2bits

If you aren't a progressive, you just hate progress.

This thread came back from the dead, but I'm not against taking a swing at a zombie. It's worse than that for McDonalds franchises, which run a much lower profit margin. Almost all the wage increases have to be covered by higher prices, losing them even more customers. It's entirely possible (situation dependent of course) that there is no price which raises revenue enough to cover the wage increases. This is when the restaurant closes and everyone loses their jobs.

I provide quotes in the other thread that prove Stefan's comments were not limited to the caller's least-bad options. I could go line by line gathering more "non-arguments" that apply equally to the caller's children and anyone elses' children. This is a positive thread, rather than critical like the other, so I'll bow out and let you have the last word. I'll just say that Stefan has earned trust with me (even after the Frozen magic-is-insanity stuff ), but no one will ever accuse me of being a Stefbot. Not that you are a Stefbot yourself.

[nm]

Justin K, there are many good arguments against numerology already and they are easy to find. Google "numerology debunked". Even the top hit is a good start. It's an age old superstition, so we've had ages to compile its fallacies. People are bad at intuiting probabilities, so it's not surprising that they are mystified by an "impossible" set of coincidences. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-our-brains-do-not-intuitively-grasp-probabilities/

I don't think Stefan wants people to convert in the abstract. This call was just one data point (albeit very recent!), with many to the contrary. However, extolling the perils of secularism and virtues of religion, while describing in great detail the benefits the caller's children would have by staying in the Mormon church (even if they could get out)... That's all but overt encouragement, and certainly discourages all deconversions.

Stefan preferred "religion" or "subsets of more gentle Christianity" but yes, he did. I appreciate you, Michael, but this is annoying. We listened to the same show, and Stefan spent an hour justifying the series of comments he made around 27:04: "Where would you go? Let's say that you could get your whole family out of the group. And the question is well then what? Where do you go? Where do you find the sustenance that religion provides? The structure, the depth." Stefan then says he had more conversations about philosophy in church than he ever did at school. More conversations about values, principals, and ideas sitting in a pew than he did sitting in a coffee shop. These were general comments not limited to the caller's least-bad options. Stefan didn't say the sentence "Convert your children to religion so they don't grow up to be secular, state-loving, free-love divorcees" but there are quotes later in the show that sum to that position. I'm sorry if this comes across as hostile, but I also feel some frustration. Maybe this was just a series of rambling thoughts that went in the wrong direction, or maybe a huge misunderstanding. I know Stefan values honest feedback.

I'll be the contrarian. Like others, I was also moved by the emotional situation of the caller. However, Stefan went off the reservation with a train of thought that leads to this logical conclusion: We should raise our children in religion for utilitarian reasons. He's not wrong because of a conclusion I dislike. Go where the evidence leads. Instead, there were a series of incomplete and cherry picked data, logical fallacies, and overall emotional bias that led to what I consider a false conclusion. I wouldn't be surprised if either Stefan expresses regret later, or announces the results of this reverse psych experiment. I want to go on and dissect it sentence by sentence. I feel that strongly about it. However, these days I'm not much for internet, lengthy, typed, forum back-forth. My daughters are asking me to play before bed now. This is the best avenue for immediate feedback to the show. I will probably email the show and see if I can challenge Stefan directly. Update: I found a more appropriate thread for my comment here: https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/43536-an-atheist-apologizes-to-christians-call-in-show-march-4th-2015/

You can't steal your own private property by the definition of 'theft'. You must first argue that someone else has a greater claim to the property, which makes your question a bit nonsensical. Then you can say there is theft of others' property. It is absolutely false that the lower classes must work for rich masters. That would be slavery, which can only exist through force with the sanction of government. The "lower classes" absolutely have options. They can start a service business, many of which require little or no startup capital... oh wait, that can only happen if the government regulations, licensing, and taxation can be satisfied. Without the moral hazzard of government support, they are more likely to be forward looking and save some small amount of capital. This greatly opens their options as well. The fact is, the only reason the "poor" work for the "rich" is that they offer the "poor" their best option at the time. In a real free economy, the vast majority will earn what they are worth. If you want to earn more, invest more capital in yourself and become more valuable. Any deviation from this reflects inefficiency that will be corrected by the market. If you earn too much, your employer is at a competitive disadvantage. If you earn too little, you are free to leave and work somewhere else. Good intentions to help the poor are fine, but the ends don't justify the means. Taking money earned by some and giving it to others who have earned less is real theft. The best possible argument is that the theft is justified (just like "war" justifies murder), but then we must ignore the costs of the market distortions that redistribution causes. If you give stolen goods to the poor, are they better off? Immediately, sure, just like freshly printed money makes first-recipients richer. You pay the costs later. From both fiscal and moral standpoints, it just doesn't work.

Opinion is subjective, and truth is objective. Can you have the opinion that 2+2=4 or that rocks fall down? It's an opinion exactly because you don't know it's true, and if it was true it's not really your opinion.Also, truths are consistent with each other. If you have two beliefs that are inconsistent, one or both is false, but for certain they can't both be true.

What if it is? You seem disturbed by the possibility, but I would like to understand more about why that is. It might very well be the case that we have genetic traits that lend to statist society (I would argue we do, to varying degrees), but that doesn't threaten the objective determination that statism is immoral today by thinking humans who know better. It doesn't give any moral foundation to modern statists. Is this the fear?Natural selection considers only individual fitness, and by extension the fitness of communities that aid individuals, in a particular environment. Sometimes that means the strongest male kills all competing males for dominance. It has nothing to do with what 'ought' to be or what's fair or what's moral. As thinking people, with knowledge and insight and moral responsibility our ancestors never had, we can and 'ought' to overcome our basest drives to be more than animals.

I was going to reply to your post point-by-point, but I need to stop. Suffice to say, except for the sentence above, the rest sounds a little too irrational and fuzzy for my taste.

State-enforced professional licenses are a fabrication of Satan! Amen!?

I like a lot of your points. I should reiterate what I said to TheRobin. We can define "exist" anyway you like, but there are consequences to how we define the things that "exist". If I took your position and said that thoughts and information exist, we would need to be careful and consistent during a conversation about thoughts and information that we did not ascribe any physical or energetic traits to those things (thoughts exist, I think of god, god exists). It leaves a lot of opening for rhetorical slight-of-hand or logical slip, and I suspect that's why most people in FDR seem to prefer the mass/energy usage of "exist". It keeps a clear divide between the "real" and "abstract". However, to say information doesn't exist is not the same as saying there is no information. We would need an existential word for things that need to be described, but which do not have mass or energy. I think that semantic gap is fueling this thread. Your comments about oxygen and subatomic particles are good, but I can counter by saying "oxygen" is just a shorthand description for that particular arrangement of protons, neutron, and electrons in orbitals. Oxygen still represents matter and energy, even if we can reduce the definition of 'oxygen' to child components which have mass and energy themselves. My usage of "presence" and "absence" goes to the point I made above about not having an existential word for abstractions like thoughts and information. Mass/energy and information can both be present or absent, so these terms are for things irrespective of whether they exist. Yes, I'm invoking a thought experiment to add or remove a thing. If it can be added to a system without changing the mass or energy of the system, it's being created from nothing. That violates the Conservation laws, and I conclude it does not exist. The converse applies if the system mass/energy does change. It doesn't necessarily need to be a "magic" mechanic at all. For example, to test whether a chair exists, we can magically place a chair in a room (the room being the closed system). Or, a group of craftsman can bring in wood and tools, make the chair, and then leave. Either way, we have an empty room before, and a room with a chair after. Mass must have been added to the room for this to happen, and the chair exists. Only things that exist can transform. Things that do not exist merely appear and disappear. I'm going to move away from a thought as an example of information, since the wet chemistry of a brain leaves the closed system difficult to define. Are a collection of wooden blocks, made into the shape of the word "thought", acceptable? If so, imagine them in a room. We can move the blocks around to make different words, or even no words, and the energy and mass of the room before/after will have not changed. The only thing that's changed is the information encoded by the blocks. Or we can destroy the word "thought" and create the word "elephant". This is not a transformation since the latter is not a requirement of the former. All the while, the room/system energy is unchanged, and the words themselves do not exist in matter/energy. Only the blocks do.

Hey, give me credit for saying our odds are infinitely better.