Sunday School

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

It’s a big escalation from “silent time” or “optional reflection” if teachers are leading prayers that reference Jesus. You can’t treat “Christians” as one monolith on this issue because tradition, race, age, and political affiliation all matter.

I would look at their graphs more if I wasn’t so distracted by their pictures so brazenly made by AI.

In the picture of the protest, one of the American Flags on the left side has the square with the stars in the middle of the flag. In the middle bottom of the picture, there is a rainbow-ish flag in what is apparently supposed to be a MAGA-ish rally. And in the lower right part of the picture, there is an upraised stump of an arm in the midst of the raised fists.

And further down with the article on homeschooling, most of the faces don’t even look like humans! The standing adult’s head looks like jumbled puzzle pieces! And one kid has boxes for arms!

Using AI for artwork in a piece just screams laziness and piss-poor editing and can even call the scholarship into question.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Simon, you are still redefining “faith” to make it appear intellectually respectable. You are using the religious version, which explicitly praises belief without evidence, and you are stretching it to also mean rational expectations grounded in observation.

Yet, any day of the week, faith has a dual meaning of religious belief and faith in something.  The thing is, religious people have faith in their faith – it’s their religious beliefs that give them faith in life.  Those religious beliefs, as far as science can explain them, are not all craperoo.

[Belle RoseParticipant]

“ Faith is a present-tense confidence and belief in something unseen, while hope is the future-oriented expectation and desire for something to happen
. Faith is often described as the foundation, or the “substance of things hoped for,” while hope is the confident anticipation that stems from that faith. Both are intertwined: faith provides the trust, while hope is the resulting confident expectation that motivates action.”

….that is what came up in Google AI overview when I wrote Faith versus Hope lol 😂

did AI just outsmart us all? 😂 it’s the apocalypse. There’s a virus infected monkey running the streets. https://nypost.com/2025/10/28/us-news/aggressive-monkey-infected-with-covid-and-stis-running-loose-in-mississippi-after-transport-truck-overturns-sheriff/

This is how it starts. we are all going to die lol 😂 😂 😂

[jakelafortParticipant]

The AI faith and hope connection is a dodge. Probably reflects the biases of the public and the creators. Would not want to shoot anyone in the nuts with reality.

And yes of course there is as we all know a mundane usage of faith that is not at all the same as what is meant by faith in connection to religion. (That applies in my opinion to secular ideologies) I have faith in my loved ones to be or do blah blah.

Faith is the relinquishing of critical faculties that might otherwise cause the thinker to realize the subject is filled with lies and destructive of decency.

Faith is the complete surrender of reasonable norms enabled by the relinquishing of critical faculties.

Faith is the substitution of our good sense for the authority of an institution and its mythology.

Faith enables evil on scales not otherwise possible.

Religious faith gives faith in life? I think not. Faith brings out the suicide bombers who are making a bargain. Fuck the lives of those Mf’s so that i can get laid in paradise. Those same striped believers think this life is temporary and illusory and a tiny temporal shortstop before eternity.

Many of those victims of faith believe they will become immortals and are otherwise motivated not by this life but by fear of punishment in next and hope of valhalla. So much for sincerity. So much for integrity. So much for faith in this life.

For secular ideologies those are often at root also rejection of this life. Communism and Palestinianism are about achieving utopia. That is of course an unreasonable and unattainable state of being. Palestinianism is a curious faith in that the visible evidence is rejected for the mythology.

Faith in the sense described is something that people of actual intelligence are not in possession. Intelligent people are always questioning everything. Intelligence enables us to reform our understanding in light of good argumentation and evidence. Faith keeps us in ignorance and fights our inclination towards reason.

[StregaModerator]

@jake – your mention of Utopia touches a long-standing thought I have.  How do those Utopia Warriors behave, if they finally achieve Utopia on Earth?  What do they do?  They’re fighters, not bakers. What do the ‘Freedom Fighters’ imagine their role would be, in the Utopia they seem to be fighting for?

[jakelafortParticipant]

Strega,

Valid question and one that has occurred to me as well.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Belle Rose:

did AI just outsmart us all? 😂 it’s the apocalypse. There’s a virus infected monkey running the streets.

If AI can’t draw human hands or faces properly, I wouldn’t give AI that much credit.

And COVID-19 and STIs didn’t kill off humanity the first time around, whether it came from from Bat-Soup or the Wuhan Virology Lab, so a weaker strain from a monkey most likely won’t do it either.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by  TheEncogitationer.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Strega,

your mention of Utopia touches a long-standing thought I have. How do those Utopia Warriors behave, if they finally achieve Utopia on Earth? What do they do? They’re fighters, not bakers. What do the ‘Freedom Fighters’ imagine their role would be, in the Utopia they seem to be fighting for?

Well. not speaking for Jake, but myself, since Utopia is literally “no place,” the Utopia Warriors will never know, though we do see from historical examples how Utopia Warriors act when they try to achieve Utopia.

Jonestown, Guyana under Rev. Jim Jones and “Year Zero” Kampuchea under Pol Pot are the two most prominent examples.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendum

[jakelafortParticipant]

In the event some lurker is confused about the Israel and Palestine morality play this video is worth watching.

[Author]

Posts