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‪there are all sorts of things that can terrify you about genz/gen-alpha but one that bothers me is people growing up in a world where one is accustomed to not owning things, does not know what owning things means, where having the agency to do both good and evil is a radical idea‬

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and i must sound so boomer about all this but really it all came down to something as simple as them taking away my goddamn super monkey ball game. surely even the most cloudpilled digital native can understand why losing access to childhood media is inherently upsetting

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‪i feel like i start to understand why the framers of the us constitution put the first and second amendments in there. as a european i will probably never be fully comfortable with the second one and it has had obvious bad outcomes. but they still had a fucking point, you know‬

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‪if someone wants to download fucking vorophilia pornography games onto their device that should be their god-given right as a human being, if you ask me, whatever i may think of such software. there's this deep technopuritanism of our times that makes me want to stab things‬

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i fucking hate the Christian God with every fibre of our being but He is a more merciful master than fucking Steve Jobs! i can at least be a fucking [series of exotic slurs] in this lifetime, i can do Evil, i have the right to do what i want before my supposed eternal damnation

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‪a higher angel appears before god to present a new creation: a human being. an incredibly powerful thing, with its own inner world‬

‪god is about to congratulate the angel on this, but is interrupted‬

‪“look, i've lobotomised him! he can only do good!”‬

‪this is about the ipad pro‬

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‪and that might seem like a strained metaphor, but fundamentally a “computer” or a “smartphone” or a “musical instrument” or a “camera” or what have you becomes an extension of the human body, and so the long arm of the corporate overlord or the state reaching in is… violating‬

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ティージェーグレェ , @teajaygrey@snac.bsd.cafe
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LOL, God most definitely did not create the iPad Pro. ;)

I do kind of wonder about that set of tablets that got smashed by Noah when enraged about the golden calf? If I had to hazard a guess, they had more than 10 Commandments scrawled onto them.

(more from a histrionics perspective that is. I think it was KRS-One who mentioned something about Egyptians having something similar to 42 Commandments? IMHO, God or whatever was trying desperately to "dumb it down" for folks who were clearly too stupid to follow that many rules. Alas, human still can't even seem to follow 10. How many murders are committed still?)
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ティージェーグレェ , @teajaygrey@snac.bsd.cafe
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IMHO, from a liturgical perspective, the parable of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit was less about a choice being correct or not; and more about:

What do you do about it now that you have been ejected from the Garden of Eden?

Science indicates that factory farming is one of the worst producers of greenhouse gases, on a planet that, not coincidentally, is also corroborated by almost all scientific studies to be undergoing global climate change due to human actions.

The lesson from that, should be: we should probably stop murdering for food, and go back to being frugivores, which is what humans were (again, from what most science seems to indicate as far as I am aware) predominantly frugivores evolutionary speaking in a historic sense.

Similarly, the 10 Commandments, are more in the realms of actions which if you do, you're going to have a bad time generally speaking.

Murder someone? Well, vengeance is awfully common as a response.

Adultery? That rarely works out well for families.

etc.

Those lessons were learned, the hard way, over the ages no doubt, long before they were ever codified into written language.

The temptations to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors are apparently strong enough that many people will keep repeating them.

But if we are truly to evolve spiritually? I think there are lot more lessons, and occasional spiritual teachings, which indicate things well beyond human existence.

As an undergraduate, I had to read the Japanese short story of 蜘蛛の糸「kumo no ito」aka "The Spider's Thread" The Wikipedia page on it summarizes the plot pretty accurately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spider's_Thread

Essentially, there's a dude in hell (Kandata), but Shakyamuni takes pity upon him and extends down a single spider's thread from the heavenly realms of paradise, because once in his life Kandata had spared the life of a spider. It all goes sideways still, but the idea that y'know, humans co-exist on Earth with many other forms of life and that humans should learn to be kind to them and not be self centered, is sort of a core tenant of that short story. Spiders, last I checked, have been on Earth hundreds of millions of years longer than humans. Yet how common is it for a human, to squash a spider, or other insect? That's still murder. Though no human court will try it as such. If humans are ever to truly evolve, they need to cultivate a lot more empathy and compassion for all living things around them on this planet.

Sending missions to Mars, or even the Moon, is not evolving the human species. It's a waste of human resources that could be better spent solving human problems (also see, Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon").
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