Ookami38

"just Google it" has always been a shitty reply. People are asking for your opinion because they want opinions from people, not some nameless site/author/whatever. Even if you're just regurgitating information, it's coming from a PERSON not a random article. Never mind the reliability of the source. Heavens forbid that we social creatures social about a thing for a bit.

I will personally develop a toy that juuuuuust skirts the edges of their definitions called a dildon't. I see a glorious market in my future.

I mean, I'm mid 30s, and it took me a long time to internalize "he, she, they" rather than "he, she, it". It's just how they were used when I was growing up. Fortunately, I've had the opportunity to learn and grow. At the end of the day, just speak with respect and make sure you listen as much as, or more than, speak.

One more time, for the commenters in the back!

Morality and religion are the same in society, broadly speaking. Any of the myriad interviews with a non-religious person being asked how they derive morality without religion is telling enough for that.

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Same as every other year. Auntie wanted to cook the turkey well done. We had to once again remind her firmly we are a MEDIUM RARE TURKEY FAMILY.

Can I get a comic credit??

If you had asked me 10 years ago, it'd be a firm "atheist". A year ago, "agnostic". Today, I don't identify with a religion, but I think there's a lot of interesting things within them. Given a charitable interpretation of any of them's texts, as well as looking at the parts where a large number of religious systems agree you can arrive at some pretty profound pieces of wisdom.

I don't necessarily think these things tell us much about our origin, or what happens after death, or speak to any kind of deity. What they do speak a lot on is the human condition. What we value, what themes and motifs speak to us.

I don't really like the terms "religion" and "religious". To me, those are the organized, preachy kinds of almost-cults most of us here have problems with. I prefer referring to my own personal beliefs as spirituality. Where the two differ, in my mind, is that religion is found externally. Someone converts you, or you're born into it. Spirituality is found through self-reflection. Some of the self reflection processes involves talking to and learning from others, but it ultimately comes back to a deeply individual assimilation of this new knowledge with the unique lived experiences you've had.

This is the way. Causing drama is what an attention seeker wants. Avoiding drama is what a person who has whatever we want to call the affliction wants. In all cases, the best case is to just accept the person at face value, avoid the drama, and keep living.

The person in question was very thorough about reviving older spelling conventions. I asked him about it once and he gave me a reply written in what he considered right. It was a LOT. Still, I'm impressed with his commitment to the bit.

That's fine. Any effort to perfectly categorize everything based on some kind of ruleset tends to fail. Most real world things don't really fall neatly into boxes like we want them to. Looking at species and gender as the two obvious examples.

We have yet to settle on an actual definition for "species" that works in every case. It was originally "can produce reproductively viable offspring" but a myriad of species break this rule. Then there's dogs. Every pet dog belongs to the species Canis Familiaris. It takes one look at a beagle and a great dane, for instance, to see where that doesn't exactly feel right.

Gender (or sex, even) is another example where categorization fails. For the longest time, we had two of each, and anything else was aberrant. Then we saw that there were enough odd cases that a third "intersex" category was added and wildly accepted. Today, we see so many different expressions of gender and sex that the categories of "male" and "female" have largely lost the meaning they have. They're just not useful descriptors of what we actually see.

Almost every attempt at categorization will end up with edge cases where we just have to make an arbitrary distinction. If you want that to be the nail in the coffin to say "religion's don't exist" then fine. Neither do music genres. Gender. Species. Or we can have an actual discussion on these topics, settle on a functional meaning for this conversation (as I tried to do multiple times) and actually exchange ideas, learn, and grow.