Wesley

The unfortunate by-product of the argument from effect is that no amount of evidence doesn't have problems, counter evidence, contradicting anecdotes, or holes.

I'm sure some of these have already been said, but I was raised Christian and had many of the same questions- and here are the theories presented: It was an evolution of the creation myth from polytheistic religions, by which a god would have been speaking to the other gods. It was the trinity, by which God the creator would have been speaking to God the Son and/or God the Spirit. It is the "majestic plural" by which it was common in ancient times for kings and rulers to refer to themselves as "we" and "us". I never was a fan of polytheism or the trinity, so by default I had accepted the majestic plural theory. I think now it is a hold-over from polytheism. It was then used as a majestic plural by rulers who believed themselves to be as demigods and popes who realized the contradictions in the Bible and then offered the majestic plural as a way for God to exist as a singular entity, but yet still refer to itself as "we".

fdrurl.com/bib This is Stefan's Bomb in the Brain series which will provide a great starting point and a very thorough launching point.

I continued to read the comments. There are some I felt I had to post as ridiculous. (All very positively rated)

Reading the comments on this article are making me sick for the future of the world. I am working on my own stuff and going to therapy and will do better in my family I choose later. When I see that I am up against this, I am getting quite sad for the fate of the world. It can seem that we are working against the world in such a fundamental aspect of wanting to treat children at least with as little violence as we show to random people on the street. The "children are everything" as we treat them as less people than we treat strangers. Its a crazy cognitive dissonanace I cannot understand.

+1

There is a theory which I am floating, but I cannot say whether it is true or not based on what you said. I tend to be against standardized tests. They can be helpful in getting in the right "ball park" but there is obviously a lot more personal things going on. Something to recognize is that many therapists are not good. Nothing beats a good therapist, but you seemed to indicate that your father had not gained anything from extensive time with them. This would make me very skeptical and start to think that they are more about earning money than helping people. A personality test may not help you diagnose yourself or work through your issues, but it may teach them which kind of therapies will work and how to influence you. It also can be a way to pathologize things, or just make you spend $2k on a test and then because of the fallacy of sunk costs you will just have to go to therapy there. I hope it is a good test and useful for you, but I am skeptical of things, and my instincts on limited information are telling me they want standardized proof as to why you need long term therapy from them or to learn your personality and how to better convince/manipulate (neutral connotation intended) you that you should stay with them. It is also easier to do something standardized rather than actually communicating and learning. Feel free to disagree with more evidence, but you seemed to have a similar instinct before you went about this place, but curiosity and a desire to improve led you to go anyway. Let me know what you think about this.

I do not necessarily have the most experience or knowledge to be able to answer this, but I will put my thoughts down and hopefully something coherent and useful will come out of it. 1. With this I think of UPB as what stef says often. When you want to analyze a moral idea you want it to be in the form of a universal statement. Killing is wrong/evil is analyzeable as a proper theory. Steve kills Dave isn't necessarily as the individual examples can bog people down in details and issues that have little or no relevance to the actual analyzed premise. I think Euthypro was more burdened by ignorance of logic than ignorance of rhetoric. 2. You are placing your own values on to Socrates. Martyrdom can create amazing social and political action as people are far more shocked into change by death than by the logic of an argument. Just look at Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr, or even 9/11. Shocking death can create dramatic change in a certain direction. Socrates may have wished that this change could be made. He may have stood up for his principles to the point of not wanting to run away from them. Maybe he was old and travel and hiding for the rest of his life just wan't worth it. Maybe he truly believed that Democracy was just because he hadn't successfully analyzed it. Maybe the world was just so far gone that "suicide" was the best option in his mind. There are many possibilities as to why staying and being killed would be preferable to leaving. It is nearly impossible to know his motivations.

Thanks for everyone's input. I was on vacation last week, so I wasn't focusing on such things. I will plan on becoming more serious about my dream journaling in the upcoming weeks and maybe months. I'll let you know if I run into problems again or need any help. Thanks again. [applause]

Well there was no "not going to sleep when they wanted me to". Out of fear, we (and my mother would also have fear and get us to go upstairs) would run upstairs when we heard him stir sometime around scheduled bedtime. Staying up usually would have carried the threat of verbal abuse, punitive punishments, and all of that would be complied with at the risk of physical abuse.As we would get older and had the ability to fight back, or to leave the house he would reduce the potential punishments or threats. As a senior, if I was going to stay out past 10:30 or 11, I needed to find a place to spend the night. He has to get up and check all the doors when one person opens one door. It is an OCD tendency to relieve anxiety about people breaking in at night. I also understand that they did not have to get me up, but they chose to, regardless of my opinions on the matter. My opinions rarely mattered. While learning was encouraged in the intellectual sense, I was "guided" to have their opinions (obviously the internet has made that irrelevant) and my parents had nearly 0 emotional presence to talk about feelings, opinions, or dreams. I would imagine that the nightmare I remember may have had something warning me, or reliving of a past experience. Of course, my dream was not listened to, and like many of my opinions, emotions, etc I was taught that the proper response was to repress the dream, emotion rather than express, record and/or analyze it. I am not a light sleeper obviously. I have always liked to sleep. I wonder if in some way, sleep is some sort of escape from the world. Even if I didn't remember it the next day, sleep was a pleasant experience. It easily could be a taught or learned response to dreams and feelings to repress them, rather that openly express and analyze them by bringing them into consciousness.

As a baby, there was one time that I have been told where my mom kind of forgot to get me up in the morning and all of a sudden realized that I had been there for several hours longer than she expected. She then ran into my room, but I was upright and happy, presumably I had slept extra for most of the time and had just gotten up to play with the toys in my crib. What I remember of sleep is that I never seemed to be able to get enough as a child. I had school on weekdays and would have to get up to my alarm (which half the time I slept through and had to be woken up by my parents). Part of this was a general not wanting to go to school, which I found boring and pointless, and part of it was that I hadn't slept enough. I had an early bedtime which I couldn't sleep at. I would always end up reading or on my phone until too late and not get up easily in the morning. On Saturday, I couldn't sleep in because I had to do chores and having 1 day a week where I was relatively idle and could sleep in was a negative in my father's eyes. I also had to get up on Sunday morning as we had church. I don't remember this as I am sleeping, but apparently when my mom would get me up when I missed my alarm, I would tell her that I am awake and have conversations, but I was somehow not conscious of what was going on and I would actually be sleeping or immediately go back to sleeping. I may have trouble falling asleep, but I almost never wake up in the middle of the night. Maybe once every 6 months to a year with a vivid dream about falling, which I woke up and then fell right back asleep. I can't remember any particular dreams. I was not enthusiastic about trying to remember them at the time. I'm thinking now once that I had a nightmare and talked to my father about it. He told me that it didn't need to be scary and that it was in my mind and that I could control it. So I had the dream again and apparently (I would know it as now) consciously repressed my subconscious thoughts at the time. Thats all I can think of.

I have started keeping a dream journal. I listened to Stef's recent podcast with the social worker/psychologist who said that when he did it, he would wake up and write down the dream real quick and maybe a short analysis and go back to bed. In the morning, he would then do a more extensive analysis as he reads through it. I am planning on implementing this. My issue is that I have trouble remembering my dreams. I know that I dream at least most of the time. I often wake up in the morning with the tip of a dream in my mind, but I can't remember it. I remmeber about 2 dreams a month when I likely dream a couple dreams a night. Has anyone else gone through this? How can I remember my dreams better? Any tips on analyzing a dream once I have on down? Let me know your thoughts. Thanks [blowkiss]

Killing someone doesn'y fit NAP. Inbreeding with daughters would not folloe the NAP if they are not old enough to choose. There is debate as to what age that is, but we all agree that a 40 year old father "inbreeding" with a 5 year old is despicable, but a 60 year old man "inbreeding" with his 40 year old daughter isn't evil. It is odd, but they are allowed to make their own decisions. You can defend others, and many do when someone is in danger. If a woman who is 5 years old is being sexually abused by a 40 year old father, it is very much justified to use force to prevent him from doing that. The child in essence is using you as an agent for her self-defense as she is not capable of protecting herself. Slavery that is forced is wrong. If you can't hold a job and can't take care of yourself, then you might volunteer to do manual labor for only food and shelter as pay (theoretically). Force slavery violates NAP.

This is mostly true. It is sort of an inverse graph (think y=1/x) where the first few years have a massive amount of brain development and some 95% or so could be complete by the age of 3 or something. This being said, it is possible for a brain to change. It is called neuroplasticity. The problem with this is that a brain that is sick had to to decide to change itself, which is difficult at best and takes years and years of work. The average person doesn't go through life altering self-knowledge. Someone who is severely damaged would be less likely to voluntarily go through self-knowledge. Besides this, there is a certain amount of violence and neglect that it is just not possible to recover from. If a child is starving, beaten multiple times a day, yelled at, tortured physically, emotionally, never taught nearly anything but the existing violent room where they are being held captive and un-loved for 3 years it would be impossible to recover from the lack of brain development. I do not know where the line exists where damage becomes unrecoverable, but some such line exists.