So today I drove five hours to see the eclipse, had a tire blow out, didn't see the eclipse because of thick clouds, and got stuck in traffic for hours on the way back. (I'm still not home.) But at least I haven't been shot by maniac, yet.
RIP ArbitraryValue. Do you guys remember how excited he was about the eclipse there at the end? It's all he could talk about. That's what I'll remember most.
When the Creator tells you to do something like that, you want to get it in writing just in case the judge has a different theological take on the matter.
After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”
--Genesis 22:1-2
Blind obedience to god telling you to murder someone, no matter how dear they are to you, is one of the most highly praised actions in the Abrahamic canon.
mental health treatment in america is to grab a gun, wave it at people then drown in your addiction of choice. This woman chose "religious conspiracy bullshit"
Oh maximizing addictions and false logic are the best ways to make money though. Who the fuck cares if it's bad for the poors. It will never affect the god holy rich who are above it all.
Every 6 months really. They just happen in places people aren't a lot of the time. Heck next year north America will get another eclipse.... But you'd have to travel to northern Canada in early spring to see it and it doesn't sound nearly as fun a vacation spot as Mexico I bet to the chasers.
If you go on YouTube and look up videos of the eclipse yesterday, you'll see a ton of videos about why the eclipse marks the beginning of the end of the world. Just pure and total insanity or people taking advantage of that insanity. You might be surprised but you probably won't be because you know in your heart that we're just that far gone now.
This is why I literally groaned when I read another post on lemmy about LLMs using YouTube to learn from...
Ffs do we want these things to be unhinged conspiracy theorist Nazi replicators? I can't think of a worse data set to use than YouTube.... Maybe 4chan, but I don't doubt that's already been scraped.
I'll never forget when Google released their early development ai in the early 2010's and 4chan turned it into a racist sexist genocidal maniac in like a week
Yeah I was going to say this is what overpopulation looks like. Then I remembered the witch trials in the 1600s and thought there's plenty more crazy shit people have done. There's more people now and arguably less crazy shit. Stuff like this is always going to happen though, human condition. Still horrible, we've got lots of work to do as a species.
Those of us who grew up without it literally can’t imagine scenarios like this, though I’ve heard disturbing things from people who seem otherwise sane that make me understand what drives some to do these things. When you’ve internalised fables of good vs evil and that’s how you define reality, it’s a small step to think you have to commit atrocities to save the innocent. You don’t have to have a very divergent mentality to convince yourself of this.
We will all be better off when the vast majority of people give up these fables and begin to live in the real world.
friend, just reading the headline - this isn't organized religion at work, this is psychosis. she could have said the Care Bears told her to do it - same thing.
Psychosis PLUS organised religion. That’s my point, friend. Psychosis alone is a tragedy we should work to address as a society. But many of these stories would not end in senseless violence if there weren’t an underlying system of fantastical belief that bolstered people’s delusions and convinced them their delusions were divinely inspired.
Ehh I dunno... I'm as atheist as anyone with an IQ above 60, but I think religion is just a convenient scapegoat for mental illness here. I'm pretty sure someone who shoots strangers on the highway would have done it in a world without religion too, and they would say it's a different mystical force that made them do it. I don't think Christianity actually moved this person to do this.
Religion isn’t a scapegoat, and it has nothing to do with IQ. Very smart people are roped into it, and that’s what I mean by it being a social cancer.
Very smart people are raised with stories that they take as reality – that supplant their ability to judge reality for what it is – and it at best colours how they interpret everything for the rest of their lives, and at worst amplifies and gives focus to mental conditions they already have.
Religion is a warped lens through which people are forced to see reality from such a young age, they are incapable of seeing actual reality, and in some cases it just amplifies the otherwise mild mental illness they’d likely have had already.
Without it, some people would already have been disturbed, but with it those people are given a purpose for their delusions.
Take a society with no mental health assistance and then pepper it with tons of religious fervor. It's a recipe for disaster.
I'm in the middle of the first episode of the third season of the podcast Long Shadow. This one is going to be about mass shootings. Looks like they haven't added it to their website yet, but both of the prior seasons were excellent so I expect this to be more of the same.
In 1976, Larry Cohen made a film called "God Told Me To," where random people commit murders in the name of God. The movie explains it as (spoiler alert) the influence of aliens, but apparently such a thing doesn't actually need science fiction explanations.
Edit: Also, we live in what was the path of totality in Indiana and watched the eclipse in a park. When we came home, my daughter saw a bunch of people in a church parking lot doing some post-eclipse bowing down in prayer (I missed it) and she thought it was hilarious.
"I fell to my knees in that Aldi parking lot" is a popular meme on instagram currently, due to a sighting of Christians welcoming the end times in an Aldi parking lot.
I watched a video yesterday about the whole history of TimeCube.com, and it had the same sorts of patterns we see in online radicalization today. Someone with an untreated mental illness posted regularly on a website, and was egged on by people who thought it was funny. Then some kid who also has an untreated mental illness sees it and takes it seriously. Then that kid does something horrific because of it. (In TimeCube's case the kid jumped in front of a train after meeting the old guy and being rebuffed.)
Come on, what do I say here? Lock her in jail? Push her off the cliff?? Craziness should not be supported unless it’s in a tiny padded cell under constant supervision. Too many people in this country claim insanity and if she really is, let her watch Boomerang all day; if she’s not test her boomerang-ability
It was the chemtrails. I have photographic proof of Chemtrails visibly crossing the eclipse. I know Joe Biden scheduled the eclipse so we all look up at the right time to be exposed to the mind control chemicals
… is this really easier for some people to believe, than mental illness?
I had to explain to someone that the glasses are needed because you never stare at the sun no matter how dim it may seem. I'm not sure what they originally thought the glasses were for but I get the idea they thought the eclipse was giving of weird energy or powers...
There's never people who God tells them to go cook really good food for the poor. Or maybe we just don't hear about them because that's not really news worthy.
There objectively very very many who say just that, you don't hear about it because no one cares if you're doing something good they only care when you're being shitty.
Now that sounds more spicy. I gotta run this strategy by my wife...hold on...."the sky daemon from the eclipse asked me to please find a local gangbang. I know, I know, I will ask for proof of testing and will definitely meet them all in a public place like a MacDonalds. So?" Yeah she said no.
Folks on Talk Radio and the Televangelical circuit have been doing dime-store prophecies about the Eclipse being the end of the fucking world for fucking months. I was honestly a bit surprised shit like this wasn't more common.
Maybe Americans are building up a tolerance to the endless media hysteria.