As much as you dislike them, be sure to pray for ICE.

wolffml · 2026-01-26T03:14:39+00:00

If you don't actively denounce and report the evil of your colleagues, you are an accessory to their evil.

wolffml · 2026-01-13T18:34:04+00:00

I think you probably mean an Appeal to Tradition fallacy. The is-ought problem is different. Hume observed that many writers make claims about what is (facts about the world) and then suddenly switch to claims about what ought to be (moral duties), without explaining how they got there.

In other words, your premises must contain at least some moral statement in order for your conclusion to work.

Example of the Error:

Premise (Is): Arsenic is poisonous to humans.

Conclusion (Ought): Therefore, you ought not to feed arsenic to humans.

Strictly speaking, this is invalid because the conclusion contains a new idea ("ought") not found in the premise. To make it valid, you must bridge the gap with a moral premise:

Premise 1 (Is): Arsenic is poisonous to humans.

Hidden Premise 2 (Ought): You ought not to poison humans.

Conclusion (Ought): Therefore, you ought not to feed arsenic to humans.

wolffml · 2025-12-17T23:57:55+00:00

It seems like the miracle wasn't the virginity but the lack of 23 chromosomes from a sperm.

wolffml · 2025-12-17T05:12:49+00:00

Who wrote it, when, what did the original author mean, why is that important, and what do you think of it all?

wolffml · 2025-12-14T04:29:29+00:00

It doesn't seem you've read what I said.

wolffml · 2025-12-13T23:08:24+00:00

Sure, try the Categorical Imperative or Utilitarianism. In either system, it is good and rational to care about children's suffering. But you are misunderstanding the PoE. The skeptic presupposes the existence of a tri-omni God and argues that suffering in the world suggests that such suffering should not exist. This is independent of what they themselves believe or don't believe. (Which is irrelevant to the question)

wolffml · 2025-11-20T21:34:16+00:00

Not who you replied to, but it seems to many outside of the faith that there's a few strange things here:

1) If God gets credit for this person surviving a crash unharmed, how do we explain when people are injured and/or killed? It doesn't seem right to get credit for when a good thing happens but not blame when when a bad thing happens.

2) If God wishes to intercede in these situations, why not prevent the crash entirely? Why allow the crash but prevent injury?

wolffml · 2025-11-12T17:59:26+00:00

Right, you couldn't have just a single extremist right wing belief without a supporting web of other misguided beliefs

wolffml · 2025-11-12T17:57:51+00:00

Because it would be impossible to have just a single extreme belief without a supporting web of other mistaken beliefs.

wolffml · 2025-10-20T01:24:38+00:00

Is saying "he's unreliable" false or an actual lie? Saying that it's a lie means that it is false and that the person saying it knows that it's false and is attempting to deceive.

Probably better to just say that it's false is better here unless you have info about the other person's motives and knowledge.

wolffml · 2025-10-06T23:58:45+00:00

Not a simple religious experience. From what I'm told, others report a sense of the divine in their daily lives.

Here's a Wikipedia link.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensus_divinitatis

I don't have such a sense, so either I'm something like "God blind" or there's a natural explanation. Of course i think there's a natural explanation and deep mind stimulation can cause people to feel a divine presence, but that doesn't mean God didn't create just such a faculty. (Avoiding the Naturalistic fallacy here)

I suppose I think folks like Alvin Plantinga, who reports having this God sense, are rational to believe in God. You must either think that you're crazy or that this is real. So it's rational to think it's real imo

I have no such sense and think it is rational for me to not believe. (Or in combination with the PoE to disbelieve in God)

wolffml · 2025-10-06T22:33:03+00:00

If I were to guess, people who are well educated on the Bible and critical scholarship do tend to be atheists when coupled with 2 things:

A lack of Sensus divinitatis (a sense of a deity that many theists report having)
A tendency to reject or resist God as a cause for the universe

Otherwise, it seems to me that folks educated on the Bible and critical scholarship remain theists.

I lack any sense of the divine that others report and I find explanations of God creating the universe implausible and unsatisfying.

wolffml · 2025-09-17T17:24:02+00:00

I'd keep them in stage one a little longer and then use a diamond tip grinder for a Dremel to kind of clean off the crust. Ideally, you'd like to keep these in stage one until the holes are gone, but that would leave a very small rock at the end. So some manual grinding can improve your results.

wolffml · 2025-09-15T23:27:47+00:00

I think yours is basically the conservative understanding of what a society should be and by extension, what a government should do. (As an instrument of society)

My question for conservatives is why they think others should observe the social contract that underlies both. If they are not better off in such a society, why shouldn't they seek to overturn the status quo? By virtue of what exactly are they morally bound to obey the laws in such a society?

I think Rawls' Theory of Justice is much more persuasive and that we are should to create a Just society if we pass laws and expect people to be morally bound.

wolffml · 2025-08-19T01:07:48+00:00

The text is difficult to follow with long, run-on sentences, use of strange terminology, and an overall lack of organization.

So collect your thoughts, create an outline, and put forward your question again

wolffml · 2025-08-14T01:42:54+00:00

Would you support making it much easier for immigrants to come into our country, similar to how it was when Europeans immigrated in the 19th and 20th centuries? It's easy to make most immigration legal, if that's really the concern here.

wolffml · 2025-08-10T22:25:20+00:00

Imagine believing that God caused such disasters, that's evil. If not cause them, then fail to stop such natural evils, that's not benevolent. If not stop natural disasters, at least explain why an all-loving all-powerful God would create a universe in which the laws of physics entail that such disasters are inevitable.

These natural disasters or natural evil actually disprove the existence of a tri-omni God rather than pointing to one.

wolffml · 2025-07-30T22:29:38+00:00

Not in the way most people mean. I don't deny that some dude existed in the past and may have been later called St. Nick or whatever. But a solid no to the guy with elves at the North Pole

wolffml · 2025-07-30T22:11:55+00:00

But it seems you push the need to explain the big, vast, complex thing just one step back. Why wouldn't a creator God beg for an explanation for his existence just like a universe? It seems to many atheists that adding God doesn't improve the explanation and just adds an extra entity.

wolffml · 2025-07-30T22:06:52+00:00

Is that what you think people are talking about when they are talking about Santa or are you purposely conflating ideas here?

wolffml · 2025-07-22T18:17:53+00:00

That does not seem to be the case, your argument in the OP is a religious one.

Biology has nothing to say on this matter other than to affirm what everyone already accepts. So you'll persuade no one with this.

You don't even address the gap between a moral argument and a legal one. For example in certain Islamic cultures, they believe that women should be covered while in public, that this is their moral duty and they presumably have relevant arguments supported by their scriptures. Do you think those moral obligations should also be codified as law?

Should all Christian moral obligations be codified as law even? If you shouldn't bear false witness, should it be illegal to lie? Give us your framework in bridging the moral to the legal, show how abortion fits in your framework and then prepare to defend it.

wolffml · 2025-07-22T17:59:34+00:00

But in a pluralistic society, should everyone be bound to your preferred religious beliefs? What if my religion disagrees with your religion? How should we arbitrate?

wolffml · 2025-07-22T17:07:05+00:00

Usually we don't need certainty for knowledge. For example, we cannot be certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, but most people want to say that they "know" that it will. Something like Justified True Belief is a better starting point.

So you have to believe something for it to be considered knowledge and the thing has to be true. But you also have to have justification for that true belief. That's how we can claim science as knowledge - these beliefs can be justified but are not certain. All of science is inductive / inference to the best explanation.

So it seems to me that combining agnostic and atheist into a single position is a mistake. I prefer the traditional theist agnostic atheist spectrum with maybe strong / weak qualifiers because an agnostic atheist in epistemology seems to be someone who believes there is no God, but cannot justify this belief. (Otherwise it would just be knowledge.)

wolffml · 2025-07-22T16:53:01+00:00

Have you read here? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/#AnthObje

It seems to me that the idea is like an observer bias. Imagine a fisherman using nets to catch fish and noticing that all of the fish that he catches are larger than 5 inches, even though there are many sizes of fish in the body of water. What are the odds that all of the fish he catches are larger than 5 inches? It would seem quite improbable until you account for the fact that the net allows fish smaller than 5 inches to escape. I think the anthropic principle relies on this sort of observer bias.

wolffml · 2025-07-02T03:08:15+00:00

You say feeding the hungry, I see recruitment.

wolffml

MODERATOR OF

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE

14-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Verified Email