MonDie

In other words if anything Jesus says seems to contradict The Law, then you're reading something wrong. Given how ancient both are, this might not be so unreasonable?

It doesn't have to be an institution. Anybody with any degree of fame or prominence can use it to manipulate people. Pastors, politicians, professors, news reporters, authors... Your defense, when without qualification, defends blind obedience to anyone who uses religion deceptively. There's no mention of the pang one ultimately feels after having been used or cheated.

"No, what I’m saying is his understanding of religion is flawed; if a chef buggers up a recipe is it the recipes fault?" If somebody is following that chef's orders, shouldn't we be concerned for them? Does forwarding excuses for their naivety help, or hurt? What if in the end, these people only feel robbed and cheated because of how they were manipulated?

The right to choose does not conflict with attempting to persuade others of your own viewpoint. You could contend that, while the propensity for religion is not fundamentally malevolent, religion is hijacked by the power-hungry. Throughout history people acquired power by claiming to be godly or chosen, but maybe these were just manipulative, narcissistic sociopaths. After all, the communist dictators sought to supress religion, but they were no better. Here's a sample from a psychopathy questionnaire. Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory-Short Version: A Further Test of the Internal Consistency and Criterion Validity (Colins, Noom, VanderPlasschen, 2012)

It's a PDF.

Here's the report filed by the Committee Against Torture. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/docs/ngos/JusticeMagdalenes_Ireland46.pdf

It's either about embracing the penis or worrying about it excessively. It's ambiguous. The tiger's blank facial expression doesn't help any.

^#1893 I'm not sure how to take that...

That's begging the question. Circularity is: A because B and B because A.

Yet we ignore what was done directly by oppressive nuns in Magdelene laundries. There's a United Nations report on it. They not only didn't hold happiness as fundamental, but mostly seemed rather indifferent to suffering. Yet they were clearly practicing some kind of religion. Psychologists have identified several psychological manifestations of religiosity: intrinsic, extrinsic, quest, and fundamentalism mainly. The first three are mostly independent of one another.

Are you shifting the goalpost, or conceding?

Or having a wanted child, concieved at 15 due to poor sex education, taken away by nuns because you're unmarried, and being forced to spend your adulthood in silent repentance, locked away in a Magdalene laundry.

New testament: nearly 2 millennia ago, Greek. Torah, 1st half of Old Testament: compiled 3 millennia ago, in Hebrew, during the times of David and Solomon, but includes Moses/Exodus from 300 years prior. Greek translations of Tanakh/OT about 2 millennia ago, which serve as basis for most modern translations. Epic of Gilgamesh: 4 millennia ago, cuneiform.

The simulation hypothesis and multiverse inflation both violate this if true. One part of that definition is more essential, and the other is derived and subject to change based on the real or hypothetical scenario being described.Plus it's only Wikipedia. In my humble opinion, laws dictate both what can happen, and what cannot. The absence of governing principles might not mean that nothing could happen, but rather that anything could happen. Thus acausality.

You assume the authors already knew everything about the message they were supposedly conveying. What consequence would it have been if people three millennia ago knew vaguely what Earth was like three million millennia ago? Maybe that wasn't the point.If I recall, it says somewhere that God cannot lie... but maybe that was a lie!

NyaaNyaa, If we can simulate a 2D or 3D space using only 1s and 0s, then I imagine a creator could simulate relativity from within whatever meta-dimensional space it exists within. If I am wrong, then how could the simulation hypothesis work? Shoot, this is philosophy!

Intervention might be possible regardless. All that 20% means is that there are things we can do to override our genetics, and that a sizeable percentage of us are already doing them.

The cougar will be pretty brutal to its prey, unless you stop it first, for example by killing it.

Obsessive compulsive disorder? Gender conflicts?It's off topic anyway. People with OCD often have sexual obsessions.

The value of inquiry as a personal and societal ideal can provide a default metaethics when there are open questions, which there certainly are for utilitarian metaethics.

I hope you didn't miss the addendum. I wonder. Could we try it on other primates? Would they care enough to suppress the erection? Nay, other mammals. How far back does the erection go, anyway?

Dissily Mordentroge, you postulated that one could fool the penile plethysmograph. There is no shortage of research on this matter. I found these old ones. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311045/ http://www.researchgate.net/publication/247332259_Instructional_control_of_penile_circumference_in_assessments_of_sexual_preference This looks like an unpeer-reviewed submission since it says 1987 instead of 1988, SIGNS OF FEIGNING IN THE PHALLOMETRIC TEST (Freund, Watson, & Rienzo) also this one, possibly not peer-reviewed or not accepted Voluntary Control of Penile Responses as a Function of Stimulus Duration and Instructions (Lalumiere & Earls, 1992) and these abstracts http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2003767 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1546933 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0005796783900372 and this more recent, peer-reviewed 2011 paper, THE INFLUENCE OF PRESESSION FACTORS IN THE ASSESSMENT OF DEVIANT AROUSAL (Reyes, Vollmer, Hall) "We evaluated the effects of presession masturbation (1 participant) and arousal-suppression strategies (2 participants)." The abstracts show that erection can be suppressed, but that subjects overestimate their success at this (Adams 1992) and have more difficulty doing this while actively describing the erotic content (Mahoney 1991). Furthermore, there was "some degree of suppression of erections but no significant enhancement of erections. (Adams 1992)" The 2011 study says that the participant successfully "suppressed arousal to baseline levels only after he received a more specific suppression instruction," counting aloud back from 100.

I was talking about motion through Earth's ecliptic plane, which necessarily involves retro/prograde cycles from the parallax shifts due to Earth orbiting the Sun. Looking at photos 31-35 in Externet's link, that's obviously not what was meant because Pluto is currently in Saggitarius around 275-295 ecliptic longitude.

On ResearchGate, there is a 1989 paper "Heterosexuality, Homosexuality, and Erotic Age Preference". I recall it mentioning "signs of faking" as a criterion for exclusion. I will check the citation later. I can understand aversion to homosexual contact as adaptive. It's wasted time and an unnecessary disease risk. I cannot explain homophobia, however.

obedience?