Over thirty years ago, I told a friend of a friend “Australians come from Australia, Romanians come from Romania, therefore Canadians come from Canadia”. She’s been calling it “Canadia” for thirty years.
We’ve been together for ten years now, and she’s just found out that it’s not called “Canadia”. Boy am I in trouble.
“Girls desire a knight in shining armor to come sweep them off their feet!” — my pastor
For the longest time, I struggled because I was told all my life what a “woman’s purpose” was, and my desires never lined up with that. Felt like a freak because I never desired romance, sex, or partnership with a man (or anyone else, for that matter). If that was my purpose, was I supposed to will myself to want that for myself? Was I doomed to be alone forever? Was I wrong to want to pursue adventure and things that I wanted?
If my desire ≠ God’s desire (which was apparently union with a man at some point in the future), then my desires were… wrong. Maybe/probably even evil.
So I fucked up my life trying to follow that and fit into that mold. I did things I never wanted to do because it was the “right thing” to do in the eyes of God.
After I escaped, I never really recovered. But… I discovered a lot about myself.
I did bearded dragon rescues & fostering, I got into cosplay, learned how to sew stuffed animals, got some mental health care, rekindled my love for nature… all by myself. I learned to love me and not base my worth on what other folks believe I should do or how I should behave. I don’t have a partner who gets to dictate my personality. I got to grow on my own.
I’m still coming to terms with… a lot of things about myself, but now I’m able to grow freely instead of being confined to such a small pot.
Don’t let people define who or what you are, or what your purpose is in life. Only you get to do that. It’s both terrifying and freeing, but you can do this.
Even for those us who fit into the straight/white/cis mould, learning how to create purpose and meaning for yourself is a really hard battle against expectations imposed growing up. Thanks for sharing a really wholesome story :)
That truth is absolute. It’s very much subjective. Much in the way right and wrong are subjective.
Life is complicated and things don’t fit into perfect little boxes.
Except when it comes to Math. Math is absolute, as long as you ignore statistics.
Gotta ignore infinities too. The axioms they’re based on are highly controversial.
And
irrationalimaginary numbers. I mean the numbers make sense, but it’s not like we can intuitively understand sqrt(-1).
God exists and watches everything you do and loves you while threatening you with eternal damnation.
You’re allowed to be atheist of course, but do you have any more proof that there are no gods than they have that gods exist?
EDIT: Y’all can have your opinion, no one’s questioning that. You’re allowed to believe there are no higher powers, but I’m not allowed my personal belief that there is?? Not one person has provided proof that there is no Higher Power. Grow up…
You should familiarize yourself with the concept called Burden of Proof. They (those who believe in God, and claim he exists and created all things, etc) are the ones where the burden lies. It is not for the rest of us to prove their beliefs for them, or you.
The default position is that we don’t know if a specified thing exists. To prove or disprove it, you need evidence. I can prove that the Christian God doesn’t exist, as it is logically impossible, but it’s possible that some other version of a god might exist, I don’t know. I don’t have evidence either way.
How can you prove the Christian God doesn’t exist?
It’s logically impossible, it has contradictory aspects.
Yes, you said that, but what exactly?
For example, omnipotence is a self-contradictory term, as you have a dilemma - if a being is all powerful enough to give itself limits, it is not omnipotent as it wouldn’t be able to do the things it limited itself to do. Whereas if it can’t self-impose limits, it’s also not omnipotent as it isn’t able to self-impose limits. Another example is that suffering exists in the world, which would be a contradiction if an all-powerful being that wanted to end suffering existed, since it should, but it isn’t.
And these are just contradictions within God’s character. If you want to look at the things he actually claims to have done, you’ll find numerous more in the Bible. Just as one example, Jesus’s last words are different in almost every gospel.
None of this is new or hasn’t been thought about, written about and deflated for centuries. I doubt you have any theologians shaking in their boots.
The meaning of omnipotence as it translates to Good has always been nuanced. There have always been things God can’t do - sin being the obvious example. You could debate whether he can, but just never would because of his character, but it amounts to the same thing and has been orthodoxy for centuries.
The apparent contradictions on the Gospels (especially synoptic) have been done to death. Debated and answered more times than you’ve had hot dinners. There is no serious theologian or biblical scholar who would hear that argument and be at all concerned by it.
Honestly the same applies to the idea of a good god and suffering.
It’s impossible to prove the non-existence of something. It’s on those who believe in god to prove its existence.
And the Bible doesn’t count as sufficient evidence because that would be like believing Harry Potter exists because JK Rowling says so.
Unless you claim, as OP did, that you can actually disprove it.
I agree that the Bible is not sufficient in the sense that it proves anything or sews up their arguments, but to suggest its historical value as evidence is the same as modern day fiction is absurd.
I’m not against religion, but that’s not how evidence and proof works. Do you have any proof that tiny invisible pink elephants aren’t hiding in your fridge?
that’s not how evidence and proof works.
Proof of a negative is common in science and mathematics.
No, you can’t prove that something never happens or that something doesn’t exist.
Edit: For those who are downvoting here are some sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#Proving_a_negative
Careful, many online atheists don’t understand that they have to prove a negative. That they have to prove the assertion: “There is no god.”
The default position is that there is yet insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion.
Edit: Thank you for the downvotes, you have provided me with further evidence that online atheists don’t understand that they have to prove a negative. Your butthurt fuels me.
This guy eats babies
prove me wrong
You have made the assertion, thus you have the burden of proof.
“what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” QED
…Do you not realize that the same goes for god?
I wasn’t arguing for the existence of god.
Let me break this down:
- “There is a god.” --> Burden of proof
- “There is no god.” --> Burden of proof
- “Hey, man. I don’t know.” —> No burden of proof
The second one is wrong, there is no god is not a claim that requires evidence in the same way there are no fairies in my fridge doesn’t require evidence
That’s not really how it works though. If I tell you there’s an invisible dragon living under your bed who will burn your house down at some time in the future if you don’t give me $10. You can’t disprove it, but because I’m the one making the claim that the dragon exists the burden of proof is on me.
The burden of proof tennis is quite tricky here because it’s not about whether you claim something exists, it’s whether you claim something that goes against what’s generally accepted. If I claim quantum mechanics don’t exist, it’s not on you to prove they do.
And that’s before we get into the fact that there isn’t a general consensus on whether God (or any gods) exist.
Your premise is incorrect. The burden of proof for quantum mechanics is on the people claiming they exist. They provided those proofs, which is why people believe in them. I haven’t studied quantum mechanics, but if you asked somebody who does, they could offer proof or evidence. And if they couldn’t, then your claim it doesn’t exist (until proof was proffered) would be correct.
It was on them until society generally accepted it. Now if I claim it doesn’t exist, the burden is on me.
Or how about this: if I claim dinosaurs never existed and thus the fossils didn’t come from them, it’s not on you to prove they did.
And he’s terrible with money! He needs more money!
George Carlin, how we miss thee.
If you work hard you’ll have a successful life
See also: “get good grades in university and you’ll be flooded with job offers!”
That wasn’t a lie, exactly, it was just Baby Boomers not realizing how much the world changed since they were in school. It used to happen that way. My mother got her first job out of school when the employer came to campus to recruit through a job fair.
It’s just an overly positive way of saying, “If you don’t get good grades in uni, many HRs will de-list you before looking at your resume”.
I literally have never come across a job posting that asked for GPA. Unless it’s like an academic internship or something. Get the degree, and nobody cares about your grades.
“maybe” was how my mother said “no.”
“Ignore them and they’ll go away” in the context of bullying. Hint; it took a mental breakdown and violence to make it stop, back in the mid-90s.
Anything having to do with Christianity.
My father pulled that “just ignore it” shit, too. Somehow it wasn’t the bully’s fault for attacking me, it was my fault for being such an entertaining target.
Christopher Columbus set out to prove that the Earth was round after eating an orange or something and that’s how jesus discovered America
Wait, what‽
You probably had the same damn book I did, with an illustration of him eating an orange and seeing the wings of a butterfly coming up over it and supposedly realizing they look just like the sails of a ship and so, gasp, the world must be round like this orange!
When I was a little kid, I asked my grandfather what the bumps in the middle of the road (the reflectors) were for. He told me that it was so blind people could drive. It made perfect sense to me, and I believed that for longer than I should have!
Your grandfather sounds rad
Basically everything my mother ever said. I repeat a lot of it back to her now, and she always asks, “where did you hear such absurdities?”
Ohhhhhhh how good that must feel.
“I never said that!”
The axe forgets, the stump remembers
That talking to strangers was bad.
That strangers are bad and cops are good.
That you should base your diet on carbohydrates, and minimise fat intake.
Wait why the f the base is full chok of calories? Is this *how to get child obesity " manual?
The food pyramid is commonly taught in American schools as the “ideal” diet.
It was started as a sales tactic to boost grain sales, but was marketed as scientific research. And since this was started decades ago, you couldn’t simply google their sources to verify whether or not the studies were legit.
Turns out it’s a crock of shit, and teaching it to kids does make childhood obesity rates worse. Because of course it does, an excess of carbs is horrible for you.
Fuck
So the short answer is greed again.
I went through the 30 seconds of effort to make the always has been meme.
Image uploads are down at the moment so just imagine I posted it here, thank you.
Men are logical. Women are emotional.
Such an enormous generalization and oversimplification. Very false.
That turning on the light in the car at night was illegal because it would cause a glare on the windshield.
I believed this into my mid-20s when my husband corrected me with a fuckton of teasing and incredulity.
God is real.
The post says a lie, not a truth lol
God is a 3 letter word created for stupid people to think they have the whole fucking universe wrapped up in a neet little package inside their heads.
It’s far more than that.
Imagine whatever you want.
That if a racoon saw you swimming, it would swim out to you and sit on your head and drown you.
My fully adult mother actually feared this was something that could happen to her children, and she warned us of this “danger” every summer when we were young.
This is awfully specific, haha.
