There are a billion reasons, but this video shares some. “Sex & Circumcision: An American Love Story by Eric Clopper”
I also like to cite that it only started to reduce the pleasure of men in America, at a time when a similar practice was started to stop “self-abuse” in women.
And I like to talk about how it messed up David Reimer’s life.
I have a ton more arguments, but those are some of my favorites. It is an unnecessary invasive procedure, and no children give consent to have their genitals mutilated before the age of consent!
Props to Andrew Yang for criticizing this practice.
So there are at least 3 videos with Yang on this channel. I like his ideas and hope he stands a chance in 2024, though I am behind Sanders this election. When Sanders gets old or finishes 8 years, we’ll need people like Yang.
72% of 18-22 year olds have no religion in Britain. Overall, I think I would have been happier and more successful living in the UK or basically any western European country where this trend is far accelerated and where the socio-economic views and ethics agree with mine. I am starting to feel relieved that this trend is so accelerated in the youth, and I know it won’t stop and will be just like gay marriage, ending segregation, suffrage, permitting divorce, or ending slavery. I don’t think I will feel any nostalgia for the loss of religion, religious fables, or forced communion with racist/prejudiced/tribal cultists when I die, hopefully in another 40 years, for there is just too much the world offers outside of that narrow inherited world-view.
America may be behind, and my experience knowledge and general intelligence/openness may have happened to put me ahead of the curve as a logical thinker, but I do feel relief knowing that America generally follows Europe and if I were to leave this country in a few generations religion and all of the associated evil ideologies are still predicted to die out here. We may soon not have anyone as eloquent as the recent old atheists in Britain who are about to die out, but the arguments will be won, because the younger generation will not be prejudiced from the start.
Without childhood indoctrination in religion, almost no atheist has converted to it in the last century because all the claims look ridiculous and there is not a shred of evidence to back any of it up. The arguments that used to be persuadable for Christian apologists in less modern eras have all been refuted by centuries of more careful thinkers–philosophers and psychologists, or by the data accumulated by science as the most objective means we have ever discovered of obtaining the truth. Now the apologists speak with elusive language like lawyers only to keep their own flock from knowing the truth, for their own financial or psychological benefit, while countless conservative institutions uphold the lie. The younger generation has started to know that the truth doesn’t change no matter what people say or believe, and remains ready to be found. Consequently, the next generation of thinkers won’t be persuaded, because they has just gotten too good at questioning why the truth needs so many lies, institutions, and violence to be defended if it’s so obvious.
So in ten years the conservatives have moved from denying climate change to denying most of it is caused by human activity, retrenching their position to where they’ll be safer.
The producers at Fox News are at it again
Scott Adams is one of the “deniers.*” (You might remember Scott as the famous artist of the “Dilbert” comic who turned into a Trump fan.) He acts like he is sharing his neutral observations, while he tilts everything against his target. Recently he criticized “Bill Nye: the Science Guy,” just like the Fox News program he linked to.
It’s acutely painful to watch this decline in clear thinking, because I have read a couple of good books by Scott Adams from when he wasn’t a wingnut, and I don’t know what happened to him. He’s getting old though, and may have developed brain cancer. Either his brain has fried, or (as a result of his hand injury that has made it harder to draw,) he plans to switch to blogging about politics to the Trump zealots on his new social media platforms for an eventual monetary return. If you want clear proof that his remaining core fanbase don’t understand how to do accurate research (they’re simply hopeless idiots and probably the lazy kind), just read the comments.
Then fairly read his article, and watch the video of Bill Nye annihilating the Fox News anchorman, and think about how for every single allegation Scott Adams he falls flat. Bill Nye was put in an inferior position on a talk show, with a guy who tries to steer the conversation, force him to answer scripted trick questions in a short time slot, without giving Bill Nye to develop his arguments or present his side.
Nevertheless, Scott Adams says Bill Nye developed cognitive dissonance when his position failed him, and refused to answer a precise question because he didn’t know — which according to Scott shows that Bill Nye is just another believer “on faith.” (Scott Adams you’ve said you’re an atheist, so you should have awareness from having encountered this fallacy before. Theists and reality deniers love to say “You can’t know *anything* for sure, and anything less than 100% confidence leaves room for me. Therefore even if though am not an expert in what you are talking about, you should take my position seriously as though my position has an equal chance of being true.”
It is shows Scott Adams hasn’t thought it through when he expects Bill Nye to answer the trick question with a precise answer, (and treats any abscence of an answer as proof that Bill Nye is wrong.) Had he took the bait and answered, Bill Nye’s credibility would still have been attacked even if he had pulled a number out of thin air and said 70% or 90%, rather than what he said — “If you want a number, global warming is 100% accelerated by human activity.” The precise number is a technicality when Bill Nye is plainly arguing that most of the warming is caused by humans, and that he believes the rate is hazardous.
This is confirmed when the host keeps interrupting him before he can make any good points. Of course I don’t think Bill Nye is a good debater, and he isn’t good at quick one line retorts, but he is a good presenter or lecturer.
When you look past his clumsy retorts and look at the content of his arguments when he has time to do them, he always makes better points than the less developed minds he’s pitted against who make unscientific arguments like,
>”If global warming is caused by CO2,
>and CO2 causes global warming
>and if there were volcanos on the moon,
then why is the moon cold?”
It’s superb irony how Scott Adams calls Bill Nye deluded. (Of course Scott Adams is really rich but he is still an opportunist who usually ends every post with shilling one ofhis products. Which makes one wonder if he tries to create controversial posts to shill for his company, but is a shady technique he seems to have learned from reading Donald Trump.)
Tl;dr: Bill Nye is great, Scott Adams is an idiot, and my farts prove Global Warming is caused by humans.
*”Climate Change deniers” don’t like the word anymore because it is too objective about their relationship to the position. They instead prefer to be called “Climate Change Skeptics” even though skepticism does not mean denying overwhelming sound evidence, and as “unskeptics,” or “pseudo-skeptics” they diminish the gravity of the word. Conservatives have done a good job at moving the word choice since we can’t even “Global Warming” anymore without them cherry picking exceptions (usually of freak weather like tornados or cold spells which we wouldn’t have if not for the messed up weather we cause,) so we now have to say “Climate Change” to prevent those objections, which sounds really ambiguous. It makes it sound like scientists aren’t sure about Climate Change, like it could even be getting colder, and in effect it is a minor victory by technicality for the less educated side–the more obstinate side. I won’t pretend to be neutral about the question of global warming on my blog when they’re clearly wrong, and scientists rightfully want the public to recognize it to be a closed question we’ve debated and solved, so that we can “get the move on” to our other problems.
Granting that all men are entitled to their opinions, doesn’t mean that men are entitled to their own set of facts. The climate change crowd are the skeptics, they are the scientists.
The conservative estimates scientists publish erring on the safe side to avoid being wrong are alarming enough, but what is more alarming is the succeses of the propaganda campaign by anti-intellectual forces in America, and of the fossil fuel companies–who as the richest companies on Earth have reason and money to finance disinformation experts as easily as they hire lawyers. Oddly, the other side refuses to believe that paid liars could exist, or somehow believe the green companies are hiring more paid liars even though those companies are not nearly as prevalent, profitable, or unconcerned about “the tragedy of the commons.”
I hope no one is seriously making the argument disfigured/retarded babies are better than no fewer babies, and if birthrates are slightly low abortion is therefore harmful. Half the babies doesn’t mean half the productivity as I’ll explain later.
Low birth rates aren’t a major issue yet when you look at how low the population of the Earth was historically. That and we can either take the smartest from 3rd world via the brain drain, or provide better benefits like long maternity leave and taxes to encourage mothers. We could literally make a government campaign with propaganda to have more kids if we believed in racial purity; the propaganda works well for wars.
As for the inverted population pyramid problem, manage the economics of a slight decline in the growth rate and well-fare benefits that were not sufficiently saved for, or just bring in immigrants. You can hire more nurses and caretakers on visas and accept that machinery and education is now more important than labor for your economy.
To start off, Suguri has to be oldest living God in the world I’ve heard of.* She is a 46 billion year old “Goddess” who used to be a human before she became a lonely cyborg, and stopped talking to anyone for a billion years.
*(Buddhas do appear to be older in the Lotus Sutra, but I don’t fully understand Buddhism or its kalpas, so I’ll ignore it.)
I wonder if her author and illustrator realizes that he worships the savior-goddess he created. He loves her enough to have drawn new art of her nearly every week for nearly ten years, and still does on twitter. He would be wise not to bother with marriage, or his wife will be jealous of the attention he puts into his goddess.
Her backstory puts Captain Planet to shame too. It doesn’t get more heroic than spending countless years to fix a polluted Earth all by yourself, and then defending the newly saved Earth from alien invaders all by yourself.
Fyi, here is Suguri’s backstory to prove how heroic she is:
The earth had been utterly destroyed by war.
Suguri was a cyborg who began to bring the Earth back to life plantings trees and stuff for thousands of years.
In the vast and wide Earth, she was only one person who would endeavor to do whatever it took.
She gave humans hope and made them want to work together.brought them together.
Then she risked her life fighting to protect her Earth when the invaders came.
I’m moved! Why aren’t you worshiping cute little Suguri? It’s crazy to worship a baby Hebrew god that allegedly created the Earth only 6,000 years ago. That and he has done a poor job of showing himself, protecting us, or helping with our problems. (He seems to create more problems than he causes actually, like hell and Satan.) But Suguri was so awesome she sacrificed herself to save the Earth from problems she didn’t start TWICE!
Darkmatter2525 articulated the argumentum ad absurdum about there being too many stars to believe our planet or Israel is the special center of it all better than I had thought of. He did so by drawing from teleology (Aristotle’s four causes). We totally live in a universe that requires no gods to function, but all religions and their deities seem to have been created to meet the ends of humans. For power and influence over others, and tithes from their fellow man. Occam’s razor says the simplest explanation tends to be the most likely one, and a universe that is not run by any of the gods mankind believes in makes more sense.
Totally wish this video existed sooner. I embarrassed myself by presenting the argument to my philosophy professor after I developed it for feedback, without realizing it was a fairly common argument apostates develop. I still do not know the name of the argument but it is one of the strongest ones. It has become my favorite argument because it is rooted in empirical evidence of the scale of the universe, and logic, and is all encompassing. (I prefer it even over the problem of evil.)
My Mastery of Religion:
I’ll remember it for the rest of my life and never believe any Earthly religion again as a result. There is no need to study religion further for the truth about Gods since I have thoroughly collected the evidence they are all bullshit. The only reason to study religion is to understand sociology, or how religion changes the behavior of people, and how delusions changed history. It also helps to develop critical thinking which is essential in philosophy, except that there are better questions that have not been decisively solved. (Probably well over 70% of philosophers turn Atheist.) Currently I can think more objectively than anyone in the family, and in this niche I know many more facts.
I visited the debates (on Jesus’s resurrection) and enjoyed them. I also hope you did plenty of sightseeing while visiting.
Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to ask you a certain common question. Namely, what makes you so sure the Christian religion is truer than any other that lays claims to miracles? There were so many religions – there are about 5,000 gods on godfinder.org alone. There’s an apt quote that, “Most people don’t believe in Gods, but Atheists simply go one step further.”
I suppose what I wish to point out is…. “Even if we grant that Jesus was resurrected, we still have no way of knowing that he gave a divinely sanctioned message without telling us lies.” God incarnate is not beholden to any higher authority, and God has no obligation to ever tell the truth. Neither does Jesus.
endlessjune.wordpress.com 
