In most cases turf, flags, resources, are all held on behalf of an ideology which usually takes itself very seriously, whether it be Islamic State or the United States. — Tom Storm

Sure. Christianity goaded Spain into invading America so that it, Christianity, could propagate itself in the heathen. The Spanish monarchy, using Spanish soldiers as it tools, just killed all those people and carried off all that gold and grabbed all that land to help Christianity along. The human agents involved had no choice in the matter; they were just serving an ideology. It's a point of view.

Some of the assumptions here - 1) that authors always have a specific intention and can convey it; 2) that an author doesn't want a range of interpretive possibilities; 3) that it is possible for people to arrive at a single interpretation based on a single authorial intention. None of these seem demonstrable. — Tom Storm

I made no assumption about an author's intentions, abilities or desires. I only presumed that they meant to communicate something to other humans. If they made up a story just to entertain themselves, it wouldn't be written down, and if nobody liked it, it wouldn't have been passed on and recorded.

And how do you demonstrate what the author's intention is? Again, interpretation. — Tom Storm

I could have sworn that's what I said I was doing.

My own interpretation is the only one I feel either competent or authorized to report. — Vera Mont

What is all this? I was talking about the war between science and religion. — Alkis Piskas

There never has been and never can be any war between ideologies, methodologies or belief systems. Wars take place between factions of armed humans. They're usually fighting over resources and territory, but that's usually masked by an appeal to the superior value of one ideology, methodology or belief system over the other. This is done to recruit troops through emotion rather than reason. With modern propaganda platforms, it can be done faster, more effectively and on a larger scale than ever before.
But maybe it's all irrelevant and there won't be time or need for that war, because the really big one, over survival, won't need any cover stories or recruitment.

I would maintain that myths do not speak for themselves - they do not 'speak' until someone gives them a voice by deriving a meaning from them - whether that be a pauper, a professor, or the Pope. If a myth seems to comment on human life, it is because someone hearing or reading it has determined the commentary. Interpretation. — Tom Storm

Didn't someone have to tell, sing or write it first? If so, they presumably did that to communicate something to someone else.

Incidentally, in relation to Christianity it is interesting how interpretation has evolved over time. The idea that the Bible can be read as some kind of positivist text is a recent one. — Tom Storm

Of course. (Keeping in mind that The Bible isn't a single book but many and most of them were unavailable to the Catholic laity until recently. So they depended on the New Testament and whatever the priest told them, while the conservative Protestant sect leaders leaned heavily on the Old Testament for their fire-and-brimstone revivals.)
Living religion, like any other aspect of culture, is never static. The interpretation of religious texts (or narratives and traditions that have been adopted by religionists) always changes with the need of the institution. There' no point sticking to old dogma if the congregation wanders off looking for a more user-friendly doctrine... because there is always a hedge-priest or prophet to give it them... unless you can engineer a fundamentalist revival through a revolution or political shift. There is a shift in America now toward Orthodoxy in Judaism, at the same time it's declining in Christianity and Islam (after an upsurge of both in the last decades of the 20th century).
None of that influences the stories of ancient mythology, any more than the use of mangoes in chutney influences the nature of mangoes.

And this is the entire point. The book itself is contradictory and messy, and it can't speak. — Tom Storm

I only pointed to one cause-effect relationship in one story in a book with thousands of stories.

Can you point to a church or an individual who, in your judgement, has exactly the right interpretation? — Tom Storm

Of course not! That's why I never consult religionists, or anyone with a vested interest in a particular interpretation. Myths speak for themselves, and they comment on some aspect of human thought, social development or relationships. My own interpretation is the only one I feel either competent or authorized to report.

This wouldn't keep coming around if somebody just made up two different words for physical and conceptual existence.
I usually confine 'existence' to things that do so independently of the sentience that names them but don't take people to task if they refer to the existence of deadlines or psychoses; it's simply common parlance, imprecise but harmless. It goes unremarked until somebody makes an issue of the existence of time or mathematics or some other attribute of the universe. Okay, they exist the way 'blue' exists in the sky or 'friendliness' in a dog; they're not discreet things, processes or qualities, but complex attributes and processes and phenomena for which we have simple words to express how we apprehend the result.

Language doesn't lie on a table, waiting for somebody to pick it up and start playing it; thus, language has a different kind of existence from that of a trombone. Language 'exists' only as an idea; a convenient, easily recognizable collective label for a very large and complex combination of brain activities; it may be symbolically represented in many forms, but has no independent reality.

"Mind" stands for an even bigger complex of activity: for all of the processing that a brain does. But you can't put it down, leave the room and come back for it later. So it doesn't exist.

All this does depend on which Christian you speak too. — Tom Storm

What the book says doesn't depend on their interpretation. I was referring to the book itself. If Christians don't believe it, so much the better.... unless they replace it with the weird shit televangelists are spewing.

The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

John Shelby Spong

So, he's got no use for either testament? Cool.

This is true where god is fiction and just an enlargement of human tendencies, a wish fulfillment fantasy — Tom Storm

Well, what else can they be?

I think early religionists feared to give the almighty any negative qualities. — god must be atheist

If mythology is any indication, the early ones were fine with it. They made up entire deities to personify not only their own faults but larger concepts like death, war, deception, chaos, as well as destructive weather phenomena. In primitive religions, the line between benevolent and malevolent supernatural entities is not at all clearly drawn. And, of course, those spirits are limited in both power and intellect, so that a human can often get the better of them, or reason with them, or appease them.

As far as I know it was Christianity that apportioned both traits and jurisdictions so strictly; banished all bad stuff to hell and raised all good stuff to heaven, even as it magnified and exaggerated the deities themselves.
I'm guessing this was part of civilization's (most effectively, the Roman Empire's) denial and banishment of nature from all belief systems, just as they did from the cities. And it was enthusiastically taken up by Western mercantile, expansionist societies, spreading Christianity and business to the heathen parts of the world.

A fruit tree made me do it. I doubt you comprehend how pathetic your argument here is. — Banno

I doubt you comprehend that my clarification of the theological position is not an argument for or against anything.

I said that, according to the story in the Christians' reference book, evil is not caused by free will itself, but that man's suffering and free will both arise from the original sin.

The potential for natural evils already exists in the world. But man was sheltered from all natural suffering like disease, predators, parasites, falling off cliffs, getting stung by nettles, having to work for a living and growing old, as long as he was inside the divine garden. Because he ate the fruit, he was tossed out of the garden, and no longer protected from natural dangers.

Nor did I say the fruit compelled him to do evil; I said that it enabled him to distinguish between good and evil and choose which way to act.
(Adam's feeble excuse was "The woman gave me to eat" and so Eve got tossed out, plus extra punishment.
Nobody claimed this was fair; it was simply the prerogative of a miffed deity, just as Job's tribulations were the prerogative of deity making a wager with his rival.

But this bit leaves one wanting to see the film...

In mainstream Christian theology the "devil" is one of at least (assuming they are numbered incrementally) 665 other beings — Banno

Somewhat disappointing. The book is better.

So there are things that god does not do on purpose? Unforeseen consequences to his acts? He's not omnipotent, or he's not omniscient? — Banno

Huh. I made no claims for or against God. I countered a claim with an if-then argument.

Can we really take Yahweh as anything but violent, petulant and egomaniacal? — Tom Storm

Yes. You can take him in his proper context as the god of a patriarchal tribe of herdsmen in the middle east of 1500BCE. They had a rough living to make among other rough peoples; they sure could not afford a genteel god.

Man was given instruction to produce children in a sacred covenant of marriage and to live simply without extravagance. — Outlander

Not in the version I read:

Gen 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

That chapter is largely neglected, as Christians prefer the second version.

To the point, "how does freewill explain <insert suffering here>", — Outlander

It's not supposed to, not directly. Original sin does, to the extent that eating the fruit resulted in 1. man's ability to identify evil and do evil and 2. his expulsion from the make-believe garden; forced to live in the real world of disease, hardship, sorrow and pain. (Gen 3:15-19)

Thanks. Wow! That's a lot of homework! — Alkis Piskas

Not so impressive - routine research for an unrelated project.

The issue I have with logical arguments about a omnipotent/omniscient/can make contradictions true God can be seen using an (imperfect) analogy. — PhilosophyRunner

Yes. The Christians did themselves a great disservice when they promoted their god right up out of all probability. Are you familiar with the Peter Principle? Might be a bit outdated now...

people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence":

Jehovah made sense as a local tribal god, like Thor; his magic was restricted to slinging frogs and burning bushes. Then Jesus came along, casting out demons, curing leprosy and shoving God up into the Kingdom of Heaven. Then Constantine set about imposing him on all the subject peoples of the Roman Empire, which meant rolling all the characteristics of their local gods into the RC's one big god (no wonder he split into three!)
Arrives the age of reason; science keeps making the world larger and more comprehensible, and God has to be pushed farther and farther out into space and given more and more improbable attributes to keep him in power - until he makes no sense at all, except to the uncritical non-thinking believer. (Of which there are still plenty, so God is secure for a little while longer.)

Yes, but your students are in your imagination. — Bartricks

No, they're just middle-aged.

I see a couple of problematic statements there.

2. God did not create evility. — god must be atheist

Sez who, where?

3. Humans have free will and they created evility with their moral displestitude. — god must be atheist

Humans are free to choose God, any of the other gods, or Satan. They didn't create anything.

The devil exists. — god must be atheist

According to Genesis, the serpent existed, back in Eden. It is reputed to have been an incarnation of Lucifer, who shows up much later in the bible, but the serpent of Eden is just a clever snake when God curses him to be the enemy of woman.

Genesis 3:14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

Many Christians believe the Devil was once a beautiful angel named Lucifer who defied God and fell from grace. This assumption that he is a fallen angel is often based on the book of Isaiah in the Bible, which says, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations.”

But it's by no means a solid foundation.

2. The devil (Satan) is god-made. Humans can't create angels. Satan is a transformed angel. — god must be atheist

According to one version of the myth and several versions in later religious tradition. In fact, the probability is that Satan has many precedents in Middle Eastern and European folklore. He can - with little stretch of the imagination - be identified with a number of pre-existing malevolent entities.

3. Angels are not humans; they have no free will. — god must be atheist

That's a direct contradiction - without any scriptural foundation afaik - of the previous statement. He wouldn't have been "transformed" - Christians prefer 'fallen' - unless he made a very bad decision - i.e. to stand against God in an armed uprising. You don't get will much freer than that!

QED evil (*some evil) has been created by god directily. — god must be atheist

Indirectly, if his ex-creature made it. Directly, only if he put it into the world on purpose. There is nothing the big book to indicate which.
* Why? Where does the other evil come from?

Ford, Edison, Tesla, it was all with money. — schopenhauer1

I'm not sure Tesla, Ford and Edison all come from the same mold, but you're still restricted to 20th century capitalist (the capitalistest nation on Earth) America. And ignoring all the other people and all the other inventions. That's okay, but having a narrow view doesn't mean the world has to conform.

In fact, some technology absolutely needed government backing first.. usually from wartime.. then university money, then private sector. — schopenhauer1

Some technology, yes. And most of the guys who made useful things in their garage or basement were subsumed by that same capitalist machine, yes; and many were robbed of the fruit of their labour. Yet that still doesn't stop the next genius tinkering, painting, composing, solving equations, dreaming up theories, pouring the content of one test-tube into another, growing a new hybrid - unnoticed, unpaid and unappreciated - just because it is their passion. Humans are curious and creative by nature.

I do sympathize with your students! Mine were able to arrive at many clever and correct answers, given a little encouragement.

Because most agree that there is a problem of evil for God. If I can show how those who think such things are committed to having to agree that this implies it is wrong for us to procreate, then that's philosophically interesting. — Bartricks

Not nearly as interesting as you seem to think. If you wanted to indict God for some wrongdoing - and god know he's guilty of lots! - then go directly there and stop involving Susan and Mary and whoever in irrelevant no-applicable examples. If you are going to indict a god, you should specify which god and read the charges plainly.
All this palaver about an omnipotent entity having created a world - which is supposed to be 'sensible' according to no stated criteria - and then hanging himself unnecessarily on the horns of a moral dilemma no god would entertain for a minute... It simply doesn't work.

I don't know who these "most" are who agree that this is a reasonable way to address the problem of evil, or morality, or procreation. But of course the perennial problem of evil reflects on all the gods humans have ever invented. You simply invented another, even less credible one, stuffed with straw to joust against.
Asking what's moral or immoral for a god to do, according to our own concept of what's right in dating and mating has little relevance to what we ought to do under the auspices of holy matrimony and having been instructed by a quite popular God to go forth and multiply, which "most" of us have been doing with every encouragement from the earthly representatives of our various gods. Incidentally, I doubt any of those people found the world 'sensible' when they entered it or considered it their prerogative to decide its fate.

... a common mistake is not to address the question ..... — Bartricks

There were several unrelated questions in the OP. I addressed one:

Morally what ought they to do?

But you didn't like the answer, so you marked it 'irrelevant' and told me, as you do pretty much everybody, "You missed the point." The point, I assume, being "It's wrong to have kids!" You could have stated it clearly at the outset.

(I know --- all of that is irrelevant and has nothing to do with what you were saying. Carry on!)

How does that engage with the argument I made? — Bartricks

Apparently, no response does.

We are unable to affect how the world runs. Therefore we ought to frustrate our desire to procreate. — Bartricks

That's a valid opinion. Why drag worlds and omnipotence into it?

It is a system that gets entrenched and thus we become habituated beings. — schopenhauer1

Except for the times when a system stops working and is overthrown from within, or suffers a major collapse and disintegrates or is overwhelmed by an outside force. People born into the period of upheaval have nothing to become habituated to and are free to experiment, until they empower a new elite who then impose their own system.

Afterall, technology came about through this system. — schopenhauer1

Not quite. Technology begins with bone tools, stone weapons, fire and dugout canoes. It is a process of human invention on which each succeeding civilization builds.

Is technology and this way of being necessarily linked (it cannot be any other way), or is it contingently linked? — schopenhauer1

Serially and temporarily. Every system takes advantage of whatever technology exists when it assumes power and adds to the body of innovations according to its own requirements. The bronze age produced a lot of war equipment and personal decoration. Agricultural expansion periods improve on farm implement. Exploring/trading systems speed up methods of transportation; industrial periods expand the use of motive power and manufactury. The monetary age creates technologies for instant transfer of funds and information. None of it is necessary to human survival; it's driven by the needs of the prevailing system.

Engineers think of stuff, funded by financial backers. — schopenhauer1

The engineering mind tinkers whether it is funded by financial backers or not, just as the artistic mind creates art, music and poetry, whether it sells or not, the adventuresome mind explores and makes maps; the healing mind devises ways to mitigate pain. All of these activities were taking place in primitive cultures that knew nothing of money and lending.

Little communes only exist in the wider system, so that's out as a "real" alternative. — schopenhauer1

Until the system breaks down. The Greatest Depression, collapse of the web, storms rip apart the electric grid and wipe out the commercial crops, migrants battle locals; cities starve in the cold...
and the Mennonites and Seventh-Day Adventists, Okushiri and Harga survive. Then they build whatever those small populations want to.

You are laborer. — schopenhauer1

I am a parasite, a surplus old person, sucking up a pension and contributing only unpopular novels. I can do that, because the relatively benign political regime under which I live has not yet unravelled. It's in the process of unravelling, but might, with a bit of luck, outlast me...

... Or Putin drops a few nukes and all bets for a future civilization are off.

Again, nothing you're saying has anything to do with anything I have said. — Bartricks

Oh well, that happens sometimes.

Again then: the omnipotent person wants to keep the sensible world operating as it does. The omnipotent person also wants to create new life. It is wrong for them to satisfy both desires. — Bartricks

This the crux of the matter. You have not demonstrated that a new life cannot fit into an imaginary world as it operates. You have not demonstrated how the conflicting desires - if indeed they are in conflict - of a deity becomes a moral issue.

The war is back? In what way? Have I missed the news? — Alkis Piskas

You must have. Religious terrorism; systemic denial of scientific evidence; curtailment of human rights; racial strife; economic disparity; and of course... actual war.
Other than that, we're just squabbling, polluting the landscape, spreading disease and accelerating climate change. IOW, BAU.

You seem to have missed my point entirely. — Bartricks

Yes, I did. What was it?

Similarly then, the omnipotent person has the ability to satisfy both of her desires - her desire for the world to keep operating in the way that it is, and her desire to create life and make it live in the sensible world. But it would be wrong for her to satisfy both desires. One or the other. Not both. — Bartricks

By what authority do you hold and omniscient, omnipotent being to the moral standard imposed by society on ordinary mortals? You attribute superpowers to a character on whom you then place arbitrary limitations. You posit 'a sensible world' without defining 'sensible'.
Why set up an insoluble conundrum?
I can thumb my nose at God without the complications.

I do not see ‘capitalism’ as the root of all social problems myself. — I like sushi

Nor do I. It is merely the most recent dysfunction of civilization. (Organized/state religion and monarchy were two of the previous manifestations.) The last and fatal one, IMO, because it compels the afflicted society to propagate it - much as a virus replicates itself by taking over the reproductive function of the cell it's killing - and the only end-point is the death of the host. No vaccine is coming from outer space.

.[the triumphs of science and rational thought — Vera Mont]
Yes, at last! The war lasted for too long! — Alkis Piskas

It's baaaack!

The empathy factors in in people understanding that people of color who live in low-income, high crime areas cannot merely pull themselves up by their bootstraps - and neither could they in the person of color's shoes. — ToothyMaw

This is also true... of white people, as well. But empathy is not very useful if it doesn't translate to voting for better social services and fairer taxation.

I totally acknowledge that the justice system is severely flawed, but I have trouble believing that there are such confounding factors that people of color don't genuinely commit more crimes. — ToothyMaw

You can believe as you please. I asked about exact numbers - and they're not as easy to find or correlate as 'popular wisdom'. I'm saying the statistics that are readily available from law enforcement agencies do not accurately reflect the proportional rate of criminal activity among all ethnic groups. That it would take a much deeper and wider research to discover the actual proportions.

I mean, if you can provide a little bit of evidence that there are confounding factors that make it merely appear that people of color commit more crime, I'm totally open to amending my position. — ToothyMaw

I mentioned a few factors. All law enforcement disproportionately targets minorities and the poor. So do prosecutors, because they have political campaigns to look good in. People identified as Black make up 13.6% of the overall population, but 19% of the poor; while Hispanics are 19% of the population and 24% of the poor.
If for no other reason, the poor are easy to catch, easy to intimidate and easy to convict. With a clearance rate below 50%, police forces are seizing every easy win. They're over-gunned, undermanned, undertrained as a general rule, and in many police forces, the leadership encourages a siege mentality, treating the population as the enemy. It also happens that poorest states have the highest Black and Hispanic populations and the most trigger-happy police forces. But more importantly, there is this:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/08/15/see-if-police-in-your-state-reported-crime-data-to-the-fbi You can't always go by the police reports.

Imagine as well that there is a sensible world, exactly like this one. — Bartricks

At what stage of its development? Are there animals or just plants? If animals already exist, and they have to compete for survival, they will evolve into sentience, very likely through stages of behaviour that are inimical to other life forms.

So, they have two desires: a desire to leave the sensible world to operate in its own manner, but also a desire to introduce sentient life into the sensible world. — Bartricks

Then, in order to get their wish, as omnipotent entities generally do, they would have to introduce a sensible life form that fits seamlessly into the sensible world.

If there are only plants and perhaps vegetarian insects, they could introduce a well designed sentient life form. It should be small enough to make a meal out of one strawberry and sleep in the hollow of a tree. It should have a long life-span and reproduce infrequently. It should be able to fly and its wings should be solar-powered and water-resistant. The body should be covered in fur just warm enough to keep it comfortable. It should be sociable as to disposition but self-sufficient as to capability.

And you are not omniscient, but you know that this sensible world is an incredibly dangerous place, full of all manner of dangers and just about every conceivable harm. — Bartricks

That's not my definition of a sensible world. Why would I want to leave it that way?

I mean, if the omnipotent, omniscient person ought not to introduce sentient life into the sensible world if they are not going to change the sensible world, then your inability to change the sensible world should also mean that you ought not to introduce sentient life into it. Agree? — Bartricks

Not really. What would be the point of omniscience and omnipotence if you refuse yourself permission to change a world that doesn't satisfy you?

Your only usefulness to broader society is your ability to both produce and consume. If we do not value these things (in the modern context at least), the system collapses. — schopenhauer1

The operative phrase there is "in the modern context", by which I take it you mean western industrial capitalist society. I do realize that most of the world has followed suit, whether they wanted to or not.

A couple of things about this kind of society: it's anxious, alienated and terminally ill. The very conceptual foundation of capitalism is anti-human and anti-life. Since it runs on debt, it has to keep growing to survive and that means it has to consume everything and then die. But it's incapable and unwilling to look forward at long-term consequences. If we look back a few thousand year, so is the basis of "civilization" as we have learned to call urbanized, stratified social organization, fundamentally anti-life and anti-human. As we have domesticated and enfeebled dogs by breeding the wolf out of them, we have domesticated humans by browbeating, bribing and flim-flamming the zest for life out of them...

No, not quite. There is spark still left. Is there any hope for it to thrive? It depends, I think, on how soon the present system collapses; whether there is something and someone left for a new departure.
Since I like to imagine so, I suppose I'm not a real pessimist... yet.

I was thinking more along the lines of her notion of acting in one's own self-interest preceding all other reasons to act. — creativesoul

There is always a reason to act, or else we lie dormant. Amoeba needs warmth and food, swims toward the busy end of the puddle. Self-interest is primal.
Perhaps Rand would see Trump's accumulation of wealth and attempts to hold onto power as a primal, natural response, but she was unsympathetic to her fictional characters acting similarly.

I have had a variety of roommates, and honestly it seems to me that all of the best and worst qualities are equally dispersed across racial and ethnic lines, — ToothyMaw

I don't think either character or culture factor into prejudice. It's a political construct. If you look back through history, you see the pattern of where and by whom racial stereotypes were manufactured, and to serve what purpose. (Obviously, consolidation of power, land acquisition and monetary gain - but you can find a much more specific motivation for each campaign.)

Even though people of color commit more crimes in general, I think people with empathy realize that there are extenuating circumstances and screeching at them about their culture accomplishes nothing. — ToothyMaw

I'm not sure how much empathy is required if you begin with accurate and relevant statistics. What percent of the entire population is what racial designation? (I use designation distinctly, rather than origin or makeup, because the DNA is inextricably mixed)
What percent of the population belongs to the top 0.1% of income? What's the ratio of ethnicities in that percentile? How about the top 10% What percent lives below the poverty line? What is the ratio of ethnicities in that bracket? What percent of each distinct ethnic designation is or has been systematically barred from political representation, education, home and business ownership, employment opportunities and advancement? What percent of which ethnic group has been regularly attacked, arrested and harassed by police? What percent of arrestees has access to adequate legal representation? (No, I do not mean the frazzled, inexperienced public defender with 119 clients and no support staff!)
Now, where are the crime statistics collected and reported? Not at the point of occurrence, but at the point of sentencing. Do we know how many of the accused are actually guilty? How many pled out so they could get out of jail and make a living top support their families? How many well-off perpetrators got away with the very same crime?
The US justice system is not in mint condition at the moment. I'm not sure you should be drawing your conclusions about society from its performance.

Much, if not most, of the plentiful violence committed by humankind is against God’s animals, their blood literally shed and bodies eaten in mind-boggling quantities by people. [It leaves me wondering whether the metaphorical forbidden fruit of Eden eaten by Adam and Eve was actually God’s four-legged creation.]
I can see that really angering the Almighty – a lot more than the couple’s eating non-sentient, non-living, non-bloodied fruit. I’ve yet to hear a monotheist speak out against what has collectively been done to animals for so long. — FrankGSterleJr

Not according to scripture as written in *that book*. God was perfectly all right with drowning all the animals, but one breeding pair of each, when He was miffed with the humans.

And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

Then a few hundred years later, in Leviticus, He lays out a whole big list of what animal to kill for which minor transgression against Him.
That god had no pity for animals - He just didn't want their blood eaten by people

Leviticus 17:14 For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof: therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.

but He wanted it sprinkled all over the altar and out on the ground.

No, the killing, torture and extirpation of other species is not down to Jehovah... unless you consider him creator of the world, in which case he's the one who invented predation and parasitism.
(Me, I prefer to blame blind, deaf, dumb, amoral nature that shoves a life form of some kind into every possible ecological niche.)

Ho-kay....

Most mathematicians subscribe to Mathematical Platonism, which says math is discovered, not invented. — Art48

Yes, I've heard it, but I think it refers to quantities and ratios that reside in physical reality and make the orderly interaction of elements possible - else, no stable structure could exist. I do not believe it refers to measurements and equations but to the quantities and relationships we express as measurements and equations.

I’d say math consists of thoughts, thoughts such as there is no largest prime number, the square root of two cannot be expressed as a fraction, etc.

Those thoughts are the observation (possibly accurate, though non-existence is hard to prove) of pre-existing phenomena. It is the phenomena that are discovered; the thoughts are responses by a human mind. An alien mind might think quite differently about them; a shark's mind not discover them at all, nor miss them.

Under this view, thought (and emotion) is sensory input and experience. — Art48

Then why do not all the people with similar reception equipment apprehend all these thoughts, the same as they would all feel heat or wetness? A fair percentage of the human population thinks no more about the square root of 2 than do sharks, and hardly any pluck Macbeth out of the ether.

The notion seems to leave too many unknown factors unaccounted for to qualify as a defensible theory. I'd demote it to speculation or proposition.

Perhaps in Kirshner's defense, a lot of conservatives were strongly influenced by Rand and consider her an inspiration. I find that unsettling, but it's probably no worse than the left wing's attraction to Marx. — T Clark

Except for Marx's superior intellectual rigour... But never mind. He - or an observant assistant - should have either removed the book or added a copy of Gore Vidal's The Last Empire for balance. Kirshner may simply have looked up a quote for reference and neglected to put the books away.

I don't think Rand's philosophy supports Trump's actions at all. — T Clark

I'm very much inclined to agree. However anti-government she might have been, and however poor her grasp of economics (and architecture) may have been, she was all about truth-telling and self-making - at least in theory. It didn't stop her little private hypocrisies, but I don't think she would have advocated that chicanery, science denial and treason be excused in public life.

Ironically though, the Churches and the people belonging to dogmatic religions, are intolerant to other beliefs. — Alkis Piskas

It is necessary, in order to keep the established elite in power, for the rank and file to hold a rigid sense of their own rightness - and if possible, a sense of grievance against any person, group or idea that might either threaten to dethrone the entrenched elite or that can be used as scapegoats. Thus the RC vs Jews and heretics; the Anglican kings vs the papists; the Stalin regime vs reactionaries; the Repub... well, you know.
We [western democracies] had a brief period in the prosperous 1960's and '70's during which a good deal of social progress was made, because the general conciliatory attitude among branches of Christianity, increasing secularization of institutions and laws, the spread of education, cultural and ethnic tolerance, and of course, the triumphs of science and rational thought.
Some of us believed that mood would not only continue but expand... a few diehards are still fighting a valiant, doomed rearguard action against the gathering darkness.

My "uselessness" refers to the those who are not affected, who are the minority. — Alkis Piskas

I know. I don't have much use for deities, either. But I would not turn against them, nor deny access to them to people who need a spiritual reference in their lives - were it not for their intrusion into the social and political life which encompasses my life, the circumstances of my environment, my rights and freedoms and the well-being of other people for whom I have compassion.

I think at the end of the day it doesn't matter what religion one pursues (if they wish to even coin themselves by any dogma at all) because beneath all religions or spiritualities seems to be a common ground. A sacred message about doing the right thing. — Benj96

Different cultural matrices evolve different spiritual bases for their collective morality. A collective morality is necessary for the survival of any social species - ask any meerkat or elephant. For humans, with the big brain, fertile imagination and constant awareness of imminent death, it's easier to devise and to enforce a moral code with the authority of a supernatural entity behind it. But even without a personification of righteousness, the code of right behaviour grows out of the geography and up with the history of a people.

And how many of our greatest leaders even just within the last few centuries were a force to be reckoned with, inspiring the masses and being assassinated for it? Or at least attempted assassination.

Did they all know the same thing? Were they all compelled by the same truth? I wonder. — Benj96

I would venture: no. I believe they were compelled by a conviction which seemed evident to them, and which they may even have held to be The Truth, but it's not the same one. The great leaders of some peoples are the monstrous enemies of other peoples. Without going *there*, I might just mention Civil War monuments.
Whatever forgiveness a religious icon dispenses, it fails to eradicate the harm of the conflict he had caused in life, that continues on long after his death. Jesus and Muhammad both understood the trouble they were stirring up, but considered the risk acceptable for the eventual reward: a population united by faith. I don't know about the Buddha; he may have been wise enough to realize that couldn't happen; that he could only get them to behave individually.

It really is difficult to discuss American politics and societies (all of them, north to south pole) without some mention of race, racism, the theory and practice of discrimination based on one's continent of genetic origin. It has played such a significant - often decisive - part in the formation of our present nations, it's simply unavoidable. And when we don't talk about it, we still keep running up against it in the dark. Better, I think to discuss than not - but it's hard to do without acrimony.

If voting is not sufficient then what would you advocate for? — ToothyMaw

Another shift? Okay, let's take one step back. I didn't say voting is not sufficient. I said they were prevented from voting.

many thousands of people disenfranchised by Republican state voting legislation and systematic voter intimidation. — Vera Mont

This is one of the major issues the Domocrats are trying so hard to remedy, against such strenuous opposition from Republicans. You are aware that a faction even wants to rewrite the constitution, to take more rights away from citizens?

Duvall opposed legislation that would have added South Dakota to 19 other states calling for a gathering known as a convention of states, following a plan mapped out by a conservative group that wants to change parts of the United States’ foundational document. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/gop-spends-big-in-state-level-effort-to-change-u-s-constitution....

More on who eats whom:

The campaign against Duvall was part of a more than $600,000 push in at least five states earlier this year by the group, Convention of States Action, and its affiliates in Republican primaries to elect sympathetic lawmakers who could add more states to its column. Much of the money comes from groups that do not have to disclose their donors, masking the identity of who is funding the push to change the Constitution.

what would you advocate for? Some sort of upheaval? — ToothyMaw

A major overhaul is somewhat overdue. What I would advocate for, were I a US citizen, is major reform of the electoral system. It had some serious flaws at the outset that were not effectively addressed by amendments. And the interpretation of those amendments is within the domain of an increasingly political judiciary. And the problem of states' rights, which has been causing cracks and breaches in the union from its inception, has grown into great yawning fissures. Then, there is systemic ethnic discrimination, inequality of access, disparity of influence, the ubiquitous influence of money in all matters political and legal, the lobbies, the vested interest blocs, the corruption, the hostilities and the incredibly poor information available to the voting public.
Yup, an upheaval sounds about right. I'd prefer it be a political one, rather than armed conflict, like last time. The US never recovered from that civil war; the opening salvo of Part II is not that far off.

But it annoyed me. — ToothyMaw

Completely understandable. I don't much like being upbraided, reprimanded and labelled, either. It happens a lot; has been happening for 20 years, and it still annoys me.

I'd say our experience of a thought is transitory, as is our experience of a tree. But I think the view that the thought existed before it entered our mind and exists after it leaves our mind is defensible and may in fact be true. — Art48

What/who generated it? What is it made of? How does it differ from sensory input and experience? How does it travel? Whence did it arrive to your mind? Who owns it before and after the arrival? By what mechanism is it apprehended? Where does it go when it departs? Does it flit from head to head like a butterfly on flowers? Does it change shape en route from one mind to another? Why do we not routinely use telepathy?
If the notion that thoughts exist independently of minds is defensible, I have not seen or heard it credibly defended.