Why can't players choose to be atheist in EverQuest?

[cd288]

Originally Posted by Elfminster [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How do you know they're gods though?
Did somebody tell you and you believed them?

Just be quiet man

[Dural_Levant]

Originally Posted by Mblake1981 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Pain and Suffering try to strike you but miss!]

The agony of modern gamer senses. Agnostic works just fine back in 1999, looking at a list of religions, which to me was novel for even being in a game, with things like Dragon and Earth Mother worshipers.

20 years later here comes e-gamer Richard Dawkins to piss on everyones faces and some guy trying to make a shitty misplaced compromise.

For the most part, I agree with you. The average layperson is not going to care.

It only becomes a thing when you take a deep dive into the underlying philosophical questions and assumptions that are the bread and butter of these types of conversations.

In which case, its important to be precise with your language or the discourse becomes a mess.

[Reiwa]

Originally Posted by Elfminster [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Before you saw the Matrix though you wouldn't have asked yourself if you were living in the Matrix. Somebody very recently came along and implanted that new idea in your head which you're now repeating. But there was a time when you would not have thought about such things.

Is god existing a new idea like the Matrix is?

We are not the same.

[Jibartik]

Think about religion like, the science of its time.

The religious leaders were not the crackpots.

[Dural_Levant]

Originally Posted by Elfminster [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Before you saw the Matrix though you wouldn't have asked yourself if you were living in the Matrix. Somebody very recently came along and implanted that new idea in your head which you're now repeating. But there was a time when you would not have thought about such things.

Is god existing a new idea like the Matrix is?

Let's imagine there are no atheists/christians/hollywood in the world.

You look up at the moon. What do you say?

"God doesn't exist"?
"Am I living in the Matrix?"
"Who created that?"

No, probably not, if I had no knowledge of the intellectual discourse the came before me. But that is not the case.

It's not like this is a new conversation. People have been talking about this sort of thing for millennia. That laid a groundwork of rigor around "thinking" that modern-day people can build upon.

While the "Matrix" is new, the idea it expresses is not. Epistemologists have just been using different examples. The Matrix is just the latest incarnation.

[Elfminster]

What I have discovered is this:

• Atheists can only exist in reality.
  
• I can exist in both reality and fantasy.

So I'm greater than all atheists combined.

[Ennewi]

Originally Posted by Elfminster [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

What I have discovered is this:

• Atheists can only exist in reality.
  
• I can exist in both reality and fantasy.

So I'm greater than all atheists combined.

Where did you get your definition of reality from?

[Mblake1981]

Originally Posted by Danth [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I had been doing PC games, massively multiplayer included, for a good while prior to buying EQ so EQ didn't impress me all that much. It grew on me over time though as a nice shared hobby the wife and I both liked. She didn't like most of the other types of PC games I had or still have. I did have that feeling of awe for Air Warrior the first time I logged on that one in the early/mid 90's though; that's the game that felt like it had been ripped out of my imagination, not so much the role-playing games.

Danth

Original EQ, Unreal Tournament and Janes WW2 Fighters were my Air Warriors. There were no chances for me to have a computer or be online before early 2000. Edit: You probably had a bigger hey-day then I experienced, being online in the mid 90s would have been something special to experience.

[Ennewi]

Originally Posted by Elfminster [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Before you saw the Matrix though you wouldn't have asked yourself if you were living in the Matrix. Somebody very recently came along and implanted that new idea in your head which you're now repeating. But there was a time when you would not have thought about such things.

Neuromancer by William Gibson
This is the book that inspired The Wachowskis when they were making The Matrix. It was William Gibson's iconic cyberpunk novel that gave the word “matrix” that has now entered the geek vocabulary.

The Allegory of the Cave

Plato personifies this ‘unenlightenment’ of human nature through his famous “allegory of the cave” — the allegory of prisoners chained in a cave whose entire perception of reality is but shadows cast on a wall in front of them. For Plato, the shadows on the wall are not reality but rather mere reflections of more real objects. 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes similarly hypothesized in the early meditations of his “Meditations on First Philosophy” that all of the human world is but a world of shadows orchestrated by a deceitful “evil genius.” For both Descartes and Plato, this world of shadows, the cave, the simulation, or Matrix if you will, is illusory and devoid of value.

[Elfminster]

Originally Posted by Dural_Levant [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

No, probably not, if I had no knowledge of the intellectual discourse the came before me. But that is not the case.

It's not like this is a new conversation. People have been talking about this sort of thing for millennia. That laid a groundwork of rigor around "thinking" that modern-day people can build upon.

While the "Matrix" is new, the idea it expresses is not. Epistemologists have just been using different examples. The Matrix is just the latest incarnation.

Do you also ask yourself if you're Snow White and the Seven dwarves or is it just the Matrix you compare real life to?

The problem I have with you is that everything you say is not your original idea, you weren't there, and you have no proof whatsoever. You're like a parrot.

I look up at the moon and ask "Who created that"?

You come along and say, "Nobody. It's not even real. We could be Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. There's no way of knowing.".