this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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I am honestly not surprised.
I knew some people in the calvinist bible-belt regions in Holland (they're very strict, a bit similar to mormon, almost amish-like in terms of strictness except not having any aversion to technology). For example washing a car on sunday is absolutely out of the question and most people wear black those days. If you don't show up in church the whole village will hate you.
Anyway so the video rental shops in those regions were buzzing with the worst kinda porn. One of my friends managed video rental shop and he said the relative porn amount was 2-3x bigger than in the city areas.
This is for people for whom porn is highly illegal according to their religion. Somehow it causes some kind of attraction for them.
I'm very atheist and sex-positive and very much into kink, polyamory etc but it was never because of the 'forbidden' element for me. So I find it hard to understand that. But I've definitely seen it being a big thing yes.
Anything that is taboo is attractive.
Easiest way to make kids not interested in something is for their parents to do it. Easiest way to get them interested is for their parents to forbid them from it.
Pot consumption among teens is plummeting, now that it's legalized and teens see it as something that their lame parents like doing, rather than something cool and illegal.
Muah hah haa millennials, we done it again. Killed the goddamn pot industry.
Yes the exact same happened here in Holland 30 years ago when it was legalised. It became a deeply uncool "stoner" thing and none of my friends did it.
Unfortunately the countries around us kept calling hell all those years until it finally became a common thing.
Christ (and their society) can only forgive those who genuinely regret their sins, so their sins have to be something they genuinely regret. If they watched nice vanilla porn where people treated each other with respect, they might start actually enjoying sexuality, and then they might no longer regret it, and then they are doomed.
See also how rape fantasies are very popular in women's erotic media because they absolve the protagonist and reader of having proactive sexual desires. You don't need a Christian or Abrahamic framing for this, just a situation where people are ostracized for having unsuppressable natural desires. Binge eating, binge watching, doomscrolling, rotting in bed - shame creates perversion.
I'm not sure if this applies to all denominations. The Calvinists I spoke of don't do confession and there's definitely no forgiveness.
In Calvinism, the ritual of confession is a man sacriligeously trying to play God. But Jesus stilll died for God's forgiveness. That's the fundamental premise of Christianity. It's just that any priest who claims to intercede on your behalf is a fraud.
Here's a website maintained by a Presbyterian Calvinist minister.,
Ministers can attempt to divine the will of God through the Bible, but they are as much authorities on the matter as physicists are on quantum physics. Ultimately it is your responsibility to understand the will of God, to live accordingly, and to reckon with when you don't.
No person can grant you forgiveness; not yourself, not your religious leader, and not your peers, only God can. So yeah, you would see no confession and no forgiveness in a strict Calvinist culture. People can only be forgiven after death by carrying their regrets with them all their lives.
As I understand it, in Holland they also have a thing called predestination, where they think their lives have already been decided for them including any sins they might commit, and including whether they go to heaven or hell. So there's nothing really they can do about it during their lives. I don't know if this is a specific branch. It always sounded pretty grim to me, though on the other hand I would think like "hey let's go wild because whatever I do it won't matter anyway". But I probably grossly misunderstand the idea. Friends from that community have assured me that it definitely does not work that way 😅
Community also plays a big role in it, much bigger than I've seen in Catholicism. As in more judgmentally so.
I'm neither but I've lived in many places :)
Choice and "predestination" are unintuitive even in secular philosophy. The interpretation of quantum mechanics most popular among quantum physicists - the Many Worlds Interpretation - is a fully predestinatory model. Everything flows completely from the initial boundary conditions of the universe. Your choices are fully calculated in. Even if you experience quantum randomness in your perception, that's just because you can only remember your own path on the quantum world tree - neighboring universes where the quantum randomness flipped the other way are outside of your perception.
This interpretation is 100% consistent with all observations we can make. And yet we observe ourselves making choices. This is because we do not understand the full complexity of our own neurology. We simplify the fully quantum-deterministic biological computer that is our body as a person with thoughts, feelings, and motivations. In this simplification, choice seems malleable, when in truth choosing the other option would either be physically impossible or down to a quantum coin flip with no intelligent reasoning behind it.
When we imagine someone "could have made" a different choice, we are implicitly imagining a slightly different universe (branch) from the one we live in, in which some different historical quantum perturbation or some difference in the material reality resulted in them making the other choice.
Which means that while a MWI supporter believes in predestination of sorts, they can still choose freely whether to have strawberry or pistachio ice cream. It's just that the boundary conditions of the universe and the particular quantum perturbations of their particular quantum history result in them choosing one or the other.
While John Calvin was not a quantum physicist, he did preach a similar philosophy. Though this is definitely a point where the dozens of different branches of Calvinism differ on the theological details.
But roughly speaking, this means that while Calvinists do believe in predestination, they also believe/notice they can choose whether to live in sin or to obey god. It's just that this choice is determined by God, as it is determined by God whether or not they go to hell. And according to the Bible, people who make "good" choices go to heaven and people who make "bad" choices go to hell. Therefore they choose "good", or try to. Not because it earns them a place in heaven but so that if God chose to send them to hell anyway that would be kind of bullshit.
(This last sentence is heavily editorialized; it's the sort of thing they've had regular schisms about)
So a Calvinist hearing your attitude would respond something like "Of course you would go wild if you knew the truth of predestination, you're probably the sort of person that goes to hell". When someone is ostracized from the community, the community comes to the collective conclusion that they're probably the sort of person that goes to hell. They can't know God's will for certain, but the Bible tells them as much as anything can and it looks like the Bible says they're doomed.
Meanwhile they, the good Calvinists, are probably predestined to Heaven, so all their bad actions are probably just bumps on the road to God's mercy, right? .... Right?
You should generally dismiss what physicists in academia say about metaphysics, because crackpot quantum mysticism is rampantly popular and so you rarely get anything coherent from them.
I would recommend you check out my article here. Most academics in the physics departments believe in a property called "value indefiniteness" which amounts to crackpot solipsism based on poorly reasoned arguments that obviously cannot possibly be correct because Louis de Broglie presented a counterexample decades before these crackpot arguments were even made.
This is a strange phenomenon that the physicist John Bell points out in his paper "On the Impossible Pilot Wave." The "pilot wave" theory is a model which is mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics yet is value definite, and was first presented by de Broglie in the Solvay conference in 1927. Yet, despite this, academics from John von Neumann to Richard Feynman would go on to publish "impossibility theorems" trying to prove value definiteness is impossible, even though they all had a counterexample sitting in their lap.
Bell would then go on to publish several papers showing where the flaws in all their arguments are, but it had no impact on academia, and solipsism remains the overwhelmingly dominant position. Indeed "value indefiniteness" really is just a renaming of solipsism to make it sound less ridiculous. It literally means that particles have no values when you're not looking at them, and since macroscopic objects, even other human beings, are made up of particles, it naturally applies to them as well: value indefiniteness = other people don't exist if you're not looking at them.
Many Worlds arose from this same crackpot delusion of physicists who recognize that solipsism is kinda silly but don't want to give up value indefiniteness... which is literally solipsism. So they try to find a middle ground between solipsism and solipsism and their views just end up becoming coherent.
Bell points out in his paper "Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists" that Many Worlds is still basically just solipsism but with a lot of extra baggage to confuse people to what they are even arguing so it is not so obvious that it is. A lot of Laymen falsely think Many Worlds is just the claim that there are many classical worlds. If I go to measure a photon in a superposition of both possible paths, then they think it means there will be a classical world where I perceive it on one path and another classical world where I perceive it on another path.
No, Many Worlds is even more incoherent, because no one perceives anything on any path at all. There are simply no objects which travel through 3D space within the interpretation. Consider that you walk from your living room to your bedroom, and you remember clearly that you did that. Since Many Worlds is still value indefinite, there does not exist any definite trajectories in 3D space, and so your memory has to be a complete lie. That didn't happen. Indeed, no matter how strongly you feel that there is a computer/phone screen in front of you right now, in Many Worlds, that also must be a lie, because no objects exist in 3D space so there cannot be an object with a definite value in front of you right now.
This is what Bell saw as so absurd about it. Everything we perceive and believe we have perceived has to be largely disconnected from the real world, almost as if we're living in a fake simulation, a brain in a vat, that is entirely disconnected from what is "actually going on." Many Worlds is more batshit idiotic than you are led to believe from YouTube videos. It does not follow from the science at all, but follows from the crackpot quantum mysticism of "value indefiniteness," which has no basis in the mathematics at all. Even many of the believers in academia admit that no one knows how to actually derive what we actually perceive from the interpretation.
I think you're conflating mathematical and philosophical realness and then Principle of Explosion-ing your way into hating on physicsts. Quantum indefinite interpretations still result in the same mathematical predictions about observations, so all your talk about MW saying your memory is a lie is just obvious bullshit. The labels are different but there is still a mathematical structure of a person having memories.
Waa waa boo hoo. You can cry about me criticizing crackpot quantum mysticism by saying "stop hatin' bro 😢😢😢😢" but that doesn't magically make your crackpot mysticism justifiable. You have the right to have incoherent mystical beliefs, but I also have the right to criticize them. If you don't want to be criticized then don't post them on a public forum.
Did you read what I wrote at all? This is a criticism about the crackpot anti-realist claims. Yes, you can argue that objective reality doesn't exist, that all that exists is what you are directly observing in the direct moment of the observation and nothing exists outside of your direct gaze, and that you have a mathematical model for predicting what will show up in your direct gaze, and that this model makes the right predictions.
If that is just your own personal belief, I'd think you're crazy, but whatever. If, however, you start lying and claiming that this is somehow implied by the linear algebra, that quantum mechanics somehow "proves" your solipsistic crackpottery, then I am going to call you out on being a crackpot quantum mystic. If you don't want to be criticized then don't spread your quantum mysticism on a public forum.
Because you don't understand the mathematics so you don't understand what I am talking about. You have a Laymen's interpretation of MW you got from YouTube videos that paints it as just saying that different classical worlds occur in different parallel branches of a multiverse. In your mind, you think what MW is claiming is that if a photon has a 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted at a beam splitter, then the world splits into two classical branches where in one the observer measures the photon having been reflected and in the other they measure the photon having been transmitted.
You think what I am saying is absurd because you get all your info from YouTube videos and don't even understand what is seriously being advocated by these crackpots as you don't actually read the academic literature on the subject. No, what they are claiming is indeed far more absurd, which is that the photon does neither of those things, it takes no real trajectories at all in 3D space in any sense, it doesn't even exist as a distinct object in the world.
John Bell, "Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists"
MW is even more crackpot nonsense than typical anti-realist claims, because at least the solipsist believes in what they can observe in the moment. You simply cannot derive what is empirically observed from MW because it has no connection at all to the real world, and so it only reflects one's ignorance on this subject to claim that MW actually has a formula for making empirical predictions. They simply do not.
MW is anti-realist not just in the properties you are not observing, but even in the properties you observe, and just claims reality is literally a mathematical function, like a Platonic realm but rather than all mathematics it is just one function ψ(x,t). We obviously cannot observe pure mathematical functions. You need something in the mathematical model, some mathematical symbol, that refers to something that we can empirically observe, usually called an observable, yet there are no observables in MW so there is no possibility of actually making an empirical prediction with it.
Even the crackpot solipsist's views are more coherent than the views of the crackpot Many Worlder's views.
Tim Maudlin has a good lecture on this fact I will link below. I'd also recommend his paper "Can the World be Only Wavefunction?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us7gbWWPUsA
Again, my criticism is not solely that these views are obviously crackpot mystical nonsense (they are). The problem with quantum mystics is not just that they are mystics, but that they pretend quantum mechanics bolsters their mystical claims. Nothing in the linear algebra of the model comes close to having the hint of an air of implying these things. If you want to believe that personally, go ahead, but stop pretending these crank views are in any way backed by physics.
The rampant spread of quantum mysticism in academic circles is a problem because these physicists who buy into it don't always keep to themselves, many go to the media and start trying to deceive the public that solipsism is somehow proved by physics. Some even manage to get peer-reviewed papers published in academic journals claiming objective reality doesn't exist, which then crackpot idealists like Bernardo Kastrup latch onto to "prove" we all live in a grand "cosmic consciousness" because they have an academic paper and real physicists backing their views.
When even the physics departments are becoming overrun with crackpot mystics then we have a serious problem because the public trusts these people. I hold them to a higher standard than I would hold a random charlatan like Deepak Chopra which I don't expect to tell the truth anyways. It bothers me much more when I see physicists like Chris Ferrie publishing Medium articles where he claims quantum mechanics "denies reality" or Mithuna Yoganathan deliberately lying about the mathematics with claims repeatedly debunked in the academic literature to push the nonsense that the mathematics proves there is a multiverse "if you just take it seriously" than I do some random Twitter user saying some quantum mystical nonsense. These people exploit their credentials to push their own mystical mumbo jumbo views.
It's not about confession. It's about "Jesus died for your sins". If his sacrifice "saves" you from your deepest, darkest perversions, the deeper and darker those perversions, the more meaningful the sacrifice.
Did he die just to save you from the perils of having lusted over an exposed ankle? Or does his sacrifice cover the 20 hours a week you spend fantasizing about hot Asian femboys pounding your tight ass?
Ah ok I never thought of it that way. That makes sense in a weird way (sorry)
Ps after 20 hours of ass pounding I'd need more than my soul to be saved 😅
Go figure... wasn't there something with Snake Plissken and Apple?
Tim Apple and the Solid Snake
I have no idea what you're referring to :)