How Was I Bunked To Begin With?

obiwanbenobi

Active Member
The most simple way of putting it is that I was born into it.

I thought I was going to write the whole thing at once, here at home before posting it, my history which brings me to where I am at today. Then I realized, it isn't that unique and it is probably boring if i try to summarise, so how can I make it more interesting?

Well to spice things up, I'm new enough to MB and these forums and unschooled in the lingo and procedures, I am just now reading more on policies and procedures, types of things I can deal with.

My next dose of information will come when the library lets me read Mick's book. So in the more interesting light of the whole topic and forums here, I am hoping to do something a bit different, not post a book review or to post a personal full history, but to somehow meld my history and how I am currently reacting to bunk (poorly) and me struggling with how to improve my reactions and efforts. Bits from the book may come up as I work through it and ponder it all.

Does that sound interesting enough to others to consider it worth my time? :)

My particular main brand of bunk in the past was religion, Catholicism and then Evangelistic Baptist. I finally saw my way free at age 25. I'm still in trouble at times, but i largely try to avoid arguing with people because I do get so frustrated with them. I'm getting up there in years now (nearly 60yrs old) and perhaps I may not always avoid new bunk, but at least when I do engage in it now I do admit to myself that it is probably wobbly and deserves some more thought.

So I am looking forwards to improving my listening and speaking/writing.

I am well aware that I also have other areas of bunk I wish to explore. :) Those will be fun, if I can get to them.

My actual first exposure to MB was the Oroville Spillway event, which I followed (along with the entire demolition and reconstruction) - Recent events though brought me back, The 2020 Election and follow-on events just made me think that I really wanted something else to talk about besides my other forums (gardening and sustainable living, permaculture, and some other topics too :) )... The amount of bunk hitting me in the face about the virus and science probably fed my desire to find more rational sorts to interact with - though perhaps that isn't a good way to put it.

So I'm not claiming to be immune to bunk here either. I just hope I can see it when it comes by. :)
 
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My next dose of information will come when the library lets me read Mick's book.
other than a few ex-conspiracy theorist stories, most of the info in the book is here on MB...it's just a bit harder to find. If you have a question about a particular claim and can't find the quick answer through search, just ask and someone will point you the way. :)
 
I like stories. I like long stories. I like complicated stories.

If it weren't for my love of science I think I would fall prey to conspiracies of some kinds because they can be long, complex and puzzling. :)
 
I was born into a Catholic family, but a mixed parental beleif system as Mom was raised Protestant (sort of) and Dad was raised Catholic. To me that is where the indoctrination came from, the exposure at a young age to the thinking that there was a higher being who was in charge and along with all the other stuff.

We did go to church, I was the lucky child in that I was the youngest and did not have to go to Catholic school (being too young) and we moved away before I got old enough. My older siblings had to attend Catholic Mass every morning, but I'm actually not sure that was true or just made up.

What got me though were the stories in the children's books adapting the Bible stories and other surrounding teachings (not sure where they came from) but I liked reading about people helping, feeding and healing others as if by magic (the power of God or whatever you might call it).

After moving away one of the jobs Mom worked at was as a secretary for the local Catholic church we attended. As a part of that she set up and ran the library too so I spent many hours in there reading stories and looking at books (including many that I could not understand but I'd look at the pictures and some of the words and captions made sense). The children's books were good and I could get through them. Others were Greek to me (because some of them actually were :) ) but the pictures were interesting. If anything a large set of Encyclopedias were back up reading material.

A few years later Mom also got a part-time job running the township's library (from a closet at the first town hall building and then later from one of those classroom trailers they brought in and set up off to the side of the parking lot. I spent a lot of time in there too just sitting on the floor and reading whatever I could.

Once in a while as we got older we'd drive into Saginaw to the main library and I could check out bags of books from them too.

So I was surrounded by books, often, and happily so, but the religion was there too and the weekly sermons from the priests and reading the religious stories and hearing them spoken of and taught.
 
The questions were always there too though. As a kid I was taught one thing and then show the other aspects including the fact that what I was taught was not what many people did (including my parents). Both parents are racists, I have a few examples of how that went, It really bugged me and still does to this day. Dad is very extreme, I don't talk to him much, I don't like extreme politics either, but add on top of that racism and xenophobias well, it just doesn't go well, if we talk for long (on the phone). Mom is milder, but she can't help it at times and things come out of her mouth, ugh. At least I don't have to hear it all the time and I tell her I don't want to hear it ever.

Dad and Mom divorced when I was 9. Divorce back then was not common and very much frowned upon and an issue. I do not know how Mom kept her part-time job with the church but somehow that did happen for some years after. Dad soon found another family and so I suddenly had more siblings to contend with. Mostly did ok with them, finally had a younger sibling who was a friend.

The bad treatment though got worse, being a poorer family didn't help, but also now being from the divorced family, it really made the Catholic catechism school a rather icky experience for me. By age 12 I was fed up with how rotten it made me feel that one day as we were going to drop me off for the class I told Mom that I didn't want to go any more. To her credit she didn't argue with me and turned around and that was it for me. I still was angry though at what I'd experienced and also the racist stuff bugged me. It wasn't what the Bible and those stories taught should be happening and I'm always one for "Following the rules" if I can figure them out to begin with.
 
All through this we'd gotten the large family Bible from my great grand parents and I then took it upon myself to read it once in a while to educate myself further. While some parts of it were tedious other stories were interesting. I didn't much talk about it with anyone. We'd stopped going to weekly church services too. I just could not go back. My older siblings had by this time also stopped all that (my older brothers were altar boys even for some years). So from the early age and having free time while Mom was busy earning a living, i took up smoking and drinking, yes, it wasn't hard to do or to get for me. As I got older I also started smoking weed, but I told myself I could not do both so I had to quit smoking cigarrettes. Good thing I did, I'd probably be very sick by now if I hadn't.

A few years later, in the 10th grade I finally decided that yes I was going to try to go to college so I had to increase my efforts a little. I stopped smoking weed and the drinking had gladly also faded as something I no longer wanted to do, but it wasn't until I actually got away to college that I was able to start over. And yes that was a welcome change.

I haven't smoked weed since, I did drink some for a while as part of a small group of friends who'd go out on a Friday night, but that was it.

Mostly what happened to me though was that I got recruited by the Evangelical Baptist and the on-campus religious kids who were looking to get people to join their bible studies. Yeeha! It was fun for me to read and learn a more formal and regular way, but also what I did was get the residents who wanted to in our hall (of about 600 people) to get together for prayer and talking about the Bible and what it all meant and such.

With any larger group you got a bunch of different sects, the conflicts could often get wearing, I tried to get people to look at the basics and try to ignore the more divisive bits of doctrine. After some four years of that though I was done and the group faded as people changed and graduated and moved on. My own personal changes were in there too.

What finally got me to say "What?! This isn't what I believe!" was attending a wedding of a friend at our church, I had been talking to the pastor about being baptised and during that wedding ceremony i was thinking to myself, if this ever happens to me I don't believe this type of relationship is right. The vows were not what I would have been able to repeat or to follow. Along with my own questioning of the basic beleifs that were getting stirred up by the thought of being baptised. So within a few weeks I decided that no, I was not going to keep up with what I no longer believed, that it was time to do something else.

I found enough broken stuff in the system of beliefs that I did not believe, I did not believe that innocent people should be condemned due to what their parents had done (original sin or whatever), i didn't think that the god described in the bible was just, I didn't agree with their judgement, so I basically judged that god as not worthy. Along with that came freedom for me and I became a lot healthier for it. The anger that had been with me since the parents divorce finally lifted the anger at how our family and me were treated was gone and the ideas I didn't believe in no longer were chained to my mind.

I am chopping out big chunks here of the other things I learned and experienced, the natural world and science always facinated me, but my studies were not that organised. It really wasn't until college that I had more formal math and the ideas of proofs and logic were a part of my studies. My degree in computer science also forced my brain to deal with problems in a more useful manner. After completing the degree I started working on a master's degree but never finished it. The part of that which would have been the most fun for me I had barely been able to start, but that was a way of evaluating scientific theories using a neural net. This was way back in the 90's so much has changed there I am sure. I was very much enjoying the history of science and philosophy of science courses and same with the history and philosophy of AI. All of those would have been priming me for what is going on today for sure, but I had reached my limit on computer programming and sitting in front of the computer too much. By that time I had finally gotten a job that let me get out of debt and start saving and investing.

That is the next part. Where having gotten out of one rabbit hole of a long term sort, I was hoping to avoid the next.
 
I have to go back to some other things now as background and more aspects of where I'd come from.

My bent as a kid beyond reading was learning about plants and so I had a lot of house plants as a kid and I had this big book of how to do things which I studied and worked my way through all the various ways of propagating plants.

I also had the normal kid's facination with Venus Flytraps and Pitcher Plants and Sundews. Praying Mantisses. Ants were a big part of my reading and observations too, including keeping an ant farm.

Why I did not go to college for some natural sciences kind of degree was fueled by the math classes and one teacher in high school who was observant enough to notice that how i went about solving problems (without any formal training at that point) was very procedural and he said that i would probably do well with computers and computer science.

So without ever having spent much time with computers beforehand I went off to college and jumped in both feet full on.

I had to work my way through college, Mom paid for one year, Dad paid for the interest on some loans which probably amounted to half a year or more total by the time I graduated. I had some savings from working as a teen and pre-teen (I mowed lawns and did garden work for some people). The family business was commercial flooring contracting (and some wall tile too and some other things besides that), I worked summers hauling stuff, delivering, truck driving, cleaning up after jobs, warehouse, fork lift driving, whatever needed to be done. if times were slow I would clean the warehouse and get rid of old junk or at least re-organise it so it would take up less space and be less of a hazard. Nothing worse than pulling a pallet of boxes of tile off a shelf three levels up and having a box break open or fall off. Tile can be sharp... and heavy. And those bags of cement and sand and other things some weighed in over 125lbs. A lot for me to carry, but I could get them moved. The big rolls of carpeting and other flooring we had wheeled carts that could move those. When I finally had my last summer working there I was so glad to be done. Physically my body never recovered from some things that happened. I was glad to be moving on to a more safe kind of work, in an office.

Except sitting at a desk all day isn't the best for you either. I made sure to get enough walking in to keep healthy and also did some weight training, but for the most part I walked, even in the middle of winter in some of the worst blizzards I would go out walking for miles just to get some fresh air and to enjoy the snow.

At the end of my first summer of college, when I went back to school I was able to get a job working for one of the departments as a programmer working on a database for the department to keep track of students and what rooms they were in. This was all done on the mainframe, PC's were just starting up, but years away from being useful enough for what we were doing. At first I was working with a senior classmate who was a friend but he didn't stay for long so the whole thing fell on me. Which is why it took me a few extra years to get my degree. That all said though it also paid my way through the degree.

When I finally did graduate, I worked for another few years at a low pay rate to get my debts settled and started working on the masters but then decided it was time to get a better job and so I started looking away from college. At that same time the university was starting to work on converting the old mainframe system to a mini-computer, from an in-house computing shop with programmers and the mainframe engineer and all that expense to purchasing the software from another company and removing the whole floor of this huge computer equipment which cost a huge amount of $ just for the AC and electricity let alone the engineer on site and all those programmers. Well of course this didn't go well for the people who liked their home grown system, but it was too hard to keep up and cost a lot. They wanted to replace all that. They posted four positions and ended up hiring one. Me. So that was my job for the next six years to be a part of the central administrative staff working on this conversion and also having to run the existing system at the same time.

I did have the experience with the mainframe but also through the course-work I had experience with the new mini-computer system so I could do whatever was needed. I eventually became the systems programmer for the mainframe too as it was being phased out but it still had to work until everything was moved over. I also had to put processes in place between the mini-computer database program and the various printers needed (three large laser printers that could run 600 pages a minute) and come up with ways for others to get long sequences of jobs to run and keep running as long as there weren't any errors. accounting stuff. I was so happy I never had to read any of those reports other than some bits looking for the error messages needing to be found. Also I worked on the scanning machine and software for reading the grades in and printing out the sheets to begin with. All fun things. Oh, and the switchboard software and system for answering the phones. I took some equipment they had purchased a few years before and then the people who were supposed to put it in decided they didn't want to do it. Well when I was first hired there was a quiet period when they were negotiating with a vendor and then that fell through and we had to find and switch to another so I was not too involved with that so my boss asked me if I wanted to do this switchboard project and I was yeah, give me something to do.

Three weeks later it was in place and answering six phone lines so that the people running the switch board could concentrate on more emergency items instead of having to answer questions about where a teacher's office was or what room a student was in. By the time I left some six years later (when the conversion was done and it was all winding down) the phone switch board system had answered over four million phone calls.

All this is put in here, because it is the context for what came next. I was burned out. I'd spent 15 years in front of computers for course work and also for work itself or both at the times when i was working my way through school. I'd also taken a large number of computer science credits including almost all the senior level and some graduate school classes (on top of all the math). So that was my life for those years. Very much stuck inside too much and away from nature and plants.

I fished some days and weekends I could get away. I didn't take any longer vacations except for the one month I'd spent looking for work out in Colorado (and didn't find anything, but I also fished out there too :) ). I hopped on the bus and rode back to MI and the family business and worked the last two months of summer doing what I'd done before, hauling and cleaning up stuff and anything else needed. That was the last of that I ever did.

So being ready to take a break, I'd done the year of grad school and didn't finish, the job was winding down and I didn't like how it was looking for me. The other guy was going to keep working there as he was and I was looking to be stuck working with someone I didn't get along with at all. I told my boss six months that if that was how it was going to be that I'd be leaving so he knew what was up. Also the whole time I was there I was trying to get paid for the work I was doing and the same work title as the other guy. I finally got the title but they made some excuse about not being able to pay me so that was the final nail in that coffin. I saw my freedom coming ahead.

I'd been investing and saving since I'd started the conversion job, I had paid off my debts, I lived simply. So finally I was free and moved away. That fall I moved in with a friend and his family, by next spring he decided to divorce so I had to scramble for a new place to live and get moved within about five minutes time. Loaded up his truck and put my stuff in storage, came back here, stayed one night with Mom, but Step-Dad was coming back so I could not stay here. So I stayed with Dad a few weeks until I bought a small car, a tent, a sleeping bag and a few other things and then I pretty much drove around the country and camped and checked out places where I wanted to live. Perhaps.

Luckily I didn't get an offer accepted on a place or I'd have been stuck, I rented a few places, I hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail in Eastern TN and swam in the reservoir near there all summer on any days I wasn't hiking. After a few years and some bad events I moved north again since I was spending time on the road coming back and forth to here for visiting family. I lived in Ohio near Toledo and then moved back to a small city near here.

My Step-Dad then became my Ex-Step-Dad and Mom was stuck out here in the country alone. I fixed up the room here when he left it a mess and had just gotten it done when the place I was renting had some new people move in downstairs who were smokers. So I gave notice to my landlord and moved here and I've been here since then.

as an aside the Ex-SD was also into the UFO conspiracy things but also a very harsh racist (one reason why I never wanted to be around here much when he was here). Sadly he also was an excellent artist and I can appreciate his work, but his negative aspects cling to it for me too. A hard legacy IMO.

With all this room and gardens that became my main new job besides keeping track of Mom and helping her out when she needed me. :) I was able to get back to my love of plants and nature and started reading up on anything related to gardening and permaculture (which can be sort of cultish if you're not careful). I think I've avoided that rabbit hole and the prepper versions of the right wing conspiracies (my Dad on the other had is very much so in those realms - we don't talk much and I try to change the subjects when those sorts of things come up because I don't want to argue with him).

Here I study gardening, plants, beans being a big interest of mine, some genetics when I can get the time, trying to read up on the history and figure out what to do with the many hundreds of beans I have for each season. I'm always working on breeding new varieties and talking about them with other people, the gardens here can keep me busy all summer.

My current project is learning about cameras, photography, light, colors, monitor calibrations so I can see the right things on the screen and any related topic and learning about the software and other aspects like lighting. This past few weeks I finally got the two things I needed the most for the next steps in learning so I am working with those the next few weeks and hope to have better picture as a result. I have hundreds of different kinds of beans to get pictures done once I am happy with the quality of what I am doing.

So the longer version of this story, I'm skipping big parts and chunks, I'm avoiding some parts that aren't easy to talk about, conversations with old friends who decided that since I was no longer a believer that I also couldn't be a friend and losing those whole communities of people. Once I moved away that was easier.

Small town life here and this area though is still pretty religious, I don't talk to many people normally. I don't mind talking to them, but being so busy here with the gardens and being a homebody most of the time I don't get out much. The part-time library job I was doing was more my social connection, but that is now almost 11yrs in the past since I quit. The current pandemic hardly has affected my day-to-day routine other than worrying about family and friends who may be vulnerable and I've been doing a bit more reading and on-line stuff since the 2020 Election and subsequent events, but I've managed to extricate myself from getting sucked into that the past week again. Covid science and current events are where I have been having the most conflicts as I am interested in science and microbiology. Microbes play a big part in soil sciences and decomposition along with being interested in the workings of cells and life in general. Not hard for me at all to get sucked into arguing with people in some places I read/write about what they think is going on with this virus and their rejection of policies which can help save lives. Arg!

I could get on that topic for hours so I will stop here. I think I've written this fairly quickly and not all that well organised but it gives some ideas of what I've been through, the rabbit holes and some snares and also avoiding a few that came along later.

Still a work in progress. I am looking forwards to learning how to interact and cope with others who are in their various rabbit holes and that book is on it's way for me to read so I'll be sure to come back to this thread and post updates as I read and ponder what I'm reading, and of course to have questions. :)

If anyone wants to get into the various problems and issues I had with my religious beliefs and why I stopped, I'll be happy to answer questions in public or private, but I'm not sure anyone really wants my particular debunking of that. I'd read enough of the bible and studied it enough to know about what was in there. i ran into too much trouble with it when i attempted to turn it into a logical system and something to be argued about vs. a faith that you accept (lumps and all or however you may view it).

So now I am either someone who has completley put it all in God's hands and I don't have to worry about it or argue about it, or I am someone who lives without believing and the net effect is the same. If God is there and is a just God then I try not to worry or bother even if my judgement of what is recorded in the histories and the Bible are the truth or not (I don't think it is though for various reasons). So I do what I consider right and important, without being threatened with Hell, without wasting my time in whatever church or group setting, I'm done with that. The only group you may find me in next would be a seed swap or a library. I like writing and talking to people on-line and that is my social aspect for now until this virus calms down or the most vulnerable are vaccinated.

My focus though, right here is taking care of Mom, taking care of the gardens, having fun, learning as much as i can, growing good food and sharing the results and seeds with others. :)
 
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If you actually managed to read all that, well, um, sorry, haha. :) I'm sure I should have rewritten more. I'm so used to not using capital letters any more that it was a challenge to include them again.
 
In the thread on conspiracies I wrote about how coincidences have to happen to someone and gave some examples. I've saved that as a separate item here on my computer as being something important as a part of how i could make sense of the world and how some people will consider a long-shot coincidence as evidence of a deity.

Getting back to things within the faith itself that ended up giving me a way to rethink parts of it was the book called Kingdom of the Cults. If you have been into the evangelical side of things it is often referenced and used when trying to understand all the various sects and cults which surround the more common sects of Christianity. If you haven't read it already and are trying to deal with questions of faith it can be an eye-opener for sure.

What did strike me as interesting when reading that book was how did they decide which was a cult and which wasn't and how did they avoid considering themself in that manner also? Usually the main part was the claims about the Bible being infailable or correct in every part or for those who weren't so literal they could still wiggle out of logical issues by claiming that the faith itself was important and that the works of man (including the Bible) would always be prone to errors and corruptions (of the Devil of course as Satan was always hiding in every shadow).

In my years since escaping the religion I have come across other things which have helped me put the Bible in context. There are other cultures from that era which have similar stories that match in many regards. Likely they all had a common oral tradition ancestor grouping of memorized stories carried from tribe to tribe. In pondering what it takes to be a group, a tribe, a nomadic sheep and goat herding tribe in the middle of many others, what would it take to be different and to hold the group together? What kinds of laws would be important for such a group and why? That is how I figured out that much of the laws about homosexuality were likely simply necessary to ensure survival. The more babies you had the more warriors. The more gay guys having sex the less babies. Something kinda obvious to me now.

However, this gets to me a pretty funny aside and I can't really resist a bit of humor at times. Why is cannibalism not mentioned in any of the Commandments? I also don't think it is mentioned in the other laws, but I'm a bit of a ways away from having studied this recently, but to have such a thing not mentioned at all struck me as interesting. My own funny answer was that it just is so obvious and that cannibals do not ever sleep well. Your tribe won't survive for long if everyone is worried about how hungry their neighbors might be or who's got the barbie fired up tonight and
pondering who or what is on the menu.

@Mick West i have gotten part ways through the book and have been learning some important things, but also just wanted to point out that I noticed you quoted Daniel Dennett and I've always enjoyed his writings, but I'm sadly behind in reading or understanding all of them. When I walked away from my MS degree studies I mostly also left behind the whole cognitive sciences realm of authors I was interested in following and the various others too. In recent years I've gradually been putting their names back on my reading list to see what has been learned in the years since I took leave. Also we do share some common traits and experiences (and also life style since once I earned enough to retire from coding for a living i had no problem leaving it behind). I run my own website with a similar philosophy too as it doesn't cost much to run and I can do what I want with it. It isn't a blog or forum though, just a place to show pictures and some topics which catch my interest (mainly gardening and related topics).
 
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People aren't kosher.

but pigs are mentioned and said to be taboo along with other animals. anyways, this is all a complete aside. :) i've actually found out explanations of why it isn't specifically forbidden, but i'm not sure i really agree with them.
 
but pigs are mentioned
i think pigs have hooves. i'm not jewish i'd have to relook up the kosher criteria. pretty sure you can eat things with hooves, so if pigs is an exception....

(sorry to bring you off topic, but when a person brings up cannibalism you're likely gonna get some interaction :) )
 
This author says that human meat is parve, like fish.

First of all it was a joke. "people aren't kosher" sounds like a serious statement to you?


Second, you can't eat fish without scales. do we have scales? so dont say we are like fish.
(Leviticus 11:9) teaches that a kosher fish must possess both fins and scales.
Content from External Source
 
and rabbi raymond disagrees with your rabbi .. just fyi

Article:
A. The Torah makes it clear that the only meat permitted for human consumption is that of specified types of animals and birds if they have been killed and prepared in a set way.
....

No-one has the right to mutilate or desecrate a body or dispose of it in any other way than regular, respectful burial. One may not derive any benefit (“hana’ah”) from a dead body.

Though certain types of transplants are permitted in order to save life, e.g. transferring the cornea from a dead body to a living person, this is not regarded as a desecration because it is giving new life.

It may be that eating part of another person’s body might supply sufficient nourishment to keep the living person going. But even presuming that the body is already dead and one has not committed murder in order to acquire it, it is highly doubtful whether “pikku’ach nefesh” (“emergency to life or health”) can be invoked to justify eating it.
 
i think pigs have hooves. i'm not jewish i'd have to relook up the kosher criteria. pretty sure you can eat things with hooves, so if pigs is an exception....

(sorry to bring you off topic, but when a person brings up cannibalism you're likely gonna get some interaction :) )

The kashrut rules defining just the land animals that are unclean or not are here; pigs aren't listed as an exception, but as an example:

4 These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, 5 the deer, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope, and the mountain-sheep. 6 Any animal that divides the hoof and has the hoof cleft in two, and chews the cud, among the animals, you may eat. 7 Yet of those that chew the cud or have the hoof cleft you shall not eat these: the camel, the hare, and the rock badger, because they chew the cud but do not divide the hoof; they are unclean for you. 8 And the pig, because it divides the hoof but does not chew the cud, is unclean for you. You shall not eat their meat, and you shall not touch their carcasses.
Content from External Source
-- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+14:4-8&version=NRSV

3 Any animal that has divided hoofs and is cleft-footed and chews the cud—such you may eat. 4 But among those that chew the cud or have divided hoofs, you shall not eat the following: the camel, for even though it chews the cud, it does not have divided hoofs; it is unclean for you. 5 The rock badger, for even though it chews the cud, it does not have divided hoofs; it is unclean for you. 6 The hare, for even though it chews the cud, it does not have divided hoofs; it is unclean for you. 7 The pig, for even though it has divided hoofs and is cleft-footed, it does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you. 8 Of their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch; they are unclean for you.
Content from External Source
-- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+11:3-8&version=NRSV

And if you want to go OT down a rabbit-hole of bunk, ruminate on the phrase "The hare, for even though it chews the cud" for a while.
 
And if you want to go OT down a rabbit-hole of bunk, ruminate on the phrase "The hare, for even though it chews the cud" for a while.
I learned something today.
Article:
Cecotropes, also caecal pellets, or night fecs, are the product of the cecum, a part of the digestive system in mammals of the order lagomorpha, which includes two families: Leporidae (hares and rabbits), and Ochotonidae (pikas). Cecotropes are passed through the intestines and subsequently reingested for added nutrients in a process known as "cecotrophy", "cecophagy", "pseudorumination", [..]
...
This type of reingestion to obtain more nutrients is similar to the chewing of cud in cattle.

At this point, I'd question how accurate the translation is before I'd start arguing about words. The basic biology makes sense.
 
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I learned something today.
Article:
Cecotropes, also caecal pellets, or night fecs, are the product of the cecum, a part of the digestive system in mammals of the order lagomorpha, which includes two families: Leporidae (hares and rabbits), and Ochotonidae (pikas). Cecotropes are passed through the intestines and subsequently reingested for added nutrients in a process known as "cecotrophy", "cecophagy", "pseudorumination", [..]
...
This type of reingestion to obtain more nutrients is similar to the chewing of cud in cattle.

At this point, I'd question how accurate the translation is before I'd start arguing about words. The basic biology makes sense.

Were I do be writing a bible, and I wished to arbitrarily ban the eating of rabbits, I think i'd use the "they're unclean because they eat their own poop" line instead. But heck, I'm not divinely inspired.
 
So like a dog returning to it's vomit... :) Here I am reading along, it was an amusing aside and interesting too, but where does it leave me along the line? Have I made progress? Well in simple terms of happiness and getting by I have no complaints. I consider that a big improvement compared to where I was before. The amount of energy spent on trying to find the demonic influences and to be sure I wasn't falling into sinful traps or even looking for a partner in life who was "holy". So many things that used to be heaped upon me to think about fell away. I think as I get older and can tell my mind isn't as sharp as it used to be having a more simple view of life has helped. :)
 
The amount of energy spent on trying to find the demonic influences and to be sure I wasn't falling into sinful traps or even looking for a partner in life who was "holy". So many things that used to be heaped upon me to think about fell away.
I can't imagine what life is like when you're encumbered by that.

How did it feel to be in that fight of "good vs evil", and how does it feel to no longer have to fight it? What has changed?
 
I think as I get older and can tell my mind isn't as sharp as it used to be having a more simple view of life has helped.
Is it simpler? Or just better grounded in your life experience?

When you are young, and your mind is on fire, I think it's partly that don't know that much and so you have to try to figure things out on the fly. As you get older you stop having to think so much about everything because you know a lot more, so it's easier to figure stuff out.
 
I can't imagine what life is like when you're encumbered by that.

How did it feel to be in that fight of "good vs evil", and how does it feel to no longer have to fight it? What has changed?

not being so exhausted was the first thing i noticed. not being depressed about things that weren't going to change was probably the second largest part. it however took me some number of years to where i could admit that i basically was judging the god of the Bible as not being worthy and that i didn't agree with the whole system of thoughts as it was being told to me. i still don't. so to have the courage of my own mind and convictions and to live doing the best i could without doing good because i was afraid of hell or for any other reasons than figuring out what i thought was good myself and in talking to others who seemed to be thoughtful.

i still come up against some people even now though from the perspective of a person who understands the faith and what was aimed for so i can comment if i think someone is getting out of line from what their beliefs are. there is a group of people i know in another place who are very upset about the virus and the restrictions that have been put in place and have taken that as an attack on their faith to the point where they're posting false information which may be making others do dumb things. they also were pretty abusive towards someone else and that bugged me. i don't really care too much about what they think of me. well after the other person posted their mean spirited comments it really took down the ring-leader a few pegs and that was fitting IMO. but the other day they were talking about all going off to talk in some private place amongst themselves (sounds cultish and the opposite of anything i thought Jesus might have been talking about). i just asked them where was the love and grace of their savior in all of their recent behavior and left it at that.

as i get older i'm a bit more willing to be more confrontational. i'm not sure that's a good thing. i'm not quite to the point of marching on the streets or pig-biting mad but i'll be a bit more out-spoken now. i just have to learn to be more diplomatic. :)

however, that all said i think my comments at one family gathering a few months ago may have gotten my brother to think about the racist stuff he says at times. he's not nearly as bad as my Dad or some of the other relatives, but i can do without any of it completely - so if i've gained myself some peace there by avoiding the problem by commenting about it then i've done a good thing for myself.
 
Is it simpler? Or just better grounded in your life experience?

When you are young, and your mind is on fire, I think it's partly that don't know that much and so you have to try to figure things out on the fly. As you get older you stop having to think so much about everything because you know a lot more, so it's easier to figure stuff out.

haha, i like how generous that all sounds. :)

i don't think my mind works very well and there are large chunks of math and physics i don't really get. dyslexia in part contributes to that, but other things too. don't be surprised if i miss your points at times.
 
i finished your book @Mick West, thank you so much for the effort of putting all of it together (along with the reference materials). it will be a challenge to me to be able to apply quite a bit of it, but i'll keep thinking about it and how i can continue on from where i'm at and the main challenges i face (in my own family is where most of this sort of thing is at).

as i was reading along i was surprised by how much of it i'd never heard of, so i can say that i've very much been able to avoid a large amount of interaction or confrontation with many of those types of conspiracists. so far i've only knowingly had a slight conversation about Chemtrails with one person i know (who is still a friend and i'm not sure how much of it they actually believe) and the Q-Anon types i've never knowingly met anyone like that. same for the people who are into the false flags over JFK or the Las Vegas shootings. none of those are nearly as trouble to me as the more common political party stuff, racism and the religious stuff. i haven't knowingly had to confront anyone on Flat Earth either. the Alien stuff went away for me when the step-Dad became the ex-step-Dad - however, i do have a family member who used to be more involved in that, but i think that somewhat goes along with living in the SW and being anyplace near any milliary bases.

to me any time you have an area that is restricted then people can make up stories about it without consequences and if they can get enough people to believe them and to fund their continued writings (aka a few authors i won't name) and speaking appearances... well, bunk can be like horse manure ground for fertile future growth - but originally it was just grass, sunshine, water, minerals, air, microbes, fungi, bacteria, and ... to me that is suitably mysterious and interesting enough, i don't need to dress it up in other clothes to make it appear to be something it isn't. still a lot to learn there too.
 
I found this interesting:
One such approach is to “prebunk” beforehand rather than debunk after the fact. In 2017, Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, and colleagues found that presenting information about a petition that denied the reality of climate science following true information about climate change canceled any benefit of receiving the true information. Simply mentioning the misinformation undermined people’s understanding of what was true.

That got van der Linden thinking: Would giving people other relevant information before giving them the misinformation be helpful? In the climate change example, this meant telling people ahead of time that “Charles Darwin” and “members of the Spice Girls” were among the false signatories to the petition. This advance knowledge helped people resist the bad information they were then exposed to and retain the message of the scientific consensus on climate change.

Here’s a very 2021 metaphor: Think of misinformation as a virus, and prebunking as a weakened dose of that virus. Prebunking becomes a vaccine that allows people to build up antibodies to bad information. To broaden this beyond climate change, and to give people tools to recognize and battle misinformation more broadly, van der Linden and colleagues came up with a game, Bad News, to test the effectiveness of prebunking (see Page 36). The results were so promising that the team developed a COVID-19 version of the game, called GO VIRAL! Early results suggest that playing it helps people better recognize pandemic-related misinformation.
Content from External Source
 
i should take a few minutes to provide an update on how things are going for me and my resistance to bunk (in my family and by others).

i've spoken out more and stood up to some people that i'm most likely to interact with and told them i don't want to hear about it any more - it being various things like racism or politics or conspiracy theories. if needed i've cut off conversations or left or hung up the phone. this has greatly improved my own well-being and i'm much more able to be around them without us getting off into arguments over things they believe that they will not change and it saves me from wasting time or emotional energy.

stating to people that i do have boundaries and that i'm going to stick up for them first thing out is a good way to head off further troubles.

in other news i continue to work on my gardening and trying to help people grow their own food and have started a gardening group meeting at the local library. i know in some regards that preppers seem to be rather prone to some conspiracy theory ideas and around this area religion is fairly conservative so it can be a fine line, but i'll keep at it anyways. there's nothing wrong with being prepared and growing your own food is good exercise and exposure to nature that many people don't get enough of any longer. it's frustrating at times too, which i think is good for people to experience once in a while as then they need to learn how to cope with things that may not always go according to their own ideas...
 
The journey certainly continues. :)

In recent months I've had a few run-ins with conspiracy theorists and have tried to stand up to them when I have to and otherwise been able to ignore them or deflect them.

A few days ago someone was going on about all sorts of political stuff and how bad inflation is and I pointed out that you can't have 13 years of easy money and not expect it to blow up, then they posted a picture joke about political stuff to a thread that should have been about funny stuff and I asked them to remove it because I didn't want the entire web-site to turn into a political debate forum.

Yesterday I visited a family member who's the most difficult and at one point he was talking to me but he wasn't really talking it was more like he was muttering under his breath. It was like a bunch of one-liners from Faux Newts. The Island, Biden, Hunter, Fauci, Bill Gates, Vaccines, etc. one right after the other. Almost every thing he mentioned was not even a reason or an argument it was just a bunch of talking points. I didn't reply to any of it as he was going but after he seemed to have winded down I talked about the facts that for most of my life since I was about 8yrs old I'd been studying life, plants, biology, microbiology and that I didn't think it was made up or contrived, that the vaccines were helpful to some people. One of the few direct claims he made was that everyone who had the vaccine got sick while those who didn't have it were all safe - so I told him about a cousin of mine who was in the hospital for four weeks due to Covid and this was before the vaccines came out. And then I went into talking about biology and life and facts that are known and since I no longer wanted to hear him talk I kept talking as much as I could until it was socially acceptable for me to leave. :) *whew!*

The topics I used were life, evolution, space travel and being sustainable along with talking about the experiment they attempted with Biosphere II.
 
Ok, here is a thought, since I rarely if ever have to interact with a Flat Earther (I don't think I ever have talked to someone who holds this belief and has openly admitted it to me).

Can you ask them what they think when they look into space and see almost everything is round or spheroid? Why wouldn't the earth also be that way? Like why when you look at drops of water in space are they round? Why wouldn't a drop of anything else also be round?
 
Ok, here is a thought, since I rarely if ever have to interact with a Flat Earther (I don't think I ever have talked to someone who holds this belief and has openly admitted it to me).

Can you ask them what they think when they look into space and see almost everything is round or spheroid? Why wouldn't the earth also be that way? Like why when you look at drops of water in space are they round? Why wouldn't a drop of anything else also be round?
quite a lot of FEers believe in a "biblical" dome above Earth. For them, space as we know it doesn't actually exist.
 
Yeah, but that'd be bunk.
You've never kept rabbits, obviously.
They pass two distinct types of feces: hard droppings and soft black viscous pellets, the latter of which are known as caecotrophs or "night droppings" [32] and are immediately eaten (a behaviour known as coprophagy). Rabbits reingest their own droppings (rather than chewing the cud as do cows and numerous other herbivores) to digest their food further and extract sufficient nutrients.
Content from External Source
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit#Digestion
 
Ok, here is a thought, since I rarely if ever have to interact with a Flat Earther (I don't think I ever have talked to someone who holds this belief and has openly admitted it to me).

Can you ask them what they think when they look into space and see almost everything is round or spheroid? Why wouldn't the earth also be that way? Like why when you look at drops of water in space are they round? Why wouldn't a drop of anything else also be round?

Just ask them to build a model of the earth, and explain the path of the sun on this model, and the moon, and then also explain why we are pinned at 1g to earth's surface. Now grab a pot of tea, you'll both have deserved it. After that, get them to show the path of the ISS in this model, and then explain why the astronauts on the ISS feel no nett downward force.

They have no model. They won't even get to the second clause. At that point, everything they say will either contradict a measurable fact, or something they've previously said.
 
Just ask them to build a model of the earth, and explain the path of the sun on this model, and the moon, and then also explain why we are pinned at 1g to earth's surface. Now grab a pot of tea, you'll both have deserved it. After that, get them to show the path of the ISS in this model, and then explain why the astronauts on the ISS feel no nett downward force.

They have no model. They won't even get to the second clause. At that point, everything they say will either contradict a measurable fact, or something they've previously said.
Do you really think that will resonate with people like these? A whole lot of flat earthers fall into this general category.
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Ask for a flat world map with a scale, so we can look at distances on the map and see how their map matches known distances. I've asked that in online conversations for a number of years. So far no takers.
 
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