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Notes -
How about a pallet cleanser?
In the other thread a few people brought up surrogacy, and maybe I've spent too much time with TERFs, but am I the only one that overwhelmed with the feeling of Lovecraftian horror whenever it's brought up? The feeling is even more uncanny, because it's like I slept through some great societal debate where everybody decided it's actually a lovely thing that should be celebrated. Although maybe it's not all that bad, there's a certain "how it started, how it's going" quality to the NYT headlines. In any case the casual way it's supporters talk about surrogacy freaks me out even more than militant pro-choicers.
Then there's the whole slippery slope thing:
Love is love, we have a right to get married just the same as you! - Yes I agree!
We also have a right to adopt! - Sure! I mean I have my issues with adoption in practice, but in principle if there are kids without parents, and willing gay couples to adopt them I don't see an issue.
We also have a right to biological children! What? Do you expect us to be ok with not having children?
Wait what? Yes I do! I'm all for tolerance, and living and letting live, but you're not going to make me see this as a lovely family moment, and anyway I don't remember signing on to turning a fundamental human experience into an industry when I supported the gay rights movement. Accept the limits of your biology, and move on.
Which brings me to Dase's idea "postrat «don't mean-spiritedly dunk on a rationalist» challenge (impossible)". Indeed, I can't help myself, and even though I used to be rat/rat-adjacent, I find myself having growing disdain for the entire philosophy. There's a meme that's slowly gathering momentum, that all the trans stuff, and 72 genders is just a foot in the door for transhumanism, and after I heard the idea for the first time, I can't seem to unsee it. This twisted ideology will drive us to throw away our humanity, turn us into a cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg, or trick us into committing suicide, because there's a subroutine running on some GPU somewhere, that's somewhat similar to the processes in our brains. Given the utter dominance of the trans ideology, the vindication of the slippery slope argument, and the extrapolated trajectory of these ideas, I believe we have no other choice - Transhumanism must be destroyed!
I find surrogacy morally absurd, in pretty much the same reaction you do. I have gone back and forth on it with @TracingWoodgrains (respectfully) before, and it is (sadly) one of the best examples of why I can't adopt a 'live and let live' perspective, although I am dispositionally inclined toward that. I think it is a a sister moral issue to abortion, involving the commoditization of children and subordinating the natural family to liquid modernistic relativism.
Where I will push back, is that I don't think it's so much a transhuman issue as another slip of the sexual liberation + LGBT slope and repudiation that gay rights had much more social effect than, people doing their thing in the bedroom. Much like Grindr-> Tinder, this is another social-sexual transformation of norms that really matured in the gay community before being adopted by elite, then PMC straights.
Of course, straight surrogacy has been in the public consciousness for a long time (Phoebe from friends had a plotline around this in the 90s). But it really became trendy in the last decade through wealthy DINKy gay couples using this as an equal access avenue to 'biological children.
You will probably be mocked here and elsewhere for the Lovecraftian horror descriptor, but it fully resonates with me. But let me back it up, and roll back my anti-LGBT perspective here. This is ALL DOWNSTREAM from contraception, socially acceptable divorce and casual sex. I have become less and less patient with people who try to propose some limiting factor to sexual liberation that stops exactly where they want it.
The Catholic view is really the only one that provides a complete and coherent counter framework against this that isn't a bunch of special pleading.
I don't disagree, like I mentioned in the other comments, I've found myself quite receptive to Catholic moral teachings, it's just that I'm still atheist. So whereas you might say "no sex before marriage, no divorce, no abortions, and no condoms, because that's what God commanded", I would say "no sex before marriage, no divorce, no abortions, and no condoms, because if you allow it, the next thing you know some smartass is going to stick Neuralink up your earhole and turn you into one of Jeff Bezos' automatons".
Well Catholicism has the additional advantage of a sub-philosophy that suggests all these morals expressed within Natural Law, which doesn't necessarily have to be founded on "God".
But you're going to run into the pushback you find in the relativism across your other responses. You're framework is dismissed as an aesthetic complain because the moral relativist, the materialist, and the moral liberalist are married in gnawing at an object morality as arbitrary.
A Natural Law view offers a complete and coherent opposite view (while other conservative or Protestant viewpoints don't imho), but it doesn't and can't address why this not that. I suggest biting the bullet and deriving a religious foundation for your moral intuition or accept being homeless in a neighborhood of transhumanists.
Natural law has nothing to do with christianity. It was invented by greek pagans hundreds of years before christianity began, and only became part of catholic doctrine in the 13th century when Aquinas brought it in, and never got baked into the other branches of christianity like it somehow did with catholicism.
In other words, it doesn't have nothing to do with it.
Which is why I explicitly said that was an advantage of Catholicism over Protestantism, in this sense.
Christianity is fundamentally about God, right? So given that natural law came into one branch of christianity in the way that it did, the fact that there is no compelling indication that God cares about natural law is an argument against that branch of christianity moreso than it is against my point, unless you think Thomas Aquinas is the second coming of jesus or something.
It is an advantage in what sense? Its not like it makes catholicism more likely to be true than protestantism, or the coptic church, greek orthodox church, armenian apostolic church etc.
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I don't mind biting the bullet, but accepting a religious foundation requires faith, and that's something I'm lacking at the moment. Maybe the day will come, but it hasn't yet.
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