Rule - eviltoast
  • isyasad@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I will not believe anything else - especially if a lying human being sells it.

    The way that everyone else seems to be getting along normally in their lives, maybe even having fun reading through this thread, while you’re getting angry and “shouting” reminded me of a line from The Count of Monte Cristo, where the count is trying to persuade a similarly unhappy person of the existence of a god.

    ‘No,’ said Caderousse. ‘No, I do not repent. There is no God, there is no Providence. There is only chance.’

    ‘There is both Providence and God,’ said Monte Cristo. ‘The proof is that you are lying there, desperate, denying God, and I am standing before you, rich, happy, healthy and safe, clasping my hands before the God in whom you try not to believe and in whom, even so, you do believe in the depths of your heart.’

    Which is not to say that it’s a good argument; it’s actually pretty bad.
    “Look at how fortunate I am to believe in my thing, and how unfortunate you are to believe in yours” when their beliefs are totally incidental.
    But rereading it made me think about how little it matters about whose perspective is “correct” about something like that. To put it simply, there are plenty of “good people” in the world and there’s also plenty of “bad people”. Whether or not you choose to see good or bad is (in large part) up to you. Neither way is “right” or “wrong”.

    I think you would be happier if you tried to look for good instead of bad, but as you’ve stated, that’s not a goal of yours. I don’t think that you really have any more “moral integrity” than the other side though. While I’m not asking you to abandon your point of view, I think you should realize that there is a reason why your viewpoint is not very popular; it seems that you’ve had negative experiences that have caused you to become cynical about human nature but here’s a rough analysis of the numbers: the fact that most people are not that cynical is evidence that most people don’t have it that bad. People aren’t wrong to believe in good human nature when that’s what their experiences reflect. They’re coming to conclusions in the same way you are, just the other way around.

    If your experiences have been so negative, that’s an alright thing to base your views on. But I hope that you find more positive experiences in the future that might change your mind. You probably won’t find it on Lemmy.