I reject your 2nd premise. Suffering has a clear evolutionary advantage, whether physical or emotional. It is a way to incentivize us to act in ways that minimize harm to our bodies or to slow down and heal, and minimize social anguish. This leads to greater health and greater group cooperation...
I agree with @Wildswanderer in this case. I'm all for gay rights, but I don't think the employees of a politically neutral organization should be required to promote ideas that go against their conscience. This is analogous to what gay people have had to endure from heteronormative culture since...
I often hear phrases like, "Make every thought a slave to Jesus," "I'm a slave to Jesus," "Accept god's lordship in your life," etc. I don't know where this whole Jesus-is-a-servant idea plays out in the most visible Christianity of modern times. And yes, there is far too much money in organized...
People intuit, proclaim, and think various things all the time. Most of them are wrong. If you want anyone to believe you, you need to be able to point at something in the external world that matches up with your imagination, to the exclusion of all other alternative explanations. Science does...
There has been a lot of research into this topic, and a strong conclusion is that Republicans generally want unfettered access to guns because owning guns makes them feel safer from Black people. It's one of the many examples of white conservative policy being driven almost entirely by racism...
Maybe ask yourself why you completely avoided the main point of my post, and instead fixated on a way to technically reinterpret one of my side comments. I suspect the reason is cognitive dissonance, and that's a good sign that you're a better person than the portrayal of the god you worship.
Which is worse?
1. Offering governmental power, challenging people's convictions, and lying.
OR
2. Intentionally creating sapient beings, with the foreknowledge that you would torture most of them to an infinite degree, then carrying out that torture.
If I had to choose, I'd say #2 is...
Is English maybe not your first language? I can't really understand what you're trying to say in this post. It reads like it was written by a neural net algorithm.
And perhaps trickster pixies put near death experiences in our mind for fun. And perhaps we start to log out of the matrix as our brain is dying, causing those experiences. And perhaps magic conscious energy starts to transcend our realm. Who knows? Since there is no evidence for any of these...
That's why "near death" experiences are so uncompelling. Like, your brain had abnormal levels of oxygen and chemicals, and you experienced something strange? No kidding. It's exactly what a physical model of consciousness would predict, just like DMT and other psychedelic drugs can alter brain...
That's why I said "overwhelmingly" benefit. There have been studies showing that resumes are more likely to be rejected if they have a "non Caucasian" name, that infant mortality rates are halved if a black mother has a black doctor during childbirth, compared to a white doctor, that black...
Keep in mind that disapproval can be for very different reasons. There are a lot of progressives who don't approve of Biden, but that doesn't mean they're more likely to vote for a GOP alternative. I think Biden's low approval is a reflection of the face that he is more centrist than Trump was...
I'm reminded of Western allies stating that Ukraine itself should be the body that decides whether Ukraine will surrender to Russia, or what conditions it will set for an end to hostilities.
I think descendants of slaves should be the ones calling the shots on Reparation, and no one else. The...
Yep. There's a reason the US was founded as a secular nation. If you try to form policy based on religious views, you can never have a tie-breaker to chose one view over another besides violence or coercion. The framers had seen the mess in Europe, and they knew that opening that door can only...
"Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred." "
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
Just some fun quotes from Joseph Goebbels.
I'm not seeing this platform appealing to more...
Those aren't objective criteria. I asked you how can we determine which piece of writing is more eloquent than another, and you effectively answered "if one looks more perfect and has higher eloquence." That is just restating your claim. It is not an explanation. It is completely subjective. I...
No, it's not a different topic. It's a threshold. If I have no reason to think the Quran is true, then I have no reason to consider all of your Quran-based topics like Prophethood or Messengership or anything being assigned by a god. Your arguments are backwards because you are assuming the...
By "an event caused by the ego's reasoning function of the brain," what do you mean?
Do you mean the neuronal process that causes one action to be triggered by the brain instead of an alternative action? Because it is well understood how cumulative positive signals onto a single neuron, from...
This is all a bit too long.
Still, my central objection is that "an old book says so, and the book also says the book is true, and the book says that everyone secretly believes the book is true" is not a good epistemology. In fact, it is a circular and self-validating argument, and is...