Hallelujah, i remember when in Reed College we were introduced to Clifford Geertz statement about religion serving to give 'long lasting moods and motivations'. When i got into a lot of trouble from drugs, sexual immorality and all the other stuff i knew no human doctor, medication or other thing would get me well and satisfied with my wellbeing. I finally decided to follow Jesus Christ. Much more than just a mood and motivation (which is also there), i watched my illness heal and have been med free since 2014 with doctor's approval, my dad here spoke tongues in Arabic praising God without an accent (someone else astounded told us) and my dog even heal of cataracts the day after praying for her. Many prophecies that have come true many other things, feel free to message me. Above all i urge trust in the Bible and We can have a relationship with God through what Jesus did on the cross alone.
The Science of the Benefits of Religion
241–250 of 363 posts
Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am pro choice and against abortion. I don't like abortion. Nobody likes abortions. Women who feel that they need to get an abortion don't like it either. It's a horrible, traumatic procedure. But it's a reality that it needs to be legal, regulated, and safe. It's absolutely critical to civilization that women have a choice to undergo an abortion if they choose to. It's their body, their life, their future. Nobody e…
If it's a choice between the mother's life and the baby's life, because of the medical condition, I would say let the mother make the choice. But if it's a choice between the mother's feeling / opinion and the baby's life, I would say the baby's life overwrites the mother's feeling / opinion. The reason is simple, nobody gets to decide to kill the other person just because he/she doesn't like it. And the existing of…
> But if it's a choice between the mother's feeling / opinion and the baby's life, I would say the baby's life overwrites the mother's feeling
You are avoiding 100 percent of the actual dilemma. Nobody is OK with murder they disagree on what constitutes a human life. That is as they say the entire ball game which you have neatly sidestepped as if it were irrelevant. I suggest we return to it shortly.
> The only exception is the that the conception is a result of rape
This is a profoundly illogical position. It cannot possibly be OK to murder a baby regardless of whether its existence is the result of free choice of its mother. You say you "struggle with it" but how can you possibly struggle with the decision to allow infanticide? If its a person you can't kill it for your convenience.
> And many women do several times in their life. It's not a punishment, nor a definite suffering or torture.
Many people get kidney stones often multiple times. The fact that its natural doesn't mean that the experience isn't even when planned and desired torturous. Only the mother is in a position to make that judgment. Many people choose to live in small domiciles from which they only but rarely leave. This doesn't mean that for example prison isn't punitive. It is in many ways the denial of free exercise of the will over ones own person that is in fact punitive.
Let us return to the most important point.
At what point do you consider it a child and why? I think a reasonable person would agree that an unfertilized egg isn't a child but calling it a person 2 seconds after conception is very nearly as absurd. Any given egg and sperm has the potential to create life so potential wont serve as a dividing line. Some harking back to pre-scientific understanding would like to set the milestone at a heart beat but no matter how essential it may be to our existence a heart doesn't make you human. A mouse whose neck you snap in a trap to keep it from your larder has one.
There is one singular thing without which all characteristics that make you human are moot the brain. In fact one particular segment of the brain without which you would display zero meaningful human behavior, the cerebral cortex. Prior to the third trimester your brain is less meaningfully you than a squirrel. In the third trimester the surface area of the cerebral cortex increases by 30 times.
https://www.whattoexpect.com/pregnancy/fetal-development/fet...
You seem to want to sidestep this once again.
> As for when is the OK time to conduct the abortion, this is the question for people who support abortion. I don't really see the point here. The development is a continuum process. I don't believe there is a definite cut point where the humanness changes from zero to non-zero.
This is a complete cop out. As human beings we deal with situations where there is a continuum all the time. There are reasonable strategies to deal with such. Given a situation where one must pick a hard line in a complex situation where one side of the line is safe and the other dangerous you select a position far enough towards the safe side as to be certain to avoid negative consequences. This is how we are able to hire some, fire others, declare some doctors, others dropouts.
For example if nearly all fetal brain development happens between week 27 and week 38 if you select week 24 as the limit or for example week 14 by which 92% of abortions that are going to happen, happen you won't be offing what we would properly think of a human.
I hold that a fertilized egg is zero on the humaness scale. Agree or disagree? I hold that a baby viable outside of the womb is a 1. Agree or disagree? I hold that a fetus in the 27th week of development is still nearly indistinguishable from zero with a nearly nonfunctional brain incapable of consciousness or thought as we know it.
I believe that it goes from near zero to 1 almost entirely between week 27 and 38 ergo someone taking a pill to stop their pregnancy from progressing at 9 weeks is unambiguously moral.
I think the most interesting statement in your post is the statement
> in this case the conception is not a consequence of the mother's voluntary behavior.
This hints at a moralistic view as opposed to a logical one.
I suggest if you intend to defend the position that life begins at conception without benefit of the fig leaf of the fiction of the human soul you need to beg borrow or steal a different argument than life is a continuum so we can't possibly apply argumentative tools developed over thousands of years to crack that egg.
Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be a second or third order effect. It stands to reason that someone who is a part of a strong religious community would have a much better social life, support structure, and network. All of these things reduce the likelihood of getting addicted to hard drugs. You could also take it a step further and say that having such things makes breaking an addiction/rehab more likely to be successful, too.
> It stands to reason that someone who is a part of a strong religious community would have a much better social life, support structure, and network. Remove "religious" from this sentence and it is still true. Now the question remains whether a religious community is better than other communities. I doubt it, because religion usually comes with a lot of extra baggage and can become outright dangerous.
It can be better because it exists even if it's worse than some ideal but mostly non-existent community.
Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chetty also notes that his study can't be used to determine whether single parent families are a cause or an effect. Racial segregation and quality of schooling are also noted as being correlated with lower social mobility in that study. I object to the notion that there is some acceptable level of violence and abuse we need to tolerate for the dubious good that any institution might claim. There is only one acceptab…
> There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero. You don't actually believe that because governments commit violent using their police and military and you accept that.
When did I say that was acceptable?
Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
We used to believe that diseases were the result of bad smells and physicians used to go from cutting up corpses to delivering babies without substantial sanitary measures. The difference isn't lack of irrationality. To err is human after all. The difference is how science and religion move forward in response to new data.
I’m skeptical of this last sentence; I’m not sure that science is so responsive to new data either. After the myriad papers published on the replicability crisis, citation rings and the like, academic institutions have failed to change substantially with regards to either structure or process.
Science is done by humans and we're not very good at changing our opinions, in particular at institutional levels. However there is a difference between a priori stating that your dogma is infallible like religions typically do, and at least trying to follow the scientific process.
Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion
#246Every culture has some version of the golden rule yet religions claim to originate it. Most of what was studied in this article is common across all religions. Calling such practices "religion" is like calling smiling "religion". Religion co-opts nature and then, for a fee, hands it back to you. Human nature is not religion, religion puts an artificial price on that which should be enjoyed sans grift.
Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chetty also notes that his study can't be used to determine whether single parent families are a cause or an effect. Racial segregation and quality of schooling are also noted as being correlated with lower social mobility in that study. I object to the notion that there is some acceptable level of violence and abuse we need to tolerate for the dubious good that any institution might claim. There is only one acceptab…
> There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero. You don't actually believe that because governments commit violent using their police and military and you accept that.
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Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero. You don't actually believe that because governments commit violent using their police and military and you accept that.
When did I say that was acceptable?
When you said tolerating any violence was unacceptable. It takes violence to protect people from violence.
Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion
#249I feel like my life would be better if I believed in some supernatural being who loved me and cared for me and was going to bring me into his paradise of eternal ecstasy after I die. I don’t see how that couldn’t make a person happier and more able to cope with the deaths of loved ones, their own death, etc. It seems like being on a very powerful narcotic that still lets you function day to day. But I don’t see any w…
the point of genuine faith isn't to be a narcotic that let's you function in day-to-day life, it's not some sort of theological Soma out of Brave New World, it's supposed to transform, which involves a fair amount of suffering. Your life wouldn't be better if you you could believe any of that stuff, and no genuine believer treats religion or God like some sort of spiritual Xanax.
I don’t think that genuine believers treat religion like a spiritual Xanax... but I do think, and have observed, that that’s what it can often be. Especially seeing the religious people I know coping with the deaths of loved ones, and in one case the death of their child.
Re: The Science of the Benefits of Religion
#250This is something I've thought about a lot, and I say this as a diehard atheist. Historically (and even now), religion has served two useful purposes: 1. As a provider of community. There are of course other ways to socialize with wider groups. Sports clubs, going to the pub, classes, that sort of thing. But it's a lot more interest-driven and haphazard. 2. As a provider of and enforcer for a moral code. Here are som…
I'm not sure the bottom part of your argument makes sense. Religious people trust God, but I don't see a reason they would trust or distrust any specific government or news organization unless that government or news organization claimed to be divinely backed. I don't see why religion would cause someone to be more likely to blindly trust a news organization over the government. There's been a lot of US patriotism ti…
It's the authority to interpret the word of god. The authority is delegated by people you already trust to people they are trust themselves. It creates a hierarchy of power. It's easy to manipulate millions of people if you are at the top of that hierarchy. Especially when the people we're talking about have their sense of truthfulness broken at a very young age by forcing them to believe in an entity they can't see