Alan

Anyone who’s been under general anesthesia knows what it’s like.

Indeed. Under certain kinds of anesthetic, it’s like nothing happened at all between going under and coming back to Earth. It’s slightly creepy. But I think a more interesting comparison is simply: before you were born. Remember what life was like before you were conceived? Tha…[Read more]

I since learned that Facebook is NOT the place for anything resembling a meaningful or intelligent discussion

Yes. I don’t think you are losing much by disengaging from social media.

To laugh at my weight struggles? To put me down?

Be it religiously motivated or not he sounds like a toxic asshole. A 15 page rant under any circumstances is extremely agressive. Smashing you over the head like that with your belief/non-belief is ugly to say the least. Accepting an apology but not giving one? Allowing a facebook post to wreck a…[Read more]

Indeed it has been pointless. Because if I knew you were a radical postmodernist I wouldn’t have bothered answering your challenge to my argument (which was quite a rich thing to do considering everything is simply based on perspective). The inconsistencies and unresolved conflicts within post modernis. and the accompanying fear of knowledge is…[Read more]

Yes, Blaise Pascal worked that out long ago.

In reality the reverse of Pascal’s wager makes a whole lot more sense. Live as though our Earthly time is all we have. If you live as though there is no afterlife, then you will make the most out of the only being you have. If it turns out that we do live on some magical plane after we die, then at…[Read more]

Okay Ivy. Thanks for answering question number 3.  I was hoping you’d address the “at least more objective” part but we can get back to that later.

Questions 1 and 2 are far more interesting. Could you answer those please?

There’s way more evidence that God does exist than evidence that he doesn’t.

Ivy I find this claim of yours super fascinating. Could you answer three questions?

1. Could you give an example of evidence that God exists (reliable evidence, not mere claims).

2. Could you give an example of evidence that God doesn’t exist (this is a part…[Read more]

Ivy you are consistently responding to this fork in the conversation that misses my original point, which I don’t think you get and it seems you are entirely distracted on a very different topic of conversation. You are talking about “the way the world really works” and folk psychology. I don’t remember anyone bringing that up except you. Nobody…[Read more]

What is green and smells like pork???

They are all countries opposed to, or the antithesis of “secular”. Several of those countries are not muslim. Burma is Bhuddist and Uganda is Christian. All these countries have used their predominant religions to dictate laws which either impose brutal punishments on victimless crimes like acts of LGTB love (all), renouncing your religion (most…[Read more]

Part of the concept of God that underlies the Western ethos is the notion that whatever God is, is expressed in the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies

I don’t speak double dutch and there is no google translate for gobbledegook. Could you please explain this to me without the word-torturing and in a manner that is:

1.…[Read more]

imposes intelligible patterns of order onto nature’s chaos

We are really going to have to have a deepity competition this weekend. We all get to submit 10 intellectually poignant sounding and yet confusing and meaningless insights and then we will vote for the one that we can turn into a 500 page book: an attempt to explain the foundations for m…[Read more]

I think that to Jordan Peterson, the idea of God is a placeholder for our “higher nature”.

That’s another needlessly vague deepity. If God is our “higher nature” then use the term higher nature. Don’t inject judeo-Christian mythology and values into the mix, especially when God’s behaviour in that tradition is often anything but of a “higher nat…[Read more]

Very few people are real trained scientists that properly understand how to “evaluate claims” the way that you describe. And if there’s anybody on the planet to understand this process the least it is the politicians making the laws!

People use this kind of reason when they try to figure out why their jewelry is missing, defend themselves in court…[Read more]

If the USA was founded on theft, murder and genocide, the charges must be answered by themselves. What other countries did is irrelevant.

It was and this is glossed over in most American history books and barely seen in Americana. All colonial empires did unspeakable things and all but Russia admit so. They appologized unreservedly and gave some,…[Read more]