London-based writer. Often climbing.
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I don’t know what the local version of the Samaritans is where you are, but I suggest you talk to them instead of whatever you’re planning: https://www.samaritans.org/
Lol, I hadn’t even noticed that. The pro-car people are uniformly rude and ignorant and all the anti-car people are offering polite corrections.
My faves are all the people going ‘How could I possibly run errands on foot/bike/public transport?’ I do that every day! How weak are these guys? Literally yesterday I ran a half marathon on the other side of the city then went for a meal out and used walking and public transport every step of the way… except for the 21k I did running.
I think anyone who has a confirmed political ‘identity’ has almost by definition put more thought into politics generally and the position in particular than anyone who doesn’t have such an ‘identity’. I mean, I’m not conservative, but I imagine if I went to /r/Conservatives or whatever and posted ‘How come you don’t care about poor people?!?!?!?!?’ I’d get much the same eyerolling response as discussed above!
Yes.
I suppose what I’d ask you is: are you an expert in urban or transport infrastructure? Because, if not — and I say this in the politest way possible — the argument you made was probably a fairly basic one that people have heard a thousand times before. Your gloss of it here as ‘trains cannot replace cars’ suggests to me that you’re not really engaged with the issue (nobody thinks ‘trains can replace cars’).
Essentially what you did is the equivalent of me going into a Christian community and saying, ‘But if God exists, why is there evil in the world?’ as though no Christian had ever engaged with that idea, then acting surprised when people started rolling their eyes at me.
Yes, I always kind of respected the Mormons for at least trying to reconcile the existence of the Native Americans with the New Testament, beyond ‘the rocks testify’, but they also inadvertently showed how absurd the whole idea was by stretching every kind of evidence (biblical, linguistic, genetic, archaeological, etc.) so much to make it work! And of course even that didn’t seem to account for the Polynesians and… well, everyone else.
I was always especially fond of the idea that Jesus revealed himself to the Aztecs and they somehow got so confused that they ended up worshipping a giant feathered snake instead.
Fair point. I thought for a long time that the fact that Christianity simply couldn’t have spread over the globe for a millennium and a half after Christ’s death was a slam dunk argument against its core tenets, though. I cited Augustine here because I thought it was quite funny when I found out that one of the Church Fathers inadvertently agreed with me! It proved to me that my argument wasn’t a case of me indulging in special pleading or anything like that: it really is a good argument.
Fact is though that all of us, Christian or not, religious or not, find difficulties when it comes to justifying our core beliefs. We constantly adjust to take in new information without really letting it get at our fundamental ideas. I don’t see why discovering alien life would be any different for most people.
So, fun fact, St Augustine, who is considered one of the Church Fathers, explicitly argued that if the ‘Antipodes’ (i.e., southern continents not connected to Europe, Asia or Africa) actually existed and had humans living there, that would prove the Gospel was untrue.
The reason for this is as follows: Christians of his era believed that the reason God had allowed the Romans to destroy the Second Temple and push the Jews into exile was to prepare the men of all nations (as understood at the time) for the coming of the Gospel. The idea was that the Jews had taken the Old Testament, and the prophecies of the Messiah therein, across the whole world. Augustine argues that if the Antipodes contained human beings who had never had any kind of contact with Jews, and therefore no contact with the OT, and no contact with Christians, and therefore no contact with the New Testament, either, that must mean the Gospels are false. Why? Because there’s no conceivable reason that a just God would have deprived entire civilisations of the chance of redemption.
Of course, we now know that at the time Augustine was writing (4th-5th century AD), there were literally millions of people who had never had the slightest contact with the Jews or Christians and, furthermore, wouldn’t do so for another millennium. So, per Augustine’s argument, all those millions were condemned to Hell (the concept of Purgatory didn’t exist at this point, but condemning them all to no chance of Heaven, just because they were unfortunate to be born a long way away from Jersualem, is clearly also unjust). Either God is incredibly unjust and unmerciful, which means the Gospels are untrue, OR the Good News wasn’t actually spread to all men, which must also mean that they’re not true.
The upshot of this is that one of the Church Fathers has, in retrospect, irrefutably argued that the Gospels are untrue. The amount of special pleading required to make out that, actually, the Maori or the Easter Islanders or [insert any other uncontacted peoples here] had an opportunity to accept Christ and somehow missed it entirely is far beyond any sane interpretation of the evidence.
Now, as you might have noticed, this hasn’t stopped people from believing in the Gospels. I don’t see why the discovery of life on another world would dislodge people from a belief that is transparently false when nothing else has.
Lactose tolerance is not very widespread globally and there’s less of it the further you get from north-western Europe, so adding cheese to anything is a surprisingly recent and surprisingly niche culinary choice.
It can’t hurt.