Brovo

State-Church Separation

ActRaiserTheReturned said Ummm. . . I said "He doesn't JUST", "Just" is a word used to mean "He doesn't ONLY" you know. "God doesn't only know all scientific and logical knowledge. He knows all things. The ways of wisdom, everything".

Misread you, sorry, my bad.

Still, knows all things, can't figure out how to make a universe without suffering and madness and evil and damning billions of his own children to die horrible. Hm. Not a very smart god.

ActRaiserTheReturned said Metaphor sir. Metaphor. I mean, you could live in a perfect, dull, uninteresting world, with everything being daisies, flowers, sun light, unicorns and fluffy pegasi with smiley faces everywhere. And let it be that way forever and ever. You monster.

Hm... Nope. Not interested in such a world. Because I'm mortal, and have mortal whims, and mortal flaws. Eternity in paradise is boring, which is what the bible promises me for believing and worshipping the tyrant deity that took it away in the first place.

...Makes me wonder if there's also a tree of knowledge in heaven you aren't supposed to bite from.

ActRaiserTheReturned said Or, you could have this toilet of a planet, with it's good and bad moments, die, be taken to Jesus, live forever in eternal bliss that makes even the best marriages in this world look like a hand shake in comparison.

So basically, let me get this straight, from a narrative perspective here.

A god who knows everything and has unlimited power created the universe and everything in it. There he creates a paradise for some fuck off race of creatures he made in his image, complete with having the sewage system networked into the entertainment and procreation system. Then he creates an impossible to pass test, and creates a seducing monster in the guise of a beautiful angel, then is shocked when it betrays him despite already knowing it would. Snake thing then talks to dirt man and rib woman and after failing the impossible test they are damned forever, all their children are damned forever, and so on.

Then, he continues to create human beings, or at the very least their programming and hard wiring and so forth because he's a techie like that. Fast forward past all the genocides and rapes and the world wide flood and so on to the present day. He programs me to be a skeptic and not believe things at face value, then leaves utterly no evidence behind that would convince me to believe in him, then sends me to be damned in hell and burn for eternity because I did exactly as he programmed me to do.

Meanwhile, you and others like you will go to the eternal paradise you say is so very boring and which we can't have immediately because for some reason you have to suffer for 50-100ish years before he will love you enough to give you the thing he originally gave your great great great great great great ancestors but decided to take away because reasons nobody can comprehend.

Yes.

This makes complete sense for a loving, forgiving God.

Superpower For Hire, AKA PMCs

Jett Ryu said
I see your points. But war is profitable. Just look at Germany after the Nazis started WWII. During the war the economy was very strong. Same goes for America, Japan, and England. But other than food for thought, the idea might make some good RPs on here.

The broken window fallacy actually comes into play here. Whatever gains are temporary, and often purchased on borrowed cash, unless you seriously molest other nations to get things done or strip mine your own civil rights.

The only reason the Nazi state of Germany managed such a turn-around is because they already had a powerhouse industry ready and waiting to get to work. With the fascist government they were fully capable of taking advantage of that.

Then, there's the States, usually the poster child, for this sort of thing. Well, the civil war and the war of 1812 didn't boost their economy. World War 2 only boosted the economy because their competition was shut down. (There was no car industry in Japan and Germany by the end of world war 2 for example. America was only really competing with itself.) Since then further wars have only really cost America more money.

Then, the military industrial complex. It's not self-sustaining without either having clients to sell your weapons to, or of course... Using them... In very expensive wars.

As for the broken window fallacy: Sure, if a broke a window, the shop owner would have to pay to replace it, giving a window maker a job. However, if I bought something at that shop instead, the window remains in use, and the shop owner can now expand his business instead, or buy some other product himself.

Either way, money still flows, but in war, things are only lost, nothing is really gained save perhaps the loss of a potential competitor, and in expanding the military industrial complex.

EDIT

Nowadays, I should define that as in nowadays. Back in "ye olde days" wars could still be fought for acquisition of resources, territory, and manpower. Nowadays, resources are globalized, territory is largely irrelevant save in certain hot zones and taking more is considered by the rest of the world to be a very big no no, and manpower is largely irrelevant in a world with 6.5 billion people.

A topic about topics: Argument concerning arguments

I usually do it to try and cover as many counter-points as possible, though typically, I'm responding to elongated responses with my own.

The only time I might start with a very long response is if I have a lot to say about something or have to PC my way around a topic.

State-Church Separation

ActRaiserTheReturned said God did this precisely because he is omniscient. He doesn't just have logical scientific knowledge, he knows the secrets to life's mysteries. . . everything.

Wut. How can he not have logical scientific knowledge, he created the universe, and everything in it. He created everything science finds. He created human capacity for science. How does this even make sense as a statement. This is like saying a computer can't do math but created calculators.

ActRaiserTheReturned said He knows the future, the beginning, and the middle. . . he knows everything, the end from the beginning. He knows anything from a quadrillion years in the future. He is doing things the best way because they are the best ways.

What. That makes even less sense than before. He knows everything, he created everything. How is morality supposed to play into this at all? Why would anyone need to be killed, or raped, or destroyed, or sent to eternal hellfire, or otherwise... When he created and knows everything. You can't define him as a moral entity if he has the power and the knowledge to stop all evil... And then doesn't. Just, simply chooses not to.

And no, don't give me the free will argument. You just said it yourself he knows the future, everything is already written out, there is no free will in a universe where the future is set in stone by an omnipotent being who created you exactly the way you are. And the universe. And everything in it.

ActRaiserTheReturned said For example, let's say there's a little boy. He was born with damaged feet, and the Doctor's tell the father he will never walk. The father however, has found a way to surgically make him walk. Say that this is in a day before anesthesia? That's going to be one hell of a surgery for the poor little tyke. In the mean time however, there will be pain and anguish. Then, the little boy can walk.

Or he could just give the little boy the ability to walk and the knowledge about how lucky he is that he can walk. You know. Like a moral person would. Not a complete monster that gets off to seeing human suffering because... Reasons?...

State-Church Separation

ActRaiserTheReturned said
Look. If you make a banana cream pie, a french silk chocolate pie, key lime or whatever. It's good. That's what God did. Satan came along and pooped in the pie. Is it God's fault now?

God created Satan, and his nature, and being omniscient knew exactly what Satan was going to do, when he was going to do it, and yet, he did nothing.

Because God is not a good person. At least, not in a narrative sense.

State-Church Separation

So Boerd said
Full disclosure, God in the old testament was Jesus.Let me adopt a different tactic. Let's say you have an 8 year old child. What do you tell them about fire? Don't play with fire of course. Does that mean you can't tell them when they can use fire? Of course not. God is omniscient and knows when it is acceptable to kill. And who does God tell? He almost always tells His prophet, and if anyone kills without permission, they are punished. See: Cain. Cain played with fire.

Except that God created all the problems that exist in the universe. Every single one. He created rape, he created murder, he created sin, and the compulsions to commit those acts. He created all of these things, every, single, last, one, by posing an impossible test: Creating two creatures without knowledge, one before the other, giving them eternity in paradise, and then telling them to not eat from a tree, which he made easily within their reach, with very appealing looking fruit by all accounts, right in the middle of the fucking garden they lived in. Then, as if that wasn't enough to create a test which would invariable fail (totally ignorant creature + curiosity = eventual failure to obey authority figure, given eternity, that makes it assured of success), he created Satan, the talking snake, who easily fooled the completely ignorant, completely naive, completely defenseless creatures.

If he is omnipotent and omniscient, and created the universe and everything within it, including the laws by which it is governed, and human nature, then God created the very evil he condemns in mankind, and he is not a God worth worshiping by any stretch of the imagination. This is exactly like leaving an ignorant child in a room with a cookie jar. Then leaving someone in that room to tempt them to eat from the cookie jar. For an eternity. And when they eventually succumb being naive and foolish, you burst into the room and eternally curse them with aging and sickness and severe flaws of character and damn them to eternal hellfire if they don't praise you enough.

This is pretty much the very definition of Stockholm Syndrome.

So the idea that God would ever create a situation where it is acceptable to kill someone else he created... Is complete nonsense. It should never be acceptable for a loving creator God, but fact of the matter is, the Bible paints it pretty clearly: He's not a loving God, or a forgiving one. He's an abusive tyrant with an ego to match his unlimited power.

EDIT

Hmm. That came off more harsh than I originally intended. My apologies.

The Last Bastion: Bunker Chicago

I'll just be back when I'm not dead tired to review characters and update the mission roster and address this... Stuff... And things...

Please don't light my OOC on fire.

Sexual Liberation in Frozen?

As a writer, I can say pretty much that both Shy and Dark Wind are right.

Remember: A book, or a film, or a game, or other piece of narrative fiction is up to the individual person viewing it to interpret. A story can be anything you want it to be, and the most powerful stories very often leave it up to the viewer how things really, truly... End, or what they meant. Meaning is as subjective as faith: This film can be seen in a pro-LGBT light and that's a true way of looking at it, it's completely valid. So is the view that it's just a message about being pro-who you are. Whether you back that up with evidence to try and strengthen your case based on how you saw it or not is, also, entirely up to you.

Now if an author really wants to, they can come in and debunk something, state how it is, however, you'll notice this doesn't happen all that often, because most successful authors understand the magic of the viewer's imagination. It's one thing to tell someone what something is, it's another power altogether to have someone draw their own conclusions from what you have created and in doing so make for themselves an entirely new experience you may or may not have intended.

The penultimate goal of fiction is to be either informative or entertaining. Anything and everything else is secondary. So someone coming to their own conclusions about a film's message, whether it's a variation on the overall message, a message within a message, and so on, is just as legitimate a view as taking the work at face value.

The Library

There. Bishop and Daniel done.

@Valeric & Alphakoka: Depending on the Don's power level, we may want to keep an escape plan prepped... This is the only warning y'all are gonna get.

The Library

Rendezvous Crash

As Bishop entered the room, she could hear Jester laugh. Ha! Crazy bird man. Of course. The only way to make this more cliché would be with penguins. His form changes until he was wearing a suit and bow tie, a fashion style not yet invented, or at least not popular. Bishop sighed softly and was glad when the birds finally ceased speaking their strange language, and looked upon the man across the room from herself. He was a fat, pudgy thing, a disgusting example of human greed, the very antithesis of her own work as a scientist... And her father worked with this man. More and more she began to understand what went wrong.

Quietly she takes off her hat and bows her head respectfully for a moment as introduction, then she listened to his series of statements. It seemed this man was either lying to her or completely foolish to not know of her betrayal by now... Yet, her interest was piqued that her father spoke of her. Why? Hmph. "The Bishops always keep their debts." Bishop says softly as she reaches out and shakes the don's hand. Gingerly she retracted it after the handshake was done, feeling the sweat off the man's palm. "Ahh, pigs, so fat, juicy... They get that way one way or another... Fed, or perhaps genius? Hm... Hm. hm." Jester mused quietly with Bishop's telepathic link to her comrades. There was a moment of hesitation as she processed what to say, before speaking once more. "Ah, interesting... A power grab, hm? I am interested, you seem to be quite a likeable man, but... Of course... For, my own, humble self-interest, how would this benefit me, and my father?" As she awaited his response she decided to use scan on him, to figure out if he was a wolf in sheep's clothing. Jester grinned. Good... Keep it up and you might just get out of a mission one day without being horrible scarred! The amusement in his voice shattered any pretense of genuine care for her well being in her mind.

Hive of Minds

Giant wasps. Daniel Constantine had mused to himself the idea of fighting such things for a while, he had fought giant wolves, and giant bears, and many giant things, but giant wasps were new, and they were a menace. He watched his fellow compatriots carefully for a moment, he wasn't used to team work, his line of work was often the solitary kind, hunting down prey and fugitives, not discussing tea time or politics with allies. Yet, here he was, his uncle nowhere in sight, and needing to be made aware of the enemy's capabilities. Ramza was already asking questions of the ranger, though Daniel was dubious of the ranger's real ability to discern a threat. He was just a man who wanted to survive, and didn't really wish to understand, at least, that's what he interpreted at a glance. Yet it did unnerve him, all the little things crowding about him like children to a parent.

Demented children, to a parent that for all tense and purposes, had a god for a spirit.

Still. At least the god was on their side, for now. He stretches out his arms over his head and asks follow-up questions. It wasn't likely going to give much useful information, but, who knew, it was better to ask anyway. "How many wasps are there? Are they territorial? Have you ever noticed them exhibit strange behaviours, like having favourite scents, or other things we could use as bait?... Do you have some kind of booklet, or notepad, with information you've collected? Those who had to escape these beasts, was there any consistent theme for their survival? Being under the water, perhaps? I know it works on bees." He makes the last statement with a wry grin, as his uncle finally appeared and lightly grasped his shoulder, making him shudder physically in surprise before realizing what it was. "Funny. Bees. Truly... You may want to try and catch one alone, and see how dangerous it is, what it takes to kill it, no?" It was at that point that Daniel snaps his fingers.

"Do you have any... Explosives, perhaps? Something we could use to light their hive on fire, or blow it apart? If you don't, do you know where we could retrieve some?" Otherwise he couldn't much imagine being able to destroy it. After all, they must have built it on the ground, there is no way there was a tree large enough to support their hive.

... Right?...