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Cake day: February 16th, 2026

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  • you think religion represents 90% of the intellectual discourse?

    No, i’m saying 90% of intellectual discourse is at least influenced by religion because it comes from people who are religious. Atheism being significant is a very modern phenomenon so if you’re going to study anything in history, philosophy, art or science, it’s gonna be full of religious people acting out their religious beliefs.

    Even today something like 4 out of 5 people are religious, and most atheists are influenced by that common culture in some way. Dismissing the whole cultural reservoir as fairy tale is a terrible footgun, it can only make everything confusing. Everybody else is pulling from it and you refuse to even acknowledge it, that’s not gonna work.

    You’re going to read poetry but it will make no sense and the climax won’t land because you can’t empathize with the religious sentiment. You’re going to read greek philosophy but it will feel drawn out and theoretical because you can’t empathize with the religious imperatives of the author. And i say this as a strict agnostic, i’m really not the kind of guy you’ll find in a church. But you can’t get to the meat of most intellectual discourse if you dismiss religion, just like you can’t get to the meat of most physics if you dismiss math.





  • The significance of Jesus is the movement he spawned. I’m not talking about the Catholic church as it was codified by the Romans a few centuries after his death, but about the movement of Jesus which spread far and wide directly after he died. This movement flourished not by the blade and the authority of oppressive regimes, but because it simply spoke deeply to people, especially the poor and disenfranchised. This kind of thing only happened a handful of times during history.

    He was important because he created a blueprint for resistance of the oppressed, in a time where such resistance was a very hard sell because it went so contrary to the norms and cultures.


  • I think a good pointer when you want to approach religion from a sane perspective is to treat it as primitive tech. For example, modern people know that you need to separate science from politics from law from history from psychology etc… and have a different system for each. But pre-modern people didn’t necessarily know that, so religious doctrine had to serve several, sometimes incompatible purposes. You look at it and it’s like a shovel that has a hammer on it and part of the hammer can be used as a screwdriver. It makes no sense but at the same time it kinda does and it sure has dug a lot of holes and tightened a lot of screws over millennia.






  • I think where it breaks down is that even 1 coin a day is already insanely high for medieval times. A modest person would earn maybe 10 coins a year, if they are somewhat qualified or really good at what they do. And that’s only for people living in cities.

    For most people, living in the countryside, they would see very little currency. You’d mostly own what you could build, grow, raise or barter, and you’d rarely have enough surplus that you could sell for coin. To get 1 gold coin you’d have to sell 2 or 3 sheep but how often would a modest person have animals they don’t absolutely need to keep ? Not something that’s going to happen every year.

    Even the innkeeper would not see 365 gold coins a year, that kind of revenue would be way upper class.






  • You’re right to point that out it’s shady to conflate a modern nation with some past empire within its borders, i didn’t mean it like that, or in the ethnic way.

    I meant that this region, broadly speaking “Persia”, has often been the center of its own empire and a peer to its neighbors. It’s not some recently stabilized nation state with limited collective experience, it’s an old old place that already had a complex urban economy when western Europe was still neolithic. That’s why i joke with the Elamites, that shit is deep history man, broken to the yoke of empire time and time again.


  • Dude, we work for the same company and I could have typed that in, and maybe I did. I wanted your experience with it, that’s why I asked you.

    To me it’s like sending the “let me google that for you” link to answer a question. It’s just bad form. I don’t want your whole reasoning trace man, i just want to know what you understand of it and maybe you’ll catch some detail i’m missing or whatever. It’s simple, i won’t read LLM output, my colleagues know it and i get shit for it but no i am not digesting this material for you. Give me a 3 bullet-point version in your own words, the point is not just in the data exchange it’s also to make sure you are aware of the answer and we have a common truth.

    Or failing that, just give me the fucking prompt and at least i’ll know if you understand the question.