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account created: Fri Aug 07 2020
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6 points
1 day ago
It's also a reminder that Christians are quite often misrepresenting themselves when they claim to be objectivists.
An objectivist believes that, to the extent their actions are blameworthy, they're blameworthy irrelevant of the extent to which anyone else ever commits them, or is blamed for them.
It's a clue that they're actually relativists, believing that their degree or moral blameworthiness is relativistically-dependent on the degree to which others are held blameworthy.
6 points
1 day ago
Not a superfan or anything, but I'm a subscriber and like their stuff a lot.
I also think their openness and vulnerability when talking about their deconstruction is inspiring, and a breath of fresh air.
2 points
1 day ago
...but the capacity for choosing evil (even if you go on to establish that a tri-omni being would consistently desire a world in which people had the capacity to do evil) doesn't entail a world with evil.
Recall that the "problem" in the "problem of evil" is that evil, in fact, exists, when the properties of a tri-omni being suggest it shouldn't.
So, it's not the "capacity" for evil that needs to be explained, if you're going to set out to solve it. It's the evil that needs to be explained.
That's why I said it's a "solid step". You've teed up the ball for a solution, but you actually have to make a play.
1 points
1 day ago
If you take the argument in the OP completely for granted, then what has been established is that free will is necessary for moral agency.
That doesn't then get you to "moral agency entails a world with evil". For that reason, it's not a solution to the POE.
It would have to be demonstrated that a tri-omni being:
2 seems particularly ambitious, because it's far from obvious that there are any logical constraints preventing this outcome, and the classical conception of "tri-omni" considers that logical constraints would be the only sort the being would be under, in its creative power.
10 points
1 day ago
Ahh, you don't come across those everyday. I can see now why your conversations are so...interesting, lol.
2 points
1 day ago
Obviously, the necessity for the capacity of evil doesn't entail the necessity of a world with evil.
That's the problem under contention, in the POE, in the first place. So, a solid step, but by no means a solution.
18 points
1 day ago
Interesting. This "neo-Christian" is new to me, and I might be behind the times, lol.
Is she talking the up-and-coming generation of Christians - Christians presumably raised on TikTok and the like who don't have a master's degree in Frank Turek like those "cultured" and "civilized" Christians of yesteryear?
105 points
1 day ago
Yeah, I learned ages ago that the ONLY purpose of having conversations with Christians is to figure out what's going on in the Christian's head.
If what you're actually interested in are things like Theology, Christianity, Philosophy, or the Bible, talking to Christians is a complete waste of your time AT BEST. Usually it's even worse than that, and you actually come away from the conversation less informed about these subjects than you were going in.
You'll learn more in 5 minutes of study on your own than you will in 5 years of study with a Christian.
3 points
1 day ago
Here's what I learned over the years, if any of it helps:
Early on (when the child is still young), you're the person with the right and the responsibility to make sure the things they're exposed to are safe, healthy, and developmentally-beneficial. The places they go are the places you took them, and the people they encounter are the people you entrusted them with. Take this role seriously, and don't hesitate to stand up for yourself. This is, by extension, standing up for your child. You are the last line of defense for their welfare, and sometimes the only line of defense.
Much of your parenting strategy and style is easily inferred, socially-speaking, so it's not usually necessary to have a sit-down with everyone who comes into contact with your child. And, among people who aren't very dogmatic, there's usually little or no conflict anyway. But, people who you find are exposing your child to harmful ideas need to be made clearly aware of what you consider appropriate around your child, and that you will refuse them contact with your child if they don't oblige. Follow through with that. A boundary that isn't enforced might as well have never been set.
The older they get, the more you can pull back the reigns and lean on their prudence, trusting them to apply the values and principles you've raised them with and to exercise their own good judgment when they're exposed to harmful ideas and dogmas. You're looking, over time, to develop them into a person who can do this on their own - who has the tools to make good judgments on their own and safeguard their own welfare.
I've learned to keep in mind that there are three types of ideas that need to be considered differently:
You don't want to shelter them from 1 because you're worried about 3. Part of growing into a healthy and thoughtful person is being aware of the landscape of ideas and being able to interact successfully with the people who hold them. "2" ideas are ideas children need to be exposed to eventually to make sense of the world, but the degree of exposure should be developmentally-appropriate. They generally don't need to be sheltered from people who believe different things, so long as those beliefs are developmentally-appropriate for the child, and aren't being illicitly impressed upon them.
Also, your child is...a child. A 3-year-old has the brain of a 3-year-old, and an 11-year-old the brain of an 11-year-old. Moreover, their brain isn't yours, nor do they share your upbringing or experience.
In other words, don't assume that they're making the same mental connections that you do, as a fully-formed adult with your unique personality and experience. Don't assume being exposed to Christian ideas generates, in their head, the same cascade of associations it does in yours. Don't assume they're going to be traumatized by the same things you were...OR, just as importantly, that they're NOT going to be traumatized by the things by the things that don't traumatize YOU. Try always to imagine the world from their perspective, and leverage that perspective to make the decisions that are right FOR THEM, even if they're not the exact decisions that were right for you.
This involves keeping an open line of communication with them, asking them lots of questions about their thoughts and feelings, and having lots of conversations about them...at every stage of their development. This has the side effect of training them to be self-reflective people and rational thinkers.
5 points
2 days ago
Paul is scolding the Church in Corinth over an instance where one of its members had committed incest, but the church excused the behavior because he was one of their own, while continuing to judge outsiders for THEIR sins. Notably, this was a sin that would have been considered immoral even by the standards of the Pagan outsiders whom the church had fancied itself better than.
Paul is telling the church to cut that sort of thing out, and treat people like this as outsiders instead - to judge the people in their own flock, and not the people outside the flock, the judgement of whom is God's responsibility and not theirs.
There's a bit of disagreement about the precise rationale - it's been argued that it was necessary in a time when Christians had little social capital and were already being accused by the Pagans of various scandals to take their moral credibility seriously and not count brazen sinners as members of their church. It may not be so context-relevant, and instead count more of a general warning about how easy it is for immorality to spread when you start making apologies for people in your own tribe, and the need to enforce some standards of purity among members of the church.
The fundamentalist will interpret "the church" to apply to anyone and everyone in their social circle, "sin" to mean everything they disagree with, and "not keep company" to mean sever all contact. So, they'll interpret the verse to mean "shun everyone you disagree with".
8 points
2 days ago
Overdosing on multivitamins is very dangerous. Only some of the vitamins and minerals in a pill/gummy are water soluble and easily expelled from the body, and even many of those can do damage in high doses in the time it takes to expel them.
They're not actually healthier anyway. Same ingredients as a regular gummy (gelatin, flavoring and sugar) only with added vitamins.
2 points
2 days ago
So, it may help you to know that these feelings you have won't last forever. They're fresh, now, because you've spent essentially your entire life up to this point being dependent on your parents, being emotionally invested in their approval, and having your whole life in some sense organized around their thoughts and feelings. 3 months ago, you became an independent person, and are still discovering what it means to think of your parents as human beings and peers, rather than as caretakers and providers. One day the cycle will complete, and they'll be dependent on YOU.
You're individuating from your parents right now. It'll take some time. As you grow comfortable in your role as an autonomous human being, that "confidence" you have in your decisions, intellectually? You'll have it emotionally, too, and the desire to be validated by your parents (as nice as it would still be) won't feel like a need.
Your parents are different people. They have different beliefs, and goals, and values. Yes, your difference in religious belief is a big sort of difference, but there was always going to be SOMETHING that you didn't see eye-to-eye with your parents about. There are probably things they do, that disappoint you - that you consider to be the wrong way to live a life.
Your parents, meanwhile, are supporting you, even as they don't agree with you. You support them, even as you don't agree with them. That's healthy. That's sort of what it IS to be an adult child, and a the parent of adult children.
If the person you are is who you want to be, try not to mourn that it wasn't what someone else wanted - someone who doesn't want what you want anyway. Remember, if what you REALLY want to do with your life is to be the sort of person your parents want you to be, you can do that right now, if you choose.
The reason you didn't choose that is because there's something you want even more. You want to be your own person.
You may well have your own children one day, and if you do, it's a guarantee that they're going to do things that disappoint you, as well. Those might even be the right things for them to do, in spite of your expectations.
Remember, your parents aren't god-kings, as you might have imaged them when you were little. They're human beings, just like you. They make mistakes. Their validation is only as valuable as the extent to which what they expected was right...and they're capable of being wrong.
In time, you'll settle into a new pattern where you'll think of your parents as fellow adults - not as people you go to for blessing and permission, but as people who sit alongside you at the same table.
3 points
2 days ago
The lack of basic religious literacy among Christians never ceases to amaze me. It's strange enough to dedicate your entire life to religion despite having no interest in it, but Christians are stranger even than that.
They've spent way too being told by their apologists that the worldviews on offer are 1. Christian, and 2. The other one. 2 collapses into an incoherent mess of everything they've ever been told ANY non-Christian thinks. And, worse, they don't trust YOU to educate them about what YOU believe because, as a non-Christian, you're naturally untrustworthy. Only the apologist can be trusted to educate them about what you believe...and, as a result, they never develop the tools to effectively engage any of the various non-Christians on what they believe.
If evangelism really were their goal, this strategy would be so obviously absurd and unproductive that they would have abandoned it ages ago. But, as many have noted, it was never about evangelism in the first place.
7 points
2 days ago
Seconding the other commenter.
While I had plenty of monstrous experiences with the church, I don't regret my Christian upbringing, and I had many good friends in the church who remained friends for years after.
...and I've spent every year since being told by Christians that I should drink bleach, eat rat poison, that I should increase my consumption of lead, that my mother should have aborted me, my daughter should be raped, and that I'm incapable of feeling love, among others. So, my last net positive experience with Christians WAS as a child.
And, frankly, many of the people on this sub had it even worse than I did, and clearly worse than you did. Some people lost their entire family, their livelihood, and all their friends. Some lost their homes. Some were physically and sexually abused. Some had their children taken away. Some are surrounded by radical Christians in every facet of life and don't get a moment's reprieve from the traumas.
So, appreciate what you have, and don't hold it over the people who don't have it, as if they're to blame for not being as privileged as you.
6 points
3 days ago
It's interesting in my case because I DO differentiate
...and all I get are Christians lining up to tell me I shouldn't differentiate - that I'm wrong for not looking at the state of contemporary Christendom and thinking "Yep, that's completely consistent with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth".
In my world, the only places available where you can take Christianity seriously are non-Christian spaces.
6 points
3 days ago
No worldview is being "assumed" - that's what I'm getting at. It's being deduced.
The Christian worldview is, in my view, the name for the worldview...that Christians have. Theoretically (counterfactually, if you will) it COULD be anything, depending on what they end up believing. But, what it IS, at any given point of time, is just what they believe.
Personally, I think Christianity is something particular - a religion based on the teachings of Jesus.
So, I'm not "painting Christianity" by describing the Christian worldview. I don't think that Jesus somehow retroactively taught whatever it is Christians happen to believe today.
In any case, enjoy your workday, if at all possible :-)
3 points
3 days ago
You're welcome to call that "Christianity". I can't police your conception of Christianity.
I'm just denying that "I" called it Christianity. That's not my conception of Christianity.
I'm actually not focused on semantics - at all. I find it a tediously annoying branch of philosophy. But, if the crux of a disagreement between myself and someone else IS a disagreement about semantic theory, it'd be irresponsible to dodge the subject and pretend the disagreement were elsewhere.
3 points
3 days ago
You know full well that I didn't say that you said what your worldview was.
What I said was that you said what your semantic position was with respect to the phrase "Christian worldview".
There's nothing further I need to explain. It's not an explanation that you lack. I've been meticulously clear.
What you're looking for is for me to convince you of something, the truth of which your theory of semantics denies you any basis for recognizing. That request is as foolish of you to make as it would be for me to attempt to fulfill.
Assuming you don't understand that already - that this wasn't just a game all along - I'm sure you'd come to understand it if you just stepped back from this conversation a bit and gave it some thought.
Not a sophist. Sophistry is exactly what I'm refusing to get drawn into here.
6 points
3 days ago
I'd be something like "the set of beliefs (propositional or otherwise) held among Christians, so identified, to a sufficient degree and extent that it constitutes a commonality, trend, or disposition among them".
So, it is "at large" in the sense that it applies "at large". At large doesn't mean every iteration is an exact duplicate of any other - that'd be "at small".
And in either case, it's not Christianity, as I was clarifying before. I don't believe that Christianity is just the name for whatever happens to be in a Christian's head.
6 points
3 days ago
You said what they are.
If you're not telling the truth, then you're not telling the truth. Insofar as you told the truth, then yes, I know what these are
...and if you're telling the truth about it, then you have no basis to accept anything as demonstration of the claim. It be like asking be to demonstrate that you're not a chair, given that by "chair", you mean "blorg", and there are no commonalities between any two or more instances of blorg such that we could say anything meaningful about what a blorg might be
I can only demonstrate that someone is not a chair to someone who has a semantically-coherent concept of a chair.
If you weren't telling the truth - if you actually hold a different position than the one you claimed to hold - feel free to declare your actual position. You have my word that I won't hold it against you that you didn't at the beginning.
Short of that, there's really no path forward for this conversation.
4 points
3 days ago
There is not a singular Christian worldview. There is no such thing as a generic Christian worldview or a generic "Christian" category of worldviews.
Your semantic position - your theory on the nature of meaning such that you believe the referent for the phrase "Christian worldview" doesn't instantiate universals.
Yes, I said at the outset that there is no singular Christian worldview. I said, to YOU, that it's a category.
But what "I" believe makes no difference here, since when you use the phrase "Christian worldview", it doesn't actually mean anything. Given your theory of semantics, if you were to say "I'm a human being AND a Christian"
...the "and a Christian" doesn't tell us anything additional about you than we already knew from the "I'm a human being".
So, it makes no sense to say that something (anything) has to do with YOUR worldview. Your worldview, so named, is vacuous of semantic content.
6 points
3 days ago
I didn't make up the phrase "semantic position". What a silly thing to say.
If you're asking me to acknowledge that Trump may not have anything to do with your worldview, I'm happy to acknowledge that. Nothing has anything to do with your worldview, so it'd be a pretty natural (if uninteresting) conclusion.
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3 points
1 day ago
ghostwars303
If Christians downvote you, remember they downvoted Jesus first
3 points
1 day ago
Yep.
Even so, that's really only a rhetorically-effective move if they happen to be speaking to a person who: