= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChrisPine comments on Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (320)
I'm just not sure we're having the same conversation here, John. I really didn't want to debate Mormon theology or the existence of God. My main point was that the Mormon church is too restrictive in terms of what is "allowed", both in terms of behaviors and beliefs. Too restrictive on things that might give Wednesday happiness some day.
This is EXACTLY what I mean by "playing logic games". Are you really trying to understand my position here, or just reductio-ad-absurdum everything I say? Because I have a seven-year-old, and I get plenty of that already. :-)
I suspected you would say this, which is why I mentioned "candles and canned corn" in an attempt to skip over this part: yes, alcohol can hurt people, and it does. So do swimming pools. (I'm not even sure which one is responsible for more deaths per year, but they are both WAY more than for marijuana, in any case.) Yet the Mormon church forbids alcohol, but not pools. I am saying that both are fun, but only if handled responsibly.
Forgive me if I'm mischaracterizing your arguments, but I feel like you are spending more energy trying to point out why I'm wrong and Mormonism is right, than you are in honestly trying to understand my position: hurting people is bad, and having fun is good. Some things can be fun in some contexts and hurtful in others. The fun ones are good, and the hurtful ones are bad. But I didn't really need to spell that out, did I? I think you knew what I meant.
Yeah... I don't mean to ad-hominem you, but, just as a meta-statement: this really sounds like the kind of thing someone without a lot of experience with alcohol would say. Obviously she doesn't need to get totally drunk every time she drinks... this is certainly not what I had in mind. But the Mormon church also forbids a glass or two of wine with dinner, once a week. And that hurts nobody. And is pretty fun for many people. The kind of fun they will remember.
Arrogant?? Do you have any idea how incredibly impossible such a thing would have been?? Run the numbers on this one... (unless, of course, you just say "God did it"). In any case, one can look at the rings of trees, match them up to older trees, match those up to still older trees... there's been no flood for many MANY thousands of years, on that evidence alone.
Argh! I really don't want to point-by-point debate you on your beliefs! I am not trying to convince you of anything. But if you are interested, you can look into it: the flood was either allegory, or it was a serious "God just did it, then covered up the evidence" moment (and obviously I can't argue against that).
Anyway... if you find peace and happiness in the Mormon church, and you don't feel hindered by all the things you can't do, and you don't feel stifled that you can't decide for yourself what is right and wrong in all cases (I am speaking of coming to a decision that it is unethical to eat animals, for example, which the church would find to be incorrect), then fine.
However, I did not feel that way.
I assumed it was, based on the "not in moderation".
Yes it does. You are free to read section 89 where it is so forbidden to see why.
Not sure the trees would have died. Also not sure of the exact nature of the flood. The myth is an extremely common one and myths are usually based on some sort of fact. That we haven't definitively shown what this was based on does not mean that it did not exist.
I just showed that the church would not find this to be incorrect. I actually know some members that hold this exact position and they are members in good standing. Like I said some of the presidents of the church have held this position.
Something being culturally being less acceptable has nothing to do with whether it is incorrect or not. That the culture within much of the church would be biased against holding a vegetarian or vegan position it is true but that is nowhere near the same as saying the church itself holds the position to be wrong.
I assume that you do not hold that position then. I have had multiple discussions with people that did hold that position and it is one of the more annoying things to deal with.
Alcohol causes about 23,000 fatalities a year. Pools appear to cause about 3,500 fatalities per year. Tobacco causes about 400,000 fatalities per year. Cars cause about 40,000 fatalities per year.
Many of the alcohol deaths are also car fatalities as well.
Per usage alcohol has a higher death rate then either tobacco or pools. Over the long term tobacco clearly has a higher death rate. I am unsure as to if marijuana has a similar long term usage effect. To be consistent society should either make alcohol and tobacco illegal or legalize all other substances with a similar amount of harm. I personally think each state should be able to make the decision.
Actually, the best available study suggests that drinking appears to increase life expectancy on average even in fairly heavy amounts. (Ungated paper available here -- see the striking graphs in figures 1 and 2.)
In practice, of course, this varies enormously between individuals, and it's somewhat correlated with ancestry. Some people with particularly bad predispositions are indeed better off as teetotalers, but the idea that total abstinence would make everyone (or even the majority of people in Western countries) healthier is just ludicrous.
As for those supposed total alcohol death statistics, these numbers are completely arbitrary. There is simply no reasonable unique way to define deaths as due to alcohol, and with convenient enough definitions you can make the numbers vary by orders of magnitude.
As a means of procrastinating, I looked up section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants, if that's what it's called. The "why" seems to be that there are people with insufficient willpower to resist caffeine or alcohol addiction (1).
So what? There are people without the willpower to resist chewing ice. Shouldn't the Mormons ban ice?
(1) Wait! I have to be careful here. It never mentions either caffeine or alcohol! It's specifically "grape wine" addiction and "hot drink" addiction -- though Word of God is that hot drink means tea and coffee, curiously excluding soda.
Curiously including iced tea and iced coffee and curiously excluding hot cocoa and warm cider, too.
About vegetarianism: you seem to be confusing two different positions: - it is ok to not eat animals - it is not ok to eat animals
One is the Mormon position, and the other is the vegan position. I understand that the Mormon church would be ok with something living a vegan lifestyle. No problem.
I am talking about being able to coherently hold the Mormon position and the vegan position. I'm talking about having the freedom to decided for myself that I believe it is wrong to eat animals. This is different from the freedom to just not eat animals. One is about actions you do or don't do, and the other is about ethics.
If I were still Mormon, I could not give a talk in church about how it's wrong to eat animals. If I were to tell others that I thought it was wrong (I'm really not the preachy sort at all, BTW, and most of my friends are carnivores, but if I were to tell others), I would be told by someone in authority in the church that I was incorrect. That animals are here for us to use, and God said so, and I am wrong if I think that's not how it is. Because an old book said so.
I find this unacceptable. I find the idea (that I am not free to try to discover what is right and wrong in this world) to be totally unacceptable. After thinking long and hard about this (for years), and after accruing a great deal of evidence and experience, I have come to believe something, and someone who has never thought much about it at all can just tell me that I'm wrong, and This Is The Mormon Truth, because it's written in an old book. It's everything this website is against!! (IMHO)
Now don't take this the wrong way: I welcome religious people to this website, I value differing points of view, and I think we can all stand to be a bit less wrong. But I have to ask: given your viewpoints (which seem to suggest that the way to be less wrong is to listen to god and read your scriptures)... why are you here?? What are you getting out of this?
Anyway... about the alcohol: did you even read what I originally wrote? I wrote "alcohol (taken responsibly (which is not the same as "in moderation" in all cases))"
Responsibly. Which might (might!), in some cases, be to some degree of excess... but still responsibly. That is what I said. You took that and went straight to every sort of excess and irresponsibility you could think of.
Upvoted for apparently actually looking this up.
I wouldn't be so generous. The car accident statistics are probably accurate, and the pool drownings might be too, but the other two figures are necessarily arbitrary and tendentious, however they were arrived at.