Official Off-Topic Thread

[ndchristie]

they come and go, particularly if you post fresh work.  I get spikes every few months, usually after holidays - the best thing to do if you're not interested is to politely decline.  Most often you will have enough going on in your life that if you even begin to explain you and your potential employers will realize how legitimate your reasons for not taking extra work are, but without the awkward "hey that's the dick who never PMed me back" thing.

[Dusty]

Ya I try to. Though I tend to see I got a new PM, read it and say I'll get back to it later(for some reason, I never feel like replying to a PM when I first read it), but sometimes I forget.

[ptoing]

[ndchristie]

hey look! a large group of people we don't generally understand, or even want to!  let's grossly overgeneralize them for a couple of lawls and pat ourselves on the back for pretending we're smarter for it!

[tocky]

That's pretty much how all humour works, though. Everybody makes fun of everybody. Probably doesn't need the "my name is religion" "my name is science" for the joke, though, it's a bit much.

The idea that irreligious people don't want to understand religious people sounds like overgeneralization to me.

[ndchristie]

whoever wrote the comic or sympathizes with it clearly doesn't, and those are the only people I attempted to characterize - there's nothing broad about that and it certainly doesn't include the whole of irreligious people.  I can assume that most irreligious people are not, in fact, total twats, in the same way that most religious people don't believe in dragons, or anything close to it.  What frustrates me is that rather than simply poking fun at one or two extremes, it decided to include both entire groups, and helps to perpetuate the attitude that the two are mutually exclusive.  My general sense of things is that many (the majority) of scientists practice some form of faith and that many (an equal or even greater majority) of religious people put full faith in science as well.

if I posted a joke in which a black dude said "fuck you" because I stole his chicken and grits, the entire forum would rightly call me a jackass, because it's not "cool" to harmlessly tease black people about food tastes, but it's apparently ok to characterize anyone and everyone who believes in any "Religion" as completely retarded.

[tocky]

Possibly we've made the same error, then. Your response hit a bit close to home, for me. But I doubt that whoever-that-guy-is-who-made-that is making fun of you, actually. It's crude, but it picks at these beliefs, specifically:

-Reverence for old ideas over new ones (as "I've been here longer than you...").
-Unwilingness to see the things you believe in actually tested.

Aaand thes are positions that are reasonably common, and at odds with scientific principles, and probably worth being a dick about.
 
But then, the fact is he's got a character called RELIGION who is completely unlikable and believes vehemently in dragons, and that's totally crass and and it's pretty clear why that would bug you. But I don't think this is truly an attempt to characterise all religious people as that guy. But yeah, my general take from this thing is "whoever made that is kind of a dick but he's got a point", not "haha religion is for jerks."

[ptoing]

Oh no, what have I done. Religious discussion

Anyway, it IS overdrawn, tho I would rather say that the dragons are more of a metaphor for things you have no proof for. Plus there is actually more crazy shit than dragons going down in the bible. I pretty much agree with tocky here I have to say.

[Conzeit]

You're getting angry about someone with some half thought trough scribble because it characterizes two groups of people as being strictly one way or the other, and react by doing exactly the same...only you do it with very carefully premeditated thought.

I dont think that people should be forbidden from telling halfassed jokes, such as this one...I really doubt this was made and posted here to make the point that religious people is stupid, it's just a barely noteworthy statement that someone barely related to and felt like posting. You know, a joke.

You're not gonna educate anyone who actually thinks religion is stupid, and you're gonna turn off anyone who actually gets that this is not a wholly thought out joke, just a random scribble in paint...that probably was posted here without much thought either.

Allow people to say something you see as stupid, and then just say what you really think about it...if it's really so stupid you should be able to convince anyone who's actually permeable to what you got to say, not turn them off by pretending to stop people from being who they are.

[tocky]

Conceit, that whole post just now was worthless and dirisive.