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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • There is probably a natural instict to it …

    I don’t see how any of this supports or meaningfuly elaborates on your original claim.

    Morality is still subjective, but we can choose to apply objective criteria to it. Animals can still infringe on human morality regardless of if we choose to hold them morally responsible.

    sure they had knowledge that it was wrong to eat the fruit, just not about everything else, eg, nudity. They ate the fruit out of malice.

    I don’t recall anything in Genesis or the rest of the Bible that could possibly support this.

    I’m fairly certain there isn’t anything that supports this. You’re simply claiming it’s true, to which I can simply say it’s not.

    Genesis 3:17-19, Romans 8:18-23

    These two texts, at best, support the idea that Adam’s sin is the reason natural disasters happen and in my opinion, even that is a stretch. They do not suggest that our sins cause natural disasters.

    Even if I grant you that point, you still don’t need to invoke sin or the Bible to explain natural disasters. Hindus probably have their own etiological myth to explain natural disasters, but the existence of the myth doesn’t prove their gods or religious concepts have anything to do with the natural disasters.

    Plus, I found a passage that actually refutes this idea. Luke 13:1–5. Jesus explicitly says they are wrong to assume the 18 victim’s sins had anything to do with the disaster they died from.

    Overall, the state of many of these countries is due to greed. Which is sinful. The love of money is the root of all evil.

    I don’t disagree with that. The problem is that you’re being unnecessarily vague to the point of being incorrect.

    You chose to say “sin” rather than “greed”. You chose a word that includes things like mockery, homosexual sex, and pride. This makes your claim imply those things cause people to be impoverished. And somehow start a hurricane.

    This is why those far-right preachers I mentioned love to preach this rhetoric. Why else choose language that includes homosexual sex and cross dressing instead of “greed”?

    People listening to you are likely to think you’re probably a homophobe/transphobe. Hence them not giving you a chance, being hostile, and downvoting you.

    Marginalising and instilling prejudice against a group of people is sinful.

    I’m willing to grant you that because I don’t feel like searching the Bible again. But at the end of the day, the Old Testament saying “crossdressing and homosexual sex is an abomination to the LORD your God”(paraphrased) is the root of the vast majority of the marginalization of queer people. Using the word “sin” here is still too vague.

    The Old Testament codified these gender/sexual norms into law, religious institutions enforced these rules, and for the longest time in the western world, these rules were absorbed into our laws. And in a lot of the middle east they’re still there.

    I’m not suggesting that all Christians/Muslims/Jews/etc. are homophobes or transphobes or whatever. But the marginalization against us didn’t come from nowhere. And it didn’t come from a nebulous concept like “sin”.

    I’ll assume what happened in the USA. Which yes, …

    Same story. Invoking sin here is too broad, and it sounds like you’re saying traits like wrath, lust, greed, and sloth cause people to be marginalized and impoverished, which just just isn’t accurate. It also makes your claim sound prejudiced.



  • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldApple (SMBC)
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    2 days ago

    That destroys someone’s shelter and potentially injures or kills them. Not to mention the mental grief losing your home causes people. That is not good for their well-being.

    (Edit): Also, I’m not even saying it’s a good moral system. In fact I don’t think it’s possible to have an objective moral standard that isn’t majorly flawed or incomplete.

    I’m saying definitionally we can measure morality objectively, not that it’s a good idea.


  • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldApple (SMBC)
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    2 days ago

    (TL;DR):

    Listen, I’m not even rejecting your religion here. Any other topics I probably would be, but I don’t have to here.

    I think you’re applying faith where it isn’t needed, and possibly listening to some people who like to push politics into their preaching. That’s not your fault, and for what it’s worth I recommend giving your Bible a re-read, for both our sake and yours, to find out what the Bible says to you without the lens of partisan pastors telling you what you ought to think.

    Because I think both of us would agree that Jesus wouldn’t approve of the contempt for the impoverished and marginalized displayed by that claim about them I quoted below. I promise, you didn’t get that from the Bible.


    Secondly, if another animal strangles a cat, it’s generally not seen as immoral as animals cannot commit immoral actions.

    You’re conflating moral responsibility with moral evaluation. We can consider their actions immoral without holding it morally responsible.

    And sometimes we do hold them morally responsible! Sometimes our pets destroy our stuff or hurt other pets, and we respond with consequences to correct that behavior.

    They did know that eating the fruit was bad. They were told not to.

    This doesn’t address the issue.

    The fruit grants knowledge of good and evil. If they hadn’t eaten the fruit yet, they lacked the capacity to understand why eating the fruit was evil, or that disobeying God / trusting the serpent was evil.

    They couldn’t have known that disobeying God was evil, and being told “don’t eat this” isn’t the same as understanding why it’s bad to do so.

    Hurricanes and other natural disasters are a product of sin and evil being unleashed into the world.

    I’m sorry, this just doesn’t hold up biblically or empirically.

    If you have something I’m not aware of, feel free to share it, because I’m not aware of anything in the Bible (and especially nothing empirical or scientific) that links sinning and natural disasters.

    We do know how earthquakes happen and can predict them via plate tectonics and physics… We know hurricanes come from meteorological phenomena that we can measure, predict, and explain with our knowledge of thermodynamics/fluid dynamics…

    Droughts, disease, famine, volcanoes erupting, avalanches, mudslides… All of these are things we don’t need faith to explain. They even existed long before humans! Most even exist on planets humans don’t even inhabit. There are more reasons to believe that these things naturally occur than to believe that God is punishing us for sinning.

    … that the poor and marginalised are usually hit worst by natural disasters? And it’s not God who’s impoverishing or marginalising them.

    This is something I often hear from pastors who like to peddle partisan politics in their preaching. It’s true though, the poor and marginalized are disproportionately affected by natural disasters.

    But the reasons poor nations are poor are very well understood and very well documented, and invoking “sin” is not necessary to explain it. They may lack resources to harvest, or lack the means of harvesting resources themselves, or have their resources stolen via what is basically slave labor by western capitalist countries. They may not be able to set up capital generating infrastructure due to the aforementioned resource deficit… They might be plagued by droughts, or wars, or have geography that makes trade difficult, or unstable/corrupt governments, or limited education, or any number of socioeconomic phenomena, all of which we can objectively measure and directly link to the state of impoverished areas.

    Historically and legally, LGBTQ folks have been marginalized because of abrahamic religions instilling prejudice against us into the biggest systems of societal power in the world. Not to mention the subsequent scapegoating against us by the governments spawned from said systems.

    People of color… Do I even need to explain that one? Sinning simply doesn’t need to be invoked to explain or understand any of these things.


  • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldApple (SMBC)
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    2 days ago

    but you cannot believe in objective morality as a concept

    Yes you can… but even if you couldn’t, that’s not problematic in the slightest for atheists.

    Morality is subjective. Some people think invading other countries and killing civilians is fine because their leader convinced them it’s a good thing, and others see that as evil. Some people think eating pork is a sin, some couldn’t care less. Some people think eating ANY meat is cruel, and many others think it’s necessary to live healthily.

    But you can objectively measure morality by applying objective criteria. For example, if we agree that someone’s well-being is an objective measure to consider when determining if an act is moral or not, then you can make all kinds of objective moral claims. Punching a person/cat in the head? That’s immoral because it negatively impacts their well-being. Shooting a cat/person in the head? That’s immoral because they will cease to “be” entirely. Treating someone’s wounds? Moral, because it positively impacts their well-being. Donating to charity? Moral, positively impacts people’s well-being.






  • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    10 days ago

    They both ellicit the same hormonal response regardless of if it’s “secondary.” You could dampen that response by normalizing women being topless, but you could also normalize complete nudism and achieve the same thing for primary sexual characteristics…

    It’s just a subjective line we draw. It could be my sexual trauma speaking but I’d personally rather we make the line even between sexes than move it down.