The reason religion is so powerful

[John 6IX Breezy]

In the event of a fire, you would save your [emphasis added] 5-month-old baby over a stranger [emphasis added] 5-minute old fetus as would just about everyone else.

Are you familiar with confounding variables? Your addition of kinship is one such example. Any novice scientist would know to control for such a variable, or would otherwise properly incorporate it using a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA).

[The Architect Of Fate]

Are you familiar with confounding variables? Your addition of kinship is one such example. Any novice scientist would know to control for such a variable, or would otherwise properly incorporate it using a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA).

Whether the addition of kinship is added or taken out my point remains unaltered 

So impressive jargon does not save you 

[Fake Messiah]

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.

[John 6IX Breezy]

So that means that you would rather save ten frozen fertilized eggs than one baby or one older person from the fire.

Not everything can be coherently thrown into a hypothetical fire. Control for the variables at least and I'll answer the question. What would be the "frozen" counterpart for the baby, for example?

Edit: After some thought, I don't think there are very many formulations of this scenario in which I wouldn't choose the baby over the zygotes.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Not everything can be coherently thrown into a hypothetical fire.

He didn't put just throw anything into the fire and there is nothing incoherent about his scenario or mine.

 Control for the variables at least and I'll answer the question. What would be the "frozen" counterpart for the baby, for example?

He doesn't have too. His scenario holds up as is .As does the central point.

[John 6IX Breezy]

He doesn't have too. his scenario holds up as is as does the central point.

There is a shift from the logic-based approach of Nagel's argument, to an affect-based approach in Fake Messiah's scenario. And perhaps we are evolutionarily wired to value the survival of babies in ways that we are not for the survival of zygotes. Given that he is questioning the logic of the Nagel argument, his formulation doesn't quite address that: The logical answer might be the zygotes, but the intuitive answer might be the baby.

(Note that my object permanence argument also predicts this outcome.)

[The Architect Of Fate]

There is a shift from the logic-based approach of Nagel's argument, to an affect-based approach in Fake Messiah's scenario. For example, perhaps we are evolutionarily wired to value the survival of babies in ways that we are not for the survival of zygote

Given that he is questioning the logic of the Nagel argument, his formulation doesn't quite address that.

Nope the scenario remains the same and yes it does address it

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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.

[The Grand Nudger]

I take it that you weren't actually unaware of the fact that human dignity isn't a religious concept, then?  You knew that the sources and explanations you asked about existed, and were too many to count, you just don't think they "work"?

I'm guessing that's going to be a genuinely novel use of the term.  Even people who pursue abortions possess a shared humanity, and.... if you asked.....you might find that they too hold to some idea of human dignity.  They're not exactly werewolves, eh?

Not exactly, I just don't debate against links. But you aren't wrong. Saying that human dignity is religious was overbroad when what I meant was that notions like dignity and human rights are normative and not empirical. So technically, yes, they can be considered to be broadly philosophical without being strictly associated with theism and, yes, I think those attempts fail in the same way that many athiests say there isnt any evidence then quibble about what does and doesnt count as evidence. I will just leave it at that.

The main issue is whether religious ideas are uniquely dangerous in political discourse and ought not be used to justify public policies. My issue is that most political discourse is not entirely based on empirical determinations. There are normative considerations based on metaphysical conceptions of human nature and it is the pretense of "humanism" that it is devoid of metaphysical assumptions.

Religion and theism aren't interchangeable terms.  There are more explanations of human dignity than religious explanations, and more religious explanations than theistic explanations.  Each category refers to an additional claim upon which a notion like human dignity is or must be (or must be correctly) premised - as asserted by an advocate.  Seeing as there are equivalent explanations for human dignity which make no claims to the sacred, let alone a personal and intervening god, I find that neither is required to make sense or justify them.  Such that, even if there were no sacred things and no theistic gods there would still be human dignity, still be shared humanity.  If there were sacred things and gods, they would still not be the explanation for human dignity.  All of this, mind you, regardless of whether there actually -is- such a thing as human dignity.

At any rate, of course political discourse isn't limited to an empirical state of affairs.  Most of the time, we engage in politics to change how things are - to make them closer to what we wish to see in the world.  This is why religious ideas are dangerous.  They exist as our most deeply held and compelling beliefs.  Things that are so true, we would make them true wherever we found that they were not.  You and I can disagree about taxes, about crime and punishment, about defense policies  There can be no disagreement about the sacred to those who hold to the concept of the sacred.  The notion of the sacred is an inherently totalitarian belief.  Theism, profoundly more so.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Nope the scenario remains the same and yes it does address it

Then why does replacing the words frozen fertilized egg and baby with a neutral term like organism remove the emotional coloring? Saving a one-week old organism vs 40-week old organism changes the tone despite being logically identical. It normalizes the categories in such a way that people can no longer resort to Type I fast thinking (see Kahneman).

[The Architect Of Fate]

I refer to my previous statement . As your response changes nothing.