Guess again.

Because why not? Seriously that’s it.

I don’t know if they do, but they don’t care. Israel, despite how much it markets itself as such, is not a nation of Holocaust survivors.

You’re being downvoted because The Independent is a news outlet, not a country.

Just checked and I’ve got 24 tabs open right now. Basically in my case I have a list of things I’d want to do at any given moment (chat on Whatsapp, watch anime, learn Chinese, etc), so each one gets its own tab group with things I’d usually want for the thing in question easily accessible. For example in my anime tab group I have My Anime List, two tabs with different anime and Reddit discussion threads. Also in my defense I’m looking for an oven right now so that’s inflating my tab numbers a little.

Yeah because those aren’t Western.

Yeah that’s fair, though I do have to note that other than Yom Kippur in none of Israel’s past conflicts was it seriously outnumbered. That’s the image they like to sell, and intuitively it feels like it should be true, but it’s really not. Israel has always been good at raising massive armies relative to their population, and for instance surprisingly way outnumbered their enemies in 1948. Again not contesting your point; I agree that they were much more competent in the past.

Not disagreeing, but “at this point” implies they were ever anything else.

I’m no fan of the Muslim Brotherhood, but yeah “terrorist organization” is nuts. If this word ever had meaning (it didn’t), it sure as hell doesn’t now.

With what?

Uh… The (combined) second largest economy in the world? The only reason the EU isn’t considered a superpower is the chicken shit neoliberals running it; do you seriously think Russia and their “special military operation” can take the full weight of France? Germany? Italy? Really the only thing EU countries are missing is the military production to sustain more aid for Ukraine, which is not exactly a hard problem. You’re talking about Russia like it’s the Soviet Union, but it’s just not.

I disagree that the EU will have to face reality on this. The EU is definitely strong enough to support Ukraine on its own and kick Russia out; the problem is the lack of political will and, frankly, spine. I mean the fact that there are still new sanctions coming says everything that needs to be said.

I mean that would be better for everyone involved, but the EU doesn’t have the balls to make it happen.

True but this sounds more like pissing people off for no reason than cynical self-enrichment.

The word is “Western.” You’re asking about non-Western content, and the answer is: It is if you have more than like three members of your target audience, but that tends to be a tall ask around here.

I mean, how many of the languages in 1925 exist today? What about 1825? That’s your answer for the most part, that is to say: most of them save for endangered languages and successful genocides.

Um… [Citation needed]?

Not a direct answer to your question, but people misspeak all the time, so there’s no reason that wouldn’t apply to their children. However, hurtful things are still hurtful, so “I didn’t mean it” is more of a statement of fact than a get out of jail free card.

A scam requires someone to make money (or some other benefit) off someone else. That’s the case with modern Christianity, sure, but generalizing that to all religion comes with a hefty [citation needed].

I’m much more familiar with the Christian version which presents god as perfect in an absolute sense.

Islam does too, but with less emphasis on the idea of benevolence. Most relevantly, Islam states that life is a test by God and therefore suffering is an inherent part of it, which is kind of my framework here (though I don’t assume that in my argument below).

Step on a Lego > hurts > not evil. Stick a knife in someone or like commit genocide > very clearly evil.

My point is that that’s logically inconsistent. A genocide killing thousands of people and an earthquake or famine killing thousands of people both leave thousands of people dead. Hell, even letting people die at all is suffering. Back to our postulates, pillar 2 states “his will is our reality.” When you get down to it, the only kind of world that would not run afoul of the Epicurean paradox would be a no-scarcity paradise with only 100% happy thoughts, and at that point we’d be looking at robots (or I suppose angels, if there’s a material difference), not humans. Worse, when you get down to it in such a world people would either lose the ability to even conceive of evil, or be prevented from committing it by an external force. Imagine if at the mall you always had an angel making you return your shopping cart, now multiply that by ten thousand times. Essentially we’re looking at a world of lobotomized robots, which to me doesn’t sound all that appealing.

is god not capable of creating free will without evil?

It might be possible in some outlandish alternate universe, but restricting the discussion to things we can conceive of, evil is baked into the concept of free will. As I argued above, take away the capacity to commit evil and you remove almost the whole breadth of human emotion and activity, by definition running afoul of free will. Perhaps most importantly, though

a god that’s aware of evil and has the power to stop it, but chooses not to, is himself some degree of evil.

at the core of this is the assumption that suffering is ontologically evil. This is very egotistical, but it also betrays a fundamental instability in the whole thing: Without objective morality (which immediately follows from the lack of belief in a creator), how can there be good and evil? This application of the Epicurean paradox assumes that evil can exist independent of a higher authority able to determine good and evil, so it’s a case of circular reasoning more than anything else. The Epicurean paradox can only be used to reject complete benevolence (which, well yes), not complete goodness.

(feel free to take that as a challenge if you think you’ve got the answer).

Muslim here and sure (I’ve wanted to try this for a while now): The criteria for the first pillar are arbitrary. What’s being proposed is that a good creator wouldn’t allow their creation to suffer, or—taking it a step further—wouldn’t create a world where suffering is even possible. However, that would require human (or, really, lite in general) not to exist; give humans free will and suffering will happen. You could argue then that the act of creating humans was evil, which would be logically consistent, and in that case my answer is: I’ll drop (your conception of) the first pillar. God knows about suffering and is capable of stopping it but tolerates it for one purpose or another.