E

Hey Reg!  Thank you!  Great year of Sunday School 🙂

Have a great week everyone and a very Happy Christmas!

_Robert_ wrote:
They real plan is to privatize social security/medicare and get that money into the stock market. So first they have to screw it up and then they will get away with it. America is dumber than a box of hammers.

Hopefully, dumb as they are, it will become undeniable that the food shortages, restaurant closures, increasing rents, and…[Read more]

They real plan is to privatize social security/medicare and get that money into the stock market. So first they have to screw it up and then they will get away with it. America is dumber than a box of hammers.

Fuck around and find out, as they say. And the GOP will find out, I predict, in the midterms and in the next presidential election.

Immigrant workers are already going back into the woodwork rather than risk deportation, and the Republican dream of taking everyone off entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid and forcing them to accept the vacant…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
I frame the question of abortion as a healthcare choice.

Well, yeah, but (as a pro-lifer might say) what about the health of the baby?

There is a deep divide over this issue and it’s not a disagreement over facts (which would make it solvable). Rather, it’s a disagreement in attitudes.

Idiocracy.

I frame the question of abortion as a healthcare choice.

Simon Paynton wrote:

Unseen wrote:
It gets more complicated when the acts are individual (like whether to get an abortion) rather than social.

But the abortion question is framed as the greater good for the child – on either side.

It’s often “framed” by people who aren’t facing the question and the woman facing the choice has already set aside “…[Read more]

The debates on the existence of free will have been poisoned by “the god question.” The science on this topic is inconclusive. Science does not presuppose the answer. Theists however must have it exist to satisfy religious claims. They need relieve their god of the suffering and evil in his world.

Simon Paynton wrote:

Unseen wrote:
“Evil” is defined in different ways in different times, places, and communities. In Sparta, for example, it wasn’t evil to murder deformed or weak babies.

But they were doing it for unselfish reasons: for the greater good. That’s not so different from our conception of good and evil.

It gets more complic…[Read more]

After hearing Trump today on the spending deal, I have decided to stop listening to him and to Vance when he takes over. Who voted for Elon Musk, btw?

We have a pond on the property. In it, lives a really old, really big snapping turtle. I watched it grab a blue heron by the leg as I was lounging on the beach with a dram of whisky. The bird would get free and then get pulled under again. Over and over. Finally, just a few feathers floating in the water. All because of Eve. The lion does not lay…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
@robert “Evil” is defined in different ways in different times, places, and communities. In Sparta, for example, it wasn’t evil to murder deformed or weak babies. Even today, is abortion evil? Depends who you ask, doesn’t it?

Evil in the context of a “loving, all powerful god” is all and any suffering that he could easily prevent…[Read more]

@Robert

“Evil” is defined in different ways in different times, places, and communities. In Sparta, for example, it wasn’t evil to murder deformed or weak babies. Even today, is abortion evil? Depends who you ask, doesn’t it?

Free will (as gifted by a loving god) as a way to explain away the problem of evil is such a provincial human excuse in stupidity. The idea that Adam and Eve lived in a perfect world without “evil” is stupid. There could be no evil tempting serpent, LOL. The idea that a single act of disobedience (as defined by a dictator) by one person (Eve)…[Read more]

The first line of my above post should read “The notion of free will has many problems,…” (emphasis mine)

The notion of free has many problems, the first one being defining it. And, of course, one of the easiest and least honest of ways of “solving” a problem is to define it away.

One of the dishonest ways of giving us free will is to define it in a way such as this: “If you can do something you want to do and no external person or force is making…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:

PopeBeanie wrote:
You define determinism as natural law, which is consistent with its standard use in science and philosophy: every event or state of affairs results from prior states according to fixed laws.

I realize I frame determinism that way but to be more precise every state of affairs is the result of its antecedents.…

[Read more]