Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Frumple on February 15, 2022, 06:34:15 pm

Eh... modern war, maybe, but world? Who exactly is going to jump in on Russia's side, here? They're not exactly a top tier power anymore, nor do they have a bunch of allies that'd be willing to throw in on something like that.

Belarus seems to be up to some shenanigans as well, from what others have reposted elsewhere.

Putin has got a few of the former Soviet states run by strongman allies, one of which is Belarus, so it is unsurprising that this is the case.

I believe the excuse (or one of them, anyway) for the Russian troop build-up on the border was war games or some kind of military exercise with Belarus.

Islam on the other hand is actually growing last time I checked. This growth is happening in the middle east though, but that's due to a combination of political instability and the efforts of theocratic governments. Over there, there are more important things to worry about than the question of whether God exists or not. Plus, the people really need the hope religion provides.

I would put it to you that the reason Islam is growing in the Middle East isn’t because of the hope it provides people, but rather the theocratic governments you mentioned rather requiring people to at least appear to be Muslim. People are joining not because they have seen the light, but because they don’t want to be disappeared in the darkness. For example, a mob in Pakistan recently beat a man to death for blasphemy (not an isolated incident) and the militantly Islamic Taliban (now with better PR!) retaking Afghanistan and re-instating Sharia law.

I also don’t think people turning away from Christianity is as simple(!) as you make it out to be. Various scandals, for example the child abuse in the Catholic Church, are making people realize that religious institutions are more interested in maintaining their bureaucratic existence, for example shuffling around an accused priest to a different parish rather than informing the police, instead of serving their various congregations’ spiritual needs.

If you can’t maintain (or build) a relationship any other way, needs must. It may not be the best, but I can attest that it can work.

I don’t like Dawkins, but organized religion is a bad thing.

Richard Dawkins and his ilk are atheist fundamentalists, desiring the end to all religion.

JoshuaFH's interpretation is pretty insightful and accurate. I hold pretty strongly to the philosophy espoused by Benjamin Franklin when he said: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Unfortunately that quote does not mean what you think it means.

WITTES: He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it.

SIEGEL: So far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation.

WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.

I suspect you’ll be looking for another philosophy to live by, or will you just give up on trying to make your selfishness appear palatable to others?

When Norse it's höhöhö

I went hahahaha