"God works in mysterious ways" basically means "this doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm gonna ignore it"

I think is more like: "I dont have any explanation that wouldn't prove that god doesn't exist"

"it is what it is, fuck you" how I translate it.

Toilets are different though. If you've ever tried to fix one you'd eventually figure it out.

Most people would call a plumber and pay the bill for swapping the feces-capacitor-unit or whatever is billed, and that's how toilets work to them. They don't think it's magic, they think it works because the plumber was paid.

To anyone who has tried to fix one, it also isn't magic. It's just a really clever design consisting of several valves controlling the input and output of water in different pipes. I won't try to explain as there are several different designs, but the main idea is that valves work just like logical gates. On/off. Just like a computer has bits and booelean operations, toilets work by manipulating the gates(valves) either by user input (pressing the flush buttons) or by conditions changing (the pressure of water at certain levels).

Toilets are logical. You can run Doom on toilets. Try to run Doom using the bible.

They surely do in Tokyo...

That thing was smarter than my smart TV.

Honestly, if I was a God, I would create the universe, then just watch how it unfolds, why would I interfere to save what is the equivalent of ants to me?

HEY! every once in a while it feels, like, kinda special and directed at me. so doesn't that mean that - aside from all the times it doesn't - the world was created just for me, in "my image"?

Children abused by clergy.

Good works in mysterious ways.

It get worse than cancer.

That's an interesting line of thought - see, standard human religions involve actors with often inhuman motivations who often react emotionally... It's not necessarily locus of control. It's a powerful actor changing the environment, and as your own actor you can choose to attempt to influence them (through anything from appeasement to outside intercession to trickery), you can adapt your own actions (like changing to more drought resistant crops), or you can throw up your hands and say "times is tough, it's not my fault - it's because the gods are fighting"

Then you have the Roman Catholic God (aka the Roman religion deliberately engineered to make for good subjects to an empire and using Jesus's name).

Almost all religions, including Judaism, have this idea of a creator (translated as master of the universe for Jews, the yawning void ginnugagap for the Norse, etc), but the Creator isn't really an agent - it's beyond understanding for even the gods. They're the source, and living in harmony with their design brings good things and going against it brings misfortune. The creator only interacts indirectly, mostly through creation or emergent properties of systems

Then you have gods - like the God of the Israelites. They have power, agency, have limits (great as their power might be), and can be influenced by individual or group actions of humans.

But then you have the Roman Catholic God - it combines the omnipotence and omniscience of the creator with the agency and motivations of a god, and it is the only supernatural agent, the others are just constructs serving its will

My point being - if you have this one agent creating everything, who cares about you individually and shaped reality based in part on your actions as an individual - is that not an absolute internal locus of control? If your reality is being personally tailored by an all-powerful, perfect agent, then your actions become absolute... You don't have the power yourself, but your actions and experience become able to shape everything based on the judgement of this all-powerful God

It's interesting to think about

my unemployment, anxienty, depression, and alcoholism need to have a chat with Epicurus..

https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ top tier website

Yeah I don't understand religions that view medicine with scepticism but practice prayer with complete confidence. If I was religious I'd see modern medicine as a mericle. We can cure most cancers easily. Granted not all cancers but most.

Every word I say is a lie. In fact, I'm lying right now.

(Does that count as one?)

Story of my life.

Yeah, I'm gonna disagree here.

My favorite two arguments for this are rapists and babies with cancer.

So, babies with cancer are pretty straightforward - there's no way you can explain it as something good and there's no way to explain this in any logical sense. That's when people start feeling uncomfortable, because they know it doesn't make sense, but hey, they have the ultimate argument! "God works in mysterious ways."

The other one is a little more complex, but let's go. Someone rapes some other person, let's say a young man rapes a young woman. She has trauma for life, is scarred for life and is never gonna be the same. Let's say some 40, 50 years later he truly is sorry for what he's done, which I also can see happening. It doesn't really absolve him in my eyes, but hey I'm not God and my ways are quite simple and not at all mysterious. The lady has been a good person all her life, so both of them go to heaven. And one day they meet in heaven. How is that fair to her? How is he able to get to the same place of rest as her? Well, the answer is simple, "God works in mysterious ways."

So no, people don't use it to mean “I’m not going to let this ruin my life”, they use it to say "I don't really know how to respond to that because there's no way that the answer would make logical sense".

always does..

I think we tend to drastically underestimate animals... Keep in mind, most of our pets are insanely inbred social animals who are undersocialized and basically left in solitary confinement for most of their life

But AI has led to some interesting results - we can now plot languages as high dimensional shapes in information space, which is basically the core of an LLM. All human languages have similar shapes - so they started to use similar techniques to create language models for animal languages.

We don't have nearly enough data to train one yet, but already we're finding that language is everywhere - what we thought were instinctual signals turn out to be a lot more like learned, symbolic languages than we've ever imagined

For example, names are everywhere - cats, dolphins, whales, and birds definitely have names... We've found language and names everywhere we've looked closely enough, and in even plants and fungi this might exist through chemical and electrical signals.

My point being - animals have their own internal model of the world. Do you think programmers are magic when you watch them change a few words and modify a program? Maybe, maybe not. I think artists are magical when they draw something from nothing... It genuinely blows my mind every time, because no matter how much I study it they're doing something impossible for me

Some animals understand - we had a Boston terrier that genuinely understood vets were necessary, he absolutely hated it but would begrudgingly hop on the table and let them pose him or give him shots... Just like a person, he would do his best to disassociate and do what it took to get it over with ASAP. He wasn't really an obedient dog - but he was cooperative. He was stubborn as hell until our interests aligned... We established he could scratch the door to come in or out, and he would secretly go off on adventures. One day we found him a mile away from our house, walking down the sidewalk with purpose - neighbors would sometimes tell us they saw him leaving the neighborhood, but he always looked before he crossed the street and used the sidewalk.

Our next dog loved to watch dog shows - one day my sister got a medal, and we put it on her and she smiled like her dream came true... Took it off and straight face. Put a lanyard with keys on her to see if she liked the weight - nothing. Put the medal back on - huge smile

It's really ingrained in us that humans are unique in experience... We're not. Animals can learn arithmetic and play video games, they can use Instagram and form rudimentary systems of government (crows are a great case study). Dogs can use pubic transport to travel between their den and hunting grounds. Animals can choose to seek out drugs or commit suicide. They can learn to use money and engage in prostitution, they can learn to cook food, they can seek out humans and ask for help. They can have language and understanding of the world - the big difference is they don't have the same motivations.

So do they think humans are magic? Some of them do, others figure out how to work the light switch themselves, others just accept that lights turn on when humans are around

True, but I bet you'd communicate that to your pet if that was within your power to do so. In fact, if you could magically cure your pet you'd do that too.

We aren't omnipotent and omnicient though, taking merely a thought to make all the bad things go away.

Nope, it was proven that animals know vets are helping them. They just don't know they need to be helped. The argument doesn't have any merit. If you don't know something, you should tell yourself "let's figure it out" instead of "there's a reason this all powerful being does this weird shit".

“God works in mysterious ways” is blaming things on gods when your god may have nothing to do with it. That signals you’re trying to me smarter than your god way more than saying, “Let’s figure this out.”

This is full of falsehoods and outright lies. We do understand the past, we do understand how we got here, we do comprehend the reasons behind almost all events that happen as they can almost universally be explained by science. If we don't know, we keep doing science until we get the answer - which we, invariably, do.

This may have passed as wisdom a century ago but in the modern age of mandatory education and freedom of information, it just sounds uninformed and naive.

It’s common for a person to think that they are smarter than gods or that they know all the facts of the universe and what is right and wrong and then they judge the things around them based on their little ideas.

i cant decide if this is outrageously funny or incredibly naive... both?

please, cite your fact based source

Have you ever heard of a reverse exorcism?

It’s when a demon tells a priest to exit the child’s body.

Yeah, little babies with cancer surely make sense. And so does the saying "God wanted him/her there sooner!". Like that fucker couldn't just skip giving the parents trauma and create a baby at heaven directly. And I could think of dozens examples more.