Its interesting. We can both look at a landscape and agree there’s two mountains in the distance and a forest in front, and can agree on a thousand further details like if the mountains are barren or snow-topped. But only when it comes to colour can we doubt whether what the other person sees is what we see. To be fair, the artist Monet did that experiment on himself. Painted a scene with one eye open and the next day with the other. Details are pretty much the same, but the spectrum is pretty different

At least it is in terms of a spectrum. Everybody finds orange text on a red background uncomfortable to read. So there are plenty of shared perception categories at least

Yeab I’ve never set a contact photo in my life, with one exception: my sister hated a photo I’d put on Facebook so much she demanded I take it down (not just untag her). That pic is now my contact photo for her. It is awful.

Yeah the grass to milk, meat and hide pipeline is a great one

Any chemistry we could perform to make it more viable? E.g. cook it with alcohol?

By modern standards, VHS has plenty of advantages too. A corrupt portion of a computer file often means it won’t play at all, while a tape will just play apart from that section. Audio and Video are always in sync with a tape - digital files are often out by up to a couple of seconds. A tape is often more robust than a hard disk or a DVD too.

The only downsides of VHS that immediately spring to mind are quality (not that that mattered at the time - it was and is still good enough) physical space (not that I ever ran out of room) and speed of skipping to particular times, and speed of backup. Oh… and lack of togglable subtitles too (not that digital always has those either)

Making threats of violence does tend to be frowned upon

Oh yeah, fascism/vice-signalling definitely becoming more prominent here too, though mostly because the media makes them prominent. They tend not to show the “hope not hate” or “march against racism” rallies. A bit too hopeful

Sadly, socialism-lite is the nearest thing that tends to come up. Like “we can keep capitalism and billionaires, but a bit less” rather than stopping it

Ah, bugger. Got the two muddled

You know McCartney is British, right? Quite famously so?

Louis Mosely, the UK boss, is Oswald Mosely’s grandson. Y’know, the famous British fascist who wrote the Rivers Of Blood speech. One wonders how far the apple has fallen from that particular tree

If they’re the sort of people I’ve seen on televangelist shows, then I take it all back. Those guys are terrifying

I think you’re probably mistaking the loudest christians for the majority. Easy mistake to make

Not in my experience. All the christians I’ve known over the last decade have been lovely, welcoming and open. They do have their in-groups too of course, and my interests are particularly bohemian so we don’t socialise all that regularly, but honestly their religion only tends to come up if I ask about it. Otherwise they’re just as content as anyone else to come and see a movie or go for a walk or whatever.

Some of the old biddies at the church I grew up with were pretty judgmental though, but they’re all dead now. Everyone left is just… nice.

I only know Muslim parents through my kids school, because my kids best friend is Muslim, and the parents are perfectly happy with playdates with my secular kid. There are one or two cultural oddities - e.g. the mum won’t come over our house unless my SO is also home (but will meet me in public) but I’m not sure if that’s a Muslim thing or a Turkish thing.

The Jehovah’s Witness are pretty bad for all that… as are Scientologists, a load of cults, Elan Schools, and arguably even the military and manosphere. Many of these don’t necessarily bring religion into things.

Our shared objection is the human capacity for imposing power, subjugation and control of others. Where we differ is that Religion is any more a factor in that than anything else.

I’ll grant you there’s probably quasi-religious elements to more cults across history than not, mind. I guess its an easier path than most to abuse of power, if you can convince people and even more powerful entity is on your side

Which Brighton is this?

Bread, wine, communion, annual religious festivities are also all real. Gods may not be real, but neither are a lot of human concepts. Good, evil, justice, aesthetics, mathematics, class, debt, trust, freedom… any number of things we believe exist but do not have any physical presence in the universe, no proof outside of human inference and intuition (and the occasional bit of paperwork) that they exist. They all, however, have their uses, and their effects are made manifest by our actions, for good and ill.

“Those who dance are thought insane by those who cannot hear the music”

I’m not so much defending religion as opposing your point of view that it’s a marker of insanity. In fact, most things that bring people closer together as a cohesive community are positive, whether that’s hobbies, interests or beliefs. Its only when it spills into doing harm to others that it becomes a problem (e.g. in certain aspects of sports, nationalism, and religion) but I still don’t think it’s a greater marker of ill mental health than a lot of other things we take for granted

So celebrating murder is the benchmark for insanity? Public executions used to draw big crowds, nothing to do with religion. Armies still give ceremonial medals for particularly inventive or brave killing, again, nothing to do with religion. Luigi Mangelone is celebrated by many for murder… admittedly the murder of a corporate ‘hands off’ serial killer, but still - its celebrating murder.

Again, I say, people are strange enough already - religion is barely even the icing on the cake.

Religion is just ceremony and doctrine surrounding belief.

A bit like having cake and a party, because you believe the earth completing a lap of the sun dated from the day of your birth is worth celebrating. Or having someone arrested and taken to court and sent to prison for stealing from you, because you and many others in society believe in concepts like personal property, and justice, and morality. You know, all those things you believe in that definitely exist, even though you’ve never seen a photo of morality, or seen a scientific study proving that justice exists. But they must do because old books say so, and so do your peers, and anyway our whole society would fall apart if people stopped believing in them.

Humans, simply put, are weird. We’re a species composed of mental disorders unique to us and nothing else in nature. To single out religion as being especially weird and worthy of contempt is… well… a bit weird and worthy of contempt, IMO