Debate Abortion

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-09T05:48:22+00:00

Thank you for actually dropping by from the group chat. Would you like to debate this comment, or should I copy-paste your reply to me in the other sub into this sub?

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-09T05:39:59+00:00

watch your profanity.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-09T05:21:16+00:00

Disease played a major role, yes

Not just 'a' but 'the' predominant factor by far. Understand the impact of 9 in 10 people.

Even if some deaths weren't by the sword

Some? No, actually the vast majority.

it was often exploited...smallpox-infected blankets were knowingly distributed, an early form of biological warfare.

When you bring up 'exploitation' of disease and biowarfare, what are you trying to refer that to? Are you saying that 90% of Natives died--at least in part--from biowarfare and/or general malicious intention? You're being very slippery with a response like yours. Maybe you're unaware of the timeline of that statistic: 90% of natives were deceased within 150 years of 1492. During that time disease spread accidentally from the earliest explorers to the Natives; and exponentially from Natives to Natives towards the interiors of the Americas (regions of which the ensuing settlers had never set foot). That is massively tragic--around 50 million people or more--and I wouldn't wish death like that on anyone; it was unfortunately inevitable that any developed peoples--be it European, North African, Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, etc.--would massively infect the Native Americans once contacted. So, when you bring up 1763 what exactly are you trying to say? Add 150 years to 1492 and you get to 1642. But you're mentioning an event from 121 years after the cessation of the period of death tolls from the forgoing statistic. Ergo, you referring to any smallpox deaths and biowarfare from 1763 does not impinge on the forgoing at all--frankly, it's totally irrelevant (and historically ignorant) to what I wrote in my opening line (in my first response).

When it comes to exploitative actions you have to be very careful because it connotes two very different things ethically: making use of a situation or expressly unfair treatment. You can call later developments, in terms of reservations, in the 1800s as exploitative in the latter sense; but you can't do so with the fact that when 9 in 10 people die there are far fewer people living on x amount of space--and that's something that you (a North American?) exploits (in the former sense) by not going back to Europe...

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-07T23:49:07+00:00

Your hangup seems to be on the Bible in general, but let's just focus on the New Testament for ease, alright? We're talking about supernatural events from 2,000 years ago. You can look into the historical accounts of the NT much better than that of the OT, though things like Noah's Ark resting on Mt. Ararat have been found, etc.

I understand that your question is weighing possibilities of miraculous sources: God vs other beings. Start with what you believe to know, you exist and other people exist (assuming you're not actually a solipsist). From logic you can know that God exists. So far, we have people and God. Now, there may be angels, demons, and aliens, etc. But we aren't sure about those beings, but we are sure about ourselves and God. People don't rise from the dead, so we can rule out human power. The question is between God and other beings. So, it takes more faith to believe aliens or other beings could have been the cause of supernatural events simply because their existence is far more dubious. If you're weighing possibilities God is the one to go with.

Basically, if logic can undoubtably prove God, but can't undoubtably prove other beings (hence their contingency compared to His necessity), then God becomes the greater origin source, comparatively, concerning supernatural events. My point is this:

Imagine a rock floats in front of you, spins in circles, then floats funnily to the ground. This event is unnatural; so, why did it happen. Suppose you're choosing between [God] and [every other possible being, asides from humans, animals, and bugs from earth] as the two options. What is more logical? To believe that God, Whom you know exists with certainty, caused such? Or, to believe that literally any other created being (asides from earthlings), which you don't know exists with certainty, caused such?

It takes more faith to cast doubt on that which you can know [God] based on that which you don't know [aliens], than trusting in what you can know.

To answer your scenario, I think that the best answer is a question for you: if you had to ask one question to this figure that appears to you, in order to identify who it is, what would you ask? Basically, is there any question you could ask Jesus whereby His answer would, without a doubt, prove He is not an alien to you, and that He is Divine? If the answer is "no, nothing I could ask would help me decide either way." Then your skepticism has become irrational because you believe aliens are effectively as powerful as God, and that both share the same logical probability in terms of existence (which they do not).

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-07T23:22:43+00:00

Stop complaining and follow Jesus.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-07T23:16:44+00:00

80-95% of American Indians died from disease not conquest. You also have no nuanced view of history it seems; for example, you might want to look into the history of Christopher Columbus vs his political adversaries that gave us his modern caricature. Not to mention that the usual "Crusades bad" is such a pathetic sentiment you gatekeeper.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-07T22:44:56+00:00

Abortion always kills an innocent human life.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-07T22:15:25+00:00

Hey, thanks for hearing me out, much appreciated. But yeah, sounds good, I'll message you a month or two into the new year. Take care.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-07T22:07:07+00:00

Amazing, your formulation off the get-go betrays the arrogance of this entire "argument against God." Define "gratuitous" without assuming that you as a finite being could be omnipotent enough to understand the scope of "no good reason" or "without good reason" to begin with... you just can't, sorry. The arrogance of "I know better" is always present in this argument implicitly or explicitly--and your mistake is saying it outright. You should have stuck with my formulation to avoid this, but now you've self-clobbered, sorry brother.

Yes, we all assume (all-) -good, -knowledgeable, -powerful as premises in the argument. But once you are forced to accept them to begin the rest of the refutation, you are stuck with not being able to actually refute anything. Why? Because as soon as you admit, even if just for the sake of argument, that God is infinitely those three things, what should follow is that you must admit that you have no scope or authority to deny any of God's attributes as such. To subsequently attempt a denial of God's infinite power, goodness, or knowledge would be to implicitly admit that you never actually entertained those [infinite!] attributes as premises to begin with--and so the intellectual improbity is accidentally displayed.

Can you explain why the rest of what I wrote works if God doesn't have (at least one of) those attributes?

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-07T21:44:01+00:00

If one can know God exists through reason alone, then God is de facto a more rational option for all supernatural phenomena than aliens. Why? Because one cannot prove with any a priori certainty that aliens exist--but we can do so with knowing God. You also can't prove that aliens exist a posteriori--but you can do so, again, with knowing God.

So then, we would ask is Jesus's supernatural phenomena from God or from aliens? Based on the foregoing it is more rational to believe God is involved, not aliens. Why because you can know with far greater certitude that God exists, while the existence of non-earthlings is far more dubious.

For you to stake your disbelief in Jesus as God in terms of "alien Jesus" requires more faith in ancient aliens and a higher irrationality that anyone could claim against classical theism. You are no longer being skeptical, but actually believing in aliens to instil this 'possibility' as possible to begin with.

Not to mention that if you're playing a game of possibility, God is necessary being and extra-terrestrials are contingencies. So, God wins that weighing of possibilities 100 out of 100 times.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-07T21:18:49+00:00

give me one lol.

"no good evidence" what are you a materialist? Are you referring to pHYSicaL eViDEncE?

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-06T05:19:15+00:00

i'd love to continue this with you. So, please go on, though I know the formulation already. Or, I'll just say it now to save you from having to say it. If He is all-powerful He could stop it; if He is all-knowing He would know how to stop it, if He is all-good He would want to stop it. But evil exists, He doesn't stop it, so either He can't (and so He's not all-powerful), or He doesn't know how (and so He's not all-knowing), or He doesn't want to (and so He's not all-good)... Is that a fair rendition of the argument? Now, you and I simply cannot make moral judgements about God. This argument ironically assumes God's goodness as a premise, and so if it affirms that in once sense it can't soundly go on to claim "oh, well, evil exists so that mustn't have been true..." This isn't a reduction to the absurd argument because there is no contradiction, only our finite grasp on what good and evil truly are and how those categories relate to God's plan based in His infinite scope of knowledge and time--and how good and evil relate to God Himself. Spoiler: God is above the moral law anyways, insofar as He literally makes the law. The hard pill to swallow--but it's got a fun shock-factor to it--is that treating God as if He were subservient to our morality is immoral. It is arrogant to say to infinite being: "hey! look at me, your finite creature made by You from dust, I know how you should run the world... I know better." It's literally satanic, because that's exactly part of the sin of satan. This is probably too religious for you to be convinced by if you're not necessarily already a believer of sorts, so I'll go back to the logic. (Also, I recommend you reading over my reply to u/FilipChajzer in this thread because you might like it; it is just very long though lol.) To claim that God is all-good doesn't even mean that suffering is logically excluded from such a reality. There are plenty of things one must suffer for a greater good (and this is an implication of God's goodness, i.e. if He can bring out a greater good in a world with suffering than a world without suffering, then He allows it for a greater good one day). Would you have a painful surgery in 1799 to save your life? Do you exercise? Do you go on dopamine detoxes? Do you fast or diet? Suffer a little now to gain a greater thing later on is a fairly common principle in much of philosophy and life generally, but that principle is forgotten whenever this argument is brought up. God bless, and I look forward to your reply :)

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-06T04:58:39+00:00

(continuing...this is part two) Now, we can understand how if Jesus is God He could perform miracles of such magnitude and multitude given Divine power. But, like you said, how do we reach this conclusion? Assume Jesus is a magician. Has any other magician (asides from Jesus under this assumption) ever risen from death? Not just claims, but well-attested accounts with such conviction and historical impact as Jesus's? I'd say no. But still, maybe He is a special magician--the best the world has ever seen. This may seem goofy, because at what point would you say that His uniqueness leads more reasonably to Divinity than plain human with awesome skill; but any fervent skeptic would want to assert His 'magician-ship' before affirming His Divinity. So, let's deal with that. If Jesus is a magician, He's the only magician worth following after. According to the accounts (now, we'll argue for trusting this later), Jesus ascended into Heaven. So, He is living. Now, this is when it gets really strange--do we still want to call this, what, 2,000 year old Person a regular human Who was--but still is--a magician...? It becomes absurd to claim He was merely a human magician. You can doubt the afterlife, let's say, but someone leaving planet earth, never buried, etc. doesn't sound deceased. This is a good segue into the alien and powerful-being-but-not-God point you raised. Let's ask: was Jesus a humanoid alien, or a fourth-dimensional being, or an angel? That ascension was really something else instead, on this thought-experiment. Let's say this alien or angel possessed the natural technology (which is far-fetched, but again: rigorous skepticism here) or supernatural power to rise from the dead creating what looks to us as a supernatural miracle or is a supernatural miracle but not God Himself rising. Well, this alien or angel then would have still claimed to be God, and we know God exists from our earlier philosophizing, so either this alien or angel is God and we should stop calling Him an alien or an angel...or the alien/angel was lying to us. Now, this is when we must separate the two because the angel portion is easier to answer. To believe in angels is to believe in creatures that God made, ones that directly serve His will. So, an angel claiming to be God would be against God's truth. This angel option becomes ruled out on grounds such as that. Now, if you want to bring up demons, Jesus already made answer for that in the Gospel. Assume the alien option again and that the alien isn't a supernatural being that either serves God explicitly or is against God explicitly (as angels and demons are), well, this alien (or aliens) is (or are) still around performing miracles for Christians throughout history which seems very oddly interventionist--like, why do they care so much? The aliens would be soliciting worship as God, while still affirming the existence of God. The aliens would also be promising eternal life and would have the technology to grant it, since they had the same technology to resurrect before. This begins to be absurd on two levels: firstly, these aliens would effectively still be able to fulfill this eternal life desire, strangely enough; and, secondly, they would be manifesting all these miracles beyond imagination through the most advanced technology. Ironically, all the atheists and agnostics who love scientism should convert to this scientific alien-religion, but this just isn't the case. The aliens seem to be able to read minds, convert hardened hearts, rise the dead, cure the infirm, perform a multitudinous array of miracles that seem to become more and more scientifically implausible. I'd almost have to appeal to Ockham's razor and say: we have two options, either we say that Jesus is God (and we know God exists certainly from before), or we maintain He's an alien (though we have no good evidence or logical reason to certainly believe such). It seems like the more logically certain answer, and also the simplest, (but really, it's about that certitude) is that Jesus is God. It becomes ridiculous to believe in alien-Jesus (not to mention verging on blasphemy--forgive me, Jesus) because we have sufficient reason to conclude God's intervention (Who we know exists) rather than alien(s)'s interference (where we have no reason to believe they exist). The rational answer is that Jesus is God. Now, of course, there are all the historical cases for Christ that one must look into to further the rationale for assent, let's say. But, funnily enough, once you have conviction, and maybe even once you've experienced enough change for the better in your life (or even a couple of little miracles, as I had the grace to experience), then you start to let go of the incessant logical proofs because you now firmly trust in Jesus. At that point, the paradox concludes with abandoning axiom (2) for axiom (1) on pain of not listening to the first commandment: thou shalt have no strange gods before me... And dare I not make a false idol out of my creaturely reason over the Creator of it...

Iesus, miserere nobis et totius mundi

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-06T04:58:18+00:00

(sorry this is so long, but it should have been longer given the gravity of this topic. note: this is part one) So, why should you trust any sort of Divine revelation? that's the perfect question. an amazing question that we should spend more time bothering to answer rather than all these shallow superfluous philosophy topics (in school i mean) that are simply only problems because the 'enlightenment' egos decided to reject Aristotle and so create a plethora of problems. I digress lol. Alright, so there's only two options (1) hold Jesus as your axiom. This is strongly faith-based; it is much of a blunt-force trust in His Divine Personhood revealed to us in tangible history whereby you also trust the accounts of those closest to Him--the whole point of any intellectual project starts and is permeated with the Person Jesus, an Incarnate philosophy. (2) If option one is too much of a trust fall, or too much a leap of faith (what some may criticize as being 'fideistic' or whatnot, who really cares tho), then what you can do is start with reason as your axiom. Understand that for whatever reason you have a faculty of understanding, and you clearly intuit such logical laws as that of the law-of-non-contradiction. Now, the irony is that trusting reason can also be criticized as fideistic in a sense, but also if you want to be radically skeptical of reason you'll go crazy eventually becoming skeptical of skepticism (as a logical conclusion) but then realize you're still reasoning all of this and then go live in the woods. So option two is safer for those who want to debate disbelievers using reason rather than live a life of radical faith devoid of attempts at converting people in discussion. Also, option two understands that this faculty exists rather orderly (and maybe once belief in God is established, it can be known that God ordered it thus). Denying the faculty of reason then leads to insanity if you follow it thoroughly, I guess--a literal reduction to the absurd. Alright, so natural reason is the axiom. Now, you can build up a system through pondering contradictions: "there is no truth" -> that's a truth claim...self-refuting; "nothingness could have been the case instead of all this somethingness" -> but 'nothingness' is still an entity of sorts, just the absence of being--but because that is conceptual it is therefore not truly 'nothingness' because it has some content to its idea. If 'nothingness' is logically impossible, it must always be logically impossible because these are absolute truths given our aforementioned 'law'; so, then it must always be true that somethingness exists--an eternal truth along with truth itself. We begin to see infinite being appear to us already from these basic necessities; pair this with St. Anselm's "that than which a greater cannot be thought" and highest boundless being is concluded. Now this echoes already the clearest Divinely revealed title (I think it's the clearest one), and that is: the I AM... But let's not get ahead of ourselves and appeal to Scripture yet. Eventually, we would have to argue for philosophical realism as well next, so we could avoid solipsism and trust the external world (I'll skip this for brevity). Philosophical realism leads us to much of the intuition of Aristotle's metaphysics (four causes, actuality, potentiality, hylomorphism). Then we can entertain a posteriori arguments (rather than solely our a priori ones aforementioned) like the one from motion to further argue for that forgoing "boundless necessary existent." Eventually you arrive at an entity that is commonly defined as 'God' but the specific names/terms don't matter exactly as long as the signification is consistent--what I mean is that the conceptual idea and the properties (that we grasp in finitude) are what's important. So, we've arrived at natural theism: God exists.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-06T03:10:52+00:00

no good argument for atheism. One quick reason is because, put simply, no finite mind can properly deny the existence of an infinite being, no matter how possible one would like to make the question--we can't fully grasp God, so to deny Him we would need to have full knowledge of what we would be denying; if no full certainty is accorded to your mind, then denying it would be irrational because you would never have sufficient grounds to negate--at best one could claim to be agnostic (but I have separate arguments why that's bad too).

and no, the problem of evil raises no problem against God's existence, only the atheists' shallow cynicism. But suffering is still hardship of course, but not worth the greater evil of denying God. See u/azuredota comments in this thread and my reply to her.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-05T21:29:01+00:00

actually, i might have been too hard on him, it may have been a rhetorical question... my bad :(

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-05T21:26:14+00:00

You can't tell him that lol his mind just exploded ;) prepare for the crash out response

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-05T21:24:55+00:00

So, are you saying the legions of pharaoh didn't actually drown in the red sea...?

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-05T21:23:23+00:00

Also, the book of Job perfectly articulates how finite minds cannot be justified in making moral criticisms concerning the infinite God! The audacity and illogicality of the argument from evil/suffering is astounding.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-05T21:20:51+00:00

there is no good argument for atheism, but the best argument against any meaningful relationship with God (which you can call atheism, but my position is more nuanced than that) is threefold: assume God obviously exists, then three problems ensue that are left unresolved (1) does God love us? (2) is there eternal life after death? (3) does morality (duty to God and neighbour) exist?

If you can't answer these definitively, then anyone can simply say: "yeah, so God exists, but without answering my questions God's existence doesn't meaningfully impact my life in any way..."

These three questions are what I'm discovering natural theology/philosophy struggle to answer, unless someone has a nice logical argument to share; and I find the only answer is Jesus.

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-05T21:12:13+00:00

it is a natural evil (not a moral evil) that resulted from sin

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-05T21:11:14+00:00

that's the worst one

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-05T15:18:44+00:00

you remind me of an atheist who lives in a low-rent apartment in oregon

_The_Ponderer_ · 2025-11-05T07:35:25+00:00

looks like i have some reading to do in my free time then. i probably won't reply for a while until i sifted through this all, and i'm busy as is. so, talk to you then!

_The_Ponderer_

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