Listening to book 9 of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s a great “going to bed a little toasted” kinda series.

Careful you don’t cut yourself with that edginess!

the very existence of private domestic shippers in countries indicates a failure of their government to provide universal infrastructure needed by all citizens.

Nothing about providing a nationalized service forbids you from using alternate means you find more suitable. That seems like a false premise to me.

These don’t seem particularly compatible. According to you, the mere existence of an alternative is a government failure.

To extrapolate from Stevens to all centrist Dems is wild. Chuck Schumer, not exactly a progressive firebrand called Stevens’s Rogers endorsement ‘a despicable betrayal.’

This is one of my favourite movies of all time. Kjbd of an ironic picture giving how absurdly colourful the film is.

Her noted expression while her bf kisses her slays me every time.

OP didn’t mention the obligatory “who the whore now fuckwad?”

This weighing of temporary suffering against eternal bliss is just another example of what a lousy game God is playing. He could have come up with something else - but he didn’t.

Wait, why is an asshole move? He figured out a way to figure out who ought to be rewarded for all eternity after a moment’s existence, that’s pretty amazing. Think how much of art etc is grappling with the concept of death or non-existence. God instead figured out, “hey, here’s a way to sift through a bunch of people with free will and temptation and reward the good ones for all eternity.” I’d be impressed!

a huge masochistic asshole.

I mean, I agree but only because I think you’re not using the word you mean. (Masochist enjoys harming themselves, you probably mean sociopath or somesuch.) And yeah, I think you’d have to be a masochist to create this potential for infinite reward and then have ungrateful snots running around bitching about a temporary inconvenience.

Those are very different things, but I don’t see how or where they were conflated.

Because a moment’s or even human lifetime’s suffering is effectively nothing when compared to eternity. Show me someone who wouldn’t trade a hundred years of suffering for an eternity of bliss and I’ll show you a silly goof.

So, just like my friend’s kiddo getting jabbed, yeah, sucks in the moment but no reasonable person would really call it horrific suffering given that, while unpleasant, it lasted under a day compared to her (hopefully) ~ 35,600 days on Earth. Saying because suffering exists on a human time scale when you’re talking about infinity is similarly silly.

You keep coming back to this “why can’t God make free will without evil? If he can’t, he’s not all powerful!”

But it’s a basic definition problem. You’re effectively asking God to make 1 = 1 AND 1 = 2, which fine, could do but it eliminates the entire usefulness of 1 as a number.

Similarly, if the idea of free will is to find and reward good people and punish those who squander free will (by being jerks) free will probably necessitates the capacity for evil. (Otherwise, just stick with angels. Haven’t read the bible thoroughly but I’m pretty sure that’s basically the point of angels, perfect beings incapable of doing evil except for the one God made rebellious etc.)

Ehhhhhhh. You’re conflating this existence with all of eternity. Those are very different things.

Consider God as a parent. I used the example in an earlier response but my friend took her child to be vaccinated. For a baby, that’s a very unpleasant day. In a week, she won’t remember it.

Similarly, an all powerful, good God can be okay with someone suffering for a momentary blip because the end result is an eternity of paradise. (What is a lifetime of suffering against infinite years of happiness?)

“But wait!” you cry, “surely an all powerful God can skip the ANY suffering bit, right? He’s just choosing not to because he’s a prick!” Which misses the possibility of self imposed constraints on power. If I build a system and choose to work within that system, that’s still me being all powerful. And if, as an all knowing being, I know that a half moment of unpleasantness means an eternity of bliss (so I can reward free will, instead of just creating a bunch of automatons), that’s a tradeoff a good and all powerful God may make.

If there’s no God, then sure. If there is a God, there’s a life of infinite paradise for those who deserve it.

That’s the whole thing. The conclusion changes dramatically if there is or isn’t a God.

I wish we’d specify big chain stores.

My neighbourhood is “interesting” hard left bastion and a hefty dose of addiction n poverty. One little corner shop near me run by an immigrant family is always dealing with kids and junkies stealing shit. That family works long ass hours for presumably not a lot of money.

The junkies… I hate it but I get it. The coddled youngsters stealing shit, well, I pray it’s not because of messages like this.

The best explanation I’ve heard, as an agnostic, is this is our misperception of this life vs an eternal (infinite) afterlife.

Sure, bad people might live really fun lives for maybe 100 years while good people might suffer for the same. But then, for millions and millions and gazillions of millennia after that, both are punished or rewarded for how they chose to live those 100 years.

My friend’s baby had a bunch of vaccinations the other day. Horrible day for the kid, unfun and stabby. But in a dozen years, will she remember it? Nope. But that day, that’s all she could comprehend. Similarly, for this brief go around, yeah, what we can see and experience is all we can really comprehend. But the promise of at least Christianity, but I think many other religions, is that the next life is infinite and all that matters.

Thanks for the quality modding and the heads up!