow is not inferred from physics; it is a feature of the human interface interpreting relational structure. Our 3D-interfaced experience encourages the intuition that the universe is “out there”, beyond our perceptual cave, yet this does not imply that we exist in spacetime as a container. Rather, we are four-dimensional spacetime structures. The “t” in spacetime is a coordinate, not a process. Even if intuition fails, the structure remains coherent. I am not trying to kill time; I am trying to stop mistaking a psychological interface for an ontological feature. Moments do not lose meaning because they coexist. They only lose meaning if we insist that value must arise from disappearance. In short, the human experience of temporal passage is not fundamental to existence. When we remove time-as-flow from our grammar, the underlying structure becomes clearer.
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