Of course it is full of hyperbole. Persuasive arguments often are. It doesn’t mean the points being made are invalid.
Oh really? If they persisted in not providing a group insurance plan to their employees that covered the morning after pill, wouldn’t armed federal agents eventually pay them a visit?
That may be a comforting narrative for you to believe and recite, but you stated the reality completely backwards. They were historically providing insurance coverage that didn’t cover something. The government imposed the requirement that they cover something they had never historically covered. Hobby Lobby didn’t wake up one day and decide to take anyone’s freedom away, or make a move to impose their values on someone else. They woke up and found their own freedom was more limited then it was before the law was passed. They spoke up and objected. That’s the reality.
If you think they haven’t been forced to pay for someone’s contraception, perhaps that is because you can’t be bothered to think about what has actually happened in real economic terms. I will keep it as basic as possible. When you cover begin to cover something that wasn’t covered before, costs go up. Can an employer just pass the higher bill along to the employee? No, because the coverage has to be “affordable” as the government has defined it.
Yes the bill comes from an insurance company but not from the pharmacy. Does that really matter? The economic result is the same. That argument is equivalent to saying our kids and grandkids won’t ever have to pay back the national debt. They will only have to pay taxes.
I totally agree. But I don’t understand why you posted this. No one has made the opposing argument in this thread, at least not that I have noticed. Except maybe here:
“I do not object to including “intelligent design” in the curriculum as a possibility, because so many human beings on this planet believe it. I think that is enough to give it some sort of credibility.”
I don’t think scientific credibility has anything to do with how many humans believe it.
Loving and benign are not the roles of science - those terms are relegated mainly to theology and sociology.
Scientific design is meant to be functional, use the least space necessary, consume minimal resources, and require the least amount of energy for the task - nothing loving and benign about that. This is as goal-directed as it gets, as anything else is inefficient and squanders scarce resources.
One aspect to consider is the fact that the uterus is used to perpetuate the species, yet it can be discarded after use without causing death or child rearing limitations - thus leaving the mother still available to the offspring - may just be the most intelligent of its design purposes to ensure raising of offspring after its use.
EDIT: I agree with the posts above. Back to the original topic re a college restriction on homosexuals.
“Scientific design is meant to be functional, use the least space necessary, consume minimal resources, and require the least amount of energy for the task - nothing loving and benign about that. This is as goal-directed as it gets, as anything else is inefficient and squanders scarce resources.”
But female childbirth isn’t functional / efficient in that manner. There’s a lot of reproductive wastage. Obviously not enough to threaten our ability to survive as a species, but the very fact of how women are “designed” to carry / bear children isn’t very well thought out.
Re the uterus: I think that the reality is that most of the bearers of it were supposed to die shortly after it ceased to be usable. While it was functional and the mother was needed to nurture the infant, the mother’s risk would be naturally limited by the decrease in fertility provided by nursing. Eventually, enough post-menopausal survivors would be around to continue to provide some caretaking. Luckily for us, HUMANS have been able to use their minds and free will to figure out how to enable us to last longer. Like the only 1 in 4 fertilized eggs that successfully implants and proceed towards the production of an infant, it is apparently okay with nature if only 1 in 4 (or whatever) women survive childbearing, and if only some fraction of babies survive to reproduce themselves, and so forth.
It’s just like turtles laying dozens of eggs in the sand, or lobsters releasing an enormous number of fertilized eggs, only a tiny fraction of which make it to adulthood.
Is this the plan of that intelligent designer? Perhaps less easy to rhapsodize about than the wonders of the eye? B-)
If everything in life came perfectly designed, we wouldn’t need our advanced brains.
Back to related topic, perhaps if the science if homosexuality was better understood, there would be less reliance on religious texts for guidance in that area.
I don’t see why homosexuality needs to be understood in that sense. It simply is, and it always has been. It is obviously part of the natural human spectrum, and a benign part that hurts no one, like the existence of introverts and extroverts.
The need of nomadic groups to define the societies they encountered as “other” in order to preserve tribal identity and existence is, IMHO, responsible for all kinds of strictures in the Abrahamic religions: ritual genital mutilation, dietary laws favoring animals that can be successfully raised by nomads, laws that favor maximizing reproduction, and so forth.
I agree with you on a personal level, but from a “scientific” level (natural, observable phenomenon), the human brain wants to understand and provide a reason for everything. Leaving homosexuality as “simply is,” allows people to use non-scientific reasons for understanding it, labelling it, discriminating against it.
I don’t think it’s hypocritical for religious people to condemn other religious people for heresy. Again, it’s important to distinguish between Erskine’s right to have this policy (which I think pretty much all of us support) and the issue of whether it is, in the abstract, a good policy.
Are you saying that religious prohibitions against homosexuality are “heresy?” That was not my impression; in fact it is my impression that the opposite is true for adherents to religious doctrine, and that could include billions (?) of people in the world (I don’t know how many are religious).
Like the only 1 in 4 fertilized eggs that successfully implants and proceed towards the production of an infant, it is apparently okay with nature if only 1 in 4 (or whatever) women survive childbearing, and if only some fraction of babies survive to reproduce themselves, and so forth.