>> ZJ: I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. CriticalQuestion, the very point of my original
video was that bad things happen because of religion, and they don't need to. The focus
was on harms caused by religion. Saying that these harms either aren't so common, or that
your own faith community isn't participating in them, does nothing to change the fact that
religion is causing it. It's not that these particular outcomes comprise a smaller proportion
of the overall results of religion. The point is that the primary cause of these specific
outcomes is religion. People wouldn't be protesting abortion clinics in the name of Jesus if they
didn't believe in Jesus. People wouldn't be burning their kids for being witches if they
didn't believe in witches. People's families wouldn't be divided by religion if it wasn't
for religion. I don't know how many times I have to explain this. If religion is false,
then this is all totally unnecessary. Do you actually recognize that this is a problem?
Or do you think it's okay to act on fictional evidence, provided you don't do it too often?
Are 1,000 estimated witchcraft murders considered an acceptable casualty rate for your religion,
as long as there's only been a thousand of them? I guess it's no big deal that they literally
died for nothing. Now, I'm not even exaggerating when I say that I was shocked to hear you
downplay the importance of evolution in public education. I cannot believe you would claim
that "the knowledge of evolution has no real practical benefits at the teenage level",
or "evolutionary theory at high school level has really no bearing on other learning material,
or other aspects of biology", and "they can all be cogently absorbed without it". In fact,
evolution is the unifying principle of modern biology. Even the Orthodox Christian evolutionary
biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky stated: "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light
of evolution". And he was a creationist! More importantly, knowledge of evolution doesn't
have to provide some immediate practical application to teenagers in order to be worthwhile. That
knowledge is a benefit in itself. Do you honestly think evolution isn't really that important?
I mean, it's only the origin of every lifeform in existence on our planet, humans included.
It's not like that's relevant to our lives or anything. Look, there are a lot of subjects
that people learn about in school that may not be absolutely essential. You could say
the same thing about calculus, or the history of Egypt. Some people may never make use of
that. But that's beside the point. The reason that they're taught these things is because
it's a school. It is a place where people go to learn about things. That is what it's
there for. The purpose of exposing people to a variety of subjects is because it could
eventually be relevant to their lives, and they might take an interest in it. But they
would never even know that if they aren't first introduced to the field. There's a reason
it's called "public education". And if you would try to excuse these abysmal statistics
on the state of evolution curriculum in America by pointing out that America isn't the only
country with Christians in it, then aren't you tacitly admitting that this is a problem?
Furthermore, your defense of abstinence education is blatantly misleading. Stating that abstinence
itself is "the most safe and responsible" illustrates a failure to grasp the difference
between theory and practice. Abstinence and abstinence education are not the same thing.
In reality, there's quite a bit of distance between simply telling people to abstain,
and whether or not they actually will. Claiming that abstinence itself is effective
doesn't alter the fact that most people won't do it. (Or, rather, they will "do it".) Was
it not your god who gave the command to "be fruitful and multiply"? When did that turn
into "suppress this fundamental biological imperative indefinitely"? If you insist that
abstinence is totally effective, and yet in practice, your abstinence education programs
accomplish absolutely nothing, then what exactly does the theoretical efficacy of abstinence
even count for? Also, to suggest that most students are already knowledgeable about birth
control, so there's no need to teach them about it, still misses the point of education
itself. What about the people who don't already know about this? Should we just not tell them?
Are they out of luck here? Were they just dealt a bad hand, and there's nothing that
schools can do about this? No. It is up to the school system to ensure some baseline
level of knowledge, and there is no rational reason to withhold this information from students.
The refusal to educate achieves nothing, and if, as you said, the culture of the United
States is the most sexualized in the world, then it should be clear that there's a genuine
need for helpful and reliable information here. The more I think about it, the more
I realize that out of all the methods religion has harnessed to blight the world and the
mind, this is one of the most insidious: Irresponsibility. Social, educational, intellectual, and personal
irresponsibility. The unwillingness to recognize that your religion may be a problem when it
leads to burning people alive. The refusal to acknowledge its role in the failure to
adequately educate students. The denial that your ideals about sex are simply unworkable.
And the inability to admit that this is wrong. Consequences aren't important. Knowledge isn't
important. Reality isn't important. Human lives aren't even important. The only thing
that matters is your faith: Perfect, impenetrable, standing in pristine ignorance as it tears
the world apart. It must be wonderful to be so complacent. Thanks to you, the rest of
us don't have that luxury.