When I threaten you, I automatically remove reason as an allowable means to accepting my claim. I’ve in effect determined your choice. If you were truly free to exercise reason, I would have to accept its outcome no matter what, even if I considered you gravely mistaken. Punishment for arriving at a wrong conclusion turns reason into a thought-crime.
So when believers like Christians or Muslims contend their faiths are based on reason, one may simply object that this can’t be so because their god in fact doesn’t allow it. Using reason to arrive at any other belief than the correct one will earn you an eternity in hell. Thus, reason is in reality an evil to be avoided....Blind, unquestioning, and unexamined belief is what the theist’s retributive god truly desires, not a belief grounded in reason. Link
If you refer to AI models directly participating in online chats, I've discussed that with Gemini. It's rather difficult to copy, paste, and mark up the output from Gemini into a format...
One of my best friends became a Rush Limbaugh devotee years ago. We're still cordial, but our core views about life etc are very far apart now. The younger adult daughter of my friend and his...
I regard Chris Rodda's work in exposing the lies of David Barton and other Christians of his ilk as indispensable in our over-all fight for a sane America.
In the case of the customer who finds a very valuable item for cheap in an antique shop or flea market, it is the seller who put it for sale. Too bad if he did not know it was worth...
I used to watch Antiques Roadshow, American Pickers and a show with a duo of Canadian pickers I forgot the title of. In the case of our NT friend, I asked ChatGPT : "Can it be said that by...
Given the political state of affairs since the publishing of volume two. I wonder how a volume three would read like? Eta:- The deadlines we pressured Chris to meet were more often temptations...
Haa haaa...what a coincidence! I was out yesterday with a friend and we were talking about an old comrade who is the President of our local British Legion Branch. He was part of the D-Day landings...
In the case of the customer who finds a very valuable item for cheap in an antique shop or flea market, it is the seller who put it for sale. Too bad if he did not know it was worth much more than...
I never thought about this before. I assume that if a seller of a property knows about and conceals the existence of underground oil tanks on the property, that's a species of fraud. But if...
Not many people may be aware that humans came surprisingly close to wiping out themselves along with much of the life on planet Earth back in the 1970s.
Pious Fraud or Lying for Jesus. Someone might argue, "If my falsehood enhances God's truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?"...
Even "legally" there is such a thing as "fraud by omission" in the US and probably every other Western country. If this had happened in my old village of a few decades ago, the...
Modern humans have known about the germ theory of disease for some time now, so that's one of the omissions in the bible that stands out. Today of course we have newer risks, some of them...
Was it illegal to keep mum about the treasure and then buy the field? I am reminded of a former friend, a very right-wing Catholic, who said, "Sometimes legalism works in your favor."
Germs weren't as big a problem before agriculture permitted humans to begin living in large numbers and high densities in settled communities. For most of human (pre)history, life for most...
