Chiki

About Mikoto again:

About Mikoto:

Nothing wrong with banning knives.

The entire problem is that we're not in a vacuum. I've already said this: It's never ceteris paribus lol. That's the entire problem. The problem is that you claim to know that it is probably right to save lives from natural evils. Where is your proof for this "probably?" How do you know it's usually better to save lives, knowing how interconnected everything is in the world we live in? Since it's all so complicated, you can never know with any certainty what the outcomes of your actions are going to lead to. I can't know whether or not saving 130000 people will lead to overpopulation and kill 1 million people in the future with any kind of certainty. Please think on what you're going to say more carefully before posting. It does apply to the majority of consequentialists. I'm not the only person to argue this (the reason for paralysis is different here though): http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/infinite.pdf

The player is painfully slow. If I had the game, I would've finished it and the stream in around 5-6 hours.

I doubt they'll remove adopted sibling marriage.

Thanks.

I didn't get to see the rubbing bit :< anywhere I can see it?

You can marry your Hoshido siblings! Yesss!!

OMFG INCEST CONFIRMED! INCEST! YESSSSS!!!

You haven't justified anything, though. How do you know it's more probably ethical than not? You've just said it, yet provided us with no reasoning. Repeating yourself won't accomplish anything. I was just thinking about this interesting consequence before you made this post, and I concluded that it was a serious problem for utilitarianism (since you have no idea what the consequences of your action are going to be) and I think it's right. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/#WhiConActVsExpCon This view solves the problem just fine. But God obviously isn't a proximate consequentalist, so it won't work to solve the moral paralysis problem there.

It's never ceteris paribus lol. That's the entire problem. The problem is that you claim to know that it is probably right to save lives from natural evils. Where is your proof for this "probably?" How do you know it's usually better to save lives, knowing how interconnected everything is in the world we live in? Since it's all so complicated, you can never know with any certainty what the outcomes of your actions are going to lead to. I can't know whether or not saving 130000 people will lead to overpopulation and kill 1 million people in the future with any kind of certainty. I repeat: if you were right and saving many lives from a natural evil was probably the moral course of action, then we could just risk it all the time and there'd be no moral paralysis at all. That would beat the purpose of the argument. According to the moral paralysis argument, it's not probable. It's completely unknown.

How do you know that? If you were right and saving many lives from a natural evil was probably the moral course of action, then we could just risk it all the time and there'd be no moral paralysis at all. That would beat the purpose of the argument. According to the moral paralysis argument, it's not probable. It's completely unknown.

The problem is that we can't trust our common sense to lead to even a slight confidence in morality, let alone probable morality. Our common sense morality would unequivocally lead us to saving the lives of 140000 people if a cyclone was going to kill that many people. If God's ok with letting that happen, how can you ever have the slightest bit of trust in any of your moral judgments at all?

Replying to Snowy's post in another thread here: How do you know the Bible isn't meant to be a fictional story?

You honestly have to suffer from serious paranoia if you think this is a good argument.

If we want to be ethical though, if ants have the contribute the slightest bit of overall happiness to the world, then we as humans should do our best not to kill them. We may be like ants to God, but that in itself is unethical.

The theist gets into a very tough position if they admit that God might have reasons for doing actions that we can't understand. Suppose I'm playing Fire Emblem fog of war, trying to LTC 3-6 with Jill. I'm currently trying to bring my 7 turn down to 6 turns (let's say it is possible to bring the 7 turn down to 6 turns but extremely hard), and I come up with a giant list of theories on how the enemies move in the swamp, in order to rout the map for a 6 turn. Suppose none of them worked and I wasn't able to get a 7 turn. In that case, wouldn't all of my theories be inadequate and reliable? Yes. Also, in that case, wouldn't I be ignorant about how to 6 turn 3-6, if I can't come up with any theories which would allow me to 6 turn 3-6? Yes. I'd be massively ignorant about 6-turning 3-6. Let's see how this analogy works, and instead of talking about LTCing FE, let's replace it with doing the right thing. Suppose a religious person has in his hand a machine that can stop any earthquake in the world from happening. The common sense theory of morality would indicate that the right thing to do is to prevent an earthquake from killing any people, and I'm pretty sure even the Pope would prevent that earthquake from happening if he could. But these judgments are inconsistent with what God does: he lets earthquakes happen and kill millions of people. And the religious person isn't God, so he can't possibly know what the right thing to do is. Apparently, his common sense morality gives him the wrong answers, so he can't press the button on the machine to stop the earthquake. But he also should press the button because it's wrong to let people die. What should he do? He's completely morally paralyzed, unable to do anything at all. This problem doesn't just apply to the issue of natural disasters. Take any moral action you have in mind; say, killing and eating your own parents. How do you know it's the right thing to do to not eat them? Maybe God would say that it's the right thing to do because it leads to something good happening overall in the future. So how do you know it's the wrong thing to do? You literally know nothing at all: you can't decide whether or not any action is right or wrong because you're not God. And then you can't make any moral decision whatsoever. Here's the problem in a nutshell: if you admit that God might have reasons for allowing natural disasters, then you must also admit that you can't make any moral decision whatsoever. And if you can't, then you just have to let people die from cancer by leaving them untreated (how do you know it's right or wrong?), let people bleed to death from getting into a traffic accident, let people shot by a gun die, and so on. To say the least, this is a complete disaster. It's more eloquently put here:

This wasn't valid 69000-77000 years ago during the population bottleneck, which killed the vast majority of humans in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

Doesn't work for natural disasters. Read first post.

I notice that this topic keeps coming up in threads and derailing them, so it's probably best to just make a thread on it so that other threads won't get derailed. Let's start this post with a proof that God doesn't exist! First of all, it is widely accepted by theist philosophers that God is not merely omnipotent (maximally powerful within the laws of logic and omniscient (has knowledge about everything). He is also omnibenevolent )he's maximally good, all good, has no evil in him, whatever): It's helpful to get this out of the way before people say stuff like "have you ever talked to a theist in your life?" Second, we also see a bunch of needless disasters killing people that have nothing to do with people and free will. For example, the recent earthquake in Nepal killed a bunch of people and we're pretty sure that wasn't caused by people. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan killed around 16000 people and caused 230000 people to relocate due to the damage. According to theists, life on Earth is a test for us to see if we'll go to Heaven or Hell. But what's the point of this test if we just get killed off by random natural disasters that have nothing to do with people whatsoever? So these natural disasters seem not only to be wrong simply because they kill a bunch of people, but because they also prevent the people who die from being tested by life on Earth. God has all the reason in the world to stop it, so why doesn't he? Since he's omnipotent and omniscient, he knows when the natural disasters are going to come and kill people, and he can stop them with his power. If God does exist, and he knowingly lets people die from natural disasters, then that is something one would call "evil." For example, suppose I'm walking around with a gun, and I see a person about to get murdered on the street, and I'm the only person around to help that person out. Suppose I could just take out my gun, and at no harm to myself, shoot the murderer (or at least shoot in the air to chase away the murderer). I'm the only person who can prevent this murder from happening. Suppose I choose to walk away and let that person die. Would that make me evil? Yes it would. This case shows that it's wrong to let people die if someone can prevent it from happening. God is in this exact same situation. With his omniscience and omnipotence, he is the only one who can stop natural disasters, yet he chooses not to, and lets people die anyway. Why? Maybe because he's not omniscient after all. Maybe a better example would be something like this: suppose there's an ultra rich scientist who actually has knowledge of and power over the Earth's tectonic plates. Suppose the Japan earthquake and tsunami happened again, killing 10000 people. In the real world, this ultra rich scientist would probably be locked up and hated for allowing something like that to happen, since it was in his power to stop this natural disaster. Yet he chose not to save a bunch of people's lives. We would hate the ultra rich scientist for doing this, but how come we don't hate God? Since God is omnibenevolent, he has to be all good and have no evil in him. Yet, if he allows natural disasters to happen, he is not omnibenevolent. So this proof shows that a God which is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent cannot possibly exist.

A few cases in which guns have stopped mass shootings doesn't prove that banning guns doesn't improve the situation.. it's just silly reasoning. Perhaps those mass shootings wouldn't have occurred at all if guns were banned. Do you expect everyone to walk around with guns 24/7 or something? They mean the same thing. "prove" doesn't mean prove in that context: Italic = the way Blaze used the sentence. His argument was that there are exceptions to the safety of carrying guns (a general truth). Tbh I'm getting tired of your creepy obsession with constantly trying to pick debates with me. It doesn't please me that I constantly have to put down the poor arguments you make.

1) No there are not. That is literally the biggest myth in the history of informal reasoning. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule 2) This is more than balanced by there being a much greater number of criminals with guns. 3) Only a "may." It's not a ticket to protection like gun-freaks like to act it is. Copy paste where someone said that it would literally stop using criminals from using guns.

This isn't addressed to you, but if someone thinks having a totalitarian government in the US is a problem then they're a paranoid lunatic who should be locked up imo. Like Alex Jones. It's not like you're completely safe even with a gun, unless you literally have a rifle by your side 24/7. Most people don't carry guns with them outside. They could get shot from behind, be caught before they can grab their gun, get shot before you can shoot the criminal, etc. Guns aren't as helpful as people think they are. It's not a ticket to safety. It's just a ticket to more needless deaths.