My thoughts are an absolute mess, and a combination of auditory and “visual” representations. My partner says when I am thinking really hard it looks like I am reading a book and talking to myself.

I would assume the music from the water temple is similar to the music played 24/7 in hell. lol

That is because technology, not because people are better than they were 2000 years ago.

Who are “our handlers”?

Create an in depth history that can be verified by anyone as true, and take control over the world using that made up persons perceived power. Then things are going to get messy for a bit while I impose my view on the world. If things go well I can hope I will be benevolent in the end. If they don’t, purge all data of myself again and start over.

Third times the charm.

Not quite true, I think. Thanks to education, literacy, better nutrition, we have been nearing the level where the old ways are nowheres -nearly- as crude, unthinking and hurtful as they were for 5900 of those years. All the scamming has been laid out for everyone to see. And now, we get to choose.

You believe at about 1925 we shifted from “crude, unthinking, and hurtful” old ways and have made substantial progress in the last 100 years away from excessive resource consumption, constant war, and constant injustice for the majority of people living in the world today?

All we have is technological advances. As a civilization I would argue that we have made no progress, and we simply repeat histories of feast/famine, war/peace, justice/injustice because we are stupid animals.

One would think after approximately 6000 years of documented history we would have worked the bugs out of this whole “civilization” thing if we were truly intelligent or making progress.

I argue for the audience for two reasons:

1. The subjective experience for every individual will be different with any form of art.

2. The audience is what determines if something is “art”, so without the audience the creator isn’t producing “art”.

How are you defining Caucasian?

Thank you for sharing this absolutely hilarious story. Gave me a hearty laugh in the morning. haha

Good luck getting passed it! I know I wouldn’t be strong enough. haha

I would suggest going to the Library and seeing if they have a Russian language course, or finding one at a book store if you can afford it. I find having an actual structured course helps me in my learning, and it will usually include resources like audio.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I have no experience in C, but I do like Python.

Japanese is a language I have on the burner to learn. I have had a full course on it for years but never got around to getting beyond basic greetings.

After I am done learning Greek, I am going to refresh and learn more French, and then Japanese is next because I love Anime and Manga and want to watch/read it as it should be.

What made you decide to learn Portuguese?

That is one of the harder things I have noticed about learning language in general. There is always a clear difference between how a language “should be spoken” and how it actually is in practice with native speakers.

What got you interested in Mandarin?

I found the alphabet and grammar easy to understand personally, which is why I am able to read before I can do basically anything else.

Greek is spoken in Greece and numerous other countries because of the Greek diasporas in the world.

Coming from a Greek family, while the locals may speak English they generally prefer to and appreciate speaking in Greek especially in Greece.

Thank you for the well wishes.

If I agree with their point, again, I don’t care if I later find reasons or points to disagree on something different. It will not make me waste my time adjusting upvotes. Common ground is very important.

No because when I upvote someone it usually means I agree with their point. Disagreeing later doesn’t change the initial agreement.

It seems that in the end it’s one of two things… There’s what’s known as the Epicurean paradox or the problem of evil, where the confusion arises from many sources: forgetting about the existence of free will and the causal chain of events, semantic nonsense or even simple immaturity. This is the one that’s just all fluff, all wind, but words can kick one’s ass, especially if you live more in words than in reality.

I am assuming we are speaking about the Christian God in this context.

God is all knowing, and omnipresent. This means that God knows in advance the result of it’s own decisions.

If God granted free will to humans knowing that humans would commit horrible acts with it against each other, how can that God be considered benevolent?

And then there’s the one that I respect a little bit more: while the beginning of the causal chain that we can conceive (so, embedded in/attached to space and time) is evidently not a source of it, but also since things exist today we can’t deny the ‘proto-thing’ existed then I can somewhat accept you telling me that this essence we call matter and energy was always there and God is not necessary and etc etc. God has been understood for millennia as the ‘prime engine’ and unmoved mover, behind the universe and before it, the One that ‘comes from nothing’ that we have to accept because nothing comes from nothing and things exist. But many folk just skip that part and say “things exist, that’s all I can see and that’s all I will believe in”. That’s fair, but I better not see you making any logical inferences then, lol.

The question remains both Theologically and Scientifically unanswered: If “nothing” can come from “nothing”, where did the “thing” that created “everything” come from?

If we accept the Big Bang or Creationism as two theories explaining the same event from a different point of view, what was existence prior to that? Did God simply exist in infinite nothingness up until the point of creation? Wouldn’t the existence of God contradict “nothingness” simply by existing?