POTF 25 - Winner and Runner-Up

[Lord Thesaurian]

The winner of POTF 25 was Cyclops, earning 1 competition point and 5 rep points. Well done!

Winning Post

Do knowledgeable ex-atheists exist?

Optical illusions exist so some caution can be prescribed. However, since it is not an absolute mistrust, you must believe something and not nothing? You must for example, believe that you're not talking to yourself as you type on your keyboard and then press the Post button. Yes even self belief is an act of faith, and the dark hole of solipsist doubt is a repugnant place for me. I do have faith that I know things, even though I don't know how I know them. I agree with CommodusIV's skepticism about knowledge and appearances but it doesn't erode faith necessarily. I use the (admitted flawed) analogy of Cyclops Jnr's experience. He can't remember learning to talk but talk he does. He doesn't understand how me leaving for work leads more or less directly to chocolate cake for him but he's sensing a relationship and accepts that explanation from me. he sometimes ventures little explanations, often repeating some homily of mine before launching into absurd fantasy like "Scientists say dinosaurs lived one hundred million thousand ago, but now there are birds, because the meteor was cold". He's getting there, by which i mean to a place where he can debate the ideas in his sentence with me. Like Jnr I plaster half understood explanations over my ignorance, and the rest I make up. There's instinct and some sort of groupthink thing that happens with humans on top of "reason" as an individual might exercise it. Some people "know" there's a god or God or gods or whatever, with great certainty. Given the uncertainty and faith base of my own reasoning, who am I to deny them theirs? There's also the arena of reason as a (more or less) shared discipline. Taking on faith that we somewhat understand one another because we evolved that way (or God created us that way, or both) then I'm happy to argue the toss of Biblical phraseology, text analysis, history and archaeology. I think the "feeling of rightness" that might lead an atheist to openly mock the sanity of a person of faith is the same "feeling of rightness" that might get a witch tied to a stake so there are real political implications to our epistemological approaches. If you say "the Bible is true" and by that you mean "this version, glossed this way, with this praxis applied" then the implications range from a tolerant benevolent society to a living Hell. In precisely the same way the statement "the Bible is false" does too.

Runners-up this week are Akar and sumskilz. See you next time!

Runner Up Post

Do knowledgeable ex-atheists exist?

The Bible does provide objective moral standards; the problem is that we interpret those standards both subjectively and imperfectly. Is it subjective and imperfect to consider genocide to be morally wrong? At what point does god stop getting a free pass for doing stuff just because he's more perfect? This is why scripture is always subject to more perfect explanation. Also just happens to make it easier to always change the interpretation to match whatever the argument requires. A genetically distinct human life is created at the point of conception. Yeah, just like when a chicken lays an egg. But you're not a militant vegan or anything. "genetically distinct human life" is a meaningless phrase and benchmark. There is nothing "disingenuous" about equating the destruction of individual humans at the very beginning of their development (a phase common to all human life) with the destruction of individual humans at a later stage of their development. There absolutely is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_t...n_of_pregnancy "There is no sharp limit of development, age, or weight at which a human becomes viable.[15] A 2015 study found that even with active treatment, no infants born at less than 22 weeks survived, at 23 weeks survival without severe impairment is less than 2%, and at 25 weeks, up to 30% might survive without severe impairment.[16][17] According to studies between 2003 and 2005, 20 to 35 percent of babies born at 24 weeks of gestation survived," There's nothing "individually human" about them. They have no personality or emotion, no sentience. They are aware of nothing and are nothing more than a tumor or growth. You're aborting something that is at that point essentially a parasite, with the active infanticide of an entire nation's babies. I don't think it's a stretch at all to call it disingenuous. It's a woman's right to choose what happens to her body. It is not god's right to commit genocide, no matter how badly he wants Canaan for his Jews. And since 2d. and 3d. trimester abortions can often involve the fetus having its limbs ripped off and its skull crushed, I don't see that it is much different from being "dashed against the rocks". I would show you a video, but since even drawn interpretations are deleted for "gore", I can't. Just because abortion can look messy doesn't make it morally or medically wrong. A vast majority of medical procedures look pretty "gorey" to the outside observer. Ever seen someone get a steel rod put into their leg? They literally use a giant hammer. Claiming that abortions are messy is a classic move by those against a women's right to choose, but it's a totally moot and irrelevant point. It's like comparing a surgeon amputating a limb with a murderer cutting your leg off while you're still alive. The action is technically the same, but aside from that the two things are unrelated. If you want to compare videos I think there's a few of the genocide in Rwanda laying around that show genocide and infanticide are a bit more serious than a controversial medical procedure.

Runner Up Post

Coronavirus outbreak - From China to the World.

For context: The idiot ing President of America is killing Americans by mis-prescribing hydroxychloroqine; i may have some differences with americans on this site but not enough to want any of them to die. DO NOT TAKE ANY MEDICATIONS UNLESS PRESCRIBED BY A MEDICAL PRACTITIONER!!! An actual prescription is needed to buy hydroxychloroquine. yes, and your point is? https://twitter.com/Rx_Ed/status/1241391332280672256 You can't legally acquire either drug without a prescription from a medical practitioner. Hydroxychloroquine is already being prescribed for COVID-19 based on preliminary research. The FDA has approved it for compassionate use. This study found hydroxychloroquine to be effective against COVID-19 and even more so in combination with azithromycin. The sample size was small and the control group wasn't randomized. That said, more research is well warranted. I couldn't find out whether or not the FDA has approved the combination for compassionate use, but there certainly are some experts arguing in favor of them doing so. This is what Trump tweeted: HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents)..... ....be put in use IMMEDIATELY. PEOPLE ARE DYING, MOVE FAST, and GOD BLESS EVERYONE! His praise is apparently a reference to his earlier tweet about the FDA having approved hydroxychloroquine for compassionate use cases. I suppose it could be misunderstood if someone doesn't know the context, but I suspect most who are just looking for something else to be indignant about are deliberately misunderstanding it. We're meant to believe that Trump's tweet is responsible for two Nigerians in Lagos overdosing on chloroquine. Which is a reasonable assumption knowing that Trump's tweets are widely regarded as a legitimate source of medical advice around the world. You may want to stay put in Israel for the time being, but Israel is roughly 2 weeks behind Italy at this point as is Australia and the US. I'm from Seattle. I wouldn't want to be there right now. I expect it will get a lot worse. Israel banned flights from East Asia in mid-February, and no one who had been to an infected country within the last 14 days could enter without being quarantined. Soon after, only residents and citizens could enter the country going straight into quarantine. At the beginning of March, all schools and universities were closed. We've been in almost complete lockdown for roughly the last two weeks. Most of the newly identified cases were already in quarantine. The High Court has granted the government permission to use counterterrrosim techniques to track the spread. With the assumption that most people carry their phones with them everywhere, anytime anyone tests positive, everyone whose phone has been in close enough proximity to the infected person's phone is put in quarantine. Even so, it's still not completely contained. I'm in a pretty decent place to wait this thing out. Eleven floors up, and along the Mediterranean, so the air is pretty fresh. It's not even like being stuck indoors, because an entire wall of my living room is sliding glass doors that open to a deck.

[mishkin]

Congrats everybody.

[Aexodus]

Gg folks

[Akar]

Good job everyone, but especially the runner ups.