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Windows never breaks? Uhhhhh, that’s definitely not true. When I have to use Windows, I brace myself every time I have to update.

I remember some years ago there was a “malware” going around that would flash OpenWRT onto people’s routers, and set them to have more secure default settings.

There should be another thing like that, but one that upgrades Windows into a Linux distro.

As a basic end-user I have not been too happy with my experience with flatpaks. I do appreciate that I can easily setup and start using it regardless of what distro I’m using. But based on standard usage using whatever default gui “app store” frontends that usually come with distros, it tends to be significantly slower than apt, for instance, and there seems to be connection problems to the repos pretty often as well.

What happened with Opera was very predictable. When it comes to companies and corporations, and when their software products are proprietary, the pattern is always the same. They make something that might be good, maybe very good. Good enough to get some level of popularity. That’s how they start. Over time though, the profit driven model inherent in corporations pressures them to implement questionable features - things that might generate more revenue, but are things people might tolerate at best. At some point they become more anti-features than questionable. And eventually both the company and their product devolve into garbage and we find out they’ve been basically an arm of the surveillance state the whole time.

Mozilla is not immune to corruption. The deal people are referring to here is that Mozilla sets the built in default search engine to whoever is the highest bidder. If I recall, there was a brief period where either Microsoft or Yahoo was going to be that company. But generally it’s Google. And not everything Mozilla does with Firefox is considered good for privacy. That’s why we have smaller projects like Mull - basically somebody takes Firefox, removes all the problematic parts, and adds extra security and privacy features.

But those projects have a tendency to come and go, because maintaining a complex piece of software like a browser is challenging and costly, and those projects do not generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining.

So Mozilla isn’t perfect, but they are a nonprofit organization, which does provide them with a revenue model that allows them to strike a decent balance, and on the whole Firefox is a net good, and has always been one of the most important bulwarks for the free and open web. And the fact that Firefox is entirely open-source forces them to stay good.

An open-source, federated, and privacy-protecting alternative to the dominant advertising services. Something that gives the individual web user full control of which ads they see; from which indies, organizations, companies or any other groups. And where they can also filter ads based on clear categories, values, or tags, rather than everything being dictated by algorithms and “relevancy”.

As a hard (as in my faith being unshakeable) (panen)theist, absolutely agreed. Atheists should be able to talk about their beliefs openly without receiving hate, and so should theists. Antitheists need a self-awareness check - their views are rooted in ignorance of religion, prejudice, and are a form of intolerance - aka, bigotry. The hypocrisy is obvious to outside observers.

By all means your beliefs are fine, and you have every right to express them. What fundamentalists and evangelicals are doing to attack our rights is awful and I look forward to every ounce of power that we can take away from them — hopefully permanently. Church and state should be separate, and the state’s goal should be supporting diversity of belief and practice within a secular framework.

Here’s one of the problems I’m having right now though: there is so much hatred and stigma directed toward non-atheists as a whole these days, particularly in online spaces, that there’s been a sort of soft-censorship going on. In many public spaces, a theist can’t openly talk about their beliefs without immediately being mocked, stereotyped, and stigmatized into silence by antitheists. It’s roughly on par with the people who claim that anyone lgbtq+ can do what they want as long as they keep it out of public.

People should not have to seek isolated pocket communities just to be able to express their ontology.

You’re not worse than Hitler. But if there was a national movement to exterminate all theist religions by force, and they seemed to be succeeding, maybe you should reflect on whether or not you’d fall in line as a loyal citizen.

As I said previously I’m not interested in debating religion in itself, but I guess I could give my two cents anyway. If you don’t believe in any deitys, that’s totally fine. It’s completely valid to have those beliefs.

Or on the other hand if you do believe in a higher power, or powers, then it becomes a question of what ontology you believe in. Somewhat similar to what I mentioned previously, I lean more toward a panentheistic framework, with somewhat of a gnostic leaning. By gnostic I mean to say that I do not accept the idea of omnipotence, omniscience, or omnibenevolence. In that model, “God” is everything, though I believe there’s room for polytheism within that framework - that there are potentially countless beings, corporeal and incorporeal.

In my view there’s no disparity to reconcile, because everything in life works the way it works and we have no way to know if it could be otherwise. Maybe there are just fundamental constraints on what a physical reality can be? Maybe some beings are malevolent to humans, others benevolence, and sometimes one group has more success than the other?

So I would agree that the deity of the Abrahamic religions is a cruel one. I have my criticisms of their ways, many criticisms. But I don’t use those criticisms to attack theistic belief as a whole, because I know there are a wide diversity of beliefs out there with fundamentally different ways of viewing and relating with life.

Atheism is a religion. To argue that it isn’t is an attempt to use language to set it apart from other religions, as if it’s something special or superior. It’s a part of that same kind of supremacy talked about in the first article I posted.

https://www.montclair.edu/holocaust-genocide-and-human-rights-education-project/wp-content/uploads/sites/176/2019/12/RamadanPresentation-Slides.pdf

Atheism is a religion. To argue that it isn’t is an attempt to use language to set it apart from other religions, as if it’s something special or superior. It’s a part of that same kind of supremacy talked about in the first article I posted.

https://www.montclair.edu/holocaust-genocide-and-human-rights-education-project/wp-content/uploads/sites/176/2019/12/RamadanPresentation-Slides.pdf

Science is not atheism.

That would be perfectly valid too, as long as you aren’t causing harm.

Antitheism has plenty of blood on its hands, just like every other religion. Counting human lives only:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antireligion

And going beyond human lives, only something like 1-3% of the human population is vegan. That means 97% of people are actively complicit in an egregious atrocity every day, and that is blood on the hands of people of all religions.

https://animalclock.org/

There are already some good rebuttals to your comment here, but I’m going to add another. The entire language of your argument is geared toward the theistic religions. You claim God did nothing to help you overcome your addiction. As an aside I could argue, from the theistic perspective that God did help you overcome your addiction, and you’re just not aware of it. But more to the point I can point out how, in the pantheistic model of theology the universe and everything in it is God, and therefore you are God who got a part of themself clean without the help of a concept of God, in order to claim that God doesn’t deserve to claim credit for getting them self clean.

Please ignore those arguments in themselves, I’m not trying to debate religion. I pointed that out to highlight that what you positioned as an argument against religion as a whole doesn’t even make sense, and is completely irrelevant, to one subset of religions. If you have grievances with the theistic, maybe even more specifically the monotheistic religions, then why not take those grievances up with who they belong?

And also ignoring that atheism is a religion.

And speaking of LGBTQ, I once worked at a summer camp that was run by a Christian church. The pastor and her wife had programs in place for the purpose of protecting and helping LGBTQ youth. Justice and injustice can come from theists and atheists alike.