Hey why not!

Schopenhauer said the most terrible noise is that of the whip, the horse whip. It speaks of the utter carelessness of human beings, and of how bleak we never cease to be.

I could make the counterargument, human beings deeply need symbiotic contact of some sort with other species, but horse labor and horse transport was replaced by machines. Net result: potentially quite a serious loss all around, if my premise is correct.

Pessimism relies on you agreeing to limiting your outlook just so. But why would one do that? Is there any self-evidence for pessimism? I think it's histrionic. A previous post was about absurdist writers. Kinda same deal. History moves forward, and the passions some thoughts require of us, sometimes just don't work the same way. Thrill is gone, thrill is gone.

Anything that wants to keep a flame alive makes me also suspect, something needs burned down. Why pessimism? Don't tell me about stuff like horse whips. That's rhetoric, not theory.

I am not explaining my beliefs further to you. Your inability to listen to my experiences out of your constant need to proselytize, going as far as to bring up the completely irrelevant topic of objective evil as every proselytizer does, is offensive. You aren’t listening to me at all. You completely disregard my view at how there is beauty even in something that isn’t eternal. You completely disregard how I am more than comfortable living as I am, having wasted years on that search anyway when you think I should spend my whole life doing it. How arrogant of you to think I didn’t do enough research, that I should dedicate the rest of my life to finding your faith instead of being a good person in the world. If I live a virtuous life doing good to the people around me, and you believe I will go to hell simply bc I did not pray to your God in your specific way instead of some other one, then I will reiterate:

I am interested in being a good virtuous person, not in joining your nepotistic vip club

The fact that agnosticism and science are open to possibilities does not give credence to your unfalsifiable belief. This is not us having doubts about whether or not to have faith, it is a feature that lets us investigate if we're wrong, unlike you

You do not need to convince me to live a fulfilling worthwhile wasteless life through theism bc I already do with my agnosticism. You waste your breath the more you repeat that point

My only loss is if I am going to hell despite being a good person in which I am thankful for not falling prey to an evil god who is more interested in worship than in humankind being good

If you think me living a good life isn’t good enough for your God, then go proselytize somewhere else. I have no desire to hear you talk at me about what you think I should feel instead of listening to what I say

Mhm.

I'm not talking about that right now, I'm talking about how they treat their fellow man when they ask what's going on.

The pessimism that leads them to brush off their curiosity and escalate conflict.

Agreed. Seems like there’s been nothing but pessimism for a while now. The 24hr news cycle is fueled by pessimism.

To your point: "I have already investigated claims of theism and life after death [...] Why would I waste more time on that instead of living my life as best as I can?"

Because so long as it's possible that naturalism is false, then it is possible that such investigation may have eternally beneficial consequences. Compared to the infinite loss naturalism offers, the journey of seeking to disprove naturalism is worth the potential gain.

"As for the reality of loss via naturalism, that is just how life is."

Unless naturalism is false, which you admit is possible. As I keep saying, that's worth investigating due to it's eternal benefit.

"I won’t live in a fantasy just bc it more comfortable than real life"

As I said before, no one is asking you to live in a fantasy or believe what you don't have reason to believe. I'm saying you should have strong motivation to investigate and disprove your naturalism.

"Yes to trash a manuscript is a waste."

Then, analogously, everything we endeavor to accomplish on naturalism is a waste. Like the manuscript, our lives will be thrown away, destroyed, and no memory will eventually remain of our actions.

"It is not waiting to die, it is about living my life without wasting time speculating about something that seems impossible to prove."

If you think the manuscript being thrown away is a waste, then so is your time "living your life" on naturalism anyway. And it's not so impossible to prove. At least on the Christian side of things, for example, there exists 2000 years worth of an intellectual tradition answering and discussing such things. Now you may not find it convincing currently, but there's probably a great deal there you aren't fully aware of and many great people have found such arguments of natural theology convincing. All an example just to say that it's not as impossible and opaque as you make it sound. Philosophy allows us to consider such things and make convincing cases. Given that you want there to be an afterlife, that you think it's possible, and that your thinking on the manuscript reveals our lives will be a waste on naturalism, I see no reason not to dig into it. Or anything besides naturalism for that matter.

"If an after life exists, then I will learn that when I get there. If I live as good of a life as I can for myself, my friends, my family, my community, my world including the people and cultures I haven’t met, and that still isn’t enough for me to not be sent to hell, then I am comfortable calling the god that made it that way evil"

For one, if naturalism is true, there is no such thing as objective evil. Evil is simply whatever humans designate distasteful, unacceptable, or not-liked (i.e. it becomes subjective, human-dependent). So I don't know why you make such strong moral condemnation when you have no objective moral foundation to stand on and call anything evil. It's just your opinion at best.

Secondly, if God exists, then pragmatically speaking, all bets are off. At that time, all that matters is that it would have been better to have sought understanding of God and understood the situation you are in instead of having clinged to naturalism, since God is going to have the say on what happens thereafter.

So it's basically a symbolic gesture, then. We've already been doing those for the last 50 years or so. They're not working. We recycled all our plastic bottles to help the environment, then we found out that we were being lied to the whole time, and 98% of them were ending up in landfills! You'd think that would disturb even the most fervent optimist, but nope. They just kept right on trucking, same strategies, same viewpoints, steady on into the void.

If we ultimately have little to no control of the endogenous and exogenous factors of our lives then to what extent is it helpful being pessimistic. Is not optimism the only sane choice we have? I like to believe so 🍀

Clarify != Gish gallop the entire supply chain. It’s a dishonest approach to problem solving.

Small scale efforts are showing the kind of compassion and good will you claim to have for world/societal issues to the common man around you.

It's integrity.

Behold, a prime specimen: A pessimist gives up before even trying to understand what confuses him.

Small scale efforts are like trying to bail out a sinking ocean liner with a thimble. Worse, they make people complacent and satisfied that they've solved the problem when 99.9999% of the problem remains.

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Not on the small scale. I would've listened.

But apparently I just wasn't worth the effort. Better to talk down to me and act like they've won the argument without even trying.

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That doesn't sound like a mentally healthy perspective to me. One would be much more prone to fall into a state of depression with that viewpoint.

I feel as pessimism is a view for investigation and optimism is a view for hope. Both things are just a perception on a topic that are necessary to find all knowledge we can understand to bring us closer to the truth. The belief I have on this is perceptions cannot by itself be truthful and are just a tool instead of an identity.

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I was incarcerated as a minor for being monstrously violent. I was smart enough to get my life together. I saw these kids first hand. Many of them will never be able to be fixed. They were born different or fucked up beyond repair. My personal history makes me extremely sympathetic to people who want forgiveness, but not everyone is capable of earning that forgiveness.

It is also patently untrue that children's prisons in the US don't make efforts to help the prisoners. Where I was, there was individual therapy twice a week and group therapy three or four days per week. Sometimes less, if the unit was dangerous. But the staff cared and put in effort to teach us life skills, emotional skills, etc. I got three different job certifications in prison that I was able to use to help me support myself in college.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm glad you're sympathetic and have a sense of outrage about the prison system, and I'm sure that there are places that care less about the kids than where I was. But I want to caution you against being too critical. Juvenile recidivism is a lot lower than adult recidivism. The system works better than you think.

You are reading my comment as saying that 100% of everyone thought it was the end times and also that 100% of all progress is made by optimists. That's not what I think and any person making any kind of attempt at a generous reading would never assume that's what I think.

I'm saying that the person claiming that all of human history was marked by prevalent, toxic optimism is incorrect. That's not the case. Historically, cynicism has always been extremely popular. I'm also claiming that optimists are generally more effective and bringing about progress.

When did I say I was a pessimist. Leave it to an optimist to just make shit up whole cloth and claim they are correct.

No, I dont assume. But, unlike you, I am not blind to possibilities, and the positive things that have happened and are happening.

>the permanent damage

You assume. Here is one example, but there are many.

>And you call me irrational

No, I didn't. I explained that your fatalism makes you unable to see the countless counter examples that definitively prove your statements false. In order to continue to not see reality, you are now required to invent a way to represent me as someone to ignore entirely - as is the nature of continued fatalism.

It's a safe assumption to make when we can't even progress to the "trying" part because that might mess with some rich guy's bank account. Politicians are owned by the same rich guys. For decades, we've been trying to convince optimists that this bribery is an incomprehensibly huge issue that infects every other issue like a cancer, and that nothing truly positive can happen under those conditions. But the optimists just went ahead and assumed that the bribed politicians (at least the ones in their party) would fight for them anyway, despite the bribes.

Leave it to a pessimist to make that assumption on so little.

Thank you for portraying my argument against encouraging pessimism for the rest of us.