No, I’ve never told anyone what to call themselves except Christians. I don’t care what denomination or special kind of Christians they insist on being.

But now that you’ve started the Ad Hominems, calling me uneducated instead of explaining the “huge difference”, apparently you’ve run out of arguments. Or knowledge. Or both. Someone who claims to be an expert on logical fallacies like the No True Scotsman should also understand that you’ve sunk very low if you need to resort to Ad Hominems.

So you just stopped being as respectful to me as I was to you during the whole discussion and now I’ve lost interest in talking to you. You proved yourself undeserving of my time. Good day.

The difference between atheism and agnosticism has no practical meaning to the vast majority of unbelievers.

You can’t positively state that something does not exist. You can’t logically be 100% certain there is no God. We know that. So if you love going by definitions, yes, most unbelievers are agnostics, not atheists.

So why do we keep calling ourselves atheists? Because we view the likelihood of God’s existence as so infinitesimally small, the difference between agnosticism and atheism becomes negligible. If we rate the odds of God’s existence at 0,000000001% we can as well just call it zero.

In other words, stop whining about atheists not using the term you’d prefer. We don’t tell you what you should call yourself either.

If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.

And that is not an objective statement that’s verifiably and objectively true. It DOES depend on personal opinion and interpretation. Other Christians might say other stuff in the Bible is more important. Like killing homosexuals. Or burning witches.

There is no clear definition of an ideal Christian. Never was. Never will be. Every century has its own view on what Christianity has to be like, we just happen to live in one which tends to agree with your views.

In other words, according to your statement, there were almost no Christians a few centuries ago, which is verifiably untrue.

“No atheist believes in God” is a factually correct statement. It’s like saying “One does not equal two” - a verifiable, objective truth that does not rely on anyone’s opinion.

Therefore, person B made a contradictory statement, and person A would be correct in responding “Then you aren’t an atheist”, because person B stated a verifiable falsehood. Same as saying “One equals two”. We all know it’s wrong.

Christianity has a much looser definition. You quoted it yourself:

A Christian (/ˈkrɪstʃən, -tiən/ ⓘ) is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

So anyone who follows this religion and calls himself a Christian is a Christian. Nothing in the definition says “You must follow the Bible to the exact letter” in order to be one. There wouldn’t be ANY Christians if that were true.

So that leaves us with a whole bunch of people who all claim to be Christian, but have different opinions on…

• how strictly you have to follow the Bible,
• whether racism is condoned or forbidden by the Bible,
• whether slavery is forbidden by the Bible,
• who you can fuck,
• what kind of funny hat you have to wear,
• what food you can or can’t eat,
• whether you have to kill any non-believers,

… et cetera, et cetera.

And all of these people claim the others aren’t the true believers.

Now here’s a very simple question: What gives you the confidence, why should we believe you that it’s YOU, out of all these people, who follows the correct interpretation of the Bible?

That’s why the No True Scotsman fallacy applies to the whole bunch, including you, when you claim the others are no true Christians. Not a single Christian can objectively, verifiably prove that their individual view of Christianity is the correct one.

Want me to list all the parts of the Bible where it commands Christians to kill gays…?

But that’s not even the point. You know just as well as I do - Christians of each century have always cherry picked the Bible. There’s a currently fashionable interpretation of the same book that keeps changing over time. Pick a different country and a different century, suddenly people are burning witches.

The exact contents of the Bible don’t even matter that much, it’s the fact that Christians are free to interpret it to their liking.

The Bible isn’t the framework I was talking about. The framework is the Bible plus the man with the funny hat can tell you whatever the fuck he thinks it means and what makes you blindly serve his current agenda.

American “Christians” aren’t Christians

Classic defense by religious apologists and still a fallacy. You don’t wish to associate all the bad Christians with Christianity, so you pull the old “they aren’t real Christians” card. No, only you, a good and righteous and kindhearted person, you are the only one who is a true Christian. Of course. We’ve heard it countless times.

Of course they’re Christians. You don’t get to whitewash Christianity by simply declaring they aren’t.

Oh absolutely. That’s the scariest part about this whole line of argument.

Christians do not believe people are inherently good. We are all sinners. And even scarier, you can be excused for anything if you confess. Three Bloody Marys and one Hello Dolly and you’re golden. Still get into heaven.

The whole religion is just a thinly veiled framework designed to allow bad people to do bad things - and even make good people do bad things.

And don’t forget, those are the people who tell us atheists that “without the Bible, where do you get your morals from?”

Well, we can see what these biblical morals are - you mentioned it: homophobia, racism etcetera. It makes people hateful, while claiming it is charity and compassion.

Religion poisons everything.

I remember having that quite often as a kid in the 1980s. It is very delicious - somehow the consistency gives it that special something. Softer than solid ice cream because it melts a little quicker.

Fun fact - the Germans didn’t invent it, it was probably an Italian ice cream shop owner living in Germany, although several others have claimed inventing it.

I kinda prefer nosing glasses over tumblers.

A picture of two men who don’t exist.

That came in the news literally after I wrote my previous comment. FLAC is great of course, because it’s lossless.

If you google Tidal vs Spotify song count, though, you’ll find sources which say Tidal has more songs than Spotify. I’ve found everything I want on Tidal as well.

Lossy audio compression algorithms work based on psychoacoustic effects. The average human ear will not detect all the “parts” in a lossless signal - there are things you can drop from the signal because:

• Human ears are most sensitive around the frequency of human speech, but less at others
• If there is a loud signal, a much more silent one very close will be masked if it occurs within a couple of milliseconds around the loud one
• There are other more subtle aspects of the human ear you can use to detect signals we just won’t notice.

So in order to determine exactly which parts of an audio signal could be dropped because we don’t hear them anyway, they measured a couple of thousand people’s listening profiles.

And they used that “average human profile” to create their algorithm.

This, of course, has a consequence which most people, including you apparently, do not understand:

The better your personal “ear” matches the average psychoacoustic model used by lossy algorithms, the better the signal will sound to you.

In other words, older people, or people with certain deficiencies in their hearing capabilities, will need higher bitrates not to notice the difference. In the 90s, I used to be happy with 192 kbps CBR MP3. But now, being an old fuck, boy, can I hear the difference.

Ironically, I can detect the difference not because my ears are “trained” or “better”, I can detect it because my ears are worse than yours!

So the whole bottom line is this: While it may be true that you, personally, do not require lossless to enjoy music to the fullest, other people do. Claiming that lossless isn’t needed by 99.9% of the population is horseshit and only demonstrates that you have no clue about how lossy compression works in the first place.

Yep, converting lossy to a lossless format won’t magically bring back what was lost during the lossy compression.

Changing from Spotify to Tidal absolutely makes sense if you’re sensible to these differences, because Spotify’s best possible quality basically equals Tidal’s worst (320 kbps lossless). Well, and Tidal’s max quality is 24bit 192 kHz FLAC.

But boy, I wish I had these Hifiman headphones when my ears were still young and I could still enjoy the full frequency range of music.

Looks like your ears’ hearing profile matches the psychoacoustic models underlying lossy compression algorithms very closely.

That’s the thing many people don’t understand - lossy audio compression works better for you the more your ears match the average human ear.

In my case, being an older fuck with slight hearing deficiencies, I don’t match this profile as closely. That’s why I require higher bitrates (or lossless compression such as FLAC) for music to sound high quality.

So yeah - listening experience isn’t just a matter of taste, it’s highly subjective and will vary from person to person. For people like me, the difference between low-res streaming and FLAC is very noticeable, and ironically not because my ears are better than yours, but because they’re worse. :)

Yeah. On second thought, that’s even better. A shitty 80s boombox covered with band stickers is the ultimate way to listen to punk music. Sitting on table along with a dirty ashtray and a couple of empty beer bottles.

Crappy punk music should be listened to from vinyl anyway.

Unfortunately, Spotify’s streaming quality is rather low, even if you pay for a monthly subscription.

I switched to Tidal when I bought a dedicated DAC and a pair of very highend headphones and have not regretted it - you can hear the difference on good gear.

Awww look at it, how cute, it wants belly rubs.

Well, I had my 18th birthday in 1994 and I put everyone off since then.