Arkady

I don't believe that harm is necessary or sufficient to render something immoral. And even if it were, it doesn't follow that any and all immoral acti...

I have no idea. Are moral intuitions dispositive of moral questions in general? Whatever the answer, I see no reason that questions surrounding pornog...

I think the reasons people want porn are rather different from the reasons one might invoke to justify porn. In any event, such a response seems to be...

Mmm, spherical cow. Yea, like I said, notions of "identity" may seem relatively straightforward at 30,000 feet, but tend to become rather muddled when...

I just think that a physical duplicate would share the same mental states. I don't believe that the truth value of those mental states (insofar as the...

I'm not sure the observer is actually necessary, though. We could talk about what would be the case in such a universe, even if no one were around to ...

Sure. I wasn't claiming that any and all people who reject that mental states are themselves physical or material can accept the supervenience thesis,...

So refreshing to hear someone take this very sensible view.

The deciding factor for what? Virtually everything is harmful to some degree (trees are nice, but people are killed by falling branches; ladders help ...

Is this true, though? A person may possibly believe that mental states, while themselves immaterial, nevertheless supervene on physical states (or are...

I don't think we really need dogs to tell apart identical twins: with one exception, I've never known a pair of identical twins which I've had much tr...

This strikes me as incorrect, though, of course, this is all just plausible speculation at this point. Perhaps some day we'll have super 3D printers w...

I have the impression that sci-fi predictions or depictions of the future have almost always overshot the mark in a lot of ways (flying cars, usually ...

Trump continues to accuse the media of producing "fake news," but, as he never seems to actually refute anything that the Washington Post, New York Ti...

You've probably all seen me on Trading Spouses some time ago. My time on that show was quite traumatic and disagreeable for me, as you can see from th...

The parade of physicians willing to whore themselves out to supplement manufacturers in television ads also speaks to this fact.

Ah, got it. Thanks for the info. Perhaps some may suffer from liar-like problems. Let's take another look: (1) I have uttered at least one statement, ...

I am unfamiliar with the term "LD-valid," but the concept sounds interesting; I've previously given some thought to such statements, but never knew th...

In the immediate wake of the shooting, there were reports that Mateen had used gay dating apps such as Grinder (Grindr?). These reports, as you say, c...

I'm not an expert on the historical aspect of the Trinity, but I would imagine its development was motivated at least in part to reconcile the apparen...

I've not begged the question, and, speaking of the article, you may note that it says "According to the most widely accepted versions of the Way of Ne...

Then you have an idiosyncratic definition of the term, which is at odds with its actual usage in philosophy. That being the case, then I see no point ...

I said that if concepts are taken to be abstract objects, then they lack causal efficacy, by definition of abstract object. https://plato.stanford.edu...

If concepts are here taken to be abstract objects, then I would disagree with this contention, as abstract objects lack causal efficacy, and any God w...

The classical depiction of the Trinity: http://www.ancient-symbols.com/images/symbol-directory/shield_trinity.png You will notice: F = G S = G H = G B...

I am curious: what would be a Buddhist solution to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar currently being carried out by Buddhists, while...

I don't think you know what pathologists do. No one who knows the motivations behind the Orlando shooter's acts could possibly dismiss the religious f...

I think the supposition that the Orlando shooter himself was gay or bisexual and frequented gay dating sites was later debunked, IIRC.

I don't know how many full-blown atheists there really were in Renaissance Europe. No doubt some of the "spiritual" people you refer to were actually ...

Does being a freethinker somehow preclude someone from being a (neo)-Platonist?

Some YEC's (and I'm not saying that aletheist is one) claim that the speed of light in a vacuum was faster in the past in order to account for the "st...

Thanks for this, BC. As others have pointed out, you always seem to have a ready supply of relevant information to bring to bear in these threads. The...

This doesn't seem quite right. Off the top of my head, Mormonism, Scientology, and Christian Science are relatively recent inventions (though it's per...

Many were also deists, freethinkers, and various other sorts of non-Christian.

I see. Then it is a good thing that you have such an illuminating beacon into the heart of men. Perhaps you prowl the streets of your hometown with a ...

Gad...that has to be the worst standup comedy routine of all time.

And yet it is those who protest so-called "Islamophobia" who break out Muslims into a separate race (at least when it suits their agenda of demonizing...

Then it can also be ignored as desired, and thus yours (and others') tendentious claims about "racism" against Muslims can be disregarded for the conv...

I will ask this question again: which "race" is Islam?

This seems to me to be an observation as much as an assumption, wouldn't you say?

It is also hardly representative of religiously-motivated terrorism, except by those who are deliberately obfuscating, or who are ignorant of statisti...

Please remind me when "Islam" became a "race." I must have missed that.

I confess to some confusion on this point: you claimed that science rejects "chance" explanations in every domain except the origin of life. I pointed...

It represents nothing in particular: only a form of evil so severe that it would warrant the parent's (or "parent's") intervention. There was nothing ...

Terrorists (Islamist and otherwise) act for any number of reasons: political, ideological, religious, military, etc. In some cases an extreme, violent...

That a good parent doesn't shield their child from all possible negative experiences doesn't entail that they don't shield their child from any possib...

Isn't Venter involved in "minimal genome"-type research (i.e. investigating what is the minimum number of genes an organism requires in order to susta...

Uh, what? There are a lot of posts flying around in this thread (in an emotionally-charged topic), so perhaps we're talking at cross-purposes, but you...

The fact that something occurred by "chance" doesn't entail that it lacked a cause or explanation: it may simply mean that there was no intentional pl...

Many of the familiar elements of which organisms are constituted (excepting hydrogen, which was present in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, al...