(May 26, 2015 at 12:49 pm)Heywood Wrote: For an theist egalitarianism is an easy concept to accept. People should be treated the same because God created them as equals.
Okay, so first of all, that is complete bullshit, because your bible makes it very clear that god did not create everyone as equals. In fact, your god has a chosen favorite people that he allows to run roughshod over their particular part of the world in the old testament, killing other races, enslaving them, and worse, all because they are chosen and have the right to do so. Anybody saying that god created everyone equal simply has not read, or is pretending not to have read, their bible.
Quote: However if there is no God then there really isn't any rational reason to actually believe that all the different races, genders, or sexual orientations are actually equivalent. There might be rational reasons to pretend the are equivalent....social harmony and such...but is there rational reason to believe they are actually equivalent? It is simply too much of a stretch to think that nature, as a matter of happenstance, made all these things equivalent.
Can you provide a single argument or justification for the claim that people aren't equal? Not on an individual basis, of course; you'd have to be a moron not to see that individual humans have variations. But on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, can you provide even a single thing, directly and exclusively related to those factors and nothing else, that would lead one to the conclusion that these groups aren't equal? Because I simply can't see it, and you're the one making this assumption that equality, barring god magic, is just "pretend," and that contradicts everything my lived experience has shown me. So, how about instead of just setting up a strawman and attacking that, you actually justify your claim before you just go about assuming that it's true?
Furthermore, can you provide a single reason why those reasons you provide, assuming that you even can, would lead us, rationally speaking, to not want to treat others as equal? I mean, reasons to denigrate or consider a person lesser, due to factors they cannot control? There's no benefit to it, and yet you're once again assuming that it's some natural state that we're pretending doesn't exist, and so I ask you again: justify your claim.
Quote: I don't hold an egalitarian position. For instance I see no reason why men in general can't be better leaders than women or women in general can't be better leaders than men.
I notice, once again, a lack of any form of evidence to justify a venture away from egalitarianism; you might "see no reason," but you also haven't given a reason to adopt either of those positions, which is what you'd need to do. You'd also need to prove that those reasons are a product of the biological gender of the person alone, and no other factors, because if it's anything else then it's a quality not inherent to one gender or the other, and therefore doesn't apply to the situation you're trying to frame, as anyone, from any gender, could attain it.
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee
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