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Does it have to be an event in our lifetime (and not a historical event we learned about)?
If some historic event changed your life so much, we probably also like to read about it.
Finally seeing sense and not believing religion anymore changed everything.
And oddly enough, it all started because of an X-Men movie.
I would love to hear the train from x men to atheism
It was X-Men Apocalypse.
I was working in a call center at the time, and there were tvs around the room on mute with closed captions that we could look at in between being on a call. I actually didn’t work in a department that took calls at the time, so I would watch entire shows like this sometimes.
Anyway, the trailer for this movie came on during a commercial break, and there was one scene (I forget the exact quote- I might have to check YouTube for it now, but you’ll see it if you look it up) that was taking about the four horsemen, and mentioned that Christianity wasn’t the first to use that metaphor, but that it has been used by a bunch of religions and people groups before.
So that threw me for a loop and made me start wondering. And once I figured out that one thing I always heard specifically about the belief was wrong, it made me wonder what else was wrong.
So once I stopped taking everything for granted as just being true because “the Bible says it is” and started looking at it honestly, it quickly turned into realizing that it was all bullshit. As soon as you stop assuming it’s all completely true no matter what the evidence said, and actually take reality into account (for anyone that didn’t grow up as a believer this sounds totally insane, but that’s really how it be), a lot of things snap into focus.
I had a roommate I completely disagreed with at the time, but I started taking him a lot more seriously after that. Turns out he wasn’t crazy, I was.
And that’s the short version. I don’t recall enough specifics to really make a long version, but you get the idea.
Edit- typos
“it was then, when Storm mused the effects of lighting on a humble toad, that I realised there was no god…”
It was probably X-Men 3. A loving God wouldn’t have allowed X-Men 3.
It was Apocalypse.
I’m relieved to hear it. No one should have to see
X-Men 3. /sJoking aside, I see your update in your other comment. Pretty cool. I’m always fond of movies that expand my world view.
> Wade Wilson appears with CGI tape over his mouth
“… no loving god would allow this.”
That is pretty cruel.
But Deadpool has nothing to do with it. xD
Well now I need to know how the movie triggered it! And which scene!
I’m answering in another reply in this thread. But it wasn’t even the movie, it was the trailer.
Which I guess was a specific movie scene now that I type it. But yeah I’m working on this answer in another reply already.
I’ll try to edit this with a link to that reply.
I’ll throw one out for COVID, but not just the lockdowns or the immediate work changes. It was more about how the deaths kept happening. And happening. And happening. Yet people still failed to take it seriously, even to the point of rebelling against seemingly common-sense safeguards like vaccines, masking, and staying the fuck home.
In the US, we lived through about 4 years of shenanigans and bullshit and lies from an incompetent federal government leading up to the pandemic. But surely that wouldn’t fly for long. You can lie about the number of people at a rally (because who the fuck cares), you can apparently lie about where a hurricane is projected to go (because it’s jUsT a PrOjEcTiOn or something), but surely you can’t bullshit your way out of a pandemic. Hospitals at capacity. Bodies piling up. Loved ones lost. Visible, real, tangible impacts of poor leadership and poor decisionmaking.
But, turns out you can. Even in the most dire of circumstances, you can still convince people that reality isn’t real. Or even if it is, it doesn’t really matter and it’s not their problem. And there are enough people out there who will buy into that message that it will ruin things for everyone else.
Edit: To the original point of the question… I guess I had a little more faith in humanity before all that happened. More faith that real-world consequences would win out against rhetorical bullshit and tribalism.
reality isn’t real
It is worth keeping in mind Hanlon’s Razor with this. “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect.” They are running on emotions and accepting being wrong hurts so they simply don’t accept their emotions.
I knew it as “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”. I think it fits better here, too, when in the face of actual death, people still ignore common sense. Screw neglect, that’s pure, unadulterated, 100% organic, fresh as the driven snow stupidity.
I prefer this fuller version
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence.
Stupidity implies it is something that cannot be changed. Usually their behavior could be changed but it is just a hard task to change their behavior that requires the person in question to be willing to change.
I dropped everything in my twenties to look after a dying family member.
Thought my family would support me when all was said and done. I left a very promising career to do this.
Everyone just kind of went their seperate ways and I almost ended up homeless. While my dad immediately found another woman, took all his money and fucked off.
I’m just starting to recover almost a decade later.
I’m kind these days, I think. But I’m not nice.
you deserve so much more than what you were given back. Taking care of someone and seeing everyone abandon you must be soul blackening. I hope during your journey you can find someone or some way to help chip off the black layers of injustice. :/
Snowden file leaks lead me down the path to privacy and to reading books like Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. Lead me down the path to degoogling and linux and now decentralized services like Lemmy.
It seems like every week some article comes out with big tech abusing their rights. This week was Philips hue and last week or so it was a mom getting 2 years in jail because Facebook gave up information about her giving abortion pills to her daughter.
I am using all these foss services myself and making my friends and family use them and be aware of these events. It’s a slow car crash and if people are apathetic and say “I have nothing to hide” and eventually “I have nothing to say”, soon we’ll be stripped of more rights until it’s too late.
Snowden trully opened the world’s eyes bruv…
This sealed the deal for me and went FOSS
Microsoft using “off-shore” dns, like a druglord or something got me pretty annoyed, swallowed the linux pill whole! Bash scripting and all
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
“The cells of death row are filled with guys who had nothing to hide.” - Kenneth Eade
The war in Iraq. It was bullshit and everyone knew it was bullshit, but it happened because politicians forced it through. 9/11 was a horrific disaster but the war in Iraq that followed left me completely jaded.
Losing everything. My family wasn’t rich but it was well off, and in my young stupidity I thought we deserved to live better than others did because we worked hard (had a family business).
Turns out hard work means almost jack shit. I mean, I’m good now because I have very marketable skills and I do work hard at a job not many want to do, but it takes me around the world and I can tell you, fucking everything in life depends on luck, starting from where you are born.This is the biggest difference between myself and my brother.
My dad is fairly well off having run a company for decades at this point and I knew I didn’t want to lean on that. So I went on my own career path.
My brother decided to join the family company. Over the past 20 years he was gifted 50 percent of the company as a bonus. He didn’t understand that he’s only in that situation because the owner was his dad. He’s never understood how big of a safety net the two of us had growing up. He genuinely thinks that his hard work is the sole reason for his position in life and that anybody that’s willing to work as hard as he did (and he did, I won’t deny it) would be on a similar situation as himself.
The luck factor is also called opportunity. People succeed financially because they had some opportunity arise that enabled the success to be a possibility. Be it a random chance that they were given a job interview, that their dad owns a company they can start at, or they happened to grow up in an area with good education options they could lean on to develop skills, or just a serious safety-net.
I had option 2 and 4, but used option 3 to eventually get option 1. I’m mostly unsatisfied with the world because I wish everybody had option 3 and 4 to start with regardless of family.
I can tell you, fucking everything in life depends on luck, starting from where you are born.
Now my friend, you are wiser than ever before!
It’s called “Ecclesiastes 9:11”
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
starting from where you are born
This, too… how you are born dictates how (routes) to get to the riches. (Thats why some connections are useless) still; luck will find you wherever and whoever you are, its up to you to grab it firm.
You needed a 2000 year old book to tell you that hard work and intelligence matters very little in comparison to luck lol? How much money mommy and daddy have are the only thing that matters in the capitalist arrangement of the economy.
The source is irrelevant to the topic. Do you actually disagree with the quote? Do you have further to add to the conversation?
And it has come from a 2,000 year old letter. You would have had no issue with the quote had it not been included in the bible.
You have added no wisdom here. Militant atheists waving their virtual dicks around about how enlightened they are is not among the things I miss from Reddit.
We didn’t miss you either.
COVID-19. People simply refused to do the absolute minimum to stop the spread of the virus. At least in my community, everyone was still socializing with friends and family (without a mask, of course), going out to eat, taking part in recreational activities with other people. Something as simple as “stay away from other people until we get this under control” was too hard for the American public. It certain changed my view of the people around me.
Haha I remember a talking head saying at the start that this could bring humanity closer together and I sat laughing in my couch for a minute
Actions > Talk. They were telling you their true views. People rarely say the quiet part(their views) out loud so it is valuable to be able to translate their actions into their true views.
When you know how others truly feel, it allows you to decide who is worth listening to. Not to say you shouldn’t listen to people with different views, but instead decide whether they are telling you their beliefs or telling you what they think you want to hear(BSing you) and use that rate how trustworthy they are on the topic.
Same, it really bumped up my pessimism regarding people
For me it definitely highlighted how many people in American society think they are the main character and fuck everyone else.
Welcome to *The ME Show! *
Starring: Me!
Co-starring: (fuck) you!
The whole “the world will end in 2012” hysteria back then. It was my first glimpse into conspiracy theories, which I’ve spent a lot of time learning about ever since. It made me realize that nothing is ever too idiotic to not have an alarming number of people fall for it. It’s why I wasn’t surprised by the rise of the Q-movement or the resistance against the absolute bare minimum of COVID measures because of microchips in vaccines etc. All of that were just yet additional “of course people believe that shit”-moments for me.
Like Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black “A person is smart - people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.”
I haven’t been surprised by how stupid people can be in a long time.
Actually, how did the 2012 thing became such a viral trend? Literally even news sites aired it SEVERAL times here, and I already thought that’s it was a dumb conteo story. (I was 11 then)
It was the end of a ~5,000 year cycle in a mayan calendar or something.
As someone who was in his late teens then, I don’t think many people really seriously believed that the world was going to end in 2012. It was more of a running joke. I remember that a few days before the 21st of December, someone posted on a forum for students of the university I was then attending that exam results were going to be posted on the 21st; someone else responded “oh, so for some who took this course the world will actually end on that day”.
In retrospect, was probably the Battle of Seattle in 1999. Not that I wasn’t aware of the issues before, but that really ripped off the mask to show me that the U.S. is fundamentally rotten at its core: The police are not the good guys, they don’t serve and protect, they are there to visit violence on the enemies of capital. And if innocent people in their homes or going to work get caught up and harmed, fuck 'em, they’re not wealthy enough to matter. The media will flat-out lie to maintain the good-cops-vs.-evil-protesters narrative. Our leaders will eagerly sell out American citizens to the interests of global capital, with only lip service to democratic traditions. And Americans are too disengaged to really question any of it.
For me, it provided the keys to understanding the events since, from Bush v. Gore to today. At least now the rot has become so obvious that the younger generations are forced to notice.
Never heard of the Battle of Seattle. What was it about?
It was the result of anti-World Trade Organization protests organized at the group’s gathering in Seattle in 1999. Basically, the police see protesters axiomatically as bad, so they showed up in riot gear and started a riot. The media reported it as violent protestors, despite some of the people who just lived nearby and were trying to get to and from work getting caught up, kettled, teargassed, and beaten alongside protesters. I wasn’t there, but the Internet had become a thing, and IndyMedia.org had lots of first-person coverage. It was the same pattern we’ve seen ever since cell phones with cameras have become ubiquitous: The video shows that the cops get violent and then lie about it.
Finding out in primary school that other kids weren’t poor and had all the shit they wanted while we sometimes had issues getting food.
Trump
winninggetting carried by the EVs made me a bitter, jaded, hopeless husk. I lost faith in the republic, in america, in people, in common sense…I don’t know if I ever truly recovered.
Come to think of it, i’ve lived through at least two instances where the direct opposition of the public’s will have lead to death, suffering, and the collapse of represenative democracy: Bush v Gore, and the Trump Presidency. Odd how that’s a common trend.
What’s EVs?
Electoral votes
I think he meant Electoral College. Unless 2016 saw the release of the ‘Tesla-Force 1’
Four years under The Idiot destroyed any assertion that conservatives are trying to be reasonable. It’s all just a word game to these people. And they think it’s all anyone’s doing, because they think that’s all there is.
The most damning evidence for this is when right-wing bastards of the highest order get booted out for not playing the game. Mitt Romney was the fucker who wanted to “double Guantanamo.” He’s also now called a RINO, and he’s running away with his tail between his legs, because he acted like we kept fucking imagining “real Republicans” were supposed to. He asked what happened to all the talking points he ran on… because he believed that garbage. Nah, Mittens: it was ad-hoc justifications then, and it’s ad-hoc justifications now. (And he still voted to absolve The Idiot on most counts, the useless bastard.)
The damn toilet paper crisis
Losing my best friend / business partner. He died in March. A lot of things stopped making sense after that.
I’m deeply sorry for your loss.
Thanks. Didn’t want to go into details.
You never have to.
