Now that it's no longer available, I’ve realized that belief in hell must’ve been an incredibly useful social technology. Maybe even a necessary one?

I mean real hell: being burned for eternity as a punishment, with no possibility of appeal, probation, or parole. People used to really believe this could happen to them, and feared it. Now there's a powerful motivator for not being an asshole!

But I don't think anyone actually believes in hell anymore, as a real possibility for themselves. Not real…

I swear tfg WHY are there hundreds of articles making this old-ass claim when literally every statistic shows this is not true? It is women at the BOTTOM of earnings who have seen their marriage prospects collapse. Women with the highest earnings also have the highest marriage rates, it's the working class who no longer get married.

Look…

Is it possible to for German NOT to sound harsh and angry? I swear it isn't. I try to imagine tender nothing love poems, or a mother cooing to her baby in German, and it still sounds harsh. I just searched videos of nice voices speaking in German and even when it was a chirpy sounding woman demonstrating different German dialects, they still sounded fairly angry/bossy.

I can't tell if this is just my brain having seen too many WWII documentaries or if it's really just how the language inherently sounds.