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“Might such an AI mention Alibris?”
“You better run it by…”

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I take it you don’t know.
Do you know how life could have come from nonlife via totally-mindless processes?

“Yes David I know exactly how life could have come from non-life via totally mindless processes.
Unfortunately I signed a Non-disclosure Agreement.
You’ll have to wait for the National Geographic special”
I look forward to reading that forthcoming “National Geographic special.”

I similarly look forward to reading those reasons.

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I’m going to post about reasons why I think the existence of a deity, or deities is overwhelmingly unlikely.

“well-known deficiencies of Hitler’s ethics”
“Deficiencies” such as what?

“Can someone who is ‘fully a human being, or a person,’ cease being such?”
“Yes”
Biden has exhibited some mental decline.
Is Biden currently a human?

“On the Reductionist View, a person can
gradually cease to exist some time before his heart stops beating. This will
be so if the distinctive features of a person’s mental life gradually disappear.
This often happens. We can plausibly claim that, if the person has ceased to
exist, we have no moral reason to help his heart to go on beating, or to
refrain from preventing this.
This claim distinguishes the person from the human being. If we know
that a human being is in a coma that is incurable—that this human being
will certainly never regain consciousness—we shall believe that the person
has ceased to exist. Since there is a living human body, the human being still
exists. At the end of lives we should claim that only the killing of persons is
wrong.”

Re: “If we know that a human being is in a coma that is incurable,”
how could we ever know that?  (by killing an individual that’s in a coma, thereby ensuring he/she will never wake up?)

Re: “On the Reductionist View,”
is that view correct?

“Deficiencies” such as what?

Why do I need to enumerate them? I don’t understand what my going through that would do to advance the conversation.

Is Biden currently a human?

It’s Parfit’s view; ask him.

how could we ever know that?

That is an implementation detail, not a problem of principle. Philosophers often do that, bracket the messy questions and speaking in hypotheticals that capture the relevant principles.

In general, I’m not sure what you are trying to accomplish by quizzing me on these questions. If I personally adopt some ethical view you see as abhorent, getting me to say that I espouse that view isn’t going to change my mind. That concession will only move people who already agree with you against me. It isn’t going to help me see anything new. So why should I play along if the whole conversation is, at best, aimed to embarrassing me in front of lurkers?

Re: “On the Reduct ionist View,” is that view correct?

I actually think this forms its own argument against there being a personal God. Ethics is too damned messy. You can get the principles (like the Golden Rule) right, but you still have really messy problems whose solutions yield very different answers to very important questions.

To whom does the Golden Rule apply? I’m strongly inclined to think it applies only to persons, and I think the only persons we have any experience of are human persons (we haven’t discovered any alien life, or angelic life, yet). Singer disagrees: he thinks that we need to include all sentient life when we apply the Golden Rule, thus we can have obligations to animals themselves.

I think Singer is wrong, but I also think that Singer is smart and sincere, and his arguments are serious. In other words, I think the question is genuinely difficult, and reasonable minds can reach very different conclusions about serious moral questions. I mean think about it: if Singer (along with figures like Pythagoras) is right that it is usually wrong to kill animals for meat, the vast majority of humanity through history has been routinely doing some *very* wicked things–and I think that most of them have been doing very wicked things in good faith, most of humanity really thinks that eating meat is fine.

But let’s set that aside and assume that more than sentience is necessary for the Golden Rule to apply–you have to be a person, you have to have some level of rationality and maybe agency (for myself, I think that the Golden Rule is self-evident in reference to those who are agents–whether or not they can currently exercise agency, as a healthy adult while asleep or drunk). Okay, when does person-hood begin?

Note that even the Catholic Church (which is one of the most stalwartly pro-life organizations in the world) explicitly admits that we can’t say when the human soul is infused–JPII says as much even in Evangelium vitae where he forcefully reiterates the Church’s absolute condemnation of all procured abortion. (And note, that even in the Catholic tradition, you had at least one canonized saint, who was also a moral theologian, who defended early-term abortion as sometimes defensible: Antoninus. Even given the basic Catholic principles, the question is one that sincere people have historically differed on.)

Again, this is a question with serious implications: If, for example, early term abortion is murder, then it is really important to figure that out: it is, then, quite reasonable to insist it be treated like all other murder. But if it is not murder but no different from killing an ant, then that is also really important to figure out, because whether we treat it as murder or not has very serious implications on real people’s lives.

In fact, it gets even more complicated if you consider arguments like Judith Jarvis Thompson’s: she famously argued that
(to put it very briefly) even if the foetus is a person, we don’t have an obligation to let other people leach off our bodies without our consent, even if it will result in that other person’s death. Again, whether you think she is correct or not, the fact is she makes a serious argument that deserves to be answered. And it is sufficiently plausible that many people who really sincerely want to know what’s right could be persuaded by it.

If there is a God who cares about things like murder, wouldn’t he make it clear to us not only that murder is wrong, but precisely what constitutes murder and what doesn’t? Why would he leave us in a situation where some people could make serious arguments that it is wrong to farm animals for food, but sometimes infanticide is defensible, while other people can plausibly argue that any procured abortion is tantamount to murder, and eating animals is perfectly unobjectionable? Why would he leave it so some people could argue that assisted suicide is murder, while others argue that we have a right to end our lives?

Note too, even if you think modern science answers the question of hominization (e.g., if you look at the fact that a fertilized ovum already has unique DNA, or if you look at when the brain develops in the embryo, or went he heart-beat is detectable, or when we can observe a pain-response) isn’t it strange that so much of humanity through history didn’t have access to the data that would settle such a critical moral question?

“it’s extremely doubtful Hitler was an atheist…
No one would suspect Hitler of being an orthodox Christian;
I imagine he worshipped his god when he looked in the mirror”
Can a person be an atheist while also worshiping the person he sees when he looks in a mirror?

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“it’s extremely doubtful Hitler was an atheist”

_Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944: Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims_, Herausgegeben on Werner Jochmann
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65* Berlin, den 13. 12. 1941, mittags Gäste: Reichsminister v. Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Dr. Goebbels, Reichskommissar Terboven, Reichsleiter Bouhler^191 H/Fu.
Der Krieg wird sein Ende nehmen, und ich werde meine letzte Lebensaufgabe darin sehen, das Kirchenproblem noch zu klären. Erst dann wird die deutsche Nation ganz gesichert sein. Ich kümmere mich nicht um Glaubenssätze, aber ich dulde nicht, daß ein Pfaffe sich um irdische Sachen kümmert. Die organisierte Lüge muß derart gebrochen werden, daß der Staat absoluter Herr ist. In meiner Jugend stand ich auf dem Standpunkt: Dynamit! Heute sehe ich ein, man kann das nicht über das Knie brechen. Es muß abfaulen wie ein brandiges Glied. So weit müßte man es bringen, daß auf der Kanzel nur lauter Deppen stehen und vor ihnen nur alte Weiblein sitzen. Die gesunde Jugend ist bei uns. Gegen eine absolute Staatskirche, wie sie die Engländer haben, habe ich nichts. Aber es kann nicht wahr sein, daß man auf die Dauer durch eine Lüge eine Welt halten kann. Erst im sechsten, siebenten, achten Jahrhundert ist unseren Völkern durch die Fürsten, die es mit den Pfaffen hielten, das Christentum aufgezwungen worden. Vorher haben sie ohne diese Religion gelebt. Ich habe sechs SS-Divisionen, die vollständig kirchenlos sind und die doch mit der größten Seelenruhe sterben.

google translate:
_Monologues in the Führer Headquarters 1941-1944: Heinrich Heim’s notes_, edited by Werner Jochmann
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65* Berlin, December 13, 1941, guests at noon: Reich Minister v. Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Dr. Goebbels, Reich Commissioner Terboven, Reichsleiter Bouhler^191 H/Fu.
The war will come to an end, and I will see my final task in life as clarifying the church problem. Only then will the German nation be completely secure. I don’t care about beliefs, but I won’t have a priest worrying about earthly things. The organized lie must be broken in such a way that the state is absolute master. When I was young, my point of view was: Dynamite! Today I see that you can’t break that over your knee. It must rot away like a burned limb. One would have to get it so far that only idiots are standing in the pulpit and only old women are sitting in front of them. The healthy youth is with us. I have nothing against an absolute state church like the English have. But it cannot be true that a lie can keep a world alive in the long run. It was not until the sixth, seventh, eighth centuries that Christianity was forced upon our peoples by the princes who supported the priests. Before they lived without this religion. I have six SS divisions that are completely atheist and yet die with the greatest peace of mind.

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“Hitler never personally killed anyone.
His policies were carried out by millions of pious Lutherans and Catholics”
Do you consider Goebbels one of those “pious Lutherans and Catholics”?

Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, volume 1, chapter 11:
Only after the enslavement of subjected races did the same fate strike beasts, and not the other way around, as some people would like to think. For first the conquered warrior drew the plow– and only after him the horse. Only pacifistic fools can regard this as a sign of human depravity, failing to realize that this development had to take place in order to reach the point where today these sky-pilots [i.e. clergy members] could force their drivel on the world.

Goebbels, Joseph. 1948. _The Goebbels Diaries: 1942-1943_, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Louis P. Lochner (NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.), 566pp. On 374-5, from the entry for 12 May 1943:
At noon I went to see the Fuehrer. ….
The Fuehrer spoke very derogatorily about the arrogance of the higher and lower clergy. The insanity of the Christian doctrine of redemption really doesn’t fit at all into our time. Nevertheless there are learned, educated men, occupying high positions in public life, who cling to it with the faith of a child. It is simply incomprehensible how anybody can consider the Christian doctrine of redemption as a guide for the difficult life of today. The Fuehrer cited a number of exceptionally drastic and in part even grotesque examples.

The opinionated “sky pilots” of course know exactly how the world is constituted. Whereas the most learned and wisest scientists struggle for a whole lifetime to study but one of the mysterious laws of nature, a little country priest from Bavaria is in a position to decide this matter on the basis of his religious knowledge. One can regard such a disgusting performance only with disdain. A church that does not keep step with modern scientific knowledge is doomed. It may take quite a while, but it is bound finally to happen. Anybody who is firmly rooted in daily life, and who can only faintly imagine the mystic secrets of nature, will naturally be extremely modest about the universe. The clerics, however, who have not caught a breath of such modesty, evidence a sovereign opinionated attitude toward questions of the universe….

Goebbels diary entry for 13 May 1943:
One might well ask why are there any Jews in the world order? That would be exactly like asking why are there potato bugs? Nature is dominated by the law of struggle. There will always be parasites who will spur this struggle on and intensify the process of selection between the strong and the weak. The principle of struggle dominates also in human life. One must merely know the laws of this struggle to be able to face it.
….
In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew….
….we are forever members of the Aryan race. …. Aboriginal man, the Fuehrer believes, did not know the lie…. The nations that have been the first to see through the Jew and have been the first to fight him are going to take his place in the domination of the world.

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“Hitler… His policies were carried out by millions of pious Lutherans and Catholics”

_The Führer_ by Konrad Heiden (1944), page 495 after searching for: sport
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For centuries it had been true that the cleavage into two sects of approximately equal strength– if Austria was included– had helped to tear Germany apart: But now:
“As soon as a man puts on the brown shirt”,
said Rosenberg,
“he ceases to be a Catholic or a Protestant; he is only a National Socialist”–

and what else could this mean except that the National Socialist had ceased to be a Christian? At all events, this is exactly what Rosenberg had meant by his words. In a society where the individual was nothing and the nation everything, God could be nothing unless he was the nation; this was no philosophical hair-splitting, but a state of mind prevailing among large masses. The Church-weariness and faithlessness of considerable sections of the Protestant Church membership, especially in the big cities, was clear from the emptiness of the churches. But the beer halls and sport stadiums could no longer hold all the people who thronged to political meetings.

“wouldn’t he make it clear to us not only that murder is wrong”
Definition of murder: an immoral/ “wrong” killing.
Putting that definition into your statement:
‘would not he [God] make it clear to us not only that an immoral/ wrong killing is wrong’
I don’t need God (or anybody, for that matter) to tell me that a killing that’s immoral/ wrong is immoral/ wrong.

Hey, dumbass, that wasn’t the significant part of the question; I tried bolding it for you already, but just in case you actually can read, here it is again: If there is a God who cares about things like murder, wouldn’t he make it clear to us, not only that murder is wrong, but precisely what constitutes murder

The question, as phrased, already presumes that everyone knows murder is wrong, so pointing out that murder, taken in its normal acceptation, already constitutes wrongful killing is totally irrelevant. That perfectly obvious point was built into the question.

I really can’t tell if you are a just a petty troll, genuinely stupid, or suffering from a diagnosable mental condition.

And yes, I realize I’ve let myself be provoked to anger, so if you are a troll, congrats, you win.

You are, at best, an insufferable half-wit, and I’m done wasting time engaging you.