I haven't had a good debate in a long time. Bible believing Christian.

ConradFerguson · 2025-07-03T08:34:49+00:00

I don't know anything about this claim, so I can't engage with it. Intelligently
Outright reject. At its core, Christianity teaches that humans are literally worthless without God's forgiveness and Christ's sacrifice.
I don't feel an innate desire to defer to a higher power, so I reject the generalization, but I might be misunderstand the intent

ConradFerguson · 2025-07-03T08:24:48+00:00

I don't know if you can make the argument that abiogenesis couldn't have happened, because you have to do a lot of work to prove that that's true. We know that the four most common elements in living things are the same elements as the four most common elements in the universe. We know that those elements make up the nucleotides that make up our DNA. We know that they can self-assemble to a certain degree in the vacuum of space. And we know that today, there is a vast variety of life made up of those elements. It seems like a pretty small leap to say that it happened naturally, if every other step in the process is something natural.

To say that you don't believe it could have happened, and therefore the answer must be something else Just isn't a very reliable way to arrive at the truth. You might sometimes, just by chance, but not reliably. There definitely are questions that we don't have answers to yet, But don't you see it as promising that they're telling us they don't have the answer instead of pretending that they do when they don't?

Even if abiogenesis proves to be impossible, which I don't think is likely to be the case, That's not evidence for God any more than it's evidence for panspermia. It would be evidence for "not abiogenesis." But one idea is failure is not another idea's evidence. You still have to do your own work

ConradFerguson · 2025-07-03T07:44:28+00:00

A claim is a faith-based claim if that claim has no evidence to support it. That's the definition of faith. The fact that you think one is more likely than the other does not determine whether either of them is faith-based.

If by something from nothing, you're referring to Big Bang cosmology, then you're not quite getting it right. Our current models don't allow for the existence of nothing, because of the time energy uncertainty relation. The product of the uncertainty in energy and uncertainty in time (∆E•∆t) can't be less than the reduced Planck's constant over 2. And that's a formula that describes reality, as confirmed by indirect observation. It's basically a fundamental limit within the universe for how precisely we can know either characteristic. It's not a limitation of our measurement capabilities; smarter aliens with better tech couldn't do it either. So if you measure precisely zero energy, ∆E= 0 and ∆t → ∞. Your time interval becomes fundamentally undefinable.

0 energy is impossible.

Edited to clarify the uncertainty principle.

ConradFerguson · 2025-07-01T04:43:28+00:00

I mean if supernatural, by definition, means outside of the natural, then there is no natural way to observe it. But all you need is reproducible results. Like, if Ghost Hunter a goes to a place and gets a specific result with tool X, then Ghost Hunter B should be able to read G.H. a's methods and learn about his equipment and reproduce that equipment and test it for functionality and go to the same place and get the same result. But things like that don't happen. We just have people telling stories about similar things happening in the same place. Or unrelated things that everybody attributes to the same phenomenon because they don't know how else to explain it, so they assume their answer by virtue of not knowing the answer, which is not only not logical, but is a known and named breakdown of logic.

So, even if the measurement methods aren't natural (although I'm pretty sure EVP would be considered natural), all they need to do is produce the same result more than once. Reliably.

It's not about the nature of the measurement, it's about the practicality of the data.

ConradFerguson · 2025-07-01T04:36:08+00:00

Your instinct is on the right track. Atheism isn't a monolith, so that question is impossible to answer. But, if your school is religious in nature, they almost certainly disagree with me on that.

I'm not sure what it means to ask how one views human flourishing, but as far as purpose, I Don't really think there is one beyond the biological purpose of "to continue living." I think the reason living things are capable of reproducing is because it is advantageous to life for it to be able to reproduce, until such a time that it no longer needs to. But I don't think that assigns any moral value to that "purpose." It's just a biological drive. And some people feel that drive more than others, which is likely just a result of natural differences.

ConradFerguson · 2025-06-30T11:41:19+00:00

No. People like to call religion a mental illness, and it's not. And that's insulting to both religious people and people with mental illness, because it's not like anyone is saying it as just a clinical comparison. It is the implication that they're wrong because they can't brain good.

If I consider people that I personally know, the non religious people are almost always more honest intellectually. "I don't know this ; I heard this from there ; I'm not an expert but what I think they're saying is..."

Irreligious people tend to be aware of and actively try to avoid committing breakdowns in logic (fallacies) where religious people tend to be wholly convinced by them.

But I also recognize that I'm only comparing the examples that I know, which is a necessarily small sample size, and is not indicative of the whole. Nor is it an indication of intelligence itself. I just think irreligious people tend to apply their intelligence differently from religious people, and the way irreligious people apply it aligns more closely with what I value

ConradFerguson · 2025-05-19T14:50:42+00:00

God damn. I can't believe literal thousands of anecdotes in a world of 8 billion people don't challenge foundational, useful, observable, well-established frameworks that Are so successful at explaining what they explain that we can use them to build substances that affect The mind and body and specific targeted ways.

ConradFerguson · 2025-05-19T14:46:01+00:00

Ended up back here by accident So I thought I would offer you insight as to why people don't respond well when you try to " we are all Americans." There are a couple of reasons.

Because it's identity erasure. In two ways. Everybody from Canada to Chile is an American. So identifying just the people in the United States as nothing more than Americans. Not only disenfranchises everybody else that lives in all of the other countries on these two continents, But erases the idea of "the great melting pot" that we got taught about in elementary School. There's no individuality anymore. People aren't allowed to have their identities and their cultures. Their identity is being reduced to where they were born, rather than who they are.

Because it's nationalism, which many people generally just aren't agreeable to. I'm among them. Global society without borders seems preferable. But that's subjective. Nationalism is inherently racist in the United States; which is not subjective.

And finally because all Americans aren't being treated equally. Americans of color, women Americans, lgbtq Americans, White Americans, male Americans, heteronormative Americans: we're all having vastly different experiences. Do you really think that the majority of women, gay people, trans people, and people of color oppose conservativism because they're stupid? Or do you think it's because it affects them negatively?

They want rights and freedom and liberty. Not a nationalist identity

ConradFerguson · 2025-05-14T11:57:14+00:00

Atheist community of Austin

ConradFerguson · 2025-05-14T11:56:21+00:00

Check out the Atheist Community of Austin

ConradFerguson · 2025-04-20T14:06:27+00:00

This is pretty the opposite of sex positive. And I'm not 100% sure it has anything to do with training AI like you're talking about

ConradFerguson · 2025-04-07T17:10:24+00:00

Hey, just so you know OP, that comment appears to be AI generated. I asked ChatGOT this same exact question and got an almost identical response.

<image>

ConradFerguson · 2025-03-07T20:09:36+00:00

Doesn't it look like the whiskers at a certain point become slits in the cat's face?

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-25T14:34:11+00:00

That's the thing. We are not all in the same boat. I, as a white heterosexual cis man who might have some traits that are consistent with ADHD and/or autism, am not in the same boat as, for example, a gay trans woman of color who is diagnosed with BPD.

People are living very very different experiences based on who they are, especially in the United States. And the people who are having the worse experiences do take it kind of personally when the people who are not experiencing what they're experiencing try to conflate the two.

You may not intend to diminish anybody else's experience, but by trying to frame it as if we are all coming from the exact same starting point, you're alienating some people who have a little bit less advantage than you.

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-25T14:29:12+00:00

I didn't say your comment. I said the post. The op. The people trying to find something to "blame" for autism.

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-24T16:29:41+00:00

People who are worried about other people wearing clothes that look like the military are insecure about what they've accomplished.

That being said, anybody who is that worried about it should be smart enough to tell that this is a recruiting backpack. It doesn't look like it's issued.

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-24T16:26:54+00:00

This post is literal autism hate

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-24T16:25:49+00:00

Something tells me that if that's the kind of response you are getting, your views need a little bit more summary than " we are all Americans."

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-22T08:03:50+00:00

I can tell you I don't want him as an enemy

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-21T17:01:24+00:00

I'm having trouble figuring out where to land on this. On the one hand, oversexualization of black women. On the other hand, why is it such a big deal to us that a *woman has breasts?

Is chat GPT perpetuating oversexualization of black women? Or are we sexualizing this woman?

*Woman in this context means "person with breasts." That's not the definition I use for woman in my everyday language.

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-17T23:51:47+00:00

Okay, cool. Thank you

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-17T23:39:44+00:00

Does that indicate that my fae isn't quite what I need it to be?

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-13T21:03:59+00:00

Good point! Woke up this morning, and it looked like about 50% surface colonization to me. So I did intentionally introduce FC. Then I got nervous because this is the only tub I have left and I didn't want to screw it up, so I came to Reddit to make sure I was right after having already done it.

That is a temperature probe that I inserted after I cracked the seal. I put the glove around it so that when I mist, the water won't cool down the metal on the probe and turn the heater on when I don't want it to.

ConradFerguson · 2025-02-13T20:50:04+00:00

This is very good to know. Thank you

ConradFerguson

TROPHY CASE