I'm partial to "The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine"
Do the people asking that question just conveniently ignore the fact that religious leaders rape children like it's going out of style?
Immunity to cognitive dissonance is a requirement to believe in religion.
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found
I've got a little list — I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
-- Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado
There's absolutely a handful of figures -- all well known, all active in politics or business, all gladly engaging in behaviors that cause mass harm and sometimes death -- that I might be inclined to try to ~~murder~~ assassinate. (Once you're that famous, its assumed you have enemies who want to kill you, even if you're just famous for being a Beatle and writing pop songs.)
I'm not sure I could pull the trigger, having ever killed anyone, but I and many many others have motive good enough for the courts, regardless of who actually kills them.
But yeah, even if I had a really, really good rifle and training to use it (or a hit-man glad to do it for me) it would be an act of desperation. I would not fault a starving man for stealing food, and would applaud a mother swiping medicine for her kids.
My mores drive me, instead, to remove these people from their positions of power without causing them harm, or even better, to reform them ( by way of Inception maybe) so that they conduct themselves with empathy and awareness of all the harm they might cause by their actions. But when we don't have the capacity to do that, and they continue to cause harm, the knife in the night whispers.
I would be worried by those people and distance myself from them asap tbh.
I do want to commit some crimes but I also have morals, crazy concept
Last year I jaywalked directly in front of a police. While waving. Oh the thrill.
I mean, my morals are so deeply embedded in me that I don't even want to commit any crimes. Ever.
thats great for you, but imagine one day someone murders someone you really care about (may it never happen to you ever), you might want to kill that person, that is a perfectly normal feeling considering the circumstances but what stops you or not are your morals
Religious people have no empathy. Got it!
None for LBGT people that's for sure
While the quote presents a correct conclusion, it's also problematic in that it makes a slip of logic and paints a target for fallacious rebuttal.
- The slip of logic: one cannot conclude that no gods exist because all religions are clearly wrong – all that tells us is that none of the specific gods depicted by these religions exist. The path to disprove the existence of ALL gods must go through philosophy instead;
- Painted target: by juxtaposing science and religion, he invites the religious nuts to perceive and treat both things as belonging to the same class of intellectual activity, i.e. the "you have your opinion and I have mine" crowd.
Scientifically, we'd have to carry out the scenario of erasing the religions to see if the hypothesis is true. But how would we compare if they were erased?
The trick is that you don't actually need to do it, as we already have the functional equivalent analogue – the development of countless different religions in the past, in different regions of the globe – as evidence. If at least one of these religions were right, you would've expected it to show up in at least more than one region in the past, but we can clearly trace all similar religions to patterns of human migration, which strongly suggests humans created all of them out of their cultural beliefs at the time
Yeah, that was always my question. If Christianity (or any religion) was objectively the truth, why didn't we find one out of hundreds (if not thousands) of Pacific Island tribes/nations that had the exact same Bible, with the exact same teachings?
I agree that it’s a different kind of evidence.
Oh so like crabs
Is this the same dude that did a whole episode of a tv show about how second hand smoke isn’t bad for you?
Almost, they did half an episode of Bullshit about second hand smoke.
On the topic, Bullshit was weird show, using Penn and Teller to make a show about disproving pseudo science and outright bullshit, and then also trying to disprove perfectly resonable stuff.
It did make me trust public restrooms more though, but I wasn't a fan of their endangered species episode. Turns out they were right about recycling but that's just kind of sad.
To be fair, they wanted to do a Bullshit Bullshit show to correct the record, but were told no.
Not convincing to a believer, since in their view, their belief is the truth that will be discovered again.
It's actually happened with science in different ways. There have been several instances of concurrent discoveries, and some, like the Pythagorean Theorem, that has been repeatedly discovered (Pythagoras wasn't the first to figure it out)
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