RE: The reason religion is so powerful
June 8, 2021 at 12:23 pm
(This post was last modified: June 8, 2021 at 12:24 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(June 8, 2021 at 11:09 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: I think the reason we would choose an infant over an elderly person (and you hinted at something similar) has something to do with Thomas Nagel's famous argument: Death is evil insofar as it deprives us of life. Therefore, the younger you are the more life you can be deprived of, and the more tragic the death. And abortion, I would argue, logically deprives an organism of the most life possible.
So that means that you would rather save ten frozen fertilized eggs than one baby or one older person from the fire.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
