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You can say that. You have not shown it. “Race is not what marriage is” is a description of the pair: a Black husband and a White wife are still a man and a woman. The color is an extra and irrelevant fact because they still have procreative capcity and can still provide a mother and father to raise children. “The sex of the spouses is not what marriage is” is not the same sentence. It is a redefinition. You are asserting that marriage is, at bottom, a romantic contract between adults, and that male and female are decoration. That is a view. It is not a discovery that my last reply was a sermon. Declared vs reasoned. If the only thing I had offered was “a prophet said so,” you would have a point about authority. But I haven't, so you don't. The public reason is this: marriage, as a social institution, grew up around the one sexual pair that produces children and attaches those children to the two people whose bodies made them. Sex is the feature that makes that pair that pair. Race is not. You can prefer a different institution—companionate licensing of any two adults. Preferring it does not turn sex into skin. Every sexual ethic has a declared core. Yours declares that consent, love, and legal recognition are enough to make a marriage. That is not read off a telescope. It is, instead, a moral choice about what the institution is for. Calling my core “declared” and yours “reasoned” is just self-flattering branding. Leaders and God. Yes: I also think living prophets teach that sexual relations belong in a marriage of a man and a woman. That is not a secret. It is also not the only sentence in the argument. If God does not exist, the prophetic piece drops out and we are still left with the institutional and biological and legal pieces. You still have to say why the pair that can be mother and father is morally idle, and why a color bar is a good analogy for that claim. “Your church talks about God” does achieve that. What would make the parody work. It would work if I had said: people with trait T may not marry, and T had nothing to do with the kind of union. Black skin is that kind of trait. Being two men is not. Two men can love each other. They cannot procreate, nor can they be husband and wife in the sense the older institution named, nor can they be a mother and a father to the child they raise. You can call that unimportant. You cannot call it “because they have an arbitrary surface trait” without smuggling in the conclusion that sex is arbitrary. If marriage is only a private meaning two people assign, then yes, sex drops out—and so does almost every public reason to have the institution at all, including the reasons the state used to give (which were centered heavily on marriage's association with procreation and child-rearing). That is a larger rebuild than “I don’t like your prophet.” Own the rebuild. Do not pretend it is the same move as Loving. Fallacies Question-begging. Assumes marriage is already sex-neutral, then calls the older definition “unreasoned.” False analogy, second pass. Still treats sex as an add-on like race. Special pleading. Their declared goods count as reason; yours count as dogma. Straw man. Reduces the whole case to “my leader’s God.” Procreative capacity has nothing to do with marriage? Are you sure you want to go with that? We have not determined that procreative capacity has nothing to do with it. We have determined that this particular act need not conceive. Those are different sentences. A husband and wife past menopause, or using contraception, are still the kind of pair whose sexual union is the generative kind. The institution is built around that pair: the two sexes, the possibility of a child who has that mother and that father, and the same bond when a child does not arrive. Birth control and age limit an instance. They do not turn the pair into two men. Two men never were that pair. There is no generative kind sitting underneath that is merely blocked this month. So is the reproductive status, acts and genders of the participants. Except, your interpretation of your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry. That is not reasoned but declared and accepted. No. Those are not the same kind of fact as skin color, and they are not the same as each other. Skin color is not a part of the sexual act and not a part of “mother and father.” A Black husband and a White wife are still a man and a woman. The color is an extra trait. Using it to ban the marriage is prejudice wearing a rule. Reproductive status of this couple (menopause, contraception, no ovaries) is a fact about an instance. It tells you whether a child is likely this year. It does not tell you what kind of pair they are. I have already said that. This or that act tonight (whether it can fertilize) is also a fact about an instance. Union in a husband–wife marriage does not have to conceive that hour. I have already said that too. The sexes of the two people are not a third extra trait like color, and they are not “reproductive status.” They are what makes the pair a husband and a wife rather than two men or two women. You can say that difference should not matter to the civil institution. That is a moral claim about what marriage is for. It is not a finding that sex is as idle as complexion. You keep running the same collapse: because I allow sex when this couple cannot conceive, generation “has nothing to do with it,” so the only leftover is my prophet. That only follows if the ethic was “a baby must result from this act.” That was never the ethic. The ethic is: the union of the two sexes, institutionalized as marriage, ordered to children and to the bond, including when this household has no child. Declared and accepted. Yes, prophets teach that. I have not hidden it. It does not follow that there is no public reason left. “Marriage names the pair that can be mother and father” is a reason you can argue with without opening Genesis. Your counter is also declared: marriage is the legal recognition of a loving adult bond, and sex is decoration. You did not derive that from a lab. You chose what the institution is for. Calling your choice “reasoned” and mine “accepted” is just a compliment you are paying yourself. If sex is as arbitrary in marriage as race, show why a child having a mother and a father is like a child having two parents of the same skin color. Until you do that, the parody is still a parody. Fallacies Equivocation. “Reproductive status,” “this act,” and “sex of the pair” treated as one idle trait. False analogy. Sex still treated as skin. Non sequitur. Non-fertile marital sex → generation irrelevant → only dogma remains. Special pleading. Their definition of marriage counts as reason; yours counts as a sermon. I have yet to see a distinction made that doesn't boil down to "your interpretation of your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry." It doesn't matter if the couple can have kids, wants to have kids or anything else. You have seen the distinction. You have restated it as a sermon so you do not have to answer it. Here it is without a prophet in the sentence: Marriage, on this view, is the institution that joins the two sexes and attaches children to the mother and father whose union can produce them. Two men can have a household, a license, and a deep attachment. They cannot be that pair. An opposite-sex couple who cannot or will not have children is still that pair. Fertility this year, desire for kids, and use of contraception are facts about a household. They are not the definition of the pair. That is a claim about what the institution is. You can reject it. You can say marriage should be only a companionate contract. What you cannot do is pretend the claim was never made and that the only words on the table are “my leader’s God.” “It doesn’t matter if the couple can have kids” is my point about instances, which you are using as if it were a confession that generation never mattered to the kind. I have said the opposite several times. Repeating “I have yet to see a distinction” after that is not scout mindset. It is a decision that the only distinction you will count is one that does not mention sex. If your test for “reasoned” is “does not treat male and female as the two halves of the union,” then of course every argument I give will fail the test. That is a filter, not a rebuttal. I also believe prophets teach this. That is an additional warrant for me. It is not the only sentence I have offered you. If you want to debate authority, say the premises in Proposition 1 are false and we will have that argument. If you want to debate the institution, answer why a mother-and-father pair is as arbitrary as a color bar. Those are two conversations. Collapsing both into “you were told” is how you avoid both. Fallacies Straw man. Every institutional argument flattened to “prophet said.” Goalpost. Instance-level fertility treated as if it were the whole theory. Question-begging. “Reasoned” defined as already sex-neutral. Repetition as refutation. “I have yet to see” after the distinction was stated. We've already demonstrated that you don't actually care about this. If science tomorrow created a way for gay people to have biological children it wouldn't change a thing. It boils down your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry. You have not demonstrated that I do not care about mother and father. You have demonstrated that generation is not the only thing in the ethic, and that a science-fiction patch on one fact would not automatically rewrite the rest. That is ordinary. It is not a confession. If tomorrow two men could mix their own gametes and produce a child, one sentence of mine would have to change: “same-sex unions are a biological dead end.” I have used that sentence. I would stop using it in that form. What would not automatically disappear: The child would still not have a mother and a father. It would have two fathers, or a lab and two fathers. “Biological offspring” is not the same fact as “this child has a mom and a dad.” The pair would still not be husband and wife in the sense the institution named. The Law of Chastity would still limit sexual relations to that marriage. For me that is an independent warrant, not a leftover after biology is exhausted. Caring about an end does not mean it is a single lever that, if someone imagines it away, proves you never cared. A ban on sibling marriage is not shown to be “only religion” because gene editing might one day fix the medical risk. The medical risk was a reason. It was not the only reason. You do not get to delete every other reason and then declare the first one was theater. “We’ve already determined” is doing too much work. What was determined is that I will not move two men into X solely because a lab gave them a baby. That is consistent with an ethic that has more than one pillar. It is inconsistent with your test, which is: the only honest reason I may have is the one that, if hypothetically canceled, would flip my conclusion. That test is designed so that any second reason counts as proof the first was fake. Yes, prophets teach man–woman marriage. I have said that in the open. It does not empty the mother-and-father description, and it does not make a color bar a good analogy. If you want to argue that God has not spoken, argue that. If you want to argue that a child having two fathers is as complete as a child having a mother and a father, argue that. Do not treat a thought experiment that leaves the mother out as a demonstration that I never meant the sentence. Fallacies False dilemma. Either one fact flips the whole ethic, or you never cared about that fact. Moving the goalposts. “Biological children” swapped in for “mother and father.” Motivated inference. Extra reasons treated as evidence the first reason was a cover. Restated question-begging. Still “only the prophet,” still unshown. I don't think the genders or the race of the participants are important. They are on the same level to me. It boils down your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry. "They are on the same level to me." This is good. That is the actual disagreement. You think the sexes of the spouses and the race of the spouses are the same kind of fact about a marriage: extra adjectives, morally idle, interchangeable. I do not. On your view a color bar and a man–woman rule are cousins. On mine they are not, because only one of those facts is what the pair is. Saying they are “on the same level to me” is honest. It is also a declaration. You have not shown they are the same level in the structure of generation, in the words “mother” and “father,” or in the history of the institution. You have reported your sorting. “To me” does not make sex into skin. It still does not “boil down” to a prophet. A secular person can hold that male and female are the two halves of the marital pair and that race is not. Many have. A religious person can hold the same thing and also believe God has said so. Adding the second sentence does not delete the first. Refusing to hear the first because the second exists is your filter. If sex and race are truly on the same level, then “the child has a mother and a father” is no more structural than “the child has two parents of the same complexion.” That is the claim you now need to defend. Repeating that my leader talks about God does not defend it. I do not think same-sex attracted people are less human. I think you have put the wrong two traits on the same shelf. That is the argument. The parody only works after you win that argument. You have asserted it. You have not won it. Fallacies Assertion as proof. “On the same level to me” offered as if it settled the analogy. Question-begging. Same-level claim assumes the conclusion the parody needs. Red herring. Prophet sentence used to avoid defending the leveling. The parody does assume they are interchangeable. Because they are. Marriage serves the exact same role for married lesbians as married straight people. It serves the same role for infertile and fertile people. It serves the same role for black and white people. It serves the same role for people that participate in reproductive sex acts and non-reproductive sex acts. Except for you because your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry. Same for whom, and same as what? If the role is “two adults get a license, companionship, hospital rights, and a public name for their bond,” then yes: a lesbian couple, an infertile couple, and a Black couple can all occupy that role. That is the companionate definition. Once you adopt it, every further distinction looks like a sermon. You have built that result into the word “role.” If the role is the older one—joining the two sexes and attaching children to a mother and a father—then a lesbian marriage does not serve the same role. It serves the companionate role. It does not serve the generative one. An infertile husband and wife still occupy the generative kind of pair; they may fail at the fruit. Two women never occupied it. A Black husband and wife occupy it the same way a White husband and wife do. Race never left that role. Sex is the role. So the list you offered is not four examples of one fact. It is one real parallel and three lumpings: Black and White spouses: same kind of pair. Race is idle. Fertile and infertile opposite-sex spouses: same kind of pair; different fruit this year. Reproductive and non-reproductive acts in that marriage: same pair; union as well as generation. Two women and a husband and wife: different kind of pair. Same companionate goods if you only count those goods. “It serves the exact same role for married lesbians as for married straight people” is true on your definition of the role and false on mine. That is the dispute. It is not evidence that sex and race are interchangeable. It is you using the companionate definition as a measuring stick and then declaring that whatever does not fit the stick was only ever a prophet. Loving fits the first three lines and not the fourth. It stopped the state from using an idle trait to block a man and a woman. It did not hold that every use of sex in the definition of marriage is a cousin of Jim Crow. Obergefell did treat the companionate role as enough. You are with that opinion. Say so. Do not treat “same role” as a neutral observation that my side has to swallow before the argument starts. I also think prophets teach man–woman marriage. That does not make “same companionate role” into “same institution.” If the only role you will count is the one two lesbians already fill, then of course you will find no distinction except religion. You have defined the others out of the room. Fallacies Equivocation. “Role” as adult companionship vs “role” as generative institution. Question-begging. Measures every couple by the companionate role, then calls sex idle. False grouping. Race, infertility, technique, and two women treated as one list. Restated dogma charge. Still used as a substitute for defending the leveling. Still waiting to see it. Go back a few pages. I laid out 7 propositions. I don't think you have addressed them. I invite you to do so. Please lay out which ones you accept and which you do not, and why. You have seen a reasoned basis. You have a rule that the only basis you will count is one that (a) never mentions God and (b) treats every non-fertile night as if it canceled the kind. Under that rule, of course nothing remains but a prophet. That is your filter. Here is the basis, restated and clarified in pieces you can reject one at a time instead of flattening. 1. Kind of pair. Marriage, on this view, joins a man and a woman. Two men are not that pair plus an adjective. Race is an adjective. Sex is the pair. 2. What the institution is for. It grew up around the sexual union that can generate a child and attach that child to a mother and a father. That is a description of generation, not a verse. You can say the civil institution should no longer care. You cannot say the description was never offered. 3. Instance is not kind. A postmenopausal wife, contraception, and oral sex in a marriage do not “fail to cohere” as the pair. They fail to conceive this time. The pair is still husband and wife. I said generation and union are both ends. You keep quoting only the first half of that sentence and then declaring a contradiction. 4. Jackie / CAIS is not your template. CAIS is a 46,XY disorder of male development with a female-typical body. In ordinary and legal speech she can be a wife and a mother. That is an edge case in the binary, not proof that sex is idle, not proof that two men are a mother and a father, and not proof that “reproductive coherence” was my only test. Rare DSDs are why we keep layers. They are not a warrant to treat sex like race. 5. The sci-fi baby does not erase the rest. If two men could produce a child in a lab, “dead end” would possibly need a rewrite (not sure about that, actually, since "in a lab" is not necessarily "natural"). The child would still not have a mother and a father. The pair would still not be husband and wife. More than one reason can be real at once. A second reason is not evidence the first was fake. 6. God and prophets. Yes. I believe God has taught that sexual relations belong in a marriage of a man and a woman. That is an additional warrant. It is not the only sentence above. If you want to argue that God has not spoken, argue that. Do not use it as a delete key for 1–5. What is not a reasoned rebuttal: “still waiting,” “that’s it,” and “Bigot!” Those are ways of announcing that you will not count a distinction unless it already uses your definition of marriage (companionate contract, sex and race on the same shelf). Under that definition my view will always look like a sermon. That is not a finding that I never gave reasons. It is a finding that you only score reasons that concede your premise. If you want to continue, pick one of 1–5 and say why it is false. Do not run them all back through “your leader’s God” and call the thread finished. Fallacies Straw man. Multi-part case reduced to one verse. Equivocation. “Doesn’t cohere as an act tonight” vs “doesn’t cohere as a kind of pair.” No true reasons. Any non-theological reason disqualified for not being your reason. Jackie as wedge. DSD edge case used to cancel the ordinary pair. Thanks, -Smac

There is an addition that I think maybe of interest. Thank You for the Days, by Kirsty McColl. It was popular in the UK, in the eighties, although not to sure if is known in the US.

It isn't that I have successfully transcended my cognitive biases and you have not. I haven't transcended cognitive biases. That isn't my claim. My claim is that I am at least trying. That's not much of a difference. You're mindreading and imputing motives either way. Why should I believe you are trying to transcend your cognitive biases and I am not? Well, no. The Church would not sponsor its institutions of higher learning if principles of science, mathematics, and other inquiries were "the polar opposite" of how the Church teaches us to pursue knowledge and truth. This is just a lazy caricature, and a further demonstration of why you are not a reliable narrator relative to the Church. You just can't allow yourself to let the Church speak for itself, or to avoid glosses and disparaging terms. It's strawmen and "Bigot!" all the way down. I have read fairly widely, though with different emphases (I hew more toward jurisprudential lenses). Scout mindset, Sagan’s candle, Pinker on rationality: do not protect a conclusion from disconfirming evidence; do not treat intuition as a demonstration; do not confuse “I don’t know everything” with “I know nothing.” That is good advice. It is not a proof that Alma 32 and a lab notebook are two religions and you may belong to only one. Two goals is a smear of one of them. “See the evidence clearly” is a goal I share. “Get a testimony no matter what the evidence does” is a goal I reject, and not one the Church teaches, and yet that is how you characterize us . Those are not the only two programs on offer. A third is the Church's non-caricatured position: take historical, textual, and scientific questions as real questions, and also treat prayer, covenant, and moral experiment as real tests of a different kind of claim. You can botch the third program. People do. You can also botch scout mindset by deciding in advance that the only admissible evidence is the kind that already fits naturalism. That is not scouting. That is a filter. Alma 32 is not “ignore the control group.” The chapter is an analogy: plant a word, do not cast it out on unbelief, see whether it enlarges and enlightens. That is not a Nature protocol. It is also not “repeat the slogan until you feel it.” It is closer to try living under this claim and watch what it does to mind and life than it is to “choose feelings over facts.” Moroni 10 is a request for confirmation of a specific book, not a ban on asking where the plates were, what the text looks like, or what 19th-century context can explain. If someone uses those chapters as a reason never to read an awkward document, that person is misusing them. Misuse is not the official method. A few years back I introduced my wife to a phrase I had encountered on a blog: "Let us embrace the healing power of 'and.'" There are a lot of people, including yourself it seems, who are prone to present false dilemmas. An either/or choice when there are more options available. Here, you say intellectual and scientific inquiry are "the polar opposite of how Mormonism teaches." Again, that's just a lazy caricature. Daily scripture, meetings, and faith-promoting stories are formation. Every tradition forms people: journals, labs, conferences, and “here is how a rationalist talks” form people too. Formation is not automatically self-deception. The live question is whether you will let a contrary fact in. I have already said prophets have been wrong about some sexual folklore, that Miracle of Forgiveness is not the current handbook, and that descriptive history is not a standing commandment. That is not the profile of “protect the testimony at all costs.” You do not have to choose one instrument. Historians use documents. Chemists use assays. Juries use testimony plus physical evidence. People decide whom to marry with more than a regression table. “Only one method, ever” is itself a philosophical claim, and an unserious one. Pinker and Galef are not doing particle physics when they write about meaning and bias. Sagan was not doing particle physics when he wrote about wonder. They are arguing for a stance. I can take the stance—don’t lie to yourself, don’t confuse hope with a footnote—without granting that the only thing that exists is what an academic journal will print. Carroll’s line is right and is being overworked. Carroll is right when he says that we can know some things without knowing everything. The earth is not about to be put back at the center of the solar system. Granted. Restoration claims are not in that bin. “Joseph was a prophet” and “the Book of Mormon is historical” are not heliocentrism. They are historical and theological claims with arguments on both sides. “There will never be a Nature article reversing Copernicus” does not mean “therefore Moroni 10 is intellectually disreputable.” It means physical cosmology is settled in a way that 1820s New York is not. Intuition is not plausibility. Agreed. A burning spiritual impression is not a carbon date. I have not said it was. I have said that if God is involved and sends messengers, those claims are doing work in the argument. You say those premises are false. That is the disagreement. Quoting a style of rationality does not make the premises disappear, and it does not make “scout vs testimony” a forced choice. If the books taught you to prefer clarity to slogans, use them that way here: state the claim, state what would count against it, and stop treating every religious practice as a plot to avoid the data. Stop caricaturing people and ideas with which you disagree. Stop with coercive "Bigot!" pronouncements and other logical fallacies. Speaking of which... Fallacies False dichotomy. Evidence-seeking vs testimony-seeking as the only two goals. Again, we can and should "embrace the healing power of 'and.'" Straw man. Alma 32 / Moroni 10 as “succeed at feeling certain.” Category error. Settled cosmology used as a template for historical-theological claims. Remember our discussion about Caesar (or perhaps that was not you, I can't recall)? Motivated-reasoning special pleading. Formation on your side = rationality; formation on mine = bias. Thanks, -Smac

Here is the relevant line correct: "They do become Y if the act is not procreative or not strengthening the union between husband and wife." And it's just circular. Your interpretation of your church leader's interpretation of gods will says opposite gendered marriages are ok and same gendered marriages are bad. It doesn't matter if particular sex acts are procreative. It doesn't matter if the couple can have kids. So appeals to biology are specious. All that matters is that the sex acts occur between married opposite gendered people because god said so.

Sure. There are two purposes, after all: procreation and strengthening the union between husband and wife. In the ethic I have been defending, sexual acts between a husband and a wife that do not conceive—and that cannot conceive this time—are still inside X. Those acts do not become Y because a child is not possible in that hour. They do become Y if the act is not procreative or not strengthening the union between husband and wife. That is not a new patch. Again, I have said from the start that sex in marriage has two ends: generation and the union of husband and wife. If the only permitted act were the one that might conceive tonight, the second end would be empty words, and every infertile or postmenopausal couple would be in Y. I have already refused that. I'm not inclined to create a catalog of particular acts that are permissible and acts that are verboten. My public line is not a bedroom ordinance list. It is this: the pair is husband and wife; the act is their sexual union; generation need not occur this time; the act is not shared with a third person and is not a substitute for turning the marriage into a different kind of pair. If a particular act is rejected, it is rejected as a limit inside the marriage, not because “it didn’t make a baby, therefore it is the same as two men.” Why this is not the same as same-sex acts “Does not generate in this instance” is not the moral category. “What kind of pair, and what is the act for” is. Husband and wife, oral sex, no conception tonight: still the marital kind. The bodies are the two sexes; the bond is the one that can generate; this act serves union inside that bond. Two men, any sexual act: not an infertile night in a marriage of husband and wife. There is no marital kind of that sort to be serving. You are collapsing “this particular motion does not fertilize” into “therefore the pair and the institution do not matter.” That is the same move as Andy/Abigail versus Bob/Brady. I already answered it. Frequency and technique do not rewrite kind. If your test is “name every act that cannot conceive and put it in Y,” you are not describing my ethic. You are describing a fertility-only ethic I have declined. If your test is “if any non-procreative marital act is allowed, then same-sex acts must be allowed,” that only follows if the pair is morally idle. That is the premise I do not grant. I will not turn this thread into a catalog of techniques. The answer you asked for is: non-procreative sex between husband and wife can be licit in this ethic because union is a real end of that marriage. That does not license every other pairing that also fails to conceive. Fallacies False equivalence. Non-generative act in a man–woman marriage = same-sex pair. Moving the goalposts. From “kind of pair” to “this motion fertilized or it didn’t.” Continuum fallacy. If some marital acts don’t conceive, no line remains. Whataboutism. Bedroom details used to evade the pair distinction. Thanks, -Smac

Latter-day Saints are fortunate, in a sense, to have all sorts of people going out of their way to tear down our faith. To that end, I have spent many, many years listening to such voices, and then re-checking re-assessing what I believe and why. The Restored Gospel still requires faith, but it holds up remarkably well. Of the less appealing attributes of our critics is that they characterize themselves as being earnest in their pursuit of truth, but then deny that same zeal to the Latter-day Saints. As an attorney, I have had ample opportunity to observe how different people, having had different experiences and made different efforts and reached different decisions about what to emphasize and de-emphasize, and having different aspirations and motives and such, can then look at a set of given facts or postulations and reach very different conclusions about them. For example, you find my beliefs patently absurd. Not just a difference in taste or preference, but patently and obviously false and incongruent with reality. You attribute this to cognitive biases, me reflexively accepting what I was "taught from the cradle," and so on. I find your ideological position on some matters patently absurd. A man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one. That a person of your obvious intellectual rigor can affirm that not only with a straight face, but with earnestness, is baffling to me. Your utter refusal to articulate any limiting principles as to entry into sex-segregated spaces is less baffling because a man "becoming" a woman is wholly incongruent with reality, not even a close call (just as incongruent as "a man can 'become' a {space alien} by 'identifying' as one" or "a man can 'become' a {six-year-old by} 'identifying' as one." You being an unreliable narrator (overstating/misstating Carroll, profoundly misrepresenting and misapprehending Givens) is also less baffling. Where you think I am in the thrall of a religious tradition "taught {to me} from the cradle," I think you are in the thrall of ideological capture and obligation. As an outside observer, I find the trans movements "you're either with us or your a bigot" schtick to be pretty offputting. This thread, as with so many other examples, has once again demonstrated the intellectual paucity of that ideology. Yet again: I think the "Bigot!" schtick is so frequently utilized because it's all you've got. I can articulate a reasoned basis for my position. I don't think you can, either that or you are so immersed in your own worldview that you cannot accommodate the possibility that viewpoints divergent from yours might be reasonable. So you and yours retreat to name-calling. You guys often even begin with name-calling out of the gate. As a Latter-day Saint, I have had all sorts of opportunities to re-examine what I believe and why. There are certainly some things I struggle with, but nothing that I can say is demonstrably incongruent with reality. God's existence is not empirically testable, for example, so I am at liberty to reach a conclusion on grounds other than (or in addition to) empirical inquiry (such as the Spirit). In contrast, whether a man can "become" a woman is empirically testable. It can never happen. And yet you, the self-proclaimed "I'm squarely on the side of 'empirical reality'" guy, not only declare this, you seem to be entirely genuine and earnest about it. I have an ideology. Informed by my personal observations and experiences, training and education (particularly in the law), and so on. I am not in the "thrall" of it, though, as there are all sorts of ways a person can set it aside. You have done so. Many of my friends and relatives have done so. Had I not had the experiences I have had with the Restored Gospel, I may well have left also. My religion is, to me, too high-demand for me to stay with it for the sake of comfort or familial obligation. I also feel a moral obligation to myself to set aside falsehoods and bad ideas when I discern them. I stay, though, because I have had experiences that have persuaded me, many times over, that the Gospel is what it claims to be. I think trans ideology is vastly different. It operates by compulsion and coercion and control. It has no choice, really, because its fundamental tenets are incongruent with reality, so its advocates distract from that and paper over that with logical fallacies and emotional manipulation and blackmail. Again, this thread is a good exemplar of that. Folks like you and SU are quite smart, but you simply cannot resist resorting to ad hominem and other coercive tactics. It's all you've got. You can't defend your position using merit, reasoning and evidence, so you go with "Bigot!" Over and over and over. There are other elements of secular ideologies in play here as well. When I express a belief in God, I do so from a place of faith and humility. I am quite aware of my relative "nothingness," and my "worthless and fallen state" (Mosiah 4:5). It is not self-aggrandizing to consider myself a "child of God" because we all are. Nor is self-aggrandizement in any way compatible with discipleship and faith in Jesus Christ. King Benjamin put it well in Mosiah 4:11-12: The more I learn about the Gospel, and the more I apply it in my life, the more I grow, spiritually and intellectually. I feel edified. The further along I have walked the covenant path, the more I see D&C 50:24: "That which is of God is light; and he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day." The more I look at manifestations of trans ideology and other secular mandates, the more pitiable I find those in the thrall of it. The trans stuff in particular begins and ends with coercion and "in-grouping." It has nothing to offer on its merits, and so seeks to get people to accept it via shame and coercion, or else punishes them for failing to. I can say "I believe in God" and I may well be right. I can't prove it, but neither can it be disproven. Belief in a Higher Being is reasonable. In this perspective I acknowledge that others can choose to believe God does not exist. You can say "A man can 'become' a woman by 'identifying' as one," but you will never be right. It can be disproven. It is wholly incongruent with reality. And yet not only do you affirm it, you throw "Bigot!" at anyone who dares express disagreement with it. I find that pretty sad. Good thing, then, that I don't stick my head in the sand. Instead, I have spent decades listening to people like you and examining your critiques of my faith, and also studying the Gospel, and also seeking to apply it in my life. I am a fairly well-informed Latter-day Saint, both as to our doctrines, practices, history, and so on. It is sort of grimly humorous that, in your view, retaining and advancing well-examined religious beliefs just isn't possible. The only characterization you can come up with is "sticking your head in the sand" and "willful ignorance." My options are to either agree with you or I'm a "bigot." Agree with you or I am willfully ignorant. Yeesh. Pinker is right about CYA prose. “Allegedly,” “somewhat,” and “to some extent” on every clause is ugly, and a fair reader knows “Seattle is rainy” does not mean it rains every hour. I am not asking you to write like a consent form. That quote does not do the work you want. Scaffolding is not the load-bearing wall. Pinker’s point is that subordinate points can be phrased cleanly without a footnote. The shape of the earth is not a subordinate point in a geology paper, and it is also not what we have been arguing. “Science has shown the earth is round” is a fair unhedged sentence because the claim is not in serious dispute among the people in the conversation. “Your sexual ethic is false religious belief that science has shown harms people” is not that sentence. Neither is “you admitted womanhood transcends biology.” Those are load-bearing claims. If they are wrong, the argument falls down. Asking you to mark those as argument rather than as weather reports is not pedantry. It is refusing to let “So sue me” stand in for a showing. Charity is a two-way convention. Pinker says a classic writer counts on ordinary charity: do not take the least generous reading of an unhedged line (boy, is sure would be nice if you did that when evaluating the statements of the leaders of the Church). I have been asking for the same thing. “Kind of pair” is not “some infertile couples can have kids.” “Ordinary/legal/social sense” in a CAIS case is not “identity overrides biology.” You took the least charitable reading, announced I was on the record for a view I did not state, and now quote Pinker against hedging. The slogan you want is the one you have not been using. Unhedged is not the same as settled. Writers can speak plainly and still be wrong. “Don’t hedge” is advice about style. It is not a method for turning a moral conclusion into a fact about the world. If you mean “I think the Law of Chastity is harmful and false,” say that. That is clean Pinker prose. If you mean “this has been established the way roundness has been established,” you need more than a style guide. I will keep writing in English instead of a thicket of qualifiers. I will not treat your unhedged "Bigot!" and "willful ignorance" insults as if they had inherited the epistemic status of the globe. Fallacies Category error. Style advice about hedges applied to contested premises. False analogy. Round earth = your claims about sex, harm, and my sentences. Special pleading. Charity for your bluntness; least-charitable reading of mine. I have found you to be an unreliable narrator, both as to "the science" and to the Latter-day Saints. I can't give you the benefit of the doubt, as I have too often found you to not accurately state or re-state what is being said by others. I've spent 22 years on this board listening to and interacting with critics and enemies of my faith because I am afraid to look at the evidence? That seems implausible. Thanks, -Smac

I'm circling back around to this. Are non-reproductive sex acts ok between married opposite gendered people? Is it ok for a husband to perform o*** sex on his wife so that she can orgasm? How does this fit in your sexual ethic? What about opposite gendered a*** sex? What about opposite gendered mutual masturbation? These acts do not generate. They are biological dead ends from a procreation stand point. They have no reproductive purpose or possibility. Are these acts ok in your sexual ethic?

In this discussion, has there been recognition that too much reproduction can be as destructive to the survival of the community as too little, especially given the high investment infants and young children demand in terms of time and energy and resources? If so, wouldn’t it be immoral for individuals to disregard the capability not only of the individual parents, but the greater community’s ability to care for children at least at a survival level (no starvation or death from exposure due to lack of enough food and shelter for all). It seems it is logically moral to therefore allow and support those who want to reproduce while not penalizing those who don’t as long as the number of children are sufficient for a functional and healthy community. I really don’t see how outside a religious or ideological framework one can label having children as moral and making choices such that one won’t or can’t have children as immoral if one is addressing what is best for a community…it depends on the greater context whether either behaviour is beneficial or not.

It isn't that I have successfully transcended my cognitive biases and you have not. I haven't transcended cognitive biases. That isn't my claim. My claim is that I am at least trying. I read books like Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, and The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef. The core messages of those books are the polar opposite of how Mormonism teaches to gain a testimony through faith-based "experiments" (e.g. Alma 32, Moroni 10), praying, listening to testimonies, faith-promoting stories, daily scripture study, etc. One set of methods is based on trying to see the evidence clearly. One set of methods is based on trying to be successful at getting and strengthening your testimony. Two different goals. Two different methods. You have to choose one or the other. Sean Carroll talks about this in detail, of course. Just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we don't know some things. There just isn't going to be a journal in Nature that says, "New Discovery! The Heliocentric Model of the Solar System is Disproven! The Earth Really IS the Center of the Universe!" And just because something seems not only plausible but actually intuitive doesn't mean it's plausible at all. That said, I did have a fairly extended conversation with ChatGPT about all of this, and it did agree with you that saying something is "impossible" is materially different than merely saying it is "implausible," and it also agreed with you that I've been relatively sloppy about how I've articulated the confidence in my beliefs, and that the Pinker quote I gave above doesn't rescue me as much as I wanted it to, because these are my central claims. So here is a carefully worded statement of where I'm actually at: I lack belief in “God” in the broad, undefined sense. I don’t claim to know that no conceivable deity exists; without a clearer definition, there isn’t one precise claim for me to affirm or deny. The Mormon God is much more specific: an embodied Heavenly Father, literal father of human spirits, who created and governs the world, intervenes in human lives, and—according to Mormon teaching—has established strict rules about what consenting adults do in private, with severe spiritual consequences for violating them. Given what we know about evolution, the brain, physics, and the history of LDS teachings, I regard that God and the central claims built around Him as extraordinarily implausible. I have very high, though not absolute, confidence that this God does not exist and that Mormonism’s central supernatural claims are false. I can’t assign an exact probability, but I regard it as less likely than Mary Swanson living happily ever after with Lloyd Christmas. For other conceptions of God, I’d need a clear definition before I could assess whether I believe they exist. I then asked GPT-6 Luna Max the following prompt: Given what we know about the core theory, cognitive neuroscience, earth history, biology, evolution, cognitive biases, and how the teachings of the Church have evolved over time, how reasonable is my position? Am I giving too much credence to the shifting winds of science? Am I being too cocky in my assessment of the facts? Am I employing cognitive biases to rationalize what I want to believe? Evaluate the truthfulness of this statement based on the actual strength of the scientific evidence it references. Don't tell me what I want to hear, and don't be vaguely diplomatic to humans and their various contradictory belief systems that they hold dearly to. Tell me the truth. Does this statement capture the actual truth that an unbiased evaluation of the actual evidence would lead us to? It responded:

Curious. Do you see any benefit at all for same sex marriage either to the couple or to society in general or both to their marriages?

Music is supposed to make you feel! It’s working then 😉

Not exactly. This reminds me of what Richard Dawkins said: Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith. In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion (pp. 366-367). (Function). Kindle Edition.

[emphasis added] I appreciate you using the word "then" to describe the beliefs that these pioneers. It acknowledges that they lived and died before we knew much, if anything, about earth science, biology, evolution, cognitive neuroscience, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and special and general relativity. To clarify my position, when I say rationality leads to naturalism, I'm talking about the findings of modern science more than a mere choice of philosophy. Sean Carroll explains that science isn't based on methodological naturalism, it is based on methodological empiricism. Naturalism as a belief structure is the result of looking at the evidence that we now have. Scientists believe it because that is where the evidence points. I think true humility is recognizing that the religion we were taught from the cradle might be wrong and that just maybe, we are no more special than all of the other people throughout time who have been duped by false religions. I think true humility is looking at what the scientific evidence actually implies and giving it the weight that the supporting evidence indicates. Sticking your head in the sand to protect your religious beliefs isn't humility. It's willful ignorance. My favorite scientist is Steven Pinker. In addition to being a National Academies of Science member for his work as a psychologist, linguist, and cognitive scientist, and in addition to being the usage editor of the American Heritage Dictionary for 11 years, he has written over a dozen amazing books on a wide range of topics. He is an incredible communicator who applies his insights from psychology and linguistics to write understandable and memorable prose. And one of my favorite books he's written is a book on how to write well. It is a style guide called The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. One of the things he advocates in that book is to avoid unnecessary hedging. In my attempt to do that, I may have said things like, "science has proven that the earth is round" instead of saying what is technically more correct like, "while science isn't in the business of proving anything, an overwhelming amount of evidence points to it being round. But as a matter of principle, science remains open to new evidence and new interpretations of the existing evidence that could indicate it is flat." Here is what Pinker said in his own words: Writers acquire the hedge habit to conform to the bureaucratic imperative that’s abbreviated as CYA, which I’ll spell out as Cover Your Anatomy. They hope it will get them off the hook, or at least allow them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, should a critic ever try to prove them wrong. It’s the same reason that lawsuit-wary journalists drizzle the words allegedly and reportedly throughout their copy, as in The alleged victim was found lying in a pool of blood with a knife in his back. There is an alternative slogan to Cover Your Anatomy: So Sue Me. A classic writer counts on the common sense and ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker means “in general” or “all else being equal.” If someone tells you that Liz wants to move out of Seattle because it’s a rainy city, you don’t interpret him as claiming that it rains there twenty-four hours a day seven days a week just because he didn’t qualify his statement with relatively rainy or somewhat rainy. As Thomas and Turner explain, “Accuracy becomes pedantry if it is indulged for its own sake. A classic writer will phrase a subordinate point precisely but without the promise that it is technically accurate. The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged on these points because they are mere scaffolding.” Any adversary who is unscrupulous enough to give the least charitable reading to an unhedged statement will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway. Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (pp. 62-63). (Function). Kindle Edition. Your rants here make it clear that you aren't trying to understand my points, much less understand the science I'm talking about. I do think you're doing a good job of giving yourself an excuse to avoid looking at the evidence that could shake your religious convictions, and your response is a good example of motivated reasoning.

https://www.dri.edu/cloud-seeding-program/what-is-cloud-seeding/

For members or former members, we probably can tell. But for those who aren't members or don't know that much about the church, they can't tell. And they might watch it and think that it is what the church teaches, believes, etc. There was an interesting point in the video that Stargazer posted. Dehlin had commented on how anyone could think of him being affiliated with the church since it was widely publicized about his excommunication and his actions against the church. And the lawyer (who is a member) said that before he was involved in this case, he didn't know what Dehlin looked like or his name. So, just because you and I know Dehlin and know his stance and can see the criticism in the podcasts, that doesn't mean the average person can.

Many of the guests on ms are currently members. Many of them likely will not formally resign their membership… ever. Like myself. bill bennett and other active faithful Mormons appear from time to time on ms. It isn’t truly “ex-Mormon” stories or whatever the church may want it called. imho if the church insists on counting inactive, non tithe-paying, coffee drinking “members” on the rolls and using those numbers to indicate growth or strength of membership, then Mormon stories is probably a much more accurate descriptor.

The gender of the participants is not what marriage is. Your interpretation of your religious leader's interpretation of thier god says it's important, but that is not "reasoned”, it's declared and accepted. We've determined that procreative capacity has nothing to do with it, because it doesn't matter if the couple engages in procreative sex, is past menopause, uses birth control etc. What is important to you, is your interpretation of your religious leader's interpretation of thier god says only opposite genders can marry. That is not reasoned but declared and accepted. So is the reproductive status, acts and genders of the participants. Except, your interpretation of your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry. That is not reasoned but declared and accepted. I have yet to see a distinction made that doesn't boil down to "your interpretation of your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry." It doesn't matter if the couple can have kids, wants to have kids or anything else. We've already demonstrated that you don't actually care about this. If science tomorrow created a way for gay people to have biological children it wouldn't change a thing. It boils down your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry. I don't think the genders or the race of the participants are important. They are on the same level to me. It boils down your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry. The parody does assume they are interchangeable. Because they are. Marriage serves the exact same role for married lesbians as married straight people. It serves the same role for infertile and fertile people. It serves the same role for black and white people. It serves the same role for people that participate in reproductive sex acts and non-reproductive sex acts. Except for you because your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry. Still waiting to see it. Here is what I see. You believe in God. God said each kid needs a Mom and a Dad and marriage and sex are only for opposite gendered people who are married. That's it. I mean we tried to go back and forth on the biology one. You said "as a reproductive act, it does not cohere" but apparently you have no problem with opposite gendered people participating in sex acts that are non-reproductive even if they do so exclusively. Further post menopausal woman still get to have sex even though as a reproductive act that doesn't cohere. Your fine with Jackie having sex even though she has XY chromosomes and as a reproductive act that doesn't cohere. So what's left? Your religious leader's interpretation of their god says only opposite genders can marry.

I was already in the Army and remained so until I retired in 2010. That last 9 yrs was busy.

I don't think black people should be able to get married. Because they have black skin. I'm not prejudiced against them, I just have a sexual ethic where children should be raised by non-black people. Don't worry though I have really good black friends and I don't think they are any less of people. I just have a rule about an act and an institution. That is a parody, not a parallel. Race is not what marriage is. A Black man and a Black woman, or a Black man and a White woman, are still a man and a woman, and still have procreative capacity. The pair can be husband and wife. The child, if there is one, still has a mother and a father. Skin color is not a constituent of the act or of the two parental sexes. Banning marriage “because they have Black skin” is picking a trait that has nothing to do with the kind of union. That is prejudice wearing a rule. Sex is not like that. “Man” and “woman” are the two halves of the kind of pair the rule is about. Two men are not “the same marriage plus an extra adjective.” They are not a husband and a wife, and a household of two men is not a mother and a father. That is the claim you have to answer. Swapping in race assumes the claim is already false. “Children should be raised by non-Black people” is an invented end. Nobody is required by biology or by the structure of generation to believe it. “A child has a mother and a father” is not an invented end. It is a description of how children come to be. You can say that description should not control marriage law. You cannot pretend it is the same sentence as a color bar. The “I have Black friends” line is doing smear work. I have not claimed same-sex attracted people are less human. I have claimed a kind of sexual pair is not a marriage of husband and wife. If that is wrong, show that the kinds are the same. Do not swap the trait for one that is irrelevant and call the result a confession. Loving struck down a rule that used race to stop men and women from marrying. It did not hold that every restriction on which pair counts as marriage is the same as a racial ban. Treating sex as legally interchangeable with race is the move you need to justify. The parody assumes it. Again: I think the "Bigot!" schtick is so frequently utilized because it's all you've got. I can articulate a reasoned basis for my position. I don't think you can, either that or you are so immersed in your own worldview that you cannot accommodate the possibility that viewpoints divergent from yours might be reasonable. So you retreat to name-calling. Fallacies False analogy. Race is accidental to the man–woman pair; sex is the pair. Straw man. Recasts “kind of union / mother and father” as “I dislike this group.” Poisoning the well. “Good friends” sneer. Question-begging. Assumes sex is as arbitrary in marriage as color.

I can’t remember what episode I first listened to. It was about 10 yrs ago or so. No more than five min in there was no doubt it wasn’t approved by the church or ever would be. It wasn’t anti, just the criticism the guest was making would get a recommend revoked in a hurry. Anyone confused by Mormon stories thinking it is lds church approved sponsored or whatever and has listened to more than a half hour of any episode I have ever heard is probably lying.

I think it is important to some people and isn't important to other people. I wasn't asked about "some people." I was asking about you. Is sex "important?" Sure. Thank you for your response. The clarity helps. Yes, you have the right to articulate this. What do you think of Proposition 5a? Proposition 5a: Non-Latter-day Saints are entitled to articulate their thoughts about the X/Y differentiation that Latter-day Saints articulate. This gets to the heart of our differences in world view. I don't think so. No. I see people as biological "kinds." Male and female. That's it. No third sex. No "neither." No "spectrum." No "sex is a social construct." The failure/refusal to acknowledge empirical reality, and to instead retreat to emotionalisms ("I see them as individuals") is, (I think, a big reason why the trans movement is getting so much resistance. Folks like you want to tell us that a man can "become" a woman by "identifying" as one, and thus move from one "kind" to another. What about "individuals" who "identify" as an age they are not, species they are not, and so on? Because you "see them as individuals," they are somehow able to change their sex or age or species? Well, no. I am acknowledging that one "kind" of human creates eggs, the other sperm. And that two men cannot procreate, nor can two women. I didn't "give them" these "rules." Biology and "empirical reality" did. I also posit that everyone differentiates between X (appropriate/authorized expressions of sexuality) and Y (inappropriate/authorized expressions of sexuality), that a centered-on-marriage ethic is within the bounds of reasonableness, and that the Church's sexual ethic is based on reasoning (and revelation), and not bigotry. I think your sexual ethic (I'm not really sure what it is, since I don't think you have articulated it) would, if presented and evaluated, also be demonstrated "to be harmful." But I think the "harm" would not come from the constraints of your ethic (as the supposed "harm" does from the Law of Chastity's constraints), but rather from licentiousness. Hook-up culture. STI's. Elective abortion. And so on. That said, I take the welfare point seriously. A rule that is true can still be hard, and some people will be more hurt by a hard rule than others. That is not a small thing. It is also not a proof that the rule is false, or that the only honest motive for it is harm. “False religious beliefs.” That is the conclusion you need, used as a premise. If God has not spoken, say that and we argue authority. If the ethic is only “inherited American norms,” say that and we argue history. Calling it "false" in the first sentence does not show that the line I drew is irrational. It shows you have already rejected the premises. “Out group.” The Law of Chastity is not a code written for an out-group. It forbids the same acts for everyone: sex outside a marriage of husband and wife. Same-sex attracted people are not a separate caste with a harsher statute. They face a steeper application of the same statute. Same rule, disparate effects. That is real. It is also how every demanding ethic works. A married man who wants other women is not “in group.” He is under the same constraint. Outcomes. You listed lower sexual health, health, wellbeing, higher depression and anxiety, lower life satisfaction, as if those were measured effects of this teaching on people who keep it. Some religious LGBT people do report more distress. That fact, where it holds, matters pastorally. It does not do the work you want. Correlation is not “your code caused this.” Family rejection, social conflict, the gap between desire and the rule, and minority-stress stories can all sit in the same data. People who keep a strict sexual rule also show, in other slices of the population, fewer STIs, fewer unintended pregnancies, and more stable marriages. You do not get to count only the costs. A constraint can lower one kind of “sexual health” (frequency, partnered sex) and raise another (infection, fragmentation). You are using “sexual health” as “more of the sex I think they should have.” “Deprive people of these benefits.” The “benefits” in view are a sexual relationship the ethic says is not X. That is question-begging. Every sexual ethic deprives someone of a benefit they want. BCA deprives the betrayed spouse. Celibacy outside marriage deprives everyone who wants sex they are not promised. “This rule takes something I think they should have” is a restatement of your line, not an argument that mine is cruelty. And "deprive?" C'mon. A person's association with the Church is bilaterally voluntary. The individual can at any time set aside the Law of Chastity and the Church can't do squat about it (except to mete out restrictions on or removal of membership). Health is not the same as truth. If a teaching is false, say why it is false. If it is true and costly, the honest sentence is that some lives will be harder. Surgery, sobriety, and fidelity all have that shape. “People would feel better if they did not believe this” can be a reason to offer care. It is not, by itself, a reason the belief is wrong. I have already said attraction is not sin, that sloppy guilt and folklore were harmful, and that members who treat people as dirty because of desire are not following the teaching. I will say that again. None of that converts the closed set into BCA, and none of it makes “your code hurts people” a substitute for showing the code is false. Fallacies Question-begging. “False beliefs” assumed; “benefits” defined as the forbidden relationship. Causal leap. Distress among some who live the rule treated as proof the rule caused it and is therefore immoral. One-sided ledger. Costs of the rule counted; costs of the alternative ignored. Equivocation. “Sexual health” as volume of desired sex vs bodily and relational health. Appeal to consequences. Even if the rule is hard, hardness ≠ falsehood. Thanks, -Smac

Great selection…I only had to look up the Riddle Song to remind myself. The last one is the only one I don’t like…not because it’s not quality, it’s a song I want to like but I care too much they aren’t still a couple. The story songs tell can make or break an otherwise beautiful song for me and the best lost love songs fall into the break category quite a bit (also ones that now sound obsessive or inappropriate). Good music taps deep into emotion for me and that level of emotion is reality to my brain. There are some songs I absolutely love that I have to avoid because it’s almost traumatic for me to listen to them. My brain pisses me off at times.

Which is possible, but hardly inevitable. Newton. Galileo. Kepler. Pascal. Pasteur. Mendel. Planck. Then men pursued matters of both science and faith, rationality and intellectual humility (humble enough to acknowledge that we really don't "know" nearly as much as we think we do, and that we actually don't rely on empiricism and the scientific method for almost all things, and that we instead rely on transmission of information, trust, faith, limited observation, etc.). But cognitive biases are not the basis for your underlying beliefs? Oh. Let's go back to that compilation of your past statements: Are these all declarations of what you believe, or what you know? Brigham Young sometimes failed to differentiate between "doctrine" and "stuff about which I have strong feelings and opinions." Is it possible that you similarly fail to differentiation between "empirical reality" (your phrase, I believe) and "stuff about which I have strong feelings and opinions?" Why should I believe you have transcended your cognitive biases and I have not? In the end, isn't pretty much everything you have said about things on which there is reasonable disagreement to be - as you are now putting it - "I was simply telling you what I believe?" Yes, yes. We've been through this, including your various characterizations of Carroll that don't seem to jibe with ... Carroll. Here: And here: "What it implies about the likelihood?" What happened to "the strongest, most robust, most well-tested theory of all of science," that is "as strong as a child of the Hulk and Godzilla," and "proves that spirits and revelation don't exist"? Do you see just a wee bit of difference between (A) a theory that "provisionally" (as Carroll elsewhere put it) "implies" a "likelihood" of the non-existence of spirits versus (B) a theory that, as you assert, is "as strong as a child of the Hulk and Godzilla" and "proves" the non-existence of spirits? I'm getting whiplash reading your posts. From a previous discussion with you: I think we kid ourselves if we think we have a complete and pristinely accurate understanding and command of "science." We regularly come across compilations and lists of things we do not yet know, or fully know, via "science." And another: I see you doing the same sort of thing as Dr. Fauci. You conflate your opinion with "science." You honestly seem to think that what you think is "science." That your way of looking at things pertaining to the existence of God is the only plausible, reasonable, "rational" way of doing so. To disagree with you is to disagree with "science" and "rationality" (and, therefore, to disagree with you is to be stupid, ignorant, dishonest, etc.). Here: Sheesh. Even Carroll doesn't go so far as you do. He proposes that "science has provisionally concluded" some things. "Provisionally," as I hope you understand, means "subject to further confirmation; for the time being." Synonyms for it include "temporarily" and "on certain conditions." See also "subject to confirmation," "as a fill-in," "short-term," "for the present," "for now," and "tentatively." But on this thread you have blown way past "provisionally" and are saying that Caroll's theory is "the strongest, most robust, most well-tested theory of all of science," that it is "as strong as a child of the Hulk and Godzilla," and that it "proves that spirits and revelation don't exist." Don't you see what you are doing here? Here (same link): "Indicates that there can't be 'spirits?'" Indicates? What happened to "proves?" As in "the strongest, most robust, most well-tested theory of all of science," that it is "as strong as a child of the Hulk and Godzilla," and that it "proves that spirits and revelation don't exist"? "At least not?" "Known reality?" "Perceptible to us?" Again, what happened to "proves that spirits and revelation don't exist?" Surely you understand that qualified terms like "at least not" and "known reality" and "perceptible to us" don't play well together with absolutist, conclusory terms like "strong as a child of the Hulk and Godzilla" and "proves that spirits and revelation don't exist"? Here (same link): "I've claimed" being the operative wording here. Carroll posits a theory that "provisionally" "implies" a "likelihood" of the non-existence of Spirit. You then come along and assert that "effective quantum field theory--the most robust theory in all of science, positively demonstrates that such things can't exist." I see vast differences between what Carroll seems to have said and what an over-enthusiastic neophyte who read his book has construed. Here (same link) : Pinker quoting Carroll. And Carroll posits a theory that "provisionally" "implies" a "likelihood" of the non-existence of spirits. And according to you, this means "the laws of physics really do rule out spirits, revelation, and such." Thus sprach Analytics. Here (same link) : Whether Carroll is "wrong" in his theory that "provisionally" "implies" a "likelihood" of the non-existence of spirits? And according to you, isn't the discussion over? There is no debate to be had because "the laws of physics really do rule out spirits, revelation, and such." That's it. The debate is over. Analytics has spoken. To disagree with him is to deny rationality. To disagree is to be stupid, ignorant, dishonest, or some combination thereof. "Science is science," after all. And Analytics is the receptable of "Science" in its purest form. Or . . . not. It might just be that Analytics is vastly overstating what "science" in 2021 can prove or disprove. And then there's what you did to Terryl Givens (same link) : So your characterizations of Terryl Givens were pretty bold: "Givens's latest book ... is subversive ... {and} contains dozens of concessions of anti-Mormon claims that you'd find on a 'big list.'" "Givens thinks the end result is beautiful and expresses it all from a perspective of admiration in erudite language," "if you have the patience and intellect to read what he is actually saying and compare it to what the church teaches in manuals and in conference, then one inescapably comes to the conclusion that Givens is admitting it isn't true--it is a fraud." "A beautiful inspiring fraud for Givens, but a fraud nonetheless." "Listen to the podcast." Your characterizations were also, as it turns out, pretty flagrantly wrong. I responded: Elsewhere I said this: "I just now went back and looked at the email I received from Bro. Givens. Not only did he call your claim about him 'patently false,' he also said this: 'I dont believe any careful reader of the entire book could reasonably conclude such a thing.'" You never disputed my statement above, nor did you ever challenge my quote from Bro. Givens. So your various characterizations of him were, I think, demonstrably falsified, and yet you just shrugged it off. You responded: And "bow out" you did. No retraction. No revision. No acknowledgment of rank and flagrant error on your part. You just withdrew from the discussion and carried on. There is "science." And there are Carroll's findings. And there is rationality and reasoning and the scientific method and "empirical reality," and also fair-minded characterizations of the Latter-day Saints (such as Givens). There is also what you have to say about these things. These two categories do not perfectly overlap. Neither you nor Carroll has defined "God." Has this been "intentional?" Again, your various declarations based on Carroll: "{J}ust isn't plausible" is worlds apart from your various pronouncements. Again: One of the difficulties I have with taking you seriously as a purveyor of "science" is that you are not a reliable narrator. Not about Carroll. Not about Givens. Not about the Latter-day Saints. And all your various inaccuracies, mischaracterizations, misstatements, etc. do not, I think, just happen to always fall in line with your worldview, cognitive biases, etc. Thanks, -Smac

I have repeatedly said what my limiting principles were. I have never said that. Sigh. That depends upon how "God" is defined. The Mormon God--i.e. the father of Adam, the flesh-and-bone humanoid space traveler from a planet near Kolob, just isn't plausible. It contradicts everything we know about quantum mechanics, relativity, earth history, and biology. You can mock me for acknowledging this. But you are the one that asked me to comment on your testimony. What I find objectionable is your obsession with the sex lives of others. But "uniquely objectionable"? No. I never said, implied, or thought that.

I think it is important to some people and isn't important to other people. Sure. Yes, you have the right to articulate this. What do you think of Proposition 5a? Proposition 5a: Non-Latter-day Saints are entitled to articulate their thoughts about the X/Y differentiation that Latter-day Saints articulate. This gets to the heart of our differences in world view. You see people as Platonic "kinds." I see them as individuals. You assign people to classes (i.e. kinds), and then give them different rules based upon what class they are in. The classes aren't about whether they can have kids in the real world. They are about whether they can have kids in Plato's realm of the forms. That is why couples A and B, who are identically situated in every real-world way, are treated differently. This clarifies that for you, it isn't really about real-world children. It's about the dogma associated with your idealized thoughts of how the world should be. Logically, the only reasoning I see here is just begging the question. It is unethical for same-sex couples to have sex because it is unethical for same-sex couples to have sex. That is what it comes down to. In Plato's realm of the forms, sure. In the real world, if they are infertile then they don't belong to a generative kind. That is what it means to be non-fertile. I think George Michael was generally correct when he said: Sex is natural, sex is good Not everybody does it But everybody should This is supported by research. The flagship journal of the World Health Organization published a meta-analysis on the effects that sex has on wellbeing. Quoting its findings: "Of 23,930 unique titles identified, 63 studies met the inclusion criteria. We grouped the results into two categories: (i) sexual and physical health; and (ii) sexual and psychological health. The results consistently showed strong correlations between sexual health, overall health and well-being. Almost all studies found significant associations between positive sexual health indicators and lower depression and anxiety, higher quality of life, and greater life satisfaction among men and women, including older adults, pregnant women, and same-sex and mixed-sex couples. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11601183/ I find your sex code to be harmful because it uses false religious beliefs to deprive people of these benefits. When people in your out group follow your code, they can expect lower sexual health, lower overall health, lower overall wellbeing, higher depression and anxiety, lower quality of life, and lower life satisfaction. Your sex code hurts people. That is why I am against it.