Hah! Good one. I guess the statement "There are no bigfoot, ghosts, and aliens" could logically trip you off. But in fiction, we could be at liberty to talk about them. So, the proper way to deflect this type of inquiry is, bigfoot, ghosts, and aliens exist in fiction. — L'éléphant

So atheism is logical as long as God is fictional ? Isn't that exactly what atheists say?

fallacious argument can still be a proposition and even a valid proof even if unsound. — Shwah

No proof for this existence of God is valid.

any case there are proofs of creation from God in cosmological arguments, contingency of creation arguments, ontological. Aristotle required a prime mover and Plato required a form of good. I'm not sure if those overlap with your statement. — Shwah

Those aren't proofs. Those are fallacious arguments. If they were proofs, the matter would be concluded.

I have a spoiler alert guys for those who missed Philosophy 101, no proof for the existence of God succeeds, including this one, which appears to suggest that God's existence arises from the pure force of logic in that God is supposedly logicaly impossible to negate.

Wherever the nonsense arises from that one can't negate that which they don't believe, I don't know, but nonsense it is. Bigfoot isn't forced into existence by logical entailment because I'm unable to deny his existence because I don't believe in him.

If science has no way to demonstrate how the universe came into being, there is one possible explanation left. — EugeneW

From this, why doesn't this follow:

If theism has no way of proving how the universe came into being, there is one possible explanation left.

3rd

To me atheism does not make sense. What it tells me is, atheists don't believe in something that never existed in the first place. It's a circular argument. — L'éléphant

What about the denial of Bigfoot, ghosts, or aliens? Can one logically deny those?

I still loved her but couldn't take the madness anymore. — Olivier5

I think the OP was pretty ridiculous, but I'll give you kudos for salvaging this thread with your compelling story of how you banged a girl cross eyed on the way to Bangkok (my spin).

But this last line above is what caught me. Hit home.

The idea that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, to be taken literally from Genesis to Revelations is a recent innovation in the 2000 year history of the faith. — Bitter Crank

So very true. It's frustrating that people believe the reactionary literalism to be all that religion ever was or is.
Over a thousand years of Jewish midrash and Christian exegesis goes so far beyond a strict four corners literalism.

The stories within the Bible show us scenes of gore, rape, slavery, and so many more violent acts, yet Christians sit here and preach that we must do what the Bible tells us word for word. — Edward235

Point me in the direction of this mythical group of Christians (or Jews) who hold that the Pentateuch is to be interpreted literally in isolation from all other religious literature for its meaning.

This is to say your concern is a strawman. There is a reason Jews and Christians don't stone children, despite what the Bible might say. It has to do with the fact that the Pentateuch is not accepted by any group I am aware of as the sole guiding document for all life decisions.

That the Christians have a New Testament and the Jews a Talmud is a good reason to question the assumptions of your OP.

It strikes me that the purpose of the law is to make local school boards in progressive districts fearful of discussing homosexuality or transsexualism.. The vagueness might be intentional. Prudence would dictate steering very clear from any such discussion. The likely result though will be defiance by someone and then the courts can figure out the scope of the law.

Nothing much, just dancing and attempting to raise the true savior of my world. Tis the noble stoat. — Wosret

Life is always a transition from one phase to the next, always in pursuit of righteousness.

I think that's what this thread is about.

I can assure you that the universe has no meaning or emotion. — L'éléphant

No you can't. You can choose to believe there is no meaning and you can live your life that way. Or, you can choose to believe every thing is where it is for some purpose and live your life that way.

Give me a reason for choice A, not just an assurance you know A is correct.

They won't have a choice if the West reaches an agreement with Putin. One wild card is that I think this is personal for Biden. I think he wants to take a chunk out of Putin. — frank

If the agreement is reached without Ukraine's approval, you really have recreated the Munich Pact.

In any event, if the plan was to surrender, the West has certainly not set the stage for that about-face. Getting everyone lathered up about the immorality of the attack and how the Russians have to be stopped does look like a step towards an appeasement policy.

He already signalled his demands at the negotiating table: he wants Ukraine to be recognized as neutral. He wants it demilitarized, and he's probably going to choose its next leader, who'll be a puppet. — frank

This is certainly an optimistic outcome, unless, of course, you're Ukraine.

My guess is that Ukraine says no to the idea that it be de facto annexed into Russia. The proposal you've suggested is for Ukraine to surrender and hand over the keys to Russia. Surrender avoids war for sure.

Or maybe not for sure. It's hard to know. Reminds me of the Munich Agreement just a bit.

In real life, people need to act and react based on what others do and think and say, justified or not. Because typically people are not utter morons who can afford to entirely ignore their strategic environment out of some high-minded sense of principle, although NATO and the EU seem not to have got the memo. — StreetlightX

This logic works both ways of course. Putin can be blamed for not having gotten the memo either, because he too has the intellectual capacity to recognize that the Western world acts out of a sense of high minded sense of principle, even if he thinks those principles are hypocritical and naive bullshit. That is to say, just as you can criticize NATO for having acted in a way that provoked certain action, it should have been fairly obvious to Putin it would have done exactly as it did. If you're going to require that NATO and the EU be Grandmaster chess players in this environment and expect them to respond precisely to the strategic environment, then let's impose that same standard on Putin.

The matter is just unfolding, so we don't know the final result, but it is worthy to note that Russia is getting backed into a corner where their only option is nuclear, meaning on all conventional levels, they will likely come up short in the conquest to to rebuild their former empire. With the money being pumped into war effort by the West, it should go on for decades and the economic sanctions will do their fair share of damage, and Russia will also be cast off the world stage in every other regard.

It would seem that if I were Putin, I would have calculated a high minded moralistic response from the West, where the fight was not going to be over empires, land, or resources, but over righteousness itself.
Why would I want to provoke a group of crazies that believe that God is on their side? Sounds like someone just provoked a proverbial battle of Good versus Evil that the West can't help but throwing every last of its soldiers at.

Reminds me of this:

"This is the doctrine of bitachon, or trust in G‑d, which the chassidic master Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch (1789–1866) distilled as the Yiddish adage, Tracht gut, vet zein gut—'Think good, and it will be good.'

What this means, says the Lubavitcher Rebbe, is that bitachon, the absolute assurance and conviction that G‑d will make things good, actually becomes the conduit and vessel which draw down and receive G‑d’s blessings. Positive thinking is not just a way to weather negative occurrences, but actually makes positive results happen."

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2492/jewish/Good-Thinking.htm

I don't buy into these things literally of course, but I do have this instinct of refusing to say or think bad thoughts for fear that I'll think them into existence. It derives from the idea that God spoke creation into existence ("And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."). This goes well beyond as @Average suggests because it references a mystical event, as in when divine creatures of God think something or say something, they change the course of the universe.

Like many religious ideas, the far-fetchedness makes it hard to fully accept, but I do like the idea of the power it provides to each of us to change the world and the responsibility it imposes upon each of us to say and do as we'd like the world to be. I also like the paradoxical construct of this system, because it is through the power of prayer that one obtains power over the universe, as opposed to the idea that we're down on our knees begging for external assitance.

Be strong!

Do you feel the strength now within you?

Is Romanticism the cause of world wars and dreams of Utopia leading to mass murder and tyranny? — Athena

You romanticize the reason for war. War is over gold. Look deep enough, and its over something.

Yes, or threaten your job because you do accept Joseph Smith as a prophet, for that matter. — Janus

A more apt analogy would be for them to threaten your job for being anti-Mormon, which they probably would.

No, we found ourselves inching closer, objectively, as has been done in other parts of the world, to something that violates human reason. And, just for clarity's sake, any proposal that includes the compelled expression, or silence of expression the Human Consciousness that isn't itself a violation of the Human Consciousness, is evil and must be battled to the hilt. The historical record is clear as to what states do with that specific intrusion into human life. — Garrett Travers

You need not fight the American Revolution again. Your side won. We wrote a Constitution that has enshrined every principle you speak of into the very fabric of our country, so much so that we intepret our Constitution much like the Bible, it's each inerrant word leading our every move.

I know what horrors lie beyond our border. That's always been something worth fighting to protect ourselves against.

Leave the transsexuals out of this battle for the soul of our country is all I'm saying. They aren't the enemy. They are the scapegoat. It can be hard to decipher one from the other.

What C-16 represents to me is a threat of similar compulsions being placed on me by my states, and the popularity of this growing to a point where fiat sentiment overcomes human reason. I have no beef, per se, with C-16, it is the responsibility of Canadians to dispose of their little fascist mommy's boy and be free again. The same will be our responsibility with such tyranny comes to America, which again, is a genuine threat at this point in history, without question. — Garrett Travers

Let's look at this from the 100 mile overhead view so you can maybe understand my questioning these objections.

We have a group of people who generally are ostracized and ridiculed and thought of as sexual deviants. Their behavior is considered sinful and immoral by large segments of the population as it violates specific rules about gender roles and sexuality in our society.

Against that backdrop, objections are raised not as to the immorality of the behavior or as to how it simply violates societal norms, but as to the outrageous burden they place on average folks living day to day. Where we used to have very clear grammar rules, we now have to worry about "him," "her," and "their," when we didn't have to before.

So I drill down on this question about language burdens, and I'm told it's not the specific words that really cause the problem, but it's in the abstract, where I shouldn't have a governmental body telling me what to do as it relates to speech. The transsexual pronoun issue is just one example from that abstract concern.

I then drill down further on that question, and I'm told it's really not an issue in the abstract because it's conceded that your jurisdiction doesn't impose such prohibitions. You then explain the issue is actually in the hypothetical because you fear the cancer of Canada might spread southward and you'll then be burdened by having a government tell you how to speak. That is, today we find ourselves on the precipice, teetering back and forth, and unless we snuff out this pronoun mind control, we might as well hand over our First Amendment free speech rights to the KGB banging at the door.

My response to this is that I agree that free speech rights are worth protecting and I would object to burdens being imposed by the government with respect to it. I am however extremely suspicious when someone claims that it is the transsexual that poses our greatest risks to free speech. It makes me wonder whether this group is being singled out as the greatest threat to our free speech because they actually are, or whether it's all a pretextual effort to further attack this historically attacked group.

Scientists didn't lobby government to write a code in law claiming that Pluto must be accepted as a planetoid, or one would face rammifications administered by a monopoly on force. You know, like how Bill C-16 did? Like how the attempt to instantiate hate-speech laws has engulfed the social-reconstructionsist platform? That's specifically the difference: force. — Garrett Travers

There is no law dictating that you are required to call transsexuals anything. You can be as offensive or inoffensive as you like. The US has no hate speech laws. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/07/no-theres-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/

If your beef if over a specific Canadian bill, then maybe you have point there. I really don't follow what Canada does or know how over-reaching their free speech limitations are. I'd be opposed to limiting all sorts of bigotry and stupidity because I do think the right to free speech includes that.

This is specifically because the only thing we had to go off of, again, were consitently observable, emergent characteristics of the male phenotype. All species have this detection ability, and employ them functionally, by and large. — Garrett Travers

The reason we call people male or female in the vernacular has nothing to do with their genes. It has to do with how they look and act.

So, no it isn't. And if you keep accusing people of this kind of ill-will, I'm going to show you what I think of people who would seek to use shame to overpower and dismiss reason and established science. — Garrett Travers

Of course it is. Gender roles have played and continue to play significant roles in our society and a blurring of who is male and who is female has caused the outrage. Maybe your outrage comes from the technical word changes and you'd be just as mad if we started calling bowls "cups," but I think more is at play in this battle over gender identity than just words.

And yes, it did ignite furor in the physics community, but the physics community is known for employing reason and adversarial co-operation in the pursuit of truth and homeostasis within paradigms of science. See what I'm saying? — Garrett Travers

It ignited interest and debate. There is no moral consequence to how planets are named or designated. There is when it comes genders. That's just part of the Western tradition and the norms for our society.

As far as XY, that's half correct. I am referencing XY, but only in relation to consistent, and reliably observed emergence of XY phenotypical characteristics. Thus, to expect me to do something different isn't just absurd, it is outrageous, and it is particular the perception of that expectation that has ignited furor. — Garrett Travers

Men were called "men" long before we knew anything of chromosomes. My guess is that you wouldn't know a male chromosome if you saw it, and if tomorrow you learned that half the men had XZ chromosomes and not XY ones, you'd consider yourself educated. What this means is that you likely call men "men" because they look like men and act like men. You don't call MtF transexuals "women" because they don't look that way to you. If medical science could do a better job, you might change. That is, if the person had a functioning uterus and all other sexual organs and looked indistinct from any other woman, maybe you wouldn't have any objection.

What ignited furor was the supposed immorality of men acting as women and the societal expectation that it be accepted as normal. The passion did not arise over esoteric word usage and the furor that emerges when one is asked to use a new word. I don't remember such outrage when people were asked to stop calling Pluto a planet.

Well no, the violation of reason begins with the violation of the law of identity. A male is a male forever, as determined by the male's genetic composition. "She" will always maintain the final authority over her own usage of words and the manner in which they are employed. However, I will maintain the exact same authority in the opposite direction. And her pronoun does begin to have an ontological valence at the very moment that the individual in question places an expectation of a particular kind of usage of language on the part of others. Especially a usage that violates a persons individual paradigm and coherent understanding of a concept, or word. If that isn't a factor, there is no issue. — Garrett Travers

Language is not mandated by ontology. Language is determined by use. There is no male "essence" that can be reduced to anything, including chromosomes. If a person walked about and looked in every way like a man, you would call him a man, even should you later learn of some strange chromosomal variation. This is to say that you don't use the word "man" to reference an XY constitution, but you use it to reference a host of factors, many of which are not entirely consistent from case to case. The usage of the word "man" finds itself evolving.

When I was growing up, we learned the pronoun "he" was to be used to designate the third person objective because there is no neutral personal pronoun in English. You would say, "One should always eat his green beans." Why this reasonable person had to be a man was a matter of convention, but it's since been changed. If you want to maintain it, have at it, but you'll sound antiquated by some, sexist by others. The words you use are like the clothes you wear. They communicate how you wish to present yourself.

Then you should let these people know that such a manner of usage is expected on their part to not only be employed by them consistently, and not ambiguously, but inquired of others as to whether or not they are also voluntarily willing to participate. Otherwise, it is authoritarianism lite. Keep in mind such a standard is, in fact, a fallacy of ambiguity, so the responsibility for keeping the peace as regards usage is that of the person using language differently than established usage on the part of majority of the population. — Garrett Travers

I'm not arguing for prescriptive word usage from either side, but I am pointing out that be aware of what you wish to convey when you choose your words. If you are aware that a person wishes to identify as female and you insist upon using a male pronoun to refer to her, you will not simply be communicating your desire to adhere to traditional standards, but you will communicating your lack of respect for the person you're speaking to. You can tell her to take no offense and that you're simply a traditionalist, but I don't see that really working.

Looking for intent is speculating about the content of someone's mind (non physical I would/symbolic?) Not analysing the crime scene. — Andrew4Handel

Sometimes people admit to others their intent.

Murder is usually defined as unlawful killing. — Andrew4Handel

It can be, or you might create a term for an unethical killing. That is, it is possible to condemn a particular type of killing without laws while finding other forms accepted.

That seems the ancient use. Cain's murder of Abel was condemned prior to any law being given.

Let me rephrase, cancelling as political correctness gone rogue, doesn't exist. I prefer public accountability instead. — Benkei

You're just trying to cancel cancel culture.

The right's position is that the left bullies them into silence through public shame, personal condemnation, and ostracism if they don't adopt the left's ideology. From the left, I can see why you don't care what consequences befall the wicked, but it does seem the best such a tactic will do is silence them from your ears. What that means is that they won't change their mind and will just move their conversations to the privacy of their own homes. Every now and then you'll hear their mutterings and you'll call them out again, which will just either make them more careful later or they'll start telling you to fuck off and they'll find themselves a leader.

And then we get Trump.

I do think the right has marketed their position well with the "cancel culture" designation, and I do understand why you'd like to erase that from the vocabulary by declaring it non-existent. The problem is that it works, and it works because trying to stomp someone's views out, regardless of how morally repugnant you find them, doesn't work that well against 10s of millions of people.

I'm much more positive about this whole thing than you by the way. The miles and miles and miles we have traveled in the correct direction can't be overlooked. Gay people get married in Alabama today. That was unfathomable when I was a young adult. Trans people are getting elected to public office. Conservatives conserve, they protect the status quo, they drag their feet, but there's value in that too, but they do come around when right is right.

All in good time.

Here's a perfectly good reason not to visit StarBucks and to let your grievances known by spamming them. If enough people will join, media will call it "cancel culture" again. But really, fuck Starbucks. I don't need to listen to them explain away their corporate greed, we need them to stop this and have them pay their employees a living wage. — Benkei

In your OP, you gave examples of (near) universal agreement. Slavery, for example, is something we can all condemn. I'm willing to boycott those who enslave.

I'm entirely unoffended by how much a purveyor of luxury items (your mocha latte or whatever you coffee drinkers drink) pays its CEO though. If you boycott, I don't think that's cancel culture. I just think you're fighting a distinctly first world fight, a bourgeoisie revolution of sorts.

I find cancel culture offensive in instances where people are discarded instead of tolerated in the hopes of reforming, from Rogan to Whoopi. Perfection isn't a human quality. It's just all so sanctimonious, casting stones, as if we're not all in glass houses.

But, gay signals and gaydar work well enough most of the time. — Bitter Crank

I alluded to this in a different context in this thread, but I do think humans have very strong innate social skills that allow us to navigate our complicated social world, not the least of which is the ability to locate potential sexual partners. All those unidentifiable clues come together easily for some and are impossible for others. I've heard women complain about what else they have to do for the guy to notice them, and I've seen guys asking me whether they think a girl likes them after the girl has practically thrown themselves at the guy.

I was just in a restaurant with my wife the other day and we saw our waiter stroking the hair of an attractive waitress as they talked by the cash register. My wife and I both quickly exchanged glances, and I said, "must be his bestie," which she agreed. We had both registered previously he was gay and we were figuring out why he'd be getting so cozy with the attractive waitress.

This is also why it's so difficult to alter our gender identification. The slightest clue will let us know that man in the dress is not a woman. We're just way too good at noticing little clues.

They make themselves look like a woman in order to get the social and economical benefits that women have.

Some examples:

In poor Asian countries, many young men transition into women because this way, they can more easily find work as female(-looking) singers, dancers, and prostitutes.

A petite, balding man is generally not considered attractive as a man; but if he transitions into a woman, he makes for an average or even above average good-looking woman with the psychological, social, and economical perks that come with that.

If a woman is stuck in a lowly job or doesn't climb up in her career, nobody bats an eyelid; but expectations are higher for men. So some men, afraid of career failure, transition into a woman where career failure is not so heavily stigmatized.

Male-to-female athletes: those men couldn't cut in the men's league, but they can outperform women. (How about female-to-male athletes??) — baker

Other than in the harsh reality of living in abject poverty in a third world country where men find their only option for survival is to physically alter their gender in order to enter the sex industry so they can offer themselves up to Westerners, your other examples are pretty much nonsense.

Setting that aside, determining one's motives for gender reassignment surgery doesn't require armchair psychoanalysis and speculation into their mental states, but it only requires that you ask them. Unless you're committed to there being universal conspiratorial fraud among the sisterhood of transsexuals where they all provide false reasons for their desires for transition, I think we have to take their word for why they wish to transition. The surveys don't indicate they're doing it because they're old and bald and don't get the winks and stares they once did, so they now want to install some pretty breasts on themselves to get attention.

I can say that this thread has shaken out some pretty crazy and entertaining posts, and I do thank you for your contribution in that regard.

By consenting to such a procedure, they express their disdain for social norms, and they want their disdain to be respected by those who hold to the social norms. — baker

I think the social norm they disdain is that normally they are disdained and they ask not be disdained. They want not be considered abnormal, which sounds normal enough to me, but it's also contrary to what you argued above, which is when you said that they relish being different and enjoy the freak show they throw in your face. That is, they alter their sexual organs just to make your head spin, which they wouldn't do if there weren't people like you. It's all about you I guess.

Let me switch gears just a bit so that I can tease out more of your opinions. Is what you say of transsexuals applicable to gay people? That is, do men have sex with men and act effeminately in order to gain attention and do they then try to normalize their behavior by creating laws allowing them to marry and not be discriminated upon based upon their sexual preference?

How do you and Hanover know that my claim is "not to be taken seriously, but are meant as mockery and are contemptuous."? How do you know a trans-gender person isn't doing the same - mocking social roles in a society where it is a law to wear clothes and that we have agreed that certain sexes behave in certain ways so that we can tell who is who when playing mating games? — Harry Hindu

I know you don't think you're a dark sith. But, if I'm wrong, convince me otherwise. Swear to it. Put your personal integrity on the line and tell me you do. Show me examples of how you've lived your life that way. Give me names of those who can verify this for me. Prove your seemingly absurd claim and shame me for my rush to judgment

You act like deciphering intent and motive is all that difficult. We each do it 1000s of times a day. For someone so interested in human nature and what it entails, the abilities of social animals in social settings seems to be something you think non-existent.

I know the solipsistic consequences of infinite doubt. That's the slippery slope you reference and it's not interesting or enlightening.

I trust the man who tells me he prefers men despite the lovely argument I could offer him that he's just choosing to act that way to be shocking.

The same holds for the man who identifies as female or the female who identifies as male. To the extent you can accommodate their situation without damaging another's, tell me why you need to intervene.

Sometime between the Babylonian exile and the Second Temple. But Maimonides thought it necessary to make such ideas clear. — Fooloso4

The temple housed God, so the incorporeality question wasn't fully resolved, but obviously the tension had begun regarding that issue.

The decisive factor here is that they believed that God is very powerful. — baker

That's deriving a theme from the story, but it doesn't show the historicity of the events. The point I've made is that there are inconsistent accounts in the Bible that render historical accuracy impossible, so unless you're willing to posit the ancients were incapable of identifying those inconsistencies, you have to conclude the purpose of the stories was not to convey factual accuracy, but it was to convey a particular theme, exactly as you've noted.

Read the account of how Saul meets David. David plays the harp for him and they know each other well and then a chapter later he hears tale of this man David and insists upon meeting him, not knowing who he is. Interesting amnesiac event.

They aren't "quibbles." And they aren't arcane, sophisticated mathematics. They are just about the most basic possible statistical and probabilistic judgements. Let's say I have a box. You can't see inside the box so you don't know if there's anything in it. I tell you there are somewhere between 1 and 1,000 marbles in it. I reach in and pull out a black marble and show it to you, then put it back in the box. Now, can you tell me how many black marbles there are in the box? All you can tell me is that it's at least one and no more than 1,000, assuming I'm telling the truth. If I reach back in the box and pull out a marble at random, what is the probability it will be black?

We can't tell the likelihood of pulling out a black marble out of the box and we can't tell the likelihood that other possible universes will have life in them. — T Clark

I don't agree with your math. Let's reduce your number from 1000 to 2 to make this clearer. You know one marble is black. You also know there is only 1 or 2 marbles in the box. What we therefore know about our box is that it has one of the following combinations:

1 black marble
2 black marbles
1 black marble and one not black marble

There are three scenarios, one guarantees black, two guarantees black, and the third guarantees a 1/2 black and 1/2 non-black. I'm going with 5/6 chance for black based on the information provided.

How that plays out with 1,000, I don't know, but the analysis could be done.

My statistical analysis could be wrong above, but that's not the point. The point is that there is a statistical analysis that can be done here.

I'd also say the likelihood of there being life on another planet approaches 100% as the number of other planets approaches infinity.

I think it is an open question if when Maimonides denied the physicality of God and interpreted all physical aspects of the divine, whether this elevated the status of the "holy" or whether something primitive and fundamental was lost. — Fooloso4

Where do you date the theory of the incorporeality of God? Philo is 1,000 years before Maimonides, but it might be sooner. I point this out because I think it's a pretty ancient concept.

Because the meaning of words changes over time, this can lead to confusion if we don't know the etymology and cultural history. The change is not necessarily from the literal to the metaphorical and vice versa. Sometimes, the referent changes. For example, the thing that used to be called "soap" two thousand years ago in India is not what used to be considered "soap" for the past several hundred years in Europe (ie. soap in the form of hard bars), and again, the word "soap", with the relatively recent popularity of liquid soap, now has a different range of referents. — baker

That's not why. The reason the text has inconsistent accounts of the same stories is because it was pieced together from various writings by a single editor. That's the prevailing theory among religious scholars and there's substantial support for that theory.

Do give three examples where you think an ancient text was intended as metaphorical by the ancient writers. — baker

The creation story (story #1 dealing with the 7 days of creation). The creation story (story #2 dealing with the Garden of Eden). The ark story (story #1 dealing with 2 of each animal coming aboard). The ark story (story #2 dealing with 7 clean animals coming aboard and 2 unclean animals coming aboard).

That's four stories if you want to get started there. It's clearly etiological folklore.

It is sometimes said that one must read sacred texts with faith, and that if a faithless person reads them, such a person will not profit from them. — baker

I don't know what you mean by "profit from them." There are people with PhDs in religious scholarship who don't believe the texts are sacred. I don't think they would agree they've not profited from their efforts.

And I can dress like a Dark Sith Lord and demand that you address me as "My master". What is so special about sex/gender that people can identify as a sex they are not, but identifying as something else you are not, well that's just crazy? — Harry Hindu

The critical difference between your example and that of a transsexual is that your claims of dysphoria are in bad faith. In fact, they're not meant to be taken seriously, but are meant as mockery and are contemptuous.

So, there's that.

Transsexuals are dysphoric, meaning they're at unease with their physical state of being because their mental state tends to the feminine, and so they attempt to bring alignment of their mind and their body. There is (again) a critical distinction to be made. They are not delusional, but are dysphoric. If they were delusional, a man might actually think he was indistinct from a woman and then go about calling himself what he clearly was not. That would be like if you thought yourself a Sith, the problem wouldn't be a dysphoria, but it would be a delusion, meaning you had lost touch with reality.

To the extent there is actually a person out there who is dysphoric and so intimately identifies as a Sith that he insists upon being referred that way, then you might have an analogous situation, but the thing is, that's not really a thing. It's just the joke you wanted to tell, and so you told it.

Anecdotal evidence as found on social media has no validity. The accounts are not verified and they provide no statistical validity because there's no way to determine if the outliers are over-represented.

If you're interested in the actual studies, as opposed to searching for data supportive of your conclusions, you can start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detransition

I'd also point out that your argument from the data isn't entirely coherent because your specious moral argument makes it ultimately irrelevant to you.

That is to say, if your objection is to the primitive state of medical science, then the solution would be to promote advances in those medical technologies as opposed to condemning transsexuals.

Society should have a say in medical ethics. — Andrew4Handel

What makes it unethical for a person to knowingly consent to the procedure?

This study of 214 patients evaluated 20 years after their surgery states, "One hundred eighty-one (85 percent) patients in our series were able to have regular sexual intercourse, and no individual regretted having undergone GAS."

That is, after 20 years, zero regrets.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsurg.2021.639430/full