Winter Lily
@earthheart
Active 7 years, 9 months ago-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Freethinkers Must Be Free Spirits, In My Opinion in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 1 week ago

-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Freethinkers Must Be Free Spirits, In My Opinion in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 1 week ago
I consider myself a free thinker, and other people consider me to be a free spirit. In my experience, the two tend to go together as people take their free-spiritedness into their thinking. I consider someone who is not a free thinker to be a dumbass, as it’s an intellectual failing not to be. So, ideologues are behaving like a dumbass.
The fr…[Read more]
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Sunday School February 1st 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 1 week agojakelafort wrote:
Don’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.
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Sunday School February 1st 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 1 week agoReg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
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 “po…
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Sunday School February 1st 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 1 week agoReg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why 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 sen…[Read more]
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Sunday School January 25th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 1 week agojakelafort wrote:
ask him to justify his framing of almost every issue through the narcisstic lens of Trump. How is it that the president of the USA subordinates the interests of the people he is representing as the ultimate public servant to his own interests?If you did that, he would ruin you, and possibly have you shot, lol. Is anyone still…[Read more]
-
Strega replied to the topic Sunday School February 1st 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 2 weeks agoYikes, here I am, late to the party!
Thanks, Reg!!
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Sunday School January 25th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 2 weeks agoReg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
My take (yours may differ) on the cause of the fracture was replacing (or displacing) the concept of universal individual rights in favor of group-identity moral ranking. A lot of modern progressiveness has moved away from treating everyone as equal individuals and toward treating people primarily as members of… -
Strega replied to the topic Sunday School January 25th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 2 weeks ago@Jake I can’t disagree with any of your comment regarding intelligence, and I particularly like the capitalised Actual Intelligence. Really good food for thought.
-
Unseen replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Question for block universe supporters. If moving forward through time is an illusion, why can’t we have the illusion of moving backward through time? It should make no difference, right?
-
Strega replied to the topic Sunday School January 25th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 3 weeks agoThanks Reg!
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Sunday School January 11th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 3 weeks agojakelafort wrote:
I thought as mass approaches speed of light it becomes infinite?I think that mass becomes infinite as it approaches the speed of light through space, not time.
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Sunday School January 11th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 3 weeks agojakelafort wrote:
And if big bang is a beginning at what point does blocking become the nature of the thing as a whole?It’s a shape. I can’t visualise something in 4D, but I presume we have length, breadth, height, and time. Eventually, if there’s heat death, then events stop happening and time runs out.
Inside the shape, local events exist a…[Read more]
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic Sunday School January 11th 2026 in the forum
Sunday School 2 months, 3 weeks agojakelafort wrote:
Does it follow that the universe is eternal?You’re talking about a finite 4-dimensional block. It must have edges. At one edge is the Big Bang. At the other end is heat death, or whatever its terminating fate is. In between, is the history of the universe and all its internal events.
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Unseen wrote:
The block universe gives an unbelievable account of experience. If you take it seriously, nothing actually happens, however experience consists of a cluttered stream of experiences.Yet, we travel through spacetime at the speed of light. So, the block universe could exist. But I am still unable to connect the “self” with “now”.
-
Unseen replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 3 weeks ago
The block universe gives an unbelievable account of experience. If you take it seriously, nothing actually happens, however experience consists of a cluttered stream of experiences.
That the account of experience it gives is counterintuitive and implausible can be explained in terms of the unreliability of experience.Nevertheless, the entire…[Read more]
-
Unseen replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 3 weeks ago
The senses are a poor source of evidence. Our senses tell us that the world is colorful. In fact, color is in the brain, not the external world. We experience gravity as a force. We know it’s not. We experience deja vu which is a well known trick of the mind that seems real.
Some years after my mother died, I was standing on a street corner…[Read more]
-
Unseen replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 3 weeks ago
TheEncogitationer wrote:
Fellow Unbelievers: Trump tells Iranian protesters against Islamist tyranny that “Help is on the way” two weeks after the uprising starts and after anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 Iranian citizens are dead. I’d say time and agency are pretty damn real. Can you relate?The problem of agency regarding free will isn’t about…[Read more]
-
Unseen replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Unseen wrote:
No, you feel you have a certain amount of agency.What I’m saying is, we treat ourselves and each other as if we have agency, whether we “really” do or not. It’s on this level that we’re held accountable.
See, you can’t talk about agency without implying agency where there really is none. And I mean you you,…[Read more]
-
Simon Paynton replied to the topic You don't need determinism… in the forum Small Talk 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Unseen wrote:
No, you feel you have a certain amount of agency.What I’m saying is, we treat ourselves and each other as if we have agency, whether we “really” do or not. It’s on this level that we’re held accountable.
- Load More