Atheist professor, PZ Myers, has a blog entry entitled, “Anti-vaxxers are murdering children.” Note how easy it was for the atheist to lie. Please. Anti-vaxxers are not out there “murdering children.” Stop it. Maybe the atheist professor thinks otherwise because he is a dumbass. Or perhaps it is his covidphobic fever. Perhaps. I think it most likely that he is just lying. As an atheist, he does not believe lies are immoral. On the contrary, if the lie serves a “greater good,” the lie itself is good and useful. For the atheist, the ends justify the means. So he lies.
What’s funny is how stupid Myers is. He can’t even support his crazed lie with one simple anecdote. His whole blog entry focuses on a single child who has appendicitis, waits a long time for treatment because of Covid patients, but doesn’t die. Not one person dies in PZ’s story. Does he not realize that if there are no deaths, there is no murder?
I suppose there are some atheists who are just so used to lying, and who feel so morally superior for lying because their lies “are for the greater good,” that they don’t even bother trying to support their lies. They just throw them out there. And their secular colleagues lap them up.
Shadow To Light 
Reading through the comments on PZ Myers’ blog and you realize they are all dumbasses. They cite ‘data’ but never bother to examine it. I guess I just don’t understand Science.
‘Science!‘
I wonder what the delay was when I came down with appendicitis when I was 14/15 … decades before Covid-1984 was the all-purpose excuse? I recall lying there for hours, passing in and out of consciousness, puking a time or two, knowing that I was dying, before they began prepping me for surgery.
As Our Host has pointed out a time or two, many children in America are killed every year due to alcohol use by *other people*. These children don’t simply die, they are killed by the results of other people’s decisions and actions. Ergo, by ol’ PZ’s logic, these children are *murdered*. Furthermore, by PZ’s logic, everyone who consumes alcohol is guilty of the deaths of these children; that is, all consumers of alcohol are murderers. Including ol’ PZ hisself.
He’s got no reason to believe that murder is intrinsically immoral, either. Ask him about abortion. He’s simply appealing to residual Christian conditioning in his audience when he seeks a negative reaction by throwing around unfounded accusations of child-murder. He’s perfectly fine with medical professionals deliberately ending the lives of unborn babies at the behest of the mothers.
He has the rational consistency of a raving lunatic.
TFBW: “He’s got no reason to believe that murder is intrinsically immoral, either. Ask him about abortion. He’s simply appealing to residual Christian conditioning in his audience …
He has the rational consistency of a raving lunatic.”
As I constantly say, *all* God-deniers (*) are intellectually dishonest … which is worse than being merely a liar (**).
I make this unpopular claim not only because every one of them will appeal to morality — and generally, the Christian understanding of what morality entails — when doing that is convenient, and then in the next breath will deny that there is any such thing as a moral obligation.
Rather, I make the claim because the reality of morality is one of the reasons why we can know that God-denial is *not* the truth about the nature of reality, and thus that all propositions/claims which logically follow from propositions such as “There is no Creator; There is no God; We cannot know whether there is a Creator or God” are also false.
From the reality of morality, we can know that these fundamental Christian claims are true:
– There is a Creator (called by all,’God’) of all-that-is-not-God;
– There is *one* God;
– The God is a ‘who’, not a ‘what, that is, God is not an impersonal “force”‘;
– The One God is yet a multiplicity of Persons.
For, if any one of these claims were false, then there is no such thing as morality.
(*) “God-denier” covers not only the open/admitted ‘atheists’, but also those who try to pose as open-minded, but unconvinced by calling themselves ‘agnostics’ … and it includes most, if not all, of the “I’m spiritual, not religious” sort.
(**) The “mere” liar lies episodically: he lies about some fact or other. But, the intellectually dishonest person (i.e. the ‘fool’) lies systemically: he lies about the very nature of truth.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002100161X
Bilbo Baggins > [Link to paper entitled, “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?”]
Let me echo TFBW’s recent comment to someone responding as “Andrew”: “@Andrew: there’s succinct, and there’s omitting important context.”
https://shadowtolight.wordpress.com/2021/08/27/phil-zuckerman-tries-to-argue-that-atheists-are-morally-superior-and-fails/#comment-43679
Would you please supply sufficient context for readers to understand what you might be arguing for, or arguing against, or both.
testing
Hi Dhay, I assume Myers offered some sort of argument that people who oppose covid vaccines for children are murdering them. I was offering counter-evidence. Was my assumption mistken?
I really think you should read instead of assuming.
If I were really interested in what Myers had to say, I would. I’m not.
Bilbo Baggins > If I were really interested in what Myers had to say, I would [read whatever Myers had to say that Michael is criticising]. I’m not.
Not only are you not interested in what Myers had to say, you are evidently not really interested in what Michael has to say, either else you would have read Michael’s OP instead of assuming that: “Myers offered some sort of argument that people who oppose covid vaccines for children are murdering them.”
Here’s Michael’s one-sentence summary of what Myers had to say:
OP > His whole blog entry focuses on a single child who has appendicitis, waits a long time for treatment because of Covid patients, but doesn’t die.
If you are not really interested in what Michael has to say — and plainly you are not — please don’t waste your time and mine.
Sadly, trolls don’t consider it a waste of *their* time to waste your time.
> I suppose there are some atheists who are just so used to lying, and who feel so morally superior for lying because their lies “are for the greater good,” that they don’t even bother trying to support their lies. They just throw them out there.
PZ Myers is at it again: in his 03 October 2021 blog post entitled, “Twisting the story to fit your weird obsession is disrespecting the victim”, Myers tells his readers:
No, they’re not; not on any reading of the The Guardian article that Myers is referring to.
On behalf of Bilbo Baggins, who has an aversion to reading what PZ Myers has to say and who won’t bother to read it to find the link, here’s the link to The Guardian’s article entitled and sub-titled, “You can’t opt in and out of taking violence against women seriously: Sarah Everard’s murder has highlighted the inconsistencies in the provision of safe spaces”:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/03/which-bit-of-women-need-safe-places-dont-men-understand
==PZ Myers is at it again: in his 03 October 2021 blog post entitled, “Twisting the story to fit your weird obsession is disrespecting the victim”, Myers tells his readers: …==
PZ is engaging in “projection”? Who would have guessed? Who could have guessed?
Rats, Dhay! Because of your comments I was tricked into reading Myers’ blog post. I would say the link I provided is relevant to Myers’ comments, though maybe not relevant to Mike’s comments. But then I don’t think Mike’s comments get to the heart of the controversy over Covid vaccines, though they do get to Myers’ consistent dishonesty.
Bilbo Baggins > I would say the link I provided [to paper entitled, “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?”] is relevant to Myers’ comments, …
Not on the face of it:
Myers concerns himself solely with how unvaccinated adults who have contracted Covid-19 are “bed-blocking”, hence are causing delays in treatment of seriously ill children; he does not so much as mention the the vaccination or non-vaccination of children, let alone express an opinion either way.
*
(British media reports tell me that if children as young as five were to be vaccinated, it would make a HUGE difference to adults — to adults — in terms of case numbers, long-Covid case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths; but to a close approximation, children don’t themselves experience any of the serious problems that adults do, and that if children show symptoms at all they are almost invariably mild ones that don’t threaten health; that is, more children die or suffer serious health problems from vaccination than from Covid, they are more in danger from vaccination than from Covid.
(But the rather tricky — or is it? — question of whether it is ethical to put five year old Elsa at unnecessary (to her) risk in order to not put her parents at slightly greater risk and her four grandparents and six remaining great-grandparents at much greater risk — that is a tricky question in moral philosophy: it’s not one tackled by Myers, it’s not one tackled by Michael (so in this thread it’s a ‘rabbit hole’, one I will go no further down), and you and I are probably poor moral philosophers and ill-equipped to tackle it. (See Verbose Stoic’s blog’s philosophy posts for a suitable standard to match — I don’t.))
==But the rather tricky — or is it? — question of whether it is ethical to put five year old Elsa at unnecessary (to her) risk in order to not put [others] at slightly greater risk … and you and I are probably poor moral philosophers and ill-equipped to tackle it. (See Verbose Stoic’s blog’s philosophy posts for a suitable standard to match==
The question is “tricky” because a lot of morally wicked people have a vested interest in the wrong answer, and a lot of morally cowardly people have a vested interest in it being “above my pay-grade” so as to (allegedly) justify their refusal to stand against the morally wicked would-be statist tyrants.
No one is “ill-equipped to tackle” such a “rather tricky”; some of us just don’t like the answer.
Ilíon > No one is “ill-equipped to tackle” such a “rather tricky”; some of us just don’t like the answer.
Indeed! The UK government’s scientific advisers ducked the decision, saying the pros and cons are too finely balanced to make a firm recommendation one way or the other; they then passed the decision on to the government’s vaccination advisors; the end-result was the government’s fudged decision to not vaccinate ages 11 and under but to vaccinate ages 12+ (secondary education) in order to, er, protect their education from the disruption of having to isolate at home whenever a classmate failed a test.
It’s a convenient course of action, politically, but the ethical issue regarding the health pros and cons has been sidelined and dodged. And although parents are entitled to object to their child in the 12+ range being vaccinated, that child can overrule their parents if persuaded ‘for’ by the arguments for and against. Sounds like a recipe for children being pressured by authority figures in education or in health, or by peer pressure from other pupils.
The bureaucratic mind in operation is a wondrous thing to behold.
PZ Myers, again, in his 04 October 2021 blog post, “How does this deadly nonsense continue?”, about Joe Rogan allegedly claiming “…the White House faked President Joe Biden’s booster shot on live TV out of fear that he could have dropped dead in the moment.” Myers first quotes his source, The Daily Beast, then adds his comments; I have focused on the obvious bullshit:
So it’s rather more than that Biden might have died “in the moment”, it’s that he might have had bad reactions “in the moment” (possibly including dying.) Once again he demonstrates he’s just so used to lying, and feels so morally superior for lying because his lies “are for the greater good,” that he doesn’t even bother trying to support his lies. He just throws them out there.
My son-in-law had a sufficiently bad reaction to his first AstraZeneca dose that he went to Accident and Emergency as a precaution, and was told he had done the right thing. Some people do have bad reactions.
The woman who rents the cottage that’s semi-attached to my chapel got blood clotting throughout her body on her first jab, was hospitalised, then again on her second. (Why did she even have her second, given how she was after the first?!) Some people do have bad reactions.
I scarcely noticed my own vaccinations, but note that everybody was expected to sit for fifteen minutes under the watchful eyes of nurses before leaving, and the reason given was that it was in case of adverse reactions. Some people do have bad reactions “in the moment”.
Bad reactions are fortunately few, and I think the risks vaccination were worthwhile for me to accept. But: Myers’ comment seems to deny totally that bad reactions do happen sometimes.
The world’s in a bad way when Joe Rogan is the voice of reason.
^ Just think how gobsmacked Rogan himself must be by that development.