exocrinous

Of course it works. It's another name for the placebo effect.

I don't believe in omnipotent or omniscient gods, only normal ones, but I'll bite your hypothetical.

An omniscient god would necessarily have a perfect sense of empathy. They would know what everyone is feeling. And to know a feeling is to feel it, so they would feel every feeling in the world, at full intensity. Obviously such a being would need to be all emotionally resilient as well as all knowing. But they would care for the problems of mortals, because they would feel what mortals do. Perhaps in such a hypothetical, prayers are simply a person attaching a feeling of urgency to their needs, in hope that their god will feel this urgency too and respond.

But of course, I believe in normal gods, so this is all just an intellectual exercise to me.

Well I may be biased because I think brutalist architecture is beautiful, but I disagree. Every penny saved on the appearance of the building is a penny towards the functionality of the building, or towards housing more people. Would I rather have a pretty brick facade or 1% better thermal and sonic insulation? I'll pick the insulation. Would I rather have a visually interesting architectural shape or rooftop solar? I'll pick the solar. Visual appearance has never been a factor in my living needs, ugly wallpaper aside. I don't really understand the mindset of that stuff being important. I'll pick a nice colour for my bedsheets, and that's as far as it goes. And besides, elegance of form and function is a beauty all its own. I recently got a new mouse and it's beautiful to me because it works well. It has a pleasing heft, comfortable shape, no waste, and that's beautiful. A mouse in the most pleasing colour, but with poor ergonomics, would be ugly to me. Single family detached houses are hideous to me.

Haha. Two days. Tiny. Itty bitty state. Not even as big as New South Wales.

Low effort brutalism looks cheap because it is. And that's a good thing. In my country there's a homeless crisis. The waitlist for government housing is five years. And that's because too much of the government housing is single family detached houses. The politicians always say "we don't have enough money to build government housing for everyone who needs it". You know how many homeless we'd have if the government built soviet block style apartment buildings? Next to none. The people who can live on their own and just don't have enough money can live in that, the people who need support can stay in the homeless shelters that have support, and only the people who want to be homeless would be left. Brutalism is efficient. American style suburbia is inefficient, so much so that it needs to be subsidized by the government using money taken from the city, because the suburbanites can't pay for their own single family detached houses, even the ones with high paying jobs.

Hugging without consent is bad. The person you're touching might be autistic and you might be hurting them. That's why you ask first.

Americans think 13 hours in the same state is big? Cute!

You know how transphobes say to trans women, "You're a biological man, that's a physical fact of reality and you can't change that"? That's the kind of reality, law of physics, and limitation of our bodies that soulism seeks to abolish. Soulism recognises that such "laws" of reality as immutable sex are myths, and seek to abolish all belief in such laws.

Oh, okay. Soulism expands on the fact that everything is a bias.

If I was the wolf, I'd just point out that the shepherd eats lamb too, and is therefore just as much a murderer. The only difference is the amount of power in the equation. The wolf doesn't need to be bigoted to make its point, there are much better criticisms against the way the shepherd deprives the sheep of liberty. I didn't really understand why Lincoln was describing a foolish wolf who attacks the shepherd for bad reasons instead of readily available good ones. What the wolf says is pretty nonsense to me.