What's wrong with email? I'm assuming that you want privacy from big corps rather than government?

Spam is thankfully pretty much a thing of the past. I had to stop using a couple of my primary emails because they were just getting drowned in spam, like a hundred messages a day if not more.

Then Sender Policy Framework came out, which went a long way to reducing spam, then came DKIM and DMARC and it's now really down to very manageable levels, and I've been able to start using both those email addresses again. They do still get some spam, but no more than 1-3 a day now.

Don't you think you're overthinking it? Or did any of your reasons ever come true, so to speak?

When would it be a problem if someone deduces that your email domain is your own personal one?

For your other point, do you mean that someone gets access to your email - they actually break into your inbox. If they see you have a mailbox called [email protected], they'll know that's going to be the signup you used for service.com. Is that what you're referring to? Doesn't seem like a big cause for concern to me, so am I missing something?

oh dear. you really are a lost cause. Nothing I said got through did it?

edit: thank you for the discussion. Sorry for upsetting you! I genuinely didn't mean to do that, but I admit my approach was abrasive. Something for me to work on! I truly did find chatting with you useful, and I'll take on board what I've learnt from this next time I have a similar debate.

Sure. I made an assumption that people who call themselves atheist would also not believe in magical thinking. But you're not atheist and you do believe in magical thinking. You just haven't been sucked into a religion yet. You're ripe pickings for one though - if you are ever feeling low and get love-bombed by members of any particular religion, you'll probably throw yourself right in with them.

I probably can't reach you. You do seem to agree that as human beings, none of us know anything for sure. There's no certainty in life. Science understands this and is built upon that as its very foundation. Religion however does not understand this and tries to invent certainty where none exists.

So if there was one thing I'd like you to keep in mind and remember, it's that anyone who does claim to know something for sure is wrong.

pretty sure it's just this one guy stubbornly trying to turn back the tide all alone 😄

2Mudhra4real

not talking to ghosts/aliens/etc, but I can’t rule it out 100%

you keep skipping over the spiderman one. Don't think I haven't noticed lol

So I take it you don't think a mental patient might actually be talking to spiderman? Same goes for Gandalf presumably, or Yoda. What about Thor? You probably think Thor is legit because some people did once believe there was such a being, right? So what if you then found out that our mental patient was actually talking to the Marvel Thor from the movies? All of a sudden you lose interest, this guy's crazy, and definitely no longer a prophet, hmm?

well you really can go down to the local mental hospital. they deal with many people who think they have some "secret communication channel" with non-human intelligences.

you really should know this already.

some of these people will claim to talk to ghosts, for others it'll be aliens, and others again will claim they're talking to spiderman.

I am struggling to really believe you are being honest when you say you've rejected religion if you think that these people might in fact be talking to ghosts, or aliens or spiderman.

If you think such things could be real rather than simple constructions of tormented human imagination, what made you give up your religion?

nope, can't say I do

hmm so are you saying that a person who hears voices in their head might actually be talking to Spiderman, or a space alien, or an angel, or whatever it is they say they're talking to?

well it's fine unless you're maybe still not getting it.

It's not fine to be wrong. It's not fine to have a bad way of thinking. Not in this day and age, when we are all connected and ideas can spread (and be manipulated) so widely and so easily.

If you know someone who supports gay rights and sex positivity, and they also say that they believe Mohammed was a Jewish prophet (the greatest ever Jewish prophet no less), then they are either being dishonest about one of those two things, or they are ignorant about what those two things really mean.

OK but whether someone is decent or not is very subjective. It's going to vary from person to person, even between two people who otherwise have very similar worldviews. I don't know anything about Mamdani, or Sadiq Khan for that matter.

I am however concerned about religious people in positions of political power - I don't think they have any place there. I don't think it is possible to truly understand and apply critical thinking and to be genuinely religious - because of the "blind faith" problem, and also the magical thinking.

However public figures are not always honest about their religious feelings. As you said, followers of the Islamic faith in particular can be hostile towards people who have left the religion, so it would certainly affect his chances at the polls if he were to come out and admit to not believing in any of the woo-woo and the supremacism of Islam. (Just quickly want to point out that all Jewish religions are founded on woo-woo and supremacism, I'm not singling out Islam in particular. Perhaps it's true for all religions, I wouldn't be surprised but I don't know, in any case I'm just talking about Islam as that's the one you mentioned.)

I guess it is possible to consider yourself a believer of a particular religion but just not understand what that really entails. You can't believe that Mohammed was really a Jewish prophet *and* support rights for homosexuals for instance. If you call yourself a follower of Mohammed and yet say that gays should be allowed to have sexual relationships with whoever they please without feeling bad in any way, then you haven't studied your religion enough. The religion is quite clear: not only is homosexuality sinful, but homosexuals must be persecuted.

In any case, none of this changes anything about critical thinking. It is not possible to correctly practice critical thinking and be religious.

If you are religious, then giving up the religion is probably just the first step on the road towards becoming a critical thinker. However there's still a journey to make, and not every person to quit religion will ever start that journey, never mind complete it.

When I think about it, when I first quit religion, I didn't do it through critical thinking. Really it was an emotional decision, just like religious belief itself. I only arrived at my current appreciation for this process of rational thought after many years of continuing to try and understand the universe, making many wrong turns along the way.

ah you don't get it. it's not about personal preferences, which of course people are free to have.

It's about being rational. If you don't understand that being rational is objectively a superior way to think about the world, then you are also vulnerable.

I guess I was working on the faulty assumption that people who've explicitly rejected religion are rational thinkers. There are many reasons people have for rejecting religion though.

All religions are bad. A worldview eg a religion is not "good" just because it sometimes produces results which are beneficial.

They are all based on magical thinking - essentially the belief that you can tap into some secret pure source of knowledge just by wishing it to be true and thinking.

People's inability to come to rational conclusions by themselves is IMO the biggest threat to world peace today.

The first step towards rational thinking is being comfortable saying, "I don't know what that is", and "I don't know how to achieve that outcome". Then you can slowly and carefully explore the options, always ready to step back into the harsh light of your own ignorance.

Compare that with religious thinking, where the adherent jumps wildly to conclusions, and doggedly sticks to them simply because they have been conditioned by religion to think faith without evidence is in itself worthy of reward.

Romanticising Jesus.

You'd think Jesus had invented game theory the way some people talk about him!

He wasn't some kind of renegade politician with a practical and coherent vision for a more just society that he wanted to put into place. If he existed at all, he was just another poor shmuck dealing with untreated mental illness. Who knows what childhood trauma he was dealing with?

Nothing he said was particularly ground-breaking. People at Jesus's time and before already understood the concept of good neighborliness. When he said things like, "the meek shall inherit the earth", that was just the psychosis talking. He wasn't using clever metaphor, he was projecting and fantasizing out loud.

When I see people do this, eg comments like "if they actually followed Jesus's teachings" I think such people must still be in love with the "Children's bible stories" they were read as a kid, and are only upset at the church because the fantastical happy and conflict-free life of their young imaginations doesn't actually exist.

Don't you think it's important that people are able to think critically and make sensible conclusions?

I get on best with people who think outside the box and don't accept the norm. People who reject tradition, the traditional roles and hierarchies of society. So I don't really meet people on a friendly basis who are religious. Religion is tradition, literally the same thing. I've worked with people who I've later found out believe some religion or other, and from then on I can't look at them the same way, as I can't shake the feeling that they must be at least a bit stupid.

However what I do find is that the kinds of people that I do mix with can often be a bit conspiratorially minded. I meet too many anti-vaxxers. 911 deniers even.

It is IMO the same inability to think critically at play. It's one thing to speculate, and say "this might be true, or alternatively this could be true, or even this". There's nothing wrong with that, I think it's healthy in fact to challenge assumptions. The problem is that people pick one of many possible options - often one of the least likely ones - and then commit to that one position. These people have a faith much like religious faith in the daft ideas they choose to pin their egos to.

This kind of faulty thinking is IMO what leads to MAGA. It leads people to support authoritarian regimes such as Russia's or Iran's.

So I do push back on it when I encounter it, which as I say is far too often. Obviously you have to do so intelligently, and to pick your battles. No one has ever genuinely changed someone's mind through nagging or insults.

I genuinely believe it is important for people like you and me to spread the skill of critical thinking. To encourage people not to pin their loyalties so easily to some daft idea and then doggedly stick to that regardless of the other possibilities.

What are you talking about, challenging beliefs and assumptions is not persecution or discrimination.

You should welcome such challenges and have the courage to deal with them head on, as learning experiences, rather than some kind of lame-ass desperation to appease those with opposing views, in the hope they won't ask you awkward questions that challenge your cozy conceits.

I wonder if you even are irreligious, you sound more like a bible basher with this kind of intellectual cowardice and dishonesty.

sometimes it’s best to admit that you don’t know something

Well if you follow scientific principles, you *always* (not just sometimes) accept that you start from a position of ignorance.

Nothing is known for sure - at any time, new evidence could emerge that would, for instance, completely change our understanding of electricity, or of the origins of the universe.

More to the point, there is no need to take a firm position on anything. Why do you need someone to respect your right to believe what you want? Are you unable to justify your position?

There is no "right to believe what you want". That would be like having a right to have diarrhoea. Nothing is stopping you believing what you want, you don't need anyone's permission.

You can believe that the world is flat and exists on the surface of an enormous elephant's ear if you want. Go ahead. No one will stop you. They might call you stupid or deranged, but they aren't going to stop you. Well, except by convincing you of your error.

If you do understand the principles of science, then you should understand that there are things we can agree on. Everyone - even the stupidest most evangelical idiot, even the most psychotic mental patient - everyone believes in evidence.

Have you ever talked to a religious person about why they think what they do? They will cite evidence, and they will explain the conclusions they derive from that evidence.

What is different between a religious idiot and a rational actor is what evidence they trust, and the size of the leaps they will make when making conclusions from that.

Needless to say, a religious person will consider things such as a vague feeling to be evidence, or some arbitrary coincidence, and they will make huge leaps of faith based on very little evidence indeed. While a rational thinker will try to consider a whole range of evidence before drawing careful conclusions, and even then they should remain open to all possibilities.

From this acceptance of our absolute ignorance, and a willingness to question accepted wisdom, science has slowly and increasingly carefully built up a worldview which reliably and reproducibly produces useful results. In just a few centuries. This is considerably more than religion has done in millennia of make-believe and fart-worship.

Glass bottles with a deposit are often cleaned and reused which is better than recycling. And because it's all the same type of plastic, plastic bottles with deposit can be recycled much more effectively than the mixed plastic that's dumped in city recycling bins.