baker

Why is it immoral to use people? What does Cabrera say, what do you say to this?

So? Science tells us that life is a struggle for survival. How does religion not fit this struggle for survival?

Other people's NDE's are useless. There is nothing to learn from them that could provide one with an advantage in life.

This is at least backwards. The religious epistemological method is the method of revelation, it's top-down, not bottom-up. God, the divine, or some h...

Why should anyone do that?? Can you explain?

But your psycho-social wellbeing is. Friendships/family relationships and business relationships have different ends, but they are both means to an en...

Friends and family are a means to an end as well. You're using your friends and family for your psycho-social wellbeing, for your socio-economic statu...

Like I always say: Might makes right.

Self-censorship makes the phenomenon seem rarer than it is. Some people self-censor their opinions on so many things because they know stating them wo...

The press companies are private companies. They have the right to act for their own personal gain and self-promotion. Anyone can claim to abide by the...

This is why a course of action that aims to be successful cannot afford to depend on information, it cannot afford to depend on taking someone's word ...

And it goes both ways. The environmental activists need to earn their right to be taken seriously as well.

This year, we had a drought like we haven't had in decades. At a time well into the drought, I was talking to two ladies with whom I otherwise chit ch...

James' theory is actually a combination of doxastic determinism and doxastic voluntarism. Absolute doxastic voluntarism would mean that one could choo...

In the sense that death deprives the person of their future. It's a harm one can predict with some measure of certainty at any point of one's life. Fo...

There is a difference between a post-hoc justification of one's belief and the actual process by which one has arrived at that belief. The search for ...

James' Will To Believe is pertinent here: What you consider to be relevant facts is not necessarily what someone else considers relevant facts. This p...

I actually lived under reverse racism for a period time. That was back in elementary school. I lived in a culture that was about 99% white. There was ...

You made the claim, the burden of reference is on you.

Do you think that this is what, for example, Caesar was thinking when he crossed the Rubicon?

Do you have any doctrinal support for this idea? Which established theory of karma says this?

It's not uncommon for Asians to believe that Westerners/whites are inherently incapable of spiritual advancement. I've encountered this attitude among...

We're living in an era of secular tyranny.

Complete the following sentence: Because Russians have always been slaves, they should ....

Why should hatred be morally right? This is what this whole Ukraine thing is about: the sanctity of hatred, the sacred right to hate, and the duty of ...

The story goes that this is precisely what he did, but some people are just wicked and don't love God. Because you're not good enough, you're not qual...

Enter the evolutionary survival of the fittest.

That's ironically escapist when it comes from people who have a combative, authoritarian attitude toward people; but when it comes to God, they turn t...

Nah. I imagine God as a Trumpista. Look at the world: it's full of killing, raping, and pillaging. If God exists and has created the world, then he ap...

What a genuine word of God would look like In order to be credible, it would need to be in line with scientific theories, specifically, the Theory of ...

Americans have ... a peculiar understanding of communism.

Is it only Republicans who think that way? It seems that one of the likeliest explanations for why the Democrats (and the US general public) are so in...

You're conflating hardship with the psychological experience of hardship. Hardship, as in, a broken bone, poverty, hunger, cold, heat, working 12-hour...

Only to someone in a position of power. For everyone else, might makes right, and one must hold as true whatever the person says who holds more power ...

So what are you going to do about it?

The question is whether an oulook like yours can be arrived at deliberately.

Why did she do that? If partying and drinking are so great and make her so capable of ruling her people, then why apologize for partying and drinking?...

Agreed. The actual difficulty has to do with making sense of democracy and the standards of morality for democratically elected officials. A person in...

Why should the Western hatred of Russians (and Slavic people in general) be considered morally right?

Politics _should_ be sober and serious. Similar applies to many other professions. It's frightening the way people are willing to lower their standard...

I can't actually think of a single American film or tv series where I could say with certainty that it doesn't ridicule Russia or present Russians as ...

Wow. The pretense is astounding.

This is typically Western theology infused by secularism; a bottom-up approach, explaining theological matters from the perspective of humans. "Becaus...

It's interesting that some people think this is about humans being "special". I've always interpreted it in the sense of, "Even though humans are so b...

When hatred and contempt are normalized, it's only a question of time before there will be a war.

I said:

Indeed. And as I've been saying, both antinatalists and the natalists tend to be hedonists.

And this is also one of the problems with an intrapersonal understanding of karma. Without regard for other people, who gets to define what the pure d...

Only in fatalistic conceptions of karma. Such fatalistic conceptions deny that in the present moment one has any chance to act any differently than in...

Various theories of karma have in common that they view karma as a feedback loop, but they differ in the scope of this feedback loop (and thus in the ...