• fireweed@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Sure, some aspects of the 00s were shit, but that felt like a bump in the road: things were still on the up-and-up overall, and the general expectation was that we could change the future for the better, resolve the world’s issues, and live better lives than our parents. That all came crashing down sometime around 2010 with the Great Recession, failure of Occupy, and realization that Obama wasn’t the knight in shining armor we’d literally hoped for. So the difference is that Millennials remember a pre-9/11 world and the less-great-but-still-hopeful early 00s, whereas Gen Z doesn’t.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Someone recently asked why the devil admitted he’d lost the fiddling match with Johnny. They said “If he’s the devil why didn’t he just claim he’d won?”.

      I’d never asked myself that before. It had never occurred to me that the devil might cheat in a contest.

      It made me realize that the dominant view of how people operate has changed in our culture. We now tend to assume people are slimeballs. The shittiest, back-stabbiest, most underhanded dishonest stuff now seems like normal behavior. Not even consciously necessarily. We just assume everyone is a barely-held-together antihero just looking for an excuse to take the gloves off and do nasty shit, and that we’re only good to our tight inner circle while it’s okay to treat the rest of the world like garbage.

      It’s our zeitgeist. I’m finally starting to grok that word’s meaning, after having lived through four decades.

      • squiblet@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        This is beside your point but a related question to the first part is, why does Satan punish bad people? Shouldn’t he appreciate that about them?

        • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          Satan doesn’t punish. Satan’s whole job is temptation. Anyone tempted would technically be punished by god.

          I assume the mixup has to be resultant of the constant game of religious Telephone. Not really surprising. It’s pretty awkward to frame your spotless savior who is the living embodiment of Love as also doing deliberate premeditated torture, even when it’s written right there. And comparatively simple to expect it from someone who’s supposed to embody unpleasantness.

          • squiblet@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            What’s hell all about, then? I always understood from Christian theology that it was a place controlled by Satan where Bad People are tortured for an infinite amount of time after death.