I was an atheist for the last 20 years and recently converted to Unitarian Universalist.

I would say that in the west, this characterization tends to be true. But I do think there are honest faith communities acting with good intent. Unfortunately, there are few.

Interesting that the beast is said to have seven heads in Revelation. There’s also 7 Trump Towers with his name on them:

• Trump Tower, NYC
• Trump International Hotel and Tower, Chicago
• Trump Towers, Istanbul
• Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto
• Trump World Tower, New York
• Trump Towers, Sunny Isles Beach
• Trump Tower, Manila

I’m a UU, so I don’t fully subscribe to the Bible as perfect and wholly divine or authoritative. But a bunch of people are wearing red colored Satan hats with a slogan on their forehead while voting for an adulterer, glutton, slothful, raging, envious, greedy, prideful “politician.” This man is so departed from Christ… I don’t get it, besides lies, propaganda, and accelerationism.

There was a similar study reported the other day about using FMRI imagining and AI to recreate the “thought content” of someone’s brain. It required training for the AI in the person’s brain and some other training. It does seem these techniques can work with some specified models, but yeah, it doesn’t seem like hooking someone’s brain up to this would create a movie of their mind or something.

I think the more dangerous part is “This is step 0,” which this tech would have seemed impossible 10 years ago. Very strange times.

https://youtu.be/FSvNhxKJJyU?si=xzq7QvVaIcxPE-AD#t=55s

Pretty sure “intent to deceive” is on his face every day with that horrible tanner/bronzer makeup.

Meta ethics focuses on the underlying framework behind morality. Whenever you’re asking, “But why is it moral?” That’s meta ethics.

Meta ethics splits between cognitivism (moral statements can be true or false) and non-cognitivism (moral statements are not true or false). One popular cognitive branch is natural moral realism, the idea there are objective moral facts. One popular non-cognitivism branch is emotivism, the idea that moral statements all all complicated “yays” or “yucks” and express emotions rather than true/false statements.

Cognitivism also has anti-realism, which is there are moral facts, but they are truth/false conditional based on each person or group. My issue is you lose the ability to call out certain behavior as wrong; slavery is wrong; not respecting others is wrong. If you want to believe all morality systems are valid, meaning your morality is no better than some radical thought group’s, then go ahead. On an emotional level, speciesism level, rights level, deontological level, utilitarian level, and many more slavery is wrong. Again, some nut job doesn’t invalidate all other thoughts. That’s my take.

Half of the comments in here are a bunch of equivocations on the words.

“Objective” morality would mean there are good things to do, and bad things to do. What people actually do in some hypothetical or real society is different and wouldn’t undermine the objective status of morality.

Listen to this example:

• Todd wants to go to the bank before it closes.
• Todd is not at the bank.
• Todd should travel to the bank before it closes.

This is a functional should statement. Maybe Todd does go, or maybe he doesn’t. But if he wants to fulfill his desires, he should travel if he wants to go to the bank. The point is that should statements, often used in morality, can inform us for less controversial topics.

Here’s another take: why should we be rational? We could base our epistemology on breeding, money, or other random ends. If you think I should be rational, you’re leveraging morality to do that.

Most people believe in objective morality, whether they understand it that way or not. Humans have disagreed over many subjects throughout history. Disagreement alone doesn’t undermine objectivity. It’s objectively true that the Earth revolves around the sun. Some nut case with a geocentric mindset isn’t going to convince me otherwise. You can argue it’s objective because we can test it, but how do I test my epistemology?

This is just a philosophy 101 run around. I’m a moral pluralist who believes in utilizing many moral theories to help understand the moral landscape. If we were to study the human body, you’d use biology, physics, chemistry, and so on. When looking at a moral problem, I look at it from the main moral theories and look for consensus around a moral stance.

I’m not interested in debating, but there’s so many posts making basic mistakes about morality. My undergraduate degree was in ethics, and I’ve published on meta ethics. We ain’t solving this in a lemmy thread, but there’s a lot of literature to read for those interested.

Ah yes. Paying for privacy on a walled garden website. Genius business moves.

Thank you, tree.

I struggled to find the list of 19 in the article itself, which was disappointing.

The legend returns!!

This right here. Someone showed me wefwef the other day, and it feels like Apollo if you want the experience. Definitely my favorite mobile app for the fediverse.

Wefwef is amazing, especially if you like Apollo. No issues so far.

It depends. From what I understood, moderation on Reddit will become really hard after this. So the site will go down in user experience on content, worse than it is now. That’s outside of the 3rd party apps like Apollo no longer working but will have a negative impact. It sounded like some mods would just walk away than deal with not having robot spam bots to help, which it is volunteer. That could spur on further churn, again, because quality suffers.

I removed my Reddit apps and don’t plan to go back. Having said that, the tech here is still in its infancy. I see bugs daily, the native app version of this experience is not super adoptable by a mass market yet, but it can all improve with time and more bodies interested here.

Long term, this broad concept of decentralization seems to be populous. I think people don’t understand it yet, when they show up it’s rough, and there’s alternatives. But that will all continue to change in the coming months.