On Mermaids having to listen to Cass: “ This is so blatant and evil I have no idea why decent human beings let this happen.”

[Zahariel]

Cross posting is poor form.

but.

the responses to Mermaids having to listen to Cass on trans Reddit is just staggering and I think an important window into the minds of the people furthest in on this delusion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1gb26kv/charity_commission_is_instructing_mermaids_and/

“Cass and her supporters need to feck right off already. I'm sick of it being peddled around to try to legitimise crap, especially when it's been widely debunked by the rest of the world and professionals within the UK too. They keep LYING and pretending like it's "soo scientific" when it simply isn't and i'm sick of the lies and i'm sick of the British public slurping those lies up off the boots of the red tories.”

I'm not sure you're grasping the full implications of the quote.

I used to watch a few atheists on YouTube, American and male on the whole. Tbh, they got a bit repetitive and boring. They have all, without exception, fallen for genderwoo, as have i believe (and I would love to be wrong) the Satanist Temple and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Every rabid Pagan / Earth worship / Yoga cures everything / Satanist
I ever met
was ex Catholic or ex Muslim

I'm not a religious person. I don't care what another person believes in, but and this seems to me to be really important to the wider picture, I have no desire to convince other people to give up their religion. As long as your religion doesn't want to hurt other people I'm fine with it. Carry on.
I know some atheists who are just as fanatical about atheism as religious people are about their religion. At that point it just seems to be another religion to me, the religion of no religion, but determined to convert non believers to the cause. What's the difference?
Some of the atheists I know will argue with religious people to try and convince them that they should renounce their religion and become atheists. To me it feels like just another religion.
They also think that they are much smarter than the "stupid" people who believe in a religion. Thinking you are smarter than other people because of what you believe in seems to be a very modern thing. I think this sort of personality who believes that they are much smarter than everyone else because they believe in xxxxxx which is "obviously" the right and moral thing to believe in causes many problems in our society. Once you are right and they are stupid you are justified as treating them as lesser people, untermensch, sub humans.
It comes as no surprise to me that atheists who feel moral superiority from their atheism would also enjoy the feeling of moral superiority from other ideologies which are "obviously" right. It's almost an addiction.

The people I know who take their religion seriously concentrate on trying to live their own lives well according to their beliefs, not on trying to convert others.

Exactly how I see myself as an atheist. I'd probably feel the same way about GI if it behaved in the same fashion.

Yes fair point.
I was comparing the worst on one side to the worst on another side, and asking what's the difference?
But you are correct, the majority just want to get on with their lives and don't interfere with others.

Ts is maybe not strange among people who have a strong locus of their identity in political progressivism.

If you think about the people who are really tribalistic about belonging to that group, many of whom post on MN, it's clear they are really convinced that anyone from a different political positions, even the center right, are basically working from evil motives.

You can look at any facet of identity politics and see the same logic employed.

I suspect unless it's rooted out from the larger thinking it will continue to manifest in these other parts of their belief system, including gender ideology.

It's popular, as we see in this thread, to think that religion comes down to beliefs people hold for reasons that are somehow just personal.

It's not particularly true though. Many religious people are religious because they think it is in fact the most rational position. Certainly in the larger sense of the word "rational". There are lots of philosophers (and scientists though many of them these days aren't all that well educated outside of the sciences) who have religious belief that they see as deeply intertwined with their philosophical conclusions and scientific beliefs.

Science itself is rooted in philosophy, if it's rooted in anything, it's not a self-evident system at all. Anyone who doesn't root it in philosophy is, as you say, just saying "because I think so."

I'm not sure why so many people are convinced that it's just accepted that religion is a fundamentally anti-rational, or at least irrational, way of thinking?

Some of the atheists I know will argue with religious people to try and convince them that they should renounce their religion and become atheists. To me it feels like just another religion.
They also think that they are much smarter than the "stupid" people who believe in a religion. Thinking you are smarter than other people because of what you believe in seems to be a very modern thing.

I'm not sure why so many people are convinced that it's just accepted that religion is a fundamentally anti-rational, or at least irrational, way of thinking?

It's a very natural way of thinking. Personally I don't challenge anyone's belief (including the idea that we all have a gender identity) just because I don't believe it too. I'm pushing back on it being enforced on me as true and/or being taught in schools as true.

Rational thinking and clever use of language can support an awful lot of nonsense, in fact can make a very good case for it. One problem is that people reverse engineer their reasoning so as to justify their faith. People are also quite good at managing cognitive dissonance, so are able to think scientifically in their professions, while maintaining strong religious beliefs. I have family members like this.

Sorry the PCOS Sub was forced to "go private" for a while. It was targeted by the gender zealots for users talking about female biology.
We need to say "people with PCOS" not "women with PCOS" now now.

Recently, quite a few of the TRAs on TIkTok announced that they are converting to Islam (performatively, in the way they do everything, I might add).

So, as the Americans might say, that's a thing now....🤷‍♀️

Circumferences, I have mild PCOS & that makes me so angry. Whatever degree you have it-I know some women have much worse symptoms- I suspect no one wants to pander to a man's fantasy about having it...😡

Neither Sam Harris nor Richard Dawkins have gone for the gender woo. I think both started out as 'be kind' but did actually think through the implications and change their minds quite quickly.

I saw Dawkins on his tour last week - the interviewer pressed him fairly hard on whether he felt personally responsible for people turning to all sorts of crap with religion removed from their lives. He was actually pretty equivocal on that, he didn't straight away dismiss it as nonsense which I thought he might.

AliasGrace in theory they're not directly pandering to men - they're insisting that because some women with PCOS identify as men or as non binary, it is essential to remove any factual statement that only women have PCOS. It's true that if men want to talk shit about having PCOS because it is sexually satisfying to them to be talked to as a woman, they can also do that, but it is a byproduct of what the moderators thought they were doing.

I find it interesting to use the analogy of computers. Obviously, like all analogies it is imperfect; brains and computers are different in many respects. But I think of the concept of "soul" or "spirit" as being like software, and "brain" or "body" as being like hardware. I do not believe in a disembodied soul; if the concept is useful, like software requiring hardware in order to function, the soul needs to be embodied in order to function. And the hardware as a concept is not completely separate from software. Some of what we might consider to be software is built into the hardware.

So I am saying that a soul separate from a body would not function. If the Christian concept of resurrection is to make any sense, it can only be that the "software", the essence or personality, gets embodied again. Heaven would not be a place of disembodied souls. The idea that someone's essence or soul or personality is separate from their body makes little sense to me.

Re the quoted paragraph in the OP:

I think when people start swearing and using hyperbole, they know they’re losing the argument or don’t even have a solid argument in the first place:

feck right off
legitimise crap
slurping lies off the boots of the red tories

Not very, erm, articulate.

Love this ⬆️

I have my own minor personal challenge that I will share: I've had 2 experiences of ghosts. One of which I was on my own so I rationalised it as a trick of the light. It was my first ever experience (aged 20) so I'll never really know what my memory of the event was, given I'm over double that age now.

The second was a couple of years later and the person I was with heard it too... : an unmistakable laugh, followed by "oh dear"... it was a repeat of a terrible joke about a deer, from about 5 mins earlier, that had swum out to sea. It was a female voice and I was the only female in the group of people there. According to the other person who heard it, it must have been me who said it. I cringed when he made the joke, so I certainly wouldn't have repeated it.

So I do believe in "souls" that are separate from the body. But I don't believe in heaven or hell (or god) and I don't believe that the soul is a "gendered essence" - to use your analogy I would say it's the software (the personality) that fits with the hardware (its own body).

I fully accept the cognitive dissonance I've brought upon myself in saying what I do and don't believe. After the second experience I briefly went back to Christianity because I was afraid of good and evil - I needed a foundation. Then I slipped back in to agnosticism and eventually atheism. I've accepted that not everyone will believe my experience (including the person who experienced it too) and it helps me to keep belief in perspective: some people believe in ghosts, god, gender identity etc.... and some don't.

I don't want laws, education or healthcare positioning any of it as true. I don't need to challenge anyone's belief to advocate for this. They can believe whatever they like (as can I re ghosts), they just can't force the rest of us to accept it as if it were fact. Thankfully Christians and ghost-belivers don't.

I've certainly experienced inexplicable things, such as apparently knowing what was round a corner before getting there. I try to be a bit sceptical about the things I believe. I have both a scientific and a religious background, and I am well aware that we can fool ourselves about how well or poorly supported scientific "facts" are. Much scientific understanding is Occam's razor supported by experiment; certainly the simplest theory that we can't disprove tends to be the most satisfying, but is there anything to prove that the simplest explanation must be the truth? And that's before we get to examples of a simple model stopping working at very small scales or very high speeds.

Religion operates much more at a philosophical level, and is more difficult to prove or disprove. Science does impact my religious and philosophical convictions but for me cannot provide answers to all types of question, so I will continue to muse about questions of life, the universe and everything.

Permanent, ah I see. I feel a lot of sympathy for trans men, but this is just enabling further delusion.
Reddit does seem to have a lot of fetishists ime..

This all makes a lot of sense too.

Religion operates much more at a philosophical level, and is more difficult to prove or disprove. Science does impact my religious and philosophical convictions but for me cannot provide answers to all types of question, so I will continue to muse about questions of life, the universe and everything.

Although I'm not religious, I also continue to muse this, particularly in the light of my ghost belief and family members who have passed away (I have no intention of trying to contact them though... other than the occasional one way mumblings I share with my mum from time to time, not requiring acknowledgement). It's part of the human condition to do so and largely why we might "fill the void" with belief. An obvious shortcut to it all is just to accept that Douglas Adams has nailed it: the meaning of life is 42 😉

I’m an atheist who was raised in the Roman Catholic faith and for RCs the soul and the body are one; the body being created also creates the soul, there is no soul floating around in the aether waiting to inhabit a body.

The current scientific thinking on human consciousness is that it’s an emergent phenomenon that is generated by the body as a holistic system. Which would make sense as brains respond to stimuli generated by the body and the nervous system, so as evolution generated more sophisticated nervous systems it also generated more sophisticated ways for stimuli to be processed and analysed as this would assist organisms to stay alive longer to produce offspring and keep the offspring alive until maturity.

So I agree with you, that a soul or personality can’t exist separately to the physical body that created it. I absolutely cannot believe in any way that people can be born into a wrong body or that they have the wrong software running in their brain. Cartesian Dualism doesn’t make sense to me because it’s asking me to believe in the supernatural and I don’t believe that anything is supernatural.

Cartesian Dualism doesn’t make sense to me because it’s asking me to believe in the supernatural and I don’t believe that anything is supernatural.

It's great to be on a thread where different beliefs (Catholicism, general Christianity and ghosts) can all be discussed with non-believers and believers sharing thoughts together... and nobody is shouting.

Obviously I'm not going to go full rage and start saying that everyone should accept my mum's supernatural existence... because to do otherwise is denying my existence as still being her daughter... but that's the equivalent of what the genderist believers do. (Ps sorry to drag you in to this, Mum if you're reading along 🙃)

You're still a bit Catholic, dualism is (believed to be) a grave heresy.