aaa
5mo ago
I'm very skeptical that there has been a significant change in access to porn in the past 25 years.
aaa
6mo ago
PS. I'm glad that the religious right is making a comeback because maybe they can succeed in making sex negativity uncool again.
aaa
10mo ago
You lose a lot of the persuasive power of the argument if you admit that there are things (Jesus Christ) that appear to be moving but do not in fact count as "moving" for the argument. The observation that there are some things that move falls away, as far as I am concerned everything could be like Jesus and actually be motionless.
The problem with those biblical quotes is that there is a colloquial meaning to change and a philosophical one, cosmological arguments only work with the latter but those quotes in context point to the former.
aaa
9mo ago
this or something close to this might be right
Seriously? Sarah Palin was 49 years old 10 years ago so definitely not fertile. She was also not attractive in any conventional sense of the term.
aaa
1mo ago
It's about Natural Law. The problem is, moderns confuse the natural in "Natural Law" with natural as in "what happens naturally, what happens in nature, anything that happens that nobody tried to make happen on purpose" and that's the wrong kind of "natural".
Metacommentary: I wouldn't pursue this line of argumentation. At best your interlocutor will be utterly confused and think it's complete nonsense. At worst you'll have to end up defending extremely shoddy concepts of teleology.
aaa
5mo ago
I think you are reaching here. In general governments can't compel you to do any work, save for a few exceptions. The european declaration of human rights for example carves out 4 exceptions: prison labour, military service, emergency service and normal civic obligations.
For prison labour you would have to make the argument that prostitution is a necessary part of the rehabilitation process, which seems far fetched. Also most countries already ban prison labour for non-violent offenders (the US is basically the only western exception) and prostitution with a murderer seems a dicey proposition (I would want a prison guard supervising it, at least).
For military service I think the prostitution would have to be limited to other members of the military to count. You couldn't make the argument that prostitution to the general public is military activity, for example. However you could make prostitution one of the civil service options for conscentious objectors. I'm not sure if you could make it the only option. Also most countries have already abolished the draft so most governments could only do this during war.
An interesting case is emergency services, actually. In Iverson v. Norway it was determined that Norway could compel dentists to perform dentistry (for appropriate remuneration). You could use this to redistribute prostitutes (which tend to cluster in big cities) across your nation's entire territory. You could also make the argument that incels represent a national emergency that needs to be solved. But what principle would you use to compel incels to have sex with prostitutes? Probably something about involuntary treatments.
Normal civic obligations is probably your best bet. The case law on this is pretty nebulous, it's unclear what counts and you could make it like jury duty. I suspect it would get shot down, though.
aaa
9mo ago
Renaissance Europe is a very obvious example of a civilization which was both very scientifically/technologically advanced, and also deeply interested in religious/devotional matters
Intellectual work in renaissance europe was very different from today, the primary mode of argumentation was appeal to authority: they "knew" earth was spherical because aristotle said so, they "knew" it like they "knew" that nerves connected to the heart (not the brain), that planets were carried by large solid spheres of quintessence and that heavy objects fell faster.
They were doing "science" (the word is anachronistic in this context, but whatever) the same way they were doing theology: commentary on a small corpus of approved authors that were assumed to be nearly infallible and to contain the totality of all possible knowledge. It's no wonder that intellectual work and religiosity was compatible.
The cathedrals are beautiful but they are also not designed by intellectuals but by semi-literate head masons. And, tbh, when you understand why all the flying buttresses are really there they start to look kind of ugly.
aaa
5mo ago
And in your opinion something nobody fully understands is less of a shit test than believing in perpetual virginity?
aaa
5mo ago
Broadband was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now
My guess is that anyone who wanted broadband in 2004 had it. In the US penetration was 25% for broadband and 30% for dialup and dialup started declining in 2001. And dialup back then was completely fine for porn. The internet adoption curve post 2000 is a lot flatter than you'd think
Pornographic content was not as extreme or 'hardcore' as it often can be today.
Hard disagree on this one. Back in the Kazaa days you would easily download CP by accident.
I dunno, man. I remember what it was like downloading porn as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s. A lot of grainy 30-second clips, a lot of slow download speeds, a lot of waiting for Kazaa to finish up (sometimes days).
I have a hard time believing any of this would make much of a significant difference.
Maybe it was a gradual phenomenon that sloped real hard with the advent of 'hub sites. But that's still good enough as a marker IMO.
Fair enough but even hub sites are almost 20 years old at this point, youporn for example launched in 2006.
aaa
9mo ago
The problem with singling out Jesus as special (or as some kind of flesh robot remotely piloted by god) is that these are heretical (the former would be a kind of Docetism the latter similar to Apollinarianism), Jesus is supposed to be real god and real man.
The problem with making "motion" have a special meaning is that the argument is generally taken to proceed from self evident, observable properties of the universe and making "motion" be some metaphysical property would take that away. I'd argue that the distinction between per se and per accidens already does that but whatever.
Predestination is a whole other can of whorms with the free will problem, the soteriology problems, etc.
aaa
10mo ago
I think the comparison with Newton, assuming you are referring to Newton's works in physics and optics, is unwarranted because him and Pseudo-dyonisius stand on opposite sides of an epistemological divide. Pre modern intellectual work was primarily about interpreting and finding truth within a canon of works of authors in the antiquity. We don't care who wrote Newton's Principia because they stand on the strength of their argument and of empirical evidence. You can't say the same thing about De Coelesti Hierarchia because it doesn't make any argument it just states some facts that have been revealed to the author through divine revelation.
When all of your arguments are appeals to authority, who the author is becomes extermely important. Are you really going to believe some anonymous guy that tells you they received divine revelation when they are also pretending to be a mythical character that lived 500 years earlier?
aaa
10mo ago
Think about it from the perspective of someone who is already religious: you are already prepared to believe on faith that the gospels are a historical account. Many miracles would have only a few witnesses, so it is not surprising that they would not be recorded by historians (there probably were many false accounts of miracolous healers at the time and it would get lost among the fakes). But some of them are so huge and public that they couldn't escape notice.
As far as I am concerned I only believe (1) and partially (6) of that list with any certainty. There's too much conjecture in this part of history, if this standard of proof was applied uniformly we would believe in the existence of the philosopher stone too.
aaa
10mo ago
I’m merely pointing out that the specific argument “the Prime Mover argument is wrong because even a Prime Mover would need a mover” is a bad argument
Yes, you are right about this. I've just been thinking about this for a while and latched on to your message to write it down since you also said: "You’re rejecting Christians’ conception of God out of hand, but then acting like you actually refuted their argument". The argument has other problems, though.
aaa
2mo ago
The guy is probably old and doesn't want to run a landscaping business anymore. Now he takes what he can get. Because that is what the market will bear.
Oftentimes in those cases the guy running the business is the business. Once he leaves the business is essentially worthless, existing clients will re-evaluate who they are buying from: you spent a million dollars and you would be in the same position if you had started your own landscaping business in the same area.
aaa
9mo ago
The argument of @OracleOutlook is (usually) an argument by necessity, "it is logically impossible that god does not exist because..."
aaa
5mo ago
Even from an atheist perspective, I feel like the Trinity is a weak example of that?
Maybe you don't really understand the doctine of the trinity? It's something that you can't logically explain or understand but you have to believe. I'm not even sure what it could mean to believe something you don't understand.
Any attempts at making it make logical sense have been declared heretical, for example:
- Jesus was a human but operated like a remote controlled meat robot for God: adoptionism
- Jesus didn't exist before he was born in human form: socinianism
- Jesus never actually had a human body, he was something different throughout: docinianism
- Jesus is actually a separate thing from God: arianism
- Father, Son and Spirit are three different forms taken by God (kinda like water can be liquid, ice or vapor): modalism
aaa
6mo ago
This is pretty much correct. The entire political online discourse is now "what can I do/say/believe that will make my outgroup mad?"
aaa
2mo ago
PS. someone referencing himself as a "young buck" is probably the cringiest thing I've seen this year so far.
aaa
2mo ago
A piece about the alt right that doesn't mention Yannapoulos, Bokhari and the wider anti-sjw sphere looks completely delusional to me. It's true that there is a real distinction between the Alt Right™, led by Richard Spencer, and the wider anti-sjw movement of the late 2010s that got lumped in as "alt right", sometimes without even being on the right. However the former was basically along for the ride, Richard Spencer was a marginal figure in his own heyday.
aaa
10mo ago
It's amazing to me how much sway the aristotelian unmoved mover god has on a religion that clearly describes a moving, changing god. In genesis god has human emotions, moves around and even shows up at the door of Abraham, on earth. In other words he behaves more like Odin (or rather Baal) than like god-the-philosophical-entity. And even if you discount genesis (and much of the old testament) as analogical writing and superstitions of simple people, how can it be that Jesus is god and also that god is unmoved, unchanging, simple, etc?
For problems with cosmological arguments see Sobel, Logic and Theism, chapter 5.
aaa
11mo ago
The fact that it “knows” as much factual information as it does is simply remarkable
There's enough parameters in there that it isn't that surprising. In a way, however, it's a sign of overfitting.
aaa
5mo ago
Of course. That said if you take the Ghost-in-the-Machine view you can feel just as secure as pure materialists in that nothing that's been discovered so far reinforces the idea that mind is made of matter.
I think this is where we disagree. I would say that everything that we have discovered so far does reinforce the idea that mind is just an emergent property of the brain: the effects of brain injuries on the mind, the effect of psychotropics, of anesthesia, the physiological roots of various memory related syndromes (korsakov, etc). The things we have failed to discover also point to no mind-separate-from-matter: parapsychology, out of body experiences, remote viewing, auras, so-called near death experiences.
The existence and spread of the mind-as-matter theory is a testament to this since it is so counterintuitive. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the only real strike against it is that it is so counterintuitive because of the (presumed) universal subjective experience of consciousness.
25 years puts us in 1999 when internet porn was already widely available. Make that 20 and people even have broadband and can watch videos too. I don't know what you think the heyday of porn is, pornhub? They didn't invent internet pornography, there were plenty of before then. But really, mindgeek was founded almost exactly 20 years ago. Time flies.
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