There is another kind of single point of moral failure besides social structures. It is possible for people to structure their beliefs in such a way that adding a single false belief breaks their entire moral system. For example, if someone truly believes that all morality comes from God, then their behavior will change drastically for the worse if they come to wrongly believe that:

• God hates X
• God speaks through X (where X is a person)
• God speaks to them
• God lacks true authority over them

There are plenty of cases where people have come to believe such things, and turned evil because of it. If you model people as having a bunch of beliefs that they received from their parents and from observation, then throw a few randomly-generated or maliciously-optimized beliefs on top, then one way to judge the quality of a belief system is by the amount of harm that the extra, false beliefs can do. If someone attaches all their moral beliefs to a single concept like God, then a single new false belief involving that concept can turn them evil. On the other hand, someone who knows a bunch of moral rules and believes them to be individually justified (preferrably justified in multiple ways) can't have that happen.

Note that not all theistic belief systems have this problem, and major religions have safeguards (albeit imperfect ones) against certain morality-breaking falsehoods. There are also plenty of non-theistic belief systems which have the same problem.

This argument fails several ways. First as history. Some of the atrocities happened without central organization -- e.g., Islamic fundamentalists aren't all part of any one organization, although they've created a variety of more or less hierarchical organizations; the displacement of the Indians (which had essentially nothing to do with religion except as a stock of rationalizations for things people would have done anyway) -- and all the others had important elements of individual initiative.

(I must say I found it amusing that you concede that the crimes against humanity committed by atheist states weren't solely the fault of religion. When you start saying things like that, you've spent much too long seeing arguments as weapons to be used on behalf of "your side".)

Second, it refutes a position nobody holds. No religionist believes in a flavor of God-implanted moral sense strong enough to overcome all the various temptations to behave immorally; usually they believe quite the opposite, that it was mostly or totally broken by some sort of Fall. If you find yourself triumphantly refuting a view that cannot in any case survive contact with ordinarily accessible reality, you're probably dealing with strawmen.

Given 10 billion bats , that bats have been around for 50 million years, and bat generations taking let's say 5 years, and assuming that population has been stable for evolutionary history, we have a super rough estimate of something on the order of (10B * (50M/5)) = 100 quadrillion historical bats. I think a lot of anthropic calculations assume there have been 100 billion historical humans, so probability of being a human is 1/1 millionth the probability of being a bat.

I don't see a whole lot of difference between not having subjective experiences and having one one-millionth the subjective experience of a human. Once we expand this to all animals instead of just bats, the animals come out even worse.

I disagree with a few points

1 ) Most people do not have enormous amount of time to read, so the question is always if one should NOT read something actual and read a classic instead.

2) People who Do have lots of time end up reading Both actual and classic material, which is probably why you find those who read the classics superior, it's just they are more into it.

3) Academics advise towards reading the classics among other reasons because they have been advised the same way, and chosen the same way, so Choice supportive bias plays a role there.

4) In addition, they prefer that their students read something they are already familiar with than something they themselves will have to become acquainted with in order to judge. It's easier to judge Hegel than Bostrom.

5) Very motivated people tend to lose motivation when not allowed to have their own ideas, and with time become meme-copies of classic people, in part this happens because they are obligated to read Plato, Aristotle, etc... and end up losing faith in the intellectual world. High young achievers such as Feynman, Eliezer, Russell, Kripke, Wittgenstein and others take deep pride in having been outsiders in their studying methods.

5) To Dodge the Nearest Mistakes: We are all mistakers, trying to fit the map more and more to the territory. If I read Plato, I'll be reading an old scrapped map made with coal in a rush by someone with alzheimer. If I read Feynman, I'm using satellite technology to provide a three dimensional visualization that scales up to centimeter range.

Could be simple time travel, though. AFAICT time travel isn't per se incompatible with the way we think the world works. Not to the degree sufficiently fantastic prophecies might be at least.

We find bunnies in general cute, but not humans in general -- so it makes sense that a baby bunny would be cuter than a baby human. It combines babyness and bunnyness, as compared to a human baby who only has babyness. We care about the human baby more than the bunny baby because we value humanness quite apart from cuteness.

You can kill someone with a pencil.

Why would how humans feel towards rabbits effect how likely they are to be eaten by their rabbit parents?

I just search google images for 'cute baby' and 'cute bunny'. The only baby I saw that wasn't cuter than a bunny was one that was photoshopped to have rabbit teeth.

Why would this make rabbits cuter to humans?