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Re:In defence of garlic in a jar by hinkley on Friday July 01, 2022 @02:24PM (#31950625)
They say for atheists the worst moment is the Dark Night of the Soul, where, having accepted that nobody is keeping score, now you have to decide if anything means anything or if everything is completely pointless.

Having experienced that first hand, twice, that's definitely true. For the person it happens to. But for the people who have to deal with that person? The worst is when that person sublimates their need for belief into a bunch of 'secular religions' that they cling to like a... I don't know what word to use here, but let's say ninja is to mall ninja as crusader is to <clever word for atheist zealot>.

As for the steak, I often order medium well even though I want well done. Unless you're at a very high end steak house, which most of us aren't, they are always bloodier than you ask for and you rarely get a decent crust below medium well. At one point I had perfected the well done steak at home, but it's been so long that it would probably take me a couple hundred dollars in steaks to dial it back in.

Re:In defence of garlic in a jar by adventured on Friday July 01, 2022 @04:21PM (#31952248)
> They say for atheists the worst moment is the Dark Night of the Soul, where, having accepted that nobody is keeping score, now you have to decide if anything means anything or if everything is completely pointless.

They're often wrong in my observation. That's the best moment of your life: it's the bright, shining point of true intellectual freedom and real free will in action (as opposed to being caged by dogma, the fantasy opinions of others, and or outright dread of a psychotic omnipotent god looking to torture you for fun).

It's the point where you get to decide what the meaning of life is for you and what matters most to you. As opposed to allowing someone else to set the board for you (parents, teachers, evangelists, preachers, assholes) and tell you what's supposed to be important to you and how you're supposed to live. It's spectacularly wonderful, and about as far away from the worst moment as you can get.

Re:In defence of garlic in a jar by pr0zac on Friday July 01, 2022 @02:36PM (#31950807)
Its interesting you use "The Dark Night of the Soul" in reference to atheism cause the first place I heard it was with regard to meditative practice (and Buddhism) while its original use was in Catholicism, coming from a poem of that faith. The term has certainly got around!
Re:In defence of garlic in a jar by hinkley on Friday July 01, 2022 @02:55PM (#31951046)
From what I understand it got adapted by the existentialists as well, which is where most people would hear of it. No idea how they got it from the Catholics.

Lately there have been a lot of historians working backward looking for cases of 'history is written by the victor' situations and rewriting the histories. There's a great video out there, based on someone's PhD thesis, that places David Hume in a town in Southern France where a certain Jesuit priest had recently returned from a monastery in Siam and written a book about what he learned about eastern philosophy.

So they can't prove that Buddhism caused the Enlightenment, but we know for sure that one of those guys in those coffee shops had the opportunity to spend time in another coffee shop interviewing an academic who lived with Buddhists.

Edit: it was Siam, not eastern India, and definitely Hume