[waterbadger]

Good luck on your code!

I do appreciate your research and willingness to have a conversation.

I think to some degree you yourself are cherry picking isolated data points and taking them out of context to support your point. It’s a straightforward approach to rhetorically defend your perspective and of course I’m guilty of doing the same thing.

The only reason I’m bringing it up is just to say: history happens in a context. Ideas don’t come out of a vacuum. It’s really important not to take something like “birth control” (or “atheism” for that matter) at face value without trying to understand the genesis of those concepts in society and the motivations of the people who made them a standard part of the modern world.

I really do appreciate your corrections and I don’t want to be presenting misinformation. Obviously that just discredits any points I would try to make.

I didn’t present a very solid case that “birth control is rooted in eugenics” and you had fair rebuttals for the points that I made. Granted, even if I personally lack the ability to make the argument clearly that doesn’t mean that it’s not true. But I understand that you don’t have any reason to think it’s true and that’s ok.

I would say that there is a fourth mindset to add to your taxonomy which is: not to mandate birth control but to attempt to achieve the same goal by dishonestly manipulating people into choosing to use birth control who would not otherwise have used it. This is what I believe has happened on a mass scale.

I used to be an atheist too! I grew up with people that are still atheists.

I also grew up in a relatively anti-Christian environment and picked up a lot of negative assumptions about Christianity that in hindsight don’t make much sense.

My experience of being an atheist is that it was the most dogmatic and intellectually dishonest view of the world I have encountered. What I mean by that is that there is a dogmatic “orthodoxy” you are required to believe that makes numerous truth claims about reality (and morality) without sufficient evidence.

Ironically it always ultimately falls back on social proof instead of empiricism (i.e. “well no one else thinks that” or ad hominem attacks) and members are not permitted to ask reasonable questions that do not support atheist dogma.

It was a horrible, oppressive and depressing way to understand myself and the world around me.

Now, despite making extraordinary claims about reality and God’s intervention in the world the Catholic church is actually the most intellectually honest culture that I have ever been a part of (and there are literally thousands of years of sincere, good hearted and intellectually honest geniuses you can learn from).

Catholicism is not the same as any Protestant christianity you might have encountered. The Protestant reformation and the “Enlightenment” both split from the Church at around the same time and each rejected 3 basic claims about reality that the Catholic church holds to be true (this is why Protestant christianity and atheism both have to rely on assertions of dogma to maintain their views):

1. Man is an intelligent and morally accountable agent

2. The world around us is fundamentally intelligible (because we are intelligent)

3. Everything in the world has a “telos” meaning a purpose that it is directed towards.

This might seem irrelevant to your life but if you want to be self-aware and moral about your behavior and beliefs this kind of stuff becomes essential. I guarantee that “thinking what most people believe is true” is not actually an effective compass in that regard.

I wish you all the best and I hope you apply your willingness to seek the truth in a consistent manner!

[eesmith]

> My experience of being an atheist is that it was the most dogmatic and intellectually dishonest view of the world I have encountered.

Well bless your heart. You've already implied I'm degenerate, and now you're implying I'm dogmatic and immoral.

[waterbadger]

Lol, I’m sure you’re a nice person! Not trying to attack or disparage you personally in any way.

Just trying (poorly) to share the things I wish someone had told me 20 years ago. My personal experience has been that there are a set of confusing belief systems in this world that many people are victims of. These beliefs are logically inconsistent, they cause a lot of real personal suffering, and they are intellectually challenging to disentangle oneself from.

My understanding of reality is that God created your soul out of nothing and He loves you so much that He would be willing to suffer and die horribly even if it meant redeeming and reconciling solely your one soul to Him.

You have free will and the freedom to believe anything you want. There are different roads to God and diligence about the truth (which you seem to have) is one of them.

God bless you and thanks for the conversation!