Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Well that would require me to believe in satellites and photography (aren't these devices stealing your soul anyway?). It could be AI-generated for all I know.
This is not as odd as it sounds. There is a significant portion of the educated Western population who claims that God sometimes gets confused and puts a soul in the wrong body. This is something they teach children in many parts of the West.
'Don't sacrifice children because an angel told you not to' is not that odd of a belief, by comparison, imo.
But that's from growing up in a civilization that was deeply imbued with Christian values. Somebody who grew up in a Mayan city might be fine with Clancy-style late-term abortion.
Yes it does, and that is reasonable. I guess you're gesturing towards the argument of "if we are willing to believe sources like photographs, then why not also believe the Bible/Church too?".
My acceptance of videos/photographs as evidence is something I'm willing to generally apply (even to stuff that I don't like) - but I don't think stuff being written down is similarly strong evidence (and I don't think you do either, since you probably don't believe in the Quran)
No I don't believe in souls. And I'm pretty sure that even Christians, who believe in souls, don't think cameras steal them.
Good point, I think eventually photos/videos will become untrustworthy, maybe they are already untrustworthy. But I remember seeing photos of Antarctica years ago, before realistic AI image generation was a thing.
I assume you are referring to transgenderism? That's really not what most adherents believe (speaking as someone who was firmly pro-trans, and who is still broadly sympathetic to it) - given that most of us are atheists.
Some liberal detractors of transgenderism liken it to a religion by arguing a gender identity is functionally identical to a soul because lots of pro-trans people struggle to define what "womanhood" means explicitly.
But it can be done: a "trans woman" is a man who wishes to be a woman, and one's "gender identity" is just the gender/sex they wish they were (and then we redefine gender/man/woman/mother/father/etc to match gender identity instead of sex, and discourage mentions of sex) - no appeals to the metaphysical, just the phenomena of human beings having desires.
As I explained above, transgenderism boils down to the mundane claim that sometimes men want to be women, and vice-versa. I am almost certain that angels don't exist now, and never existed in the past - because I've never seen an angel, seen photographs of an angel, or heard any other convincing evidence they aren't made-up.
Sounds like you're gesturing towards the fact that atheism has no objective morality, which is a good point that I think a lot of atheists don't address. Without a God, there is just people's subjective moral preferences - "sacrificing children" (i.e. killing them for no good reason) feels immoral to me, and to many others. But if someone felt otherwise, I can't actually prove they are wrong by pointing to a line in the Bible, and they wouldn't even be "wrong", they'd just have a different taste to me (and that would be horrifying to me)
And it might even be true that humans need a God to maintain a stable society long-term. But none of that has anything to do with whether God, angels, etc exist in the first place.
Also, nice try, but I see what you did there: the pro-Clancy defence is that she was mentally unwell so it wasn't her fault. People who believe in abortion don't believe the fetus counts as human, so it's okay to kill it with full awareness of what you are doing.
My point was just that we generally at some point believe what others tell us. Whether it's that a picture in a textbook depicts something that actually happened, or that a given natural phenomena is explained by what they are saying.
Photograph-based scams are pretty much as old as the camera, like the Cottingley fairies.
It is conceivable that miniatures of icey landscapes were used in photographs with clever angles and painted backgrounds to fake Antarctica. I don't have a reason to believe that's the case but it's possible.
People who use words such as 'wrong body' are clearly referring to some kind of dualist conception of the mind - body, analogous to souls.
I've never seen a woman who can lift heavy things yet feminists will have us believe they are equal to men. Moreover, there are many things that Science has revealed to us that were prior excluded from our understanding. I can't see or smell radiation myself.
There's plenty of good reasons they come up with for these abortions.
Pure coincidence.
She was just being a girl. In her murder era. Going goblin mode on the kiddos. Being brave and independent. Performing self-care?
Pure coincidence that these people would excuse a 'true human' having a little bit of an oopsie moment while taking one of these mental health days off. Like there's some kind of slippery slope when you grant certain people the right to kill whoever they deem inferior, and celebrate it.
On a subreddit that reposts Tumblr posts, I just read a fantastic endorsement of Death Note as an examination of how monstrous people become when they’re allowed to kill without consequence. Basically, the show and manga both make it crystal clear how quickly people go from principled secret murders of bad people to convenience killings.
And all I could think was how quickly I’d be banned for life if I dared point out half of the population has the Death Note for their unborn babies. I thought of asking, “Is the Death Note a metaphor for concealed carry or Roe v Wade?”
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