Maybe use image editing software instead?

So a bad parent tells the story of how his child was innocently engaging his creativity with a tool his father provided and then the father taught the child in a potentially traumatizing way that there’s wrongthink possible when some wealthy people have decided they need to collect rent from everyone for engaging with culture. And dad blames the tool rather than the IP laws he supports that actually created the problem he now punished his child for unwittingly encountering with natural human behaviors such as curiosity and imagination.

And dad writes about it like he wants a cookie from the other IP profiteers since he was willing to throw his son under the bus to make a bad and misdirected point.

Good bedtime story. And the dragon slept happily on his hoard of IP forever knowing that the guards would stop even their own children from trying to “steal” it. The end.

I stopped biting my fingernails in high school when I viewed one under a microscope in science class. Washing your hands likely won’t get rid of all the gross stuff on your nail that you won’t want in your mouth, especially your gums, which are especially susceptible to bacteria and infection. You might need to gross yourself out with the reality of that to get yourself to stop using a fingernail.

If you can’t stop the desire to “floss” that much, maybe at least carry disposable floss around with you and use that instead.

There might be a different, less dangerous sensation you can find instead. Chewing gum?

This might not be a philosophical issue for you. You seem to be having an emotional response to your dilemma, which means the solution may not be to find belief, but to find hope or solace or even just a temporary distraction (and distractions can be productive). If the cognitive process doesn’t yield desirable results, maybe look at the issue from a different angle. If you can imagine this state of disbelief mixed with desire for belief never going away, what circumstances might make the dilemma less distressing? If it might be around for a while, you can always come back to it later when you’ve had new experiences that may change your perspective.

Something I experienced when I was younger was my certainty about what was wrong with the world and I felt righteous in raging against it as if being angry at it was a worthy excuse not to have to put effort into improving things. The older I got, the more I saw that it was “yes, and…” in that I wasn’t wrong, but there was a bigger picture I just couldn’t see at the time. I was hyper focused in pointing out what was wrong as if I was the only one who could see it, but then I realized I could be doing something about it, even if the world was never going to be a sane or just place or my efforts weren’t going to be highly impactful.

But your stated wish for believing in a benevolent deity is functionally like optimistic nihilism. Existence appears to lack inherent meaning from a creator deity, so you get to decide what is meaningful to you.

It’s not really “nihilism” because it specifically finds something worth valuing in life. And being a nihilist isn’t functionally incompatible with being a practicing Christian either, so they’re not really mutually exclusive.

The thing is, you can believe in a deity without having to accept a specific deity. Being an anti-theistic atheist or a Christian aren’t the only two possible scenarios. You don’t have to be an atheist in the sense that you actively don’t believe in a god. You can be agnostic and accept that you don’t know for certain and you may just not have enough information to draw a conclusion either way.

If you’re comfortable with believing something primarily based on your desire for it to be true, then you’re free to believe anything you want. You don’t have to pick a specific cosmology. Believe in ghosts and faeries and the hidden folk and kobolds and dragons or whatever. Believing in Christianity because some non-Christians are obnoxious just doesn’t make a lot of logical sense.

What I’m saying is it seems like you’re concerned too much with outspoken atheists and you’re letting your experience with them cloud your perspective. You shouldn’t believe or want to believe anything other than because you have reason to consider it believable. There are cringy atheists and cringy theists. That’s just people. It’ll be true of any association.

Believing something just because you want it to be true, or worse, believing something out of spite just because you don’t like some people, is not an authentic approach to matters of belief.

You can block a subreddit. You can ignore people you don’t like. Don’t let them define you. They don’t represent the concept of atheism. They are just prominent voices on the topic in one particular place. There are significantly more you never hear from because regular people don’t make it their identity and they don’t look to talk about it all the time.

I wouldn’t worry about the label. Your association will be different than others, so it might be taken several different ways by many different people. Labels become shorthand but also a bag full of various and sometimes contradictory concepts, so they’re primarily useful when they’re very simple and facilitate communication and meaning rather than make it harder to understand and more confusing. This is true of every label you think might apply to you. The label isn’t what’s important. It’s important to understand what you think, feel, and believe. It’s just as easy to say, “I don’t believe a god exists,” as it is to say, “I’m an atheist.” There are a lot of people for whom labels become a sense of identity, but that often seems to involve adopting things that don’t apply to them simply based on the association. Be yourself, determine for yourself who you are and what you think. Don’t try to shoehorn yourself into someone else’s confused bag of meanings and associations.

If I am cast aside by MAGA Inc and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can’t even relate to real Americans,

Wait til she realizes MAGA was always a grift by elites to get votes and support and they never cared for the “Real Americans™.”

The worst part is that he didn’t actually learn his lesson. He voted for Trump because of bullshit promises and now he’s just going to go back to voting for right wing libertarians who won’t win and thus he’ll be throwing his votes away instead of preventing future Trumps.

“I got my nose bitten off by a leopard, so next time I’ll coat my face in ketchup and hope no one eats my face.”

Other people, moral people

An hour ago you edited it, but now you’re telling someone to read it again when the content has changed? That’s a disingenuous tactic.

You are subjective in your perception of reality and therefore what you perceive as reality isn’t necessarily going to coincide with the perception of reality of other people so pretending that your perception is the one true set of relevant perceived truths is just your bias. So when you say you want people to make arguments based in reality, you’re only referring to your own perception, not the greater picture.

But even this argument is irrelevant. Your defensiveness to every comment in this thread indicates that you’re not open to criticism, you’re possibly looking for an argument rather than other perspectives, and you’re likely disinclined to change your perspective based on feedback because you’re not asking questions, only arguing with responses.

Some particular things being “true” is not some absolute and limited set of facts that encompasses all relevant information about any given topic. You can know a lot about the truth of a particular issue but be completely unaware of a greater context that makes that knowledge moot or even detrimental to focus on in neglect of the greater picture. Your desire for people to believe true things is actually silly because observed patterns would indicate that they likely won’t. But even more, they’ll believe their own “true things,” the truths or “truths” that they choose to focus on and value. Shouting like Willy Loman’s wife will never get the attention you want. And it’s entirely possible that your focus is dictated by your own bias because you don’t want to accept valid criticism of something you value.

You don’t seem familiar with how legislation gets passed. Thousands of hours are wasted on showboating, virtue signalling, soapboxing, and pandering on any random, often misdirected or pointless topic. You’re arguing for ideal treatment in a system where ideal conditions will never exist.

Regulating new, marginal uses instead of pushing for broader reforms seems very backwards to me.

This is a false dilemma. There’s no reason to suggest that both cannot be pursued or that pursuing one is mutually exclusive with pursuing the other.

“Bank robbers steal thousands of dollars from banks, so arresting me for just picking your pocket for $20 instead of going after bank robbers seems very backwards to me.”

People already know that people aren’t equal in skills or talents or abilities. You’re not really saying anything new there. But you are saying that people should be treated inequally by virtue of undefined criteria, and that necessarily requires someone to make a judgment call as to what is valuable and what is not. You’re not following your assertions through to their logical conclusions. Hypotheticals are useful for evaluating proposals to see if the proposals are practical or humane or achievable. If you aren’t sure how your proposal would play out, you’re admitting you haven’t thought it through enough. There isn’t much value in a raw concept with no feasibility.

you being better at math will make you favored for the accounting job

This isn’t always the way it shakes out because there are more factors than skill or merit that determine who has what position. You might be better at math, but you’re also better at cooking, so you get a job as a chef and someone who is worse at math is your accountant, but since it’s their job, they know the accounting laws that apply to your business better.

There isn’t some grand artificial intelligence with a universal database that has categorized all people and their skillsets such that we could easily identify who is better than anyone else at something and equitably apportion those people to those positions and doing so would violate individual freedoms.

What if you’re better at math, but you find being an accountant sucks and you become an artist instead? Should you be treated worse just because you didn’t choose to be an accountant?

Many determinations of “better” will be highly subjective, so it’ll just come down to what the people currently in charge think is of value, and that’s a recipe for unethical discrimination. Sure, we can determine who can run faster, but there’s not an easy measurement for who is a more deserving person if there are limited resources to apportion.

We could have universal health care that allows everyone who otherwise couldn’t afford mental health care to get access to it and then also destigmatize therapy such that it’s not seen as a weakness or shameful necessity. We could encourage compassion and empathy and accommodation rather than judgment and legal repercussions for the numerous non-violent, non-destructive conditions that many fully functional members of society experience.

people are largely responsible for their own respective lots in life

This is called the Just-world fallacy.