Bay 12 Games Forum

Sp... space. The date on that. From may. it's june

Also FD, why can it not be both? All three, even! Snorting cocaine off an implausible-physics-punch launched hatelust foe. Hell, elemental plane of cocaine sounds like somewhere stuff like that would happen.

Maybe someone buried his coop and/or owner in your garden.

I was talking about the developer, NGD Studios, not the Publisher, which is Wargaming.

Ah, didn't even notice that. It does look like NGD Studios inherited the members of another group that did do some strategy games, though. Maybe. Looks like one of the originator groups that formed up to make NGD was something called Conde Software, which did few back in '95-'97.

... seems like the games may have never made it out of Argentina/South America, though. And that was a long bloody time ago for a software development company, so who knows if they still have the same people involved.

Though yeah, Fikes, if the only existent pedigree involved is anything to go by (which, being fair, is from like two decades ago and probably shouldn't be gone by), then RTS is... possible. Which, I mean. Distant Worlds managed alright, right? It's not impossible to have a nice sci-fi 4x that just happens to be real time.

I... would probably say that people that don't consider making a choice a pleasure in and of itself has likely not had the ability to choose taken away from them often and blatantly enough. The decision may be agonizing, but that you're able to make it is, very explicitly, its own sort of bliss. Agency is often bundled with stuff that makes exercising it painful on the net, but that's little to do with the nature of agency itself, I would say.

Just as an example, that moment when you're able to walk after months of being bed-ridden, even with all the pain and weakness it involves, even if it the ability to choose your own actions is shortly going to lead to misery, is gorram sublime.

Finally coming to the question, is the aversion a matter of wanting to avoid a confusion of terminology (belief with faith)

This is usually the biggest reason for the aversion I've personally noticed. Atheism/agnosticism/etc. may be a belief, but it's not a belief in the same way a religion is, and most of the people that call atheism a belief seem to be the sorts that are trying to say it's explicitly the same as a religion, complete with tenants and rituals and all that rigmarole. And it's not. There's not even a secret handshake or somethin'. It's not a belief in the religious sense, it's a belief in the epistemological sense.

Atheism isn't even a loose confederation, really. There are some atheist groups of thought that do collaborate to degrees (this is why you do at times have atheists acknowledging each other as the same sort of critter in public), but that has little to do with the general belief itself. Calling atheism a confederation is about the same as calling people who like milk a confederation, y'know?

or is it a means of differentiating between spiritually and materialistically (I don't mean here the negative connotations, merely the relation to matter and natural laws) founded beliefs

Metaphysical and non-metaphysical would probably be better terms to use, heh. That's part of it, but as usual not the whole.

Secondly, Atheists and Agnostics, have you studied theologies and the philosophies that go with them?  Were you educated by its proponents-- not its opponents-- in them?  What about other atheists and agnostics you know?  As regards my own faith, who and/or what did you learn about Christianity from, if you have studied it?

Irreligious apatheist here, which is more or less a specific sort of agnostic. I've actually sunk a few years into theology, via philosophy education (I've said it before, I think, but I find theology to be very pretty.). Medieval christianity, general philosophy of religion, bit on eastern religions... most of it taught by a couple of christian priests, though I've since forgotten their denominations (and it wouldn't really matter for one of them, because that one was significantly radical). Beyond that, I grew up in an almost blanket christian area, and did go to church/sunday school for the earlier years of my life, though my parent was never particularly religious and regular churchgoing stopped probably around 5 or 6. I've never really been explicitly educated by opponents to any faith, much less christianity -- even the folks that weren't religious or some variant of theist were pretty okay with faith or religion as a general thing.

Unfortunately, beyond never experiencing the precise sorts of hallucinations that convince people their belief in a particular religion is true (I had different "religious experiences" that were unfortunately entirely too identifiable as hallucinations to convince myself otherwise), I, as mentioned, grew up in an area that is pretty much blanket christian and very, very vocal about it. Three churches in a two caution light town, that sort of thing. I've pretty much never actually, in person, seen the church or the faith produce something that wasn't toxic to some degree. I've met wonderful people whose love and light turned their faith into something that was positive -- some of the best folks I've ever met were religious of some sort -- but generally religion just seems to produce nastiness after nastiness. Comfort for the folks that are immediately involved (which, to be fair, is a certain sort of virtue), but gods help you if you're not.

That's where the irreligious comes from -- I've reached the point I'm fairly convinced that organized religion is a net negative. Individual faith of whatever sort I'm pretty okay with, but the organized sort just seems to consistently cause problems. Worst bit to me is that some of the worst problems always seem to be regarding following the religion itself -- few things seem as capable of leading a person to violate the tenants of their religion as a priest and congregation. For living in an area that preaches love as one of the highest tenants of their belief, I have seen a lot of hate in my lifetime

Combined with the lack of any explicitly identifiable effect on the world, I got turned off pretty hard, and it eventually reached the point where consideration of the question of divinity has pretty much no meaning to me beyond idle amusement (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, per se. Idle amusement is good.). That's the apatheism -- I don't think the question of whether there's a god or not actually matters. The answer is irrelevant; the world changes naught one bit whether there is or isn't one, insofar as I've been able to tell. If you want to get me to care enough to really fall into a theist/atheist camp, you'd have to convince me it matters, that the existence or non-existence of a god actually has an effect on the world I observe. As it is, it's fun to talk about, but that's about it.

Doesn't help that the natures ascribed to the divine are generally pretty nasty themselves. I'm arguably happier with it not mattering than I would be if it did, heh.

... that's pretty obvious, though. There's very, very little things considered "good" (Frankly, I can't actually think of any off the top of my head -- anything that's immediately painful is intent to producing delayed pleasure of some sort, or mitigating a displeasure increase.) that aren't either about enabling pleasure or preventing pain (i.e. aiming to reduce displeasurable things).

Making decent lives for folks is pretty much as fundamental a good as it gets (at least if you're not doing weird metaphysical stuff, like parts of christian theology likes to do), so far as I'm aware, and you do that by making them not-miserable, otherwise known as having a minimum pleasure threshold in their general existence. It's not all straight physical pleasures and chemical highs -- even some of the oldest historical hedonists held that the greatest of pleasures was being among friends, iirc -- but... pleasure pretty much is the most fundamental of goods. The chief one. More or less everything is derivative of it, in one way or another.

Imaginary kilobitcoins.