God is Other..immensely beyond our ability to conceive-One should never claim to know the mind of God. 🙏🏻

Which is an explicit admission that you can't know that it's there at all.

You can't claim both to know that it's there, and also that it's unknowable and inconceivable. That's not just self-refuting but monumentally absurd.

That also, by the way, disqualifies you from claiming to know or conceiving that it's good.

If you're going to defend your god's absence by insisting it's unknowable or inconceivble, then you can never, ever make any claim about its properties - that it's good, that it loves - or has any emotion - or tha tit does things or wants things.

Otherwise, you were lying in the first place.

Every defence, every excuse, every apologetic you might make about it can - nay, must - instantly be dismissed. Because, as you yourself said, it's inconceivable and unknowable.

If it is knowable, then you need to show your work. In a manner that anyone could repeat, regardless of whether they believe - and especially if they do not.

If you have to already believe in order to be convinced, then you didn't understand your obligation. And can instead remain silent until you do.

--

I always say, if you ever want to know if a god is real or not, just listen carefully to the people who believe in it, and how they describe it. They'll tell you themselves it doesn't exist.

@religion-is-a-mental-illness I am very sorry that you misunderstood what I was saying. However, I will have to agree to disagree. Faith and Spirituality are separate, as well as, intrinsic to Science. As a retired counselor with 30 years of experience, I have come to appreciate the importance of the balance of mind, body, and spirit. However, I also understand how the perversion of Christianity to fit into the political & secular world has justified such attacks on faith and belief in God. I also know that many use the “God Card” to justify abuse and persecution. This is abhorrent and a complete antithesis to my beliefs. I do wish you well, and hope that you can find peace regardless of what you believe or do not believe in.

It's a simple matter of non-contradiction. You say your god is unknowable, inconceivable, and yet you claim to know things about it, to conceive it as good and even that it's there.

This is intellectually dishonest.

You don't get to do that. You don't get to have that it's conceivable when you want it, and inconcievable when you have to rationalize its absense, such as when a baby dies of the cancer he gave it. You don't get to have that it's unknowable when it doesn't make sense, and knowable when you want to assert something about it.

That's like a married bachelor. It's contradictory and self-refuting. It's so incoherent that we can dismiss it as simply false. If someone claims to be a "married bachelor," we don't need to spend time considering it, we can say that it's not true. By definition.

It's not true, by definition. When you say your god is inconceivable and unknowable, and you concieve it and know it, then your god is not true. By definition. You've described your god such that it is false by definition.

Faith and spirituality are separate, yes. Because an atheist can look up at the stars and be amazed at the infinite universe.

Whereas, faith is dishonesty. Faith is saying that it's true because you believe it's true. There is nothing that anyone cannot believe based entirely on faith. Every religion claims to believe based on faith, and yet every religion cannot be true. It cannot be possible that both Islam and Mormonism are true. And yet, both religions believe based on faith. Which means faith cannot lead to truth. Because neither Muslims nor Mormons can figure out or demonstrate which one is incorrect. And both will insist that they are the ones who are correct. Based on faith.

If you believe based on faith, you reject anything which might show you that you're wrong. And the majority are wrong. Because Xianity is only about 31% of the world's population. So every religion is a minority.

There is an infinite number of faith-based ideas that you don't believe. A magical walrus living at the center of Pluto. A cabal of cats who control the world through microchips embedded in Amazon boxes. Fairies that live in my shoes. Every god other than yours.

You reject faith yourself. You reject the idea that you should accept the existence of fairies that live in my shoes, the great feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, and that Anubis will conduct the weighing of the heart and your soul will be eaten by Ammit if it does not balance with the feather of Ma'at, because faith is not a good reason to believe that such a thing is true. You yourself reject faith as a way to know the world, to know what's true, to accept other people's claims, other people's superstitions, other people's gods. Every other god you reject, its followers believe based on faith.

So why should I accept your faith-based claim, when you reject everyone else's faith-based claims? What is this enormous, gaping hypocrisy and dishonesty that your thing is the only thing in the world that is faith-based but true?

This is the horror of the intellectual disease known as faith.

So, yes, they are separate. Faith is a vice. It's a lie you tell yourself to keep your superstitions from being falsified.

It's not the "perversion of Christianity" that's the problem. For starters, you don't get to insist that the Xianity that others practice is the perversion. That's a No True Scotsman fallacy. It's yet more dishonesty. You don't get to pretend to define "true" Xianity. Because they will insist that you have it wrong. And what is their basis? Faith.

Attacks on faith are justified because it's a dishonest, unreliable way to know the world. Because it's a bogus epistemology. Because all believers claim to have it, and defend believing lies. Because at least some of you, probably all of you do believe lies and none of you can show who is incorrect, nor know that it's not you.

You can't claim to be correct when you have absolutely no way to know whether you're wrong. And faith is the lie which you tell to keep from finding out you're wrong.

"Attacks on... belief in god" is nonsensical and yet again completely dishonest. If you can't show your god exists, we don't need to spend time worrying about it. Belief in your god is not the default. It is your burden to prove. It's not an "attack" on your god to point out that when you describe it, it doesn't make sense. That's blaming others for your failure. You should instead be asking yourself why your god evaporates in a puff of superstition whenever you describe it. You're trying to take your failure, your problem in justifying your own god, and recast it as a form of victimhood, of those unreasonable people attacking, being mean. Dishonest.

I don't need to "attack" your god or even belief in your god. I can simply show that you can't prove your case. Nobody needs to worry about your god, because you say ridiculous things like this, instead of spending your time justifying your claims.

Faith and spirituality are not "intrinsic to science." Again, you're being dishonest here, or you haven't the first clue as to what science is.

Science is a way of not fooling ourselves. It requires us to consider we're wrong at every moment - which faith prevents - and to only claim something is true only to the extent it has been demonstrated to be true, and only to the extent it has not yet been shown to be false.

Science operates on the principle of "no one in particular." That is, "no one in particular" can perform the experiment or run the test and get the same results. Unlocking the secrets of our DNA doesn't require someone who is Asian or male or gay or married or even already believes DNA exists. If they perform the experiment as described, they will get the results as described.

Looking for your god shouldn't require someone who already believes. It should be something a Hindu, a Shintoist or an atheist could do and yield the same results. You cannot. In order to find your god, you must already believe in your god - or be manipulated when vulnerable and susceptible to such manipulation. Cause that's how "faith" works.

So your fuffing around about faith is the exact opposite of science. Faith is protection from finding out you're wrong. Science requires accepting, or even expecting, you might be wrong.

Faith and science are exact opposites. If you believe the world is flat based on faith, there is no evidence you will accept that it's not. Everything is a trick of the devil, or of sinners, or of people being paid by the government. Because that's what faith is. It's lying. Not to everyone else, to you. Faith is a crime you commit on yourself.

And spirituality isn't required. Only curiosity and intellectual integrity. And faith, belief in gods, is the antithesis of this. As I began in the beginning, you can't claim to know an unknowable god, to conceive an inconceivable god. That's intellectual dishonesty, not intellectual integrity.

The words you're popping out are vacuous, thought-terminating cliches. You recite them for yourself, to protect and defend your faith (i.e. intellectual dishonesty) from falsification, not to convey information nor explain. Because they don't explain anything. They don't even actually mean anything. And when examined closely, demonstrate that your belief is unjustified.

You described your god, by definition, as being literally impossible.

Somewhere in that faith-addled brain of yours, I think even you realize that.

I'll find peace when people like you keep your unjustified, self-refuting assertions to yourself and stop perpetuating this lie that it's us who are the unreasonable ones for lacking faith, rather than you who for having it. You are the one who is infected with the cognitive sickness that is faith.

I would really prefer to talk about your god, the next person's god, everybody's gods as much as I talk about unicorns or banshees. Which is basically never. Because nobody ever comes to me and tells me that they know their unknowable unicorn, they conceive an inconceivable banshee.

If believers shut up, non-believers will shut up. But if non-believers shut up, believers won't shut up. What you reinterpret as an "attack" is us simply responding to you. What you claim to be an "attack" is us removing the epistemological authority you've granted yourself but were never entitled to. What you think is an "attack" is us revoking your religious special privilege card, and treating your faith like every other faith, treating your claim of gods as being comparable to claims of werewolves and vampires, as it should be.

Don't want to hear from us? Don't want to hear us analyzing your god, criticizing your ideas, noticing that your god is false, by definition?

Then be silent.

If your god was real, wouldn't human discoveries advance closer and closer to it? So why are we further away from it than we've ever been, and why is it more vague, imperceptible and allegorical than it's ever been?

Not metaphorical. Immaterial. It’s very concerning that the two can be mistaken for each other. Also, human discoveries do advance closer to god, you just have to look a little harder. The pursuit of the truth is telling enough. For what purpose do people pursue knowledge of truth other than to reach for truth itself? Why dedicate yourself to true things while denying truth, the very reason why you’ve concerned yourself with the true in the first place? Can we really call an advance in knowledge such without reaching for truth when knowledge is so intimately and inherently linked to truth? You can’t know a lie, there isn’t anything to know. Therefore knowledge must only be concerned with truth.

This begs the question, what is truth? By truth, things are knowable, truth is the process by which something is understood, the equation of thought (the idea of something) and thing. Knowledge is carrying out this process. The ability to know necessarily comes from an intellect, because the senses do not perceive ideas, only things.

Since we make discoveries, we can therefore determine that these things, which existed before and had to be true before, must have been known before, since the relation of a thought and a thing is necessary for something to exist. Nothing can exist without an idea, and an idea is a product of an intellect. For example, a house does not exist unless an architect has thought of the idea of a house and then built it. Therefore there must be an intellect from which natural things come from, like a rock. God, if you will. Since God carries out his own existence, he thought of his own idea and applies it to himself via truth, he is his own act of understanding, so he must be truth.

Humans have come plenty close to a god. Socrates. Plato. Aristotle. Augustine. Aquinas. Many, many others. We are further away from a god because of a lack of study of god rather than a lack of god. Society being far from truth doesn’t make truth any less true (or relevant for that matter). The roar of the crowd cannot change reality.

Is God vague? Not if you view it from the right angle.

Is God imperceptible? Not if you don’t limit yourself to the world of the senses.

Is God allegorical? This doesn’t mean anything. What would God stand in place of? Plus, humans learn best when it is first introduced to them by allegory. Aesop’s fables to understand facts of human nature or morals. Counting on your fingers to familiarize yourself with the concept of numbers. Plato’s ‘city’ as a way to see big justice in order to understand small justice.

Why would the nature of something be reliant on our own perspective on it?

This is such empty nonsense. It sounds profound but doesn't say anything.

No, believers themselves tell us that "it's a metaphor." It's one of the key apologetics for the obviously false tales of Genesis that contradict known reality. When they tell us that the creation is a metaphor because the human species and other animals arose through evolution; that Adam and Eve is a metaphor because talking snakes and a deity so stupid that it punishes humans for not having the knowledge of right and wrong that it denied them; that the Noahic Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the Exodus are metaphors because we know that they never happened... that comes from believers.

That is, believers themselves tell us that the bible isn't actually true.

More devastatingly, they've told us that Jesus either was a metaphor or died for a metaphor. Because if the Adam and Eve tale isn't literally true, then Jesus serves no purpose. Especially given the (contradictory) stated genealogies given in the scripture which claim Jesus to be of direct, traceable descent from Adam. The descendants of a metaphor are themselves metaphorical.

So, you're arguing against a strawman from the get-go.

More importantly, saying your god is "immaterial" is the same as saying it's metaphorical. If your god can't be detected, measured or the footprints it leaves on this universe can't be detected or examined, you have no basis for asserting it exists at all. If it's some kind of "other" substance, then you need to justify that. You don't just get to rename "nonexistent" to "immaterial" and sail on through.

You're forgetting: you are the one asserting that you can know it's there. You have certainty. You claim to know the existence of what you assert as "immaterial." So, show your work. How did you detect the "immaterial"? Throwing up smoke and mirrors to hide the bogus nature of your method doesn't protect you. It's reason to be suspicious of you.

That's for you to prove, not to pretend that it's the flaw of others to not accept what you have refused to justify.

It's up to you to prove the truth of your claim, not to simply assert it because it makes you feel good to assert it.

Truth is whatever statements can be shown to be true, that is, in accordance with reality. The truth of a statement is adjudicated by evidence. Evidence is a series of facts that are either positively indicative of or exclusively concordant with one hypothesis over any other.

Facts are points of data that are either not in dispute or are indisputable in that they are objectively verifiable. They can of course be denied by someone who wishes to be disingenuous but that would not affect the fact that they are independently verifiable facts

The repeatedly and independently verifiable nature of facts demonstrates that they are not a matter of personal opinion but of objective physical reality external to the individual.

This is utter nonsense.

Truth is a conclusion. You just using the word "truth" repeatedly doesn't make something true. That's a fallacy called "argument by assertion."

Saying "by truth, things are knowable" means that you start with what you assume to be the "truth" and then "know" things as a result. you start at the conclusion and you work your way backwards. This is intellectually and morally dishonest. It means you can never discover an error or that you could be wrong. And given the number of god-claims out there, chances are that you are.

You don't get to call your thing "truth" without laying out the evidence and justifying why it singularly and uniquely points to your conclusion and your conclusion alone. You don't get to assert it and then insist it's up to us to find the evidence. Especially when you start from the presupposition of your god, and it's your claim and your burden.

By your own admission, "truth" means the presupposition you started with, it's not something you reasonably concluded. We can therefore begin with the premise that it's not true and ignore you until you do the work of justifying your claim.

More empty gibberish.

Please consult a dictionary before firing off this kind of weapons-grade blather.

This is a common mistake and I would normally skim over it, but you've been so obnoxiously pretentious that I'm going to point it out to demonstrate what an intellectual fraud you are. "Begging the question" does not mean "makes me wonder this next thing."

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Begging-the-Question

So, you pretending to lecture me in this vacuous pseudo-profound way, when you can't even get this right, is kind of hilarious.

Truth must be shown, not asserted.

But then you even admit that it can't be regarded as factual, because it's not verifiable. And is immaterial. And you still wonder why we don't believe your claims.

Translation: You can't find my god unless you already believe in it.

Translation: My god is perceptible if you ignore reality.

This is where you've rejected the notion of the existence of your god as a fact. It shouldn't require a believer to find your god. Indeed, you later go on to assert that the decline in god belief is essentially a moral failing. That means isn't verifiable by anyone, only by those of the in-group. Which shows where the problem lies, and refutes any claims to factual status.

All you have is your senses. But that's not the limit of human ability to find and gain knowledge, and yet there is no scientific endeavour that has found any "god" or any sign nor requirement of such a thing, and yet you want to insist that your perceptions are somehow even further and more reliably attuned than the most finely calibrated instruments humanity has ever built, which are discovering black holes and even planets being swallowed up by the destruction of their stars.

But you won't share it. You won't give this new form of detection to the scientific community, explain how it works and let them test, validate and implement it. It just seems like you don't want to have your process actually checked. We just have to trust you and your completely unbiased, reliable perceptions. Con artists take the same approach, by the way.

So, what, are you detecting your god's aura? It's thetans? What substance, what effect, undetectable by anyone but you, are you using to validate the existence of the same god that your parents told you about?

(I thought you guys say you're sinners; doesn't seem like we should blindly trust someone whose identity is wrapped around being unreliable, incomplete and prone to malfunction. You seem to be suggesting that you're the one believer who is not.)

The cosmological arrogance and dishonesty here is remarkable. But what you're saying is that, despite your previous regurgitation of empty prose, your god can't be regarded as knowledge (see definition above). Because it's not repeatably, reliably discoverable. Only believers can find it. Which is not knowledge. And not truth.

With this in mind, why are you being so rampantly and blatantly dishonest? Your entire approach is illicit.

Hindus will tell me similar things, by the way. And Deepak Chopra has created an entire career on blathering about things existing that don't make sense. Quantum this, energy that. As immaterial as your god.

None of them proved any god hypothesis. But let me throw some more names in there, just to flesh it out because you seem to have forgotten some. The Prophet Muhammad, Siddhartha Gautama, Shoko Asahara, Charles Manson, Marshall Applewhite.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Cherry-Picking

It's weird you would deliberately exclude some of the most influential and consequential people in the world who claim to have experienced divine revelations, some of them direct first-hand exposure to your own god.

We can't study what you haven't substantiated, what you've refused to justify, what can't be regarded as either truth or knowledge, based on the definitions of the words. We don't have classes in alchemy or phrenology, either. Because why would we?

And you just got done saying that you must "view it from the right angle" and "don’t limit yourself to the world of the senses." Well, which is it? You can't have it both ways. Do you find it to study it, or do you study it to find it? You don't seem to be able to get your story straight.

What's worse, is that your entire premise is unfalsifiable. You start with the conclusion - that your god exists - and then find ways to assign it to natural phenomena that we do undertand, and then blame humans for the fact it can't be found.

Intellectual honesty - and not being a blatant liar - demands that you study facts and evidence and form conclusions only on the basis of those facts and evidence. We don't study "god" because we can't - you've as much said so, because you can't and won't provide a reliable, repeatable method - we study the natural world. Because that's where the evidence comes from. And you yourself said that it's immaterial anyway, as a way of carefully hiding it away in an obvious attempt to justify why it isn't there.

When done intellectually honestly, we find no god is required. Just as no god is required for thunder, lightning, rain, earthquakes, stars, the sunrise, the moon, births, crops or birds flying. Everywhere we look, we don't find a god. It's only the intellectually dishonest who add on "therefore god" like a Tourette's tic. But that doesn't make it true, and the reliability of this level of dishonesty makes it even more suspicious that such sophistry is required to sustain their beliefs. Why would you need to be so dishonest if your god is real?

Studying the bible, the tanakh and the quran are not studying "god," any more than studying Harry Potter is studying magic. It's studying the human claims of gods. Which is one of the most reliable ways of abandoning the entire notion.

We know where the scriptures came from, we know that they're unreliable, fraudulent, use stolen myths and legends, are inaccurate, and have been changed and manipulated throughout history. And we know that the believers of each scripture won't accept the authority of the other scriptures for the same reasons non-believers won't accept yours.

If studying the scripture is your idea of "studying god" then you're admitting - bringing us full circle back to the beginning - that your god exists only in your book. And that everything you ranted about perception and senses was nonsense. That is, your "faith" is in a book, not in a god - the god only follows from, and is contingent upon, the book.

That's complete idiocy. Earthquakes are caused by tectonic shifts. People didn't know that before. That doesn't mean it wasn't true before. And because it was always true doesn't mean that someone knew that the whole time. That's deranged.

The entire point of truth and knowledge is discovery. Things we don't know. Your model is insane and based on literally nothing.

You claim your god exists. It's therefore inescapable that it can only exist due to an idea that it should exist. Your god must have originated as an idea and been created as a product of the intellect of SuperGod. Otherwise you're lying.

(Psst... you're looking for the Special Pleading fallacy.)

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Special-Pleading

At bottom, however, you have literally no basis for asserting this, other than your need for presupposition. Do caves exist because of an idea, or because of a natural process called erosion? So, cancer and AIDS began with ideas? What about defecation? We only defecate because someone came up with the idea? You see how stupid this is?

Fortunately, humanity is not fettered by your deficiencies, limitations or incuriosity. Your inability to comprehend the natural world is not a justification for inventing creatures to explain it. It wasn't god when we figured out earthquakes or thunder, and yet you're committed to betting on the same lame horse that primitive people of 2000 years ago bet on. One that has never paid off. At some point you need to contemplate your compulsion to devote yourself to something that has a demonstrated 0% success rate throughout all history.

The idea that everything is the idea of a deity is the death of curiosity. You need never ask any questions or learn anything, because you already know the answer: "bEcAuSe gOd!" I can't think of anything more anti-humanity and anti-intellectual.

The underlying mentality of this baseless assertion is that the universe exists only for us. That for billions of years, an infinitely expansive universe was being filled with the physical manifestations of ideas, but with nobody to notice, observe or impress, until we came along. Or, perhaps, this god was just playing with its toys by itself. How insecure is your god that it needed to come up with and then create us in order to observe its activities?

The idea that things can only exist as a result of intent and that someone, somewhere was inspired to create you, designed exactly as you are, is arrogant in the extreme. In all this infiniteness, someone, somewhere has you on its mind. You were necessary. I can't even imagine being that monumentally conceited.

But what it betrays is that your god only exists in the sense that it's a human idea.

This is the stupidest poetry I've ever read.

We know a house is created because we create them. They stand out from the natural world, because they're created. This is the Watchmaker Fallacy. You should read about it.

You're trying to claim that the natural is in fact supernatural. That the natural world is evidence of the supernatural (outside nature). This is idiotic. You have to justify the supernatural first before you get to attribute anything to it. Otherwise you're just making an argument from ignorance: "wHaT eLsE cOuLd iT bEeEe??"

Your assertion refutes itself. To claim something is created, you must compare it to something. We can compare a house to no-house. Or to the materials used to build a house. You have nothing to compare "everything" to in order to claim it's created. Saying that "everything" is proof of creation is the same as saying that nothing is proof of creation. You can't determine created from not-created because they look the same. Which makes your entire assertion incoherent. It's not even wrong.

My fingerprints on a gun are evidence for my guilt because my fingerprints not on a gun are not evidence for my guilt. If every gun in the universe has my fingerprints already on them, then my fingerprints on a gun is not evidence of my guilt. Evidence stands in contrast to falsification.

By using lies and sophistry to try and fallaciously incorporate the entire universe into supporting your delusions, you've made your entire assertion unfalsifiable.

Evidence for your god can only exist in contrast to what is not evidence for your god. And you just said there is none. Ergo, no evidence.

These words - "applies it to himself via truth" and "carries out his own existence" - literally don't mean anything. Here's some more of the same calibre:

They come from the Wisdom of Chopra quote generator. Like your thing, they sound profound, but they're not. They're just words strung together by an automaton.

If things that exist must be created, then your god must have been created. If your god can exist without being created, so can the universe. Since the universe can exist without being created, the universe carries out its own existence. If your god can do that, so can the universe.

The arguments from design and first cause are particularly fallacious. You should read up about them before embarrassing yourself by using them again.

You haven't proven anything, you just asserted what you already assume.

Sure it does. "Are the Tortoise and the Hare allegorical? This doesn't mean anything." See how that sounds?

Believers describe the events of their scripture as allegorical, metaphorical, not to be taken literally. It's necessary then to conclude that the characters cannot be concluded to literally exist.

https://www.atheistalliance.org/thinking-out-loud/the-bibles-final-metaphor/

Your god is allegorical because believers tell us that the book that describe it is allegory. Don't blame us.

Yes, like this. Believers keep describing their bible scripture as "allegorical" (i.e. Aesop-like fables). Therefore, the god of the bible can be no more real than Aesop's Tortoise and Hare. It's kind of obvious.

Who stars in fictitious stories? Fictitious characters. Why is this hard to grasp? The more your bible becomes metaphorical, the smaller your god gets. The more trapped inside its book it becomes. More and more of what you can claim to "know" (i.e. believe) about it is eroded.

It isn't. Its nature - including its existence - is discovered through facts and evidence. But you said that it is:

That is, you can know its nature if you look at it from the right (i.e. your) angle. Are you making yourself the default, "correct" person in the universe?

You also said that the nature of something is reliant upon an idea, that to exist, it must start with an idea.

Which is it? What are you even rambling on about?

Your entire post is one long Kettle Logic. That is, it's not just that each step along the way is mired in the worst fallacies of all, but stringing them together makes the problem worse.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Kettle-Logic

You've said variously, that we can only find it if we have a particular view or perception, that we must study it or we can't see it, that the universe itself proves it, we get closer to it because we keep finding it, and that we're getting further away from it because we don't study it.

It really just seems like even you don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about. You just seem to be throwing nonsense out there hoping something will stick, or it will be so incomprehensible and contradictory that people will just assume it's so profound it must be true.

It isn't.

What I will say though is that if this is the best case for a god that you can come up with, I am cured of any quanta of concern about the existence of such a nonsensical beast.

My only advice to you is to re-read all your ramble, but replacing "God" with "Allah" or "Eric, the Magic God-Eating Penguin." Perhaps then you'll spot how intellectually septic everything you said is.

--

If you ever want to know if a god or religion is false, all you have to do is listen to believers describe it. They'll tell you themselves it isn't true.

By: Robert Lynch

Published: April 7, 2023

==

I've said before that I learned more about evolution as a result of combatting evolution denial from the religious than I ever did at school. It's similarly true that I've learned more about sex, biology, chromosomes, genes and hormones as a result of the sex-denialism and anti-science attitudes of the gender cult.

There's so many issues with this article, but I think I'll only note one: the writer is a hypocrite. Sex and gender aren't the same thing and he accused people of conflating the two while he does so himself

This author implies that science does not differentiate between sex and gender, their argument is fundamentally flawed as it presumes two distinct things to be the same. He also presumes that gender isn't affected by genetics and neonatal development as well as social aspects. In fact, evidence supports that gender presentation is solidified during pregnancy, not after birth, for humans as well as certain species. Some animals can even have their genders changed, like bees (worker to queen). He writes like these are the same thing.

There are several species of birds which have more than two genders, but only two sexes. Also, barnacles will alter a crab's gender, but not it's sex to trigger egg spreading behaviors typically performed by females. After the barnacle eggs are spread the crab will resume male-typical behaviors. Another excellent example is the famous lizard species in which a trio of males display and attract differently, they cannot be differentiated by sex, they are all male, they are different genders.

In short, gender and sex are separately determined in utero, in humans males typically identify as boys/men, females typically identify as girls/women. However this is not always true, there are more human genders than sexes, and it's very likely that there are subsets of woman/men genders that have been erased for the sake of simplicity and easy stereotyping.

Umm.... this may be news to you, but humans are not bees. And you literally just refuted the notion of it being "in utero" when you described it as changing. e.g. worker to queen. The biology of bees is organized around the ability of dormant sex organs to activate (in the case of bees), or be regressed and promoted (in the case of clownfish).

We are not clownfish. We are not bees. These animals don't just "do" the girl things instead of boy things. Their biology activates (bees) or regresses and regrows (clownfish). It's a biological process. I have no idea what you were even trying to say, other than to reinforce the purely physical, biological nature of these particular animals. Species of which humans are not.

As we'll see as we go along, you can't even coherently describe, much less define "gender," so this is like saying "science does not differentiate between consciousness and the human soul." Science does distinguish: sex is real, and "gender" (in the way you ramble about it), is so incoherent it's not-even-wrong.

Meanwhile, you even ramble about biological-based changes - workers to queens (i.e. changes to support reproduction) - that are biological.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22483170/

Worker bees are female. So, I don't think even you know what you're talking about. Because calling this "gender" just reinforces how incoherent this word even is.

I can't help wondering how you can know that a crab's "gender" is different than its sex. How did you find out its pronouns? What questions did you ask it? Or did you just assume its "gender"?

So, a child knows whether to wear a dress or a suit before it's born? Is this really what you're saying?

What you're deliberately (or ignorantly) misrepresenting is that it's sexuality that is solidified before birth, and is believed to come from hormone exposure. It's sexuality that can be seen in the brain. Here's a full-on thread from a neurobiologist, which explains that previous "trans brains" didn't control for sexuality, and when that was taken into account, what was being detected was homosexuality. All you've done is mislabel homosexuality as "gender," as a way to pretend that there's more going on than there is. It's trivially known that gay people are more likely to exhibit gender nonconformity, on average, which is why this gender ideology operates primarily as gay conversion therapy, making gay girls into straight boys, and gay boys into straight girls.

We also know that gender dysphoria is associated with weaker connections in the brain associated with self-perception, in similar regions as those with other body dysmorphic disorders, such as anorexia. There is no cross-sex detection. There's no such thing as a "trans brain." A transwoman has a brain typical of a man but with weaker self-perception connections. What you're describing is bogus pseudoscience.

All you're really doing is promoting sexist stereotypes as profundities. Because a girl does a thing that is more typically common among boys, then she stops being a girl and becomes a boy. That's the entire underlying premise of your crab thing. The crab does a thing female crabs typically do, so he stops being a male crab and starts being a female crab (or something else, you never bothered to name it). And then he becomes a male crab when he does things that the boy crabs do.

Which is, of course, the core of this ideology. Putting on lipstick and carrying a handbag makes you a woman. That's all a woman is - a receptacle for applying lipstick and transporting handbags. Putting on a suit and a tie and growing a beard makes you a man. Because stereotypes. Presenting stereotypically as a thing makes you the thing. Playing dress-ups is real. Putting on a fireman's hat and you're a fireman. Dress androgynously and, like the dinosaurs being unable to spot you if you don't move, you suddenly stop being the thing you really are.

As one of my readers pointed out, guys in the 1980s with their big hair-sprayed hair and pastel colors would have all been transed. Girls in the 1990s with their boots and flannel would have all been transed. My goodness your take is shallow.

We, of course, need to pause and notice that you used female and male to describe "gender". So, you can't even get that consistent, and yet you scold the author of this article.

I really need to return to this: how did you find out how the crabs identify? How do you tell how the birds "identify"? How do you tell whether and when a male crab is a "different gender" if he's just sitting there on a rock? How do you detect it? You're saying people ("studies") have detected it, so how? Did they fill out a questionnaire? Or do you see whether they're more attracted to the picture of the frilly dress or the picture of the cowboy hat?

You said that sex and gender are different. How did you find out the "gender" of the male crabs? How did you find out the "gender" of the female birds? What are the genders? Name them.

So lizards have multiple mate-attracting strategies. By using different ones to differentiate themselves to the females, that makes them other "genders," rather than males using different strategies. Name those genders. Name the lizard genders. Words I never thought I needed to say.

What you're describing is that "man" and "woman" are activities you do. Some activities are "man" activities, and some activities are "woman" activities. Because activities need to be defined in terms of who can do them. Apparently. When a lizard stops doing the mating thing, he's male again. When a crab stops helping the barnacles he's a male again. Jesus Christ.

As Judith Butler tells us, "gender" is performative. It's a thing you do, not a thing you have or are, and only exists by repetition and observation. That's really what you're saying. But not only is it gross and shallow, but it necessarily means you can simply change genders by "doing" something else.

There's a saying:

This is your argument. The crab "changes gender" because he does female things. Like this:

Or, now hear me out... perhaps because the species is capable of doing things that either sex can do. And barnacles can entice crabs into a mutually beneficial exchange, regardless of the sex of the crab. This is what happens when you get your information from "Gender Studies" classes, not biologists or anthropologists.

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the fact you actually said that "barnacles will alter a crab's gender". Holy crap. This is like when the Catholics think the priest changes the bread into human flesh. It's magical thinking. Crab transubstantiation. Mmm, crab-cakes.

How could you ever claim to know any of this? We keep hearing that "gender" is an "internal sense of self". What they neglect to mention is, "...in comparison to others of your sex." So, how does a crab have an "internal sense," how does it map that onto human conceptions of social constructivism - crabs are not known for their consumption of Michel Foucault - and how could it inform you of any of this?

Isn't this an endorsement of "conversion therapy"? Aren't you saying that an external influence on "gender" is natural and justified?

This really is quite idiotic and deranged. You're projecting your reductive political ideology and regressive perceptions of humans onto birds and crabs. You really need to spend some time learning about the biological evolution of sex differences.

Literally all you're doing is putting everything into tiny boxes and saying that if they don't fit in them, if they don't fit your narrow conception, then they're not. A girl who doesn't like frilly pink dresses and long blonde hair isn't really a girl. A boy who doesn't like guns and army men isn't really a boy.

People think I'm exaggerating about this being the root of gender ideology, but then someone comes along and says so out loud. And I thank you for it.

There really is nothing more astonishingly regressive than the "progressive" notions of what male and female, man and woman are. They think it's profound, but it's gross, reductive and perverse.

And all of it catastrophically undermines your original claim that it's formed in the brain pre-birth. You literally described "gender" changing into something else, just by doing something for the barnacles, or performing for the female lizards.

How on Earth does any of this nonsense make sense to you?

This is false. The overwhelming majority of humans do not subscribe to this religion. They do not "identify" as boys, men, girls or women. They just are those thing, by definition. They couldn't stop if they tried. "Identify as" is the language of your ideology. Like "sinner" and "haram."

Nobody who is a thing needs to "identify as" a thing. "Identify as" is short for "identify as if." It's only necessary when you are not a thing and want to perform that thing for others.

I don't "identify" as a human. I don't need to. Because I am a human. I can't stop being a human if I tried. When I'm asleep or unconscious, still a human. What I am is externally verifiable without my subjectivity. If I "identify as" a wolf, that's because I'm not a wolf. I can't simply be a wolf, because I'm not one.

On the other hand, if I'm the only remaining person on the planet, what does "identify as" a wolf even mean? "Identify as" is, as Judith Butler says, performative. "Identify as" a wolf means performing "wolf" for the world and being observed as that. If you identify as a wolf in the forest but nobody's sees it, are you really a wolf?

The reality is that what you are is the thing you are when nobody else is around for you to perform for, or be observed. "Identify as" is the social construct.

You're trying to project your fanatical, incoherent theology onto other people.

A man is an adult male human. He will be male all his life. He cannot change that. He can be however he wants, do what he wants, dress how he wants, but what he is cannot be changed. Because sex determination happens at about 7 weeks and is irreversible. He is what he is.

A woman is an adult female human. She will be female all her life. She cannot change that. She can be however she wants, do what she wants, dress how she wants, but what she is cannot be changed. She is what she is.

One of the things you've done along the way is obliterate self ID. You said "gender" forms in the brain as early as before birth. This removes any reason to support self ID. When someone claims to "identify as" something else, there's no reason to take their word. Put them under an MRI and look. Find the "gender." You'll have to supply the region of the brain in which to detect it, of course, but you've successfully argued for a "trans test," albeit through bogus pseudoscience. I wonder if that's what you were really intending.

"Gender" as activities - dancing for female lizards, crabs helping barnacles - doesn't make this any better. Self IDing whatever you're currently doing now as a "gender" is as uninteresting and useless as putting your coffee on Instagram. Why do I care that you're doing "boy" things now and "girl" things in an hour from now? If gender is a social construct, well, it can always be constructed otherwise. When the crabs and the lizards stop doing their thing, according to you, their "gender" changes back. Because male lizards and crabs are incapable of doing those things without that "gender" change. Holy shit.

If there are so many genders, how come we've only heard of them in the last 5 years and only through kids on the internet? How come nobody heard of "cakegender" in all of human history until someone invented it by concocting their personality traits into a "gender"?

What on earth did Mephigender people do throughout time until someone invented Mephiles the Dark in Sonic the Hedgehog? That must have been psychologically traumatizing for people for thousands of years to not understand themselves until Mephiles debuted in 2006. Like everybody in 1 B.C. wondering what was going to happen in a year. (LOL.)

Well, you might scoff and say, those aren't real genders. Go on, I dare you. Define what a real gender is, and how we can know it. I dare you. On your basis that sex and gender are separate, what makes Mephigender bogus compared to one of the "real" genders... that are not synonyms for sex?

Clearly, the stereotyping is yours alone. You think male lizards can't be male if they do something you don't think is male. Crabs can't be male if they do something you don't regard as male. That's literally stereotyping.

More to the point, if "gender" is so vague (biological but not, in the brain from before birth but performative) and/or fluid (changes depending on what you're doing - like how ThatStarWarsGirl mustn't be a woman when she's playing video games, presumably - just using your logic here), if there's so many of them, then:

a) Why does anyone need cross-sex (i.e. sex-binary) hormones? There are only two choices. Why is all this transition stuff between what are only two templates? b) If "gender" and sex are so unrelated, that seems you just made a great case against all transitions. They're unrelated, disconnected, nothing to do with each other. Being unrelated means they don't need to "match" since being unrelated, they can't "mismatch." c) And why are we medicalizing children and cutting off body parts if they could stop being gender #48892 at any moment and become gender #02978?

And why should anyone care how you "identify," especially when novel - and ridiculous - "identities" are invented all the time? That's a you thing. That's your perception of yourself. You don't get to decide how I perceive you. I have that right alone. And you sure don't get to reorganize society around something so amorphous and transitory. That would be authoritarianism and insanity.

All you've taught me is that "gender" is incoherent. It's a performance you do that's in your brain since before birth and when you stop, you turn back, because bees can become queens, male crabs do girl things, and male lizards attract female lizards by not being male.

Okay great. I agree, it's incoherent. Let's ignore it then. We're not going to have 4023 different types of bathrooms for whatever different people feel they are on any given day. We're not going to have 1773 different swimming categories to allow all the genders to compete fairly against each other; putting the cakegenders up against other cakegenders. Let's go back to what we can actually know is true. Sex. Male and female. Binary. Immutable. You made a great argument to organize society around sex differences, rather than the complete mess of "gender."

So, excellent. I think you've demolished "gender" quite well.

This really is just a rambling pile of obvious nonsense disguised as depth. It's entirely derived from dated, sexist stereotype and obviously bogus junk science. None of what you're saying is supported by actual science. The domains producing this claptrap end in "Studies" not "Science."

It's not even supported by basic rational thought, for that matter, since it contradicts and refutes itself. As theology does.

But at bottom, all you're really saying is "'gender' is the word I use instead of 'personality.'"

The Bible in a Nutshell

“The Bible in a Nutshell”, by Casper Rigsby

==

Enjoy an amusing romp through the crazy world of the bible.

Along the way, realize how much of it is empty filler.

You get it wrong from the start. God isn’t a wizard or even a sentient person/entity in the same way we think of humans and animals; He’s not a “man in the sky with a beard” so to speak.

He is the essence of existence. His essence - his attributes - is existence itself. He is a purely spiritual force, a mystery, but one that you can - through science and philosophy - conclude must exist if matter, time and space exist. He is the first mover that logically must exist. And since nothing else existed, he must have used pure free will to create us (nothing existed therefore nothing was a factor in his act of creation).

You’re showing your hand with how little you understand about abrahamic religions.

This is incoherent, nonsensical word salad.

You insist your god is a mystery, which means it is not known, and then proceed to pretend you do know through “philosophy” and “science” (let’s leave aside whether you even know what either or does; whether you understand that you can’t validate things in an objective reality through merely philosophy). Such as “he must have used pure free will.” This is self-refuting. You can’t claim to know anything about your unknown god. You can’t defend your god’s absence by asserting its inscrutability, and then in the next breath make declarations about its nature.

This categorically cancels out your god.

Nevermind that you don’t get to pretend to explain a mystery by invoking an even greater mystery; that means your god explains nothing at all. Things that you claim as explanations have to actually explain. “Goddidit” is useless, both philosophically and scientifically. Which is how I can tell your claims about that are explicitly false. Your god of mystery, and vague and undefined “spiritual force” provides no explanatory power whatsoever, and is therefore not even an answer; what we call “not even wrong.”

By the way, is this the same “pure free will” he uses to endorse and enable his pedophile priests, rather than striking them down into pillars of salt? If he has “pure free will,” it cannotbe contingent upon human free will. And thus it is only by his free will choice that he does not answer the prayers of the victims subjected to their vile and predatory ministrations. If your god has “pure free will,” then there is nothing about the world that is not as it wishes it to be; it must, by definition, be singularly and wholly responsible for everything. Baby cancer, pedophile priests and all. Otherwise, you must be lying or mistaken. A god with “pure free will” that creates the world as we see it, which includes worms that must eat out the eyes of other creatures, such as humans, in order to survive, can only be evil, deranged or both.

“conclude must exist if matter, time and space exist.” Um, no. People actually study cosmology. You clearly know absolutely nothing about it and have only juvenile magical thinking to sustain your childish Santa-like delusions. Your ignorance about the natural world around you is not evidence for a god, it’s just evidence you wasted your time at school, or never attended in the first place.

Science deals with evidence and the natural world. Claiming that it can be known by science requires you to actually produce your evidence. Except you can’t, and you won’t. Because you rambled about “spiritual force,” whatever that means, which is entirely unscientific, and then presuppose what you’re supposed to be proving in the first place, which is contrary to the rules of logic.

This, in particular, completely devastates your claim: “He is the essence of existence. His essence - his attributes - is existence itself.”

If your god is existence itself, then you can’t tell god from not-god, because in your definition, everything is god. If you can’t tell god from not-god, then there can be no evidence for your god, even in principle, and thus no science can exist to find that god. A gun with my fingerprints on it is evidence because a gun without my fingerprints on it is not evidence. As soon as you say that everything, all existence, is your god, you’re saying that every gun exists already with my fingerprints on it. Which means presenting a gun with my fingerprints on it is completely useless.

And if “nothing existed therefore nothing was a factor in his act of creation” then your god is nothing. If your god is not nothing, then something can exist without creation. Which means you have an irreconcilable problem here. The universe can exist without your god, your god must have been created, or your god is nothing. To claim anything else is a fallacy of Special Pleading.

You’ve erased your god because you don’t understand evidence, science, or apparently, even philosophy. Otherwise you would know how to construct a valid argument. But you haven’t.

And there is no science whatsoever that backs up any part of this delusional, contradictory, self-refuting and illogical rambling. None of it is consistent with any supported cosmological model, and is inherently unscientific as described. Science is precise and specific, and what you’ve ranted isn’t even coherent, much less precise or specific.

Go look up an actual cosmologist and watch an interview or presentation by them about the nature of the universe. Because while you’ve made a great charade of pretending to support science, that “science” is, like your bible, of your own personal interpretation.

I can change one word - “God” - to “Galactus,” “Barney the Dinosaur” or “The Invisible Pink Unicorn” and it will still make exactly as much sense.

But thank you for confirming to the world that your god doesn’t exist. Because you literally just described it exactly that way.

Non-believers are often challenged to “prove god doesn’t exist.” We don’t need to when believers do that for us. All we have to do is watch.