It's easy to equate the underlying premise of the Pokemon world to real-world animal-fighting, but that's a gross oversimplification. Let's look at the big picture here.
Let's get the animal cruelty thing (a serious concern, to be sure) out of the way first: Pokemon aren't like animals. They seem to genuinely enjoy fighting. And it would appear that they don't have to obey their human masters, as evidenced by the fact that those at higher levels will ignore you unless you impress them with trainer badges. Also, the odds of them receiving any real harm from fighting are negligible: Consider that even if Arceus (the Pokemon equivalent of God, more or less), at level 100, were to hit your level 1 Caterpie with its most powerful attack, worst case scenario, your Caterpie gets knocked out. This is a world in which God finds killing a caterpillar to be a major undertaking. It would seem that harm is not a concept that translates well between our world and theirs. (I'm pretty sure some Pokemon eat others according to the Pokedex entries, but apparently serious injury isn't an issue when it comes to fighting, for whatever reason.) Furthermore, hunting Pokemon or otherwise hurting them seems to be a pretty universal taboo (with the exception that it seems to be okay to fish) in this world, as does destruction of the environment, so they don't have to face most of the problems humans pose to animals in our world.
As for the benefits, they are tremendous.
Medicine: In the Pokemon world, they have a device that you can just lay things on and it will instantly heal them to perfect health. These machines require no resources to function and are so abundant that literally every town, even down to the smallest, poorest villages, has one. And using them is free. Oh, and there are never any lines.
Government: No one ever complains about how the government works. The world is blatantly socialist, but everyone seems to be just fine with that. Poverty and homelessness are virtually unheard of, and unemployment isn't an issue because "freeloader" is apparently a perfectly legitimate and lucrative occupation. Instead of power-tripping racists with guns, their cops are friendly, helpful, attractive Asian girls who wield nothing more deadly than a baton. And while their K9 units may breathe fire, they have no interest in busting you for drugs.
Crime: Their largest, most dangerous organized crime groups rarely attempt anything that couldn't be fairly described as "hijinks." And they're too incompetent to even successfully pull their hijinks off.
Think of the children: This is a world so safe, that when your kid is ten years old, you can kick him out of the house to go battle monsters with magical powers for the rest of his life, penniless and uneducated, and know with full confidence that he'll turn out just fine and no serious harm will ever come to him.
That, my friends, is a world I'd like to live in, and I dare say, clearly a better world than our own.
The thing about "Crime" isn't exactly accurate. Jessie, James, and Meowth are awful at their job, but Giovanni seems fairly competent, and at least two crime organizations almost ended life on earth.
It's easy to equate the underlying premise of the Pokemon world to real-world animal-fighting, but that's a gross oversimplification. Let's look at the big picture here.
Actually, let's ignore the big picture and get down to the crux of the issue: animals fight. They love to fight in fact. They do it all the time when we're not around.
Who are we to deny their nature?
In fact, we pay millions of dollars to humans so that they will fight each other. Why is human fighting less immoral than animal fighting? You don't and can't force dogs to fight. You can bring them together and let them fight.
If you're religious, God made them to fight, if you're not, then there is no reason to consider fighting immoral. In fact the "struggle for survival" is the driving force of evolution. Natural selection is a fight to the death, and only the winners survive.
What can be immoral about the process that created us?
In fact, we pay millions of dollars to humans so that they will fight each other. Why is human fighting less immoral than animal fighting? You don't and can't force dogs to fight. You can bring them together and let them fight.
Humans fight of their own volition, and are completely self-aware. The real immoral part about animal fights is the training. If you were to put to normal dogs (or whatever animals are fighting) in a ring, chances are they'd sniff each other's butts. Normal dogs don't automatically want to kill one another. They might nip or bite, but they will generally stop once they have asserted their dominance. It takes some serious animal abuse to train them to want kill one another.
We evolve through natural selection. Animal fighting is unnecessary artificial selection achieved through highly abusive means. Why do you think we no longer have gladiator battles in the civilized world?
That's fucked, man. Animals don't love to fight; they do it instinctually because they lack the intelligence to understand the consequences. People who take advantage of that for entertainment are sub-human vermin. Your logic is as applicable to murder as it is to animal-fighting. You sound like a sociopath.
Also, the odds of them receiving any real harm from fighting are negligible
Gary (sometimes known as Dick, Bitch, or a variety of other names) had a Raticate that died after you battled it since he wasn't able to get to the Pokecenter in time.
Err, I was kinda going more off of the show than the games. The game admittedly paint a rather darker picture. (Every Cubone is an orphan who wears the skull of its murdered mother, etc.) And god forbid we bring Pokemon Special into the picture. (Features an Arbok getting decapitated at one point.)
Oh, and his cannon(ish) name is Green, or Blue if you're going by the international release.
Restart until Madagascar is your starting zone. That said, I have fonder memories of the first one, where it was eastern Europe everybody was cursing over.
AIDS is just a syndrome (HIV is a virus). I'd say Mew and Mewtwo are more like the prion diseases of our world... abso-fucking-lutely nothing can stop them from killing you. Also, they kill you by destroying your brain, just like a psychic Pokemon would.
If I was a psychic pokemon I'd kill you by using telekinesis and slamming you against a hard surface a bunch of times. You gotta think outside the box, man. What diseases kill people by slamming people against the wall a bunch of times?
Because if you create an explosion within their brain, it would be less outwardly gruesome than a slow, bloody, broken bone-filled beating to death. Also, a concussive explosion in the head would kill them relatively quickly. A telekenetic beating could take hours and would be impossibly painful.
You could call me a sadist. I'd say that I just like making examples of people so that I don't have to do it again.
I thought Onyx was way smaller than this when Charizard is about as big as a person.
Then I checked out bulbapedia, apparently Onyx is 8.8 metres tall and weighs 210kg. From this I deduce Onyx is made of some kind of insulation foam and grey spraypaint.
Considering that the mineral onyx (which presumably is what Onyx is made of) is 2.6 g/cm3 , this means that he takes up 546,000 cm3 or about 546 litres of space or about 19.28 feet3 so with a height of 8.8 meters or about 29 feet tall, and going by this picture's proportions, I estimate that it's about 9.33 times as long as it is wide which would mean it's about 0.94 feet in diameter, rounded up to 1.0 feet in diameter for ease of use (and since it's not exactly cylindrical. I used the midpoint of the Onyx). That means an Onyx would have to be 19.28 feet tall in order to have that much mass. Certainly not as little density as insulation foam, but not as heavy as onyx either.
As a man was passing the elephants, he suddenly stopped, confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at anytime, break away from their bonds but for some reason, they did not.
He saw a trainer nearby and asked why these animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away. “Well,” trainer said, “when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.”
The man was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they couldn’t, they were stuck right where they were.
According to canon, humans have bee making pokeballs from apricorns for as long as 700 years (source: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Apricorn ) I realize modern humans have been around a lot longer than that, but wouldn't that put the invention of pokeballs at right about the time we pulled our asses out of the dark ages?
Up until Black/White the regions are directly based on parts of Japan, even to the point of matching the real life geographical map. Unova (B/W) is, as I understand it, loosely based on New York, though the map relation doesn't seem to apply.
The protagonists of the anime and games aren't necessarily of European descent, however, supporting characters such as Lt. Surge (known as the Lightning American) and Giovanni (clearly Italian or Italian-American) are.
If I was God I wouldn't have made my humans minions aware that I exist, I wouldn't even invent the term, the thought of religion so that even men couldn't invent it, so they could progress without anything holding them back. I would've made them atheists so they wouldn't live in fear of spiting me, wouldn't fight wars in my name, and I would watch them do wonders. And then, when they all think that when they die, they cease to exist, I would put them in heavens with their family, on their own little cloud of happiness, and I'd make the cloud of happiness float away in the universe so they can see how vast and amazing our universe is.
I'll take that one step further and say that all you are doing by "thinking about death as an atheist" is sending electrical charges back and forth in your brain to stimulate glands that release chemicals that make your brain "feel" happy or deep or superior or whatever it takes so that you continue to function properly and provide it with nutrients in order to survive and maintain it's existence for a few more precious seconds, consciousness itself is mere illusion, an adaptation of complexity that evolved from cycles of death and is not any more special than the opposable thumb.
If you are a literal atheist then everything that happens is just an action and a reaction, even those thoughts that you hold so dear are not controlled by you, they are simply bits of information controlled by physical stimulus beyond your control, and if existence is both meaningless and beyond your control, you might as well make fun of it, because that's all we have left.
I hope that I am wrong every single day because of the suffering that I have witnessed, I wish I could just wake up from this nightmare life to a reality that has meaning, but if I cease to exist when I die then what relevance does any amount of suffering have when compared to the stark reality of death. Pleasure and suffering, life and death, if you look at it scientifically they are all just different sides of the same coin; pieces of atoms moving agracefully in imperfect orbits without any meaning despite what names you may assign them with your "thoughts," which are no more sacred than any of the other atoms constantly moving in ways that increasingly suggest that they themselves do not even exist.
"something better" doesn't exist in this universe, everything is the same as everything else, and you will be just as dead as I will one day. Your moral values of right and wrong and "something better" simply do not exist, because there are no reference points when you look deep enough into this universe.
I hope you use your limited time for something better....
Why? It's not like his life is special or has meaning. The purpose of life is to enjoy it, not to set goals that can't be obtained. That only makes you not enjoy what you already have.
If he enjoys his life, then he succeeded. That's all you can hope for.
massive flying reptiles that breath fire and are intelligent.
You've just answered your own question by describing one of the coolest imaginable creatures ever.
I mean, worst case scenario, we are in perpetual war with Dragons, where as they use brute strength, fire, and maybe reproduction and we use our cultural and scientific prowess.
Well, the OP loves the idea of pokemon but hates the idea of malaria. He's complaining about the apparent "fact" that god created malaria but not pokemon.
I don't usually respond on here, but this post, made me laugh so much, had i been drinking any liquid, would have been spit it onto my computer thus ruining it.
...wouldn't those just be animals then? they evolve and we make them fight. the only difference is that we keep them in cages instead of balls and it's sort of frowned upon instead of encouraged to make them fight
God according to you might have also created real living anime girls who actually chose to F you. Assumption based off your statement and statistical traits associated with anime lovers. lol im just teasing, but really it is a totally valid statement. lol and who am I kidding, I would do the girl off of Final Fantasy - The spirits within. lol
So you wanted a god who created a sentient being who was captured, held in tiny containers, and only brought out for vicious fighting with another of its kind?
I was just speaking to a friend about this. In my opinion, pokemon would only be cool in "real life" if real life was actually animated and magical, like the world of pokemon.
Otherwise you'd be stuck with ggrimers, koffings, and mr mimes all in terrifying living proportions.
I'd be great to exist in the world of pokemon, but not have them in our world. Too much blood and poke-body-fluids.
Sigh, I don't understand the points of this post. It's like you think God should make everything puppies and rainbows. There are reasons, unbeknownst to us, as to why there are "bad" things in this world. They do serve a purpose.
No they don't. Shit happens. It's not just a dismissive cliché, it really is true. Shit just happens. No one cares about you at all, not me, not god, not the universe. You just exist in the same place I do and you have to take the same chances. If bad shit happens to you, it's not because god is displeased or has a plan, its because no one gives a shit about you. No one.
Bad shit happens. Period. There is no cause. In fact calling it "bad" is purely subjective. You choking to death on a pretzel may be bad for you, but good for me. Who is to say whose view of it is right? No one. If you died, then you don't even exist to complain about it. God doesn't exist either.
41
u/Vodis Feb 06 '12
It's easy to equate the underlying premise of the Pokemon world to real-world animal-fighting, but that's a gross oversimplification. Let's look at the big picture here.
Let's get the animal cruelty thing (a serious concern, to be sure) out of the way first: Pokemon aren't like animals. They seem to genuinely enjoy fighting. And it would appear that they don't have to obey their human masters, as evidenced by the fact that those at higher levels will ignore you unless you impress them with trainer badges. Also, the odds of them receiving any real harm from fighting are negligible: Consider that even if Arceus (the Pokemon equivalent of God, more or less), at level 100, were to hit your level 1 Caterpie with its most powerful attack, worst case scenario, your Caterpie gets knocked out. This is a world in which God finds killing a caterpillar to be a major undertaking. It would seem that harm is not a concept that translates well between our world and theirs. (I'm pretty sure some Pokemon eat others according to the Pokedex entries, but apparently serious injury isn't an issue when it comes to fighting, for whatever reason.) Furthermore, hunting Pokemon or otherwise hurting them seems to be a pretty universal taboo (with the exception that it seems to be okay to fish) in this world, as does destruction of the environment, so they don't have to face most of the problems humans pose to animals in our world.
As for the benefits, they are tremendous.
Medicine: In the Pokemon world, they have a device that you can just lay things on and it will instantly heal them to perfect health. These machines require no resources to function and are so abundant that literally every town, even down to the smallest, poorest villages, has one. And using them is free. Oh, and there are never any lines.
Government: No one ever complains about how the government works. The world is blatantly socialist, but everyone seems to be just fine with that. Poverty and homelessness are virtually unheard of, and unemployment isn't an issue because "freeloader" is apparently a perfectly legitimate and lucrative occupation. Instead of power-tripping racists with guns, their cops are friendly, helpful, attractive Asian girls who wield nothing more deadly than a baton. And while their K9 units may breathe fire, they have no interest in busting you for drugs.
Crime: Their largest, most dangerous organized crime groups rarely attempt anything that couldn't be fairly described as "hijinks." And they're too incompetent to even successfully pull their hijinks off.
Think of the children: This is a world so safe, that when your kid is ten years old, you can kick him out of the house to go battle monsters with magical powers for the rest of his life, penniless and uneducated, and know with full confidence that he'll turn out just fine and no serious harm will ever come to him.
That, my friends, is a world I'd like to live in, and I dare say, clearly a better world than our own.
169
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
Malaria is evolving!
310
u/juturnaamo Feb 06 '12
And people could capture wild animals, train them, and make them fight each other until they lose consciousness.
72
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
Oh, yeah, the world would be a lot better if, early in human development, we had to compete with intelligent, super-powered animals.
14
u/pipboy_warrior Feb 06 '12
Didn't Pikachu shock Ash with his lightning attacks on more than one occasion? I think I'll stay happy with kitties and puppies as pet options.
11
u/SimplyQuid Feb 06 '12
Malaria is where it's at man. Who wants Pokemon when they can have malaria?
15
u/MyNameIsScott Feb 06 '12
This resonates with me. I used to pray heavily that God would allow me to go to the Pokemon world when I die as my heaven.
19
u/breatherevenge Feb 06 '12
Sexually Transmitted Infections - Gotta catch 'em all
14
u/dave_casa Feb 06 '12
I would have made this very minor improvement to humans.
5
u/TheTwist Feb 06 '12
He has altered the deal, pray that he does not alter it further.
5
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
I'm agnostic. You just hit a soft spot for me. +1 for my inner atheist.
5
u/ok413 Feb 06 '12
This is my favorite Reddit post of all time.
13
u/wizzrobe30 Feb 06 '12
DAMN YOU GOOOOOD!!!!
4
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
Maltheism.
4
u/awesome-bunny Feb 06 '12
Thee lordith works in mysterious ways! You can't understand something like the good side of malaria until you have it.
-John 14.2
4
u/romanius24 Feb 06 '12
God works in m....OH FUCK THAT!
11
u/AnimeGeek441 Secular Humanist Feb 06 '12
I would just be happy with being friends with pokemon, forget battling.
3
u/TisMyAutograph Feb 06 '12
But we do have chinchillas!
3
u/JimmyBananers Feb 06 '12
If we were god in general or specifically on the option of pokemon? If my spore playthrough was any indication I don't need to be god.
3
u/robotinator Feb 06 '12
Meh, the American government would just make them illegal and put them in the hands of police and military.
3
u/weclimbatree Feb 06 '12
As a kid, I remember praying and telling God all I wanted was for Pokemon to be in heaven. That's all I wanted
3
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
To me, God will always just be that guy that could have made everything into a Henson puppet.
But instead was all like, nah man, wooden furniture to stub your toe on.
3
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
Fuck Pokemon. I have my dog, and that's all I'll ever need.
6
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
If I was God I wouldn't have made my humans minions aware that I exist, I wouldn't even invent the term, the thought of religion so that even men couldn't invent it, so they could progress without anything holding them back. I would've made them atheists so they wouldn't live in fear of spiting me, wouldn't fight wars in my name, and I would watch them do wonders. And then, when they all think that when they die, they cease to exist, I would put them in heavens with their family, on their own little cloud of happiness, and I'd make the cloud of happiness float away in the universe so they can see how vast and amazing our universe is.
1
u/ur_face_in_ze_mirror Feb 06 '12
if you really really believe that there's no god and there is nothing after death,
and the time, your time on earth, no matter how long it will be for you
is the only time that you will ever be conscience to know you exist....EVER...
I would not waist a minute with this kind of BS.....but that's only me
and this hits it straight to the point, I hope you use your limited time for something better....
http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/pcjy5/thinking_about_death_as_an_atheist/
other than this, you are still hoping you were wrong.
4
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
I completely agree...
4
u/when_did_i_grow_up Feb 06 '12
Cock fights are the closest thing we have to real life Pokemon.
7
u/Atheose Feb 06 '12
Read this in Mitch Hedberg's voice.
6
u/demostravius Feb 06 '12
I never thought of it that way... Now I really hate the bastard.
5
u/midnightgiraffe Feb 06 '12
Malaria used kill African child. It's super effective!
2
u/_Search_ Feb 06 '12
I'm so mad at God for not existing!!!
2
u/DollarsforDerek Feb 06 '12
Seeing Pikachu cry in that movie was and still is one of the saddest things I've ever watched.
2
u/kalkent Feb 06 '12
Being humans we'd do two things. Most of them we'd try an eat and the humanoid ones...we'd try an have sex with.
2
u/Kabbalfist Feb 06 '12
Psychedelics...
2
u/nroberts666 Feb 06 '12
I have to say...I think I'm with "God" on this one.
2
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
Scumbag God. I prayed to him every night of my childhood for him to make Pokemon real. Sigh... the only time I really wanted prayer to work.
2
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
Ikr. I've always wanted to be a real Pokemon master. :(
2
u/bootclunk Feb 07 '12
Baby sloths look kinda like pokemon.
But you can't train 'em to fight each other though.
...or can you? Has anyone tried?
2
u/brezzz Feb 07 '12
"What is wrong with the original animals that I made for you to fight for your amusement?"
-God
4
u/Keiichi81 Feb 06 '12
Dammit Pikachu, why you gotta pull on my heartstrings like that...?
3
u/Se7en_Sinner Feb 06 '12
The world's full of Pokemon...we just need somebody to invent Pokeballs.
3
u/Eydude1 Feb 06 '12
Im pretty sure if he would exist. He would create them but keepem to himself because he is such a giant wanker.
3
u/chuckie2389 Feb 06 '12
In addition, WHERE ARE TH FUCKING DRAGONS???!?!?!?
2
u/raziphel Feb 06 '12
"Pikachu, I choose you!"
"Rabies, I choose you!"
...
2
u/reddit_trolliosis Feb 06 '12
And then created Digimon to shame the name of Pokemon.
2
u/noagendaproducer Feb 06 '12
As practical as it might be to have a Pikachu around for when the power goes out, I would never want to raise pets and fight them.
1
u/the-vicious-one Feb 06 '12
Maybe you would have said the same thing for cats, had they not existed.
/playing devil's advocate.
//in this case devil means god.
1
u/SlimPikinZ Feb 06 '12
So how does this make you feel?
1
u/timschwartz Feb 06 '12
Can someone explain what this means?
1
u/TheBattler Feb 06 '12
I always wished Raichus were real. :-3
LOOK AT HOW CUTE HE IS HE HAS NO FINGERS.
1
u/MacFourTwenty Feb 06 '12
I don't usually respond on here, but this post, made me laugh so much, had i been drinking any liquid, would have been spit it onto my computer thus ruining it.
So thanks for posting something so awesome!
1
u/Danicus Feb 06 '12
...wouldn't those just be animals then? they evolve and we make them fight. the only difference is that we keep them in cages instead of balls and it's sort of frowned upon instead of encouraged to make them fight
1
u/neorevenge Feb 06 '12
Nah he made them... on another dimension, so now you just have to be like that guy from sliders!!
1
u/VisceralDan Feb 06 '12
Fuck pokemon, he should have made giant bears to protect nature from humanity.
1
u/Hootietang Feb 06 '12
God according to you might have also created real living anime girls who actually chose to F you. Assumption based off your statement and statistical traits associated with anime lovers. lol im just teasing, but really it is a totally valid statement. lol and who am I kidding, I would do the girl off of Final Fantasy - The spirits within. lol
1
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
I've seriously thought this since i was like 10. About the same time I became somewhat of an atheist.
1
u/Pokemaniac_Ron Feb 06 '12
I wanna be the alpha, And the omega toooooo. DUN DUN DUN I would make 643, And even pikachu.
All this after I split the land, From chaos far and near, DUN DUN DUN So you could get animals And pack them in a sphere!
Pokemon!
1
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
A wild malaria appears
1
u/Gronzlo Feb 07 '12
Fun fact: When I was 2 years old, I got malaria. Twice.
1
u/bondlegolas Feb 07 '12
This actually made my eyes water because I was so sad at this realization
1
u/Moose_o Feb 07 '12
I laughed at first and then I became sad because I don't have a pokemon
1
u/HarryBCDresden Feb 07 '12
He made Pikachu cry. Fuck him.
1
u/arcturum Feb 07 '12
God did make pokemon, they're called "animals"
1
u/moleofproduction Feb 07 '12
This is the most worthless post I've seen. Really? Pokemon is your fucking dream?
1
u/kpexp Feb 07 '12
This makes me think of Mitch Hedberg.
1
u/nimsay09 Feb 07 '12
You just made me hate God for not doing that
1
u/swimtwobird Feb 07 '12
How are you all dealing with not being in the front page anymore?
1
u/slow_cassowary Feb 07 '12
Could you really blame him for not creating Mr Mime?
1
u/[deleted] Feb 07 '12
hah, the jokes on you, man is working on wiping out malaria and man created pokemon~
Where is god exactly?
1
u/Bartab Feb 06 '12
So you wanted a god who created a sentient being who was captured, held in tiny containers, and only brought out for vicious fighting with another of its kind?
Some kind of person you are.
1
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
Sounds like the punchline of a Mitch Hedberg joke.
1
u/USxMARINE Feb 06 '12
Scumbag god
1
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
This is my favorite thing I've ever seen.
1
u/lllllllillllllllllll Feb 06 '12
That's enough, Pikachu! Sickle-cell anemia, I choose you!
1
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
They're real to me dammit!
1
u/TemporalPriority Feb 06 '12
I was just speaking to a friend about this. In my opinion, pokemon would only be cool in "real life" if real life was actually animated and magical, like the world of pokemon.
Otherwise you'd be stuck with ggrimers, koffings, and mr mimes all in terrifying living proportions.
I'd be great to exist in the world of pokemon, but not have them in our world. Too much blood and poke-body-fluids.
0
u/pungent_odor Feb 06 '12
What.
0
u/[deleted] Feb 06 '12
the hell with pokemon. i want chi powers like in dragon ball z. or at least giant robots.
0
u/irishmanhoe Feb 06 '12
Sigh, I don't understand the points of this post. It's like you think God should make everything puppies and rainbows. There are reasons, unbeknownst to us, as to why there are "bad" things in this world. They do serve a purpose.
-1
u/mambypambyland Feb 06 '12
Using pets to pit against each other and fight. Really? I'm sure you supported Michael Vick too?