SARS-CoV-2: Electric Superflu

Cock teasing

4 Likes

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1246238200563032064?s=19

Are you familiar with Fox News at all? Donald Trump? Your level of optimism about the post-religious world is that of a time traveler steeping directly from an early 2000s message board to the modern day.

3 Likes

Awful. Hasn’t that family already experienced enough pain and loss as Mets fans??

7 Likes

I haven’t left my apartment building in 3 weeks. Feels like forever.

1 Like

I think it’s sociologically impossible for organized religion to not exist. If it somehow didn’t, a lot of conservative religious folks would instead gravitate towards something resembling secular alt-right beliefs. I don’t see how that would be an improvement.

1 Like

You’re allowed /supposed to go for walks if you’re feeling ok and keep your distance from others. Keep healthy.

2 Likes

I live in the middle of NYC and am taking zero chances right now.

12 Likes

Yeah I get that, but staying cooped up for what may be 3 months or more will likely take its toll on your physical and mental health.

1 Like

Equal parts deep and totally unsolicited condescension and horrible reading comprehension. Great post! You are a great poster.

Anyway, I guess when I came here from an early 2000s message board it was just before the time George W Bush was telling people God told him to invade Iraq. Buddy, religious mania aka mental illness manifesting itself in mass murder and misery is a phenomenon that is both way more psychologically powerful than, and looooooong predates, Fox News and Donald Trump.

And with regards to COVID19, even Fox and Trump are no longer telling people to congregate inside of a building and breathe on and sing to each other and shake each other’s hands and everything else that happens in a church. In fact, there is only one type of people that are still doing this stuff that is directly harmful to the public health. Who is it? Various religious grifters and griftees! And why not? They are the ones that are protected by Jesus’s magical blood!

I don’t see how that would not NOT be an improvement. The religious aspect adds another layer of malicious nonsense onto their belief systems AND gets the indirect benefit of less scrutiny than a secular belief because people are (reasonably) scared of “attacking” another person’s religion more so than “attacking” any other type of belief.

If somebody tells you that Hillary Clinton has a child sex slave dungeon at Pizza Hut, nobody is shy about calling that stupid. If somebody tells you that Zombie Jesus turns himself into crackers and we’re supposed to eat his cracker body and drink his blood wine, 90+% of people are gonna politely change the subject at best.

But anyway, this is outside the scope of the thread for sure so I’ll let you have the last word if you want.

1 Like

This doesn’t make sense. Why would the “brain chemistry” being more primal make it less likely to be replaced? Why wouldn’t it make it more so? And given that we observe territoriality, even primitive war-waging, in the higher apes, why do you even think xenophobia is less primal than religion? We don’t see religion in the apes.

For many people, religion functions as a heuristic and leads them to generally do a lot of the social behaviors that they would have done without the trappings of religion. Religion doesn’t turn people into assholes. Especially now in America when there is much more freedom to change religion or have none at all, assholes are free to shop around and find a religion that enables them to be an asshole.

Of course, I identify as a statist and a theist, so I tend to see atheistic libertarian bros as worse than religious conservatives.

Here’s what some people are doing with their free time in lockdown.

1 Like

Who did the doctor take the phone from?

1 Like

You bring up a good point, and I think primal is not the word I’m looking for. My understanding is that the neurological activity associated with religious devotion/love is more closely related to the activity associated with the most important aspects of our survival, i.e., food, mating, than the activity associated with status, group dynamics, etc. The first group refers to a process that’s more strongly an evolutionary necessity than the process involved the latter group.

I believe that it’s harder to wean somebody off of religion than an ideology. I’m obv super far from a scientist, so my whole spiel may be invalid.

Edit: I’m not positive if NotDavidS was calling me in particular an “atheistic libertarian bro”, but for the record I’m most definitely not that.

As a Mets fan, pain is all I know

Aside from grocery store trips, I’ve been cooped up for 3+ weeks and it has definitely had a negative impact.

2 Likes

I’m no scientist either, don’t worry about it. If the bolded is true, though, it still suggests to me that religion would absolutely be replaced. Organisms don’t generally cast evolutionary necessities aside like a ragged shawl, you know?

I was not calling you an atheistic libertarian bro, just putting out there where I am coming from. I took Sam Harris in the asshole draft. Everything I think about politics touches upon how much I hate libertarians.

Things are getting worse around where I live. The last few weeks I’d been supplementing cooking with food delivery. Chinese food once a week. Grubhub restaurant delivery once a week. I tried to do Chinese yesterday and every Chinese restaurant in my area has apparently thrown in the towel and closed until at least May. I tried to do grubhub and something like 75 percent of the restaurants that were operational a week ago are gone. Those that are still operational have wide gaps in their menus. Uber eats is completely offline in my area now. The pizza place that delivers seems to be all that is left. I live in a large suburban area with lots of restaurants.

6 Likes