Atheist Memes

I mean, are we assholes because we let ants die? I agree if he exists he isn’t deserving of worship, but calling him an asshole for letting kids die is kinda rich from a species that mostly gives no fucks about creatures with lower intellect.

They won't debate you but they will tell you that "God has a plan for you" or something like that. Even if that plan is living a super short life and dying and agonizing death.

And the ones that do snap and do horrible things aren't really true (insert religion here) anyway.

It's survivorship bias with an added dash of No True Scotsman.

Yeah, I've unfortunately encountered more than a fair share of younger human-shaped excrement that definitely weren't exposed to high levels of lead.

Maybe we'll find out PFAS has similar effects.

Lead poisoning is the single most detrimental effect experienced by humanity, so far.

They've been poisoning people with lead since before Roman times. They used to make drinking glasses from lead

Plastics are the modern lead.

You say you don't want to assume the worst in people, and so do I, but at some point we have to be realistic.

Your philosophical dilemma is valid, but I would point out that pointing fingers is the best choice we have in this matter. Say, indeed, the ones fucking shit up do have intellectual disabilities, they still continue doing it. Reprimanding them for it is perhaps society's way of trying to get them to stop. Sort of like in the case of a child I guess - children being considered in this argument as having not enough understanding of the consequences of their actions. Equate, if you will, 'goddamn it Billy, stop running in the street' to 'goddamnit grandma, stop voting for idiots'.

The problem then is that Billy may listen, but grandma is set in her ways and has the notion that age brings wisdom regardless, so she's less inclined to listen to what the equivalent of Billy for her has to say.

I see no alternatives for this (that is to say, an attempt to correct erroneous behaviour) in the context of the aspirations of modern society.

As a thought experiment, in the most extreme case, what would we do? Test everyone for lead and remove, for example, the right to vote across a certain threshold? That doesn't take into account the baseline intellectual ability of individual (which can vary across a population) and the degree to which said discovered lead levels would affect them. It's entirely possible that a lead-laden 'smart' brain still has more capability than a pure but idiotic one. Not sure how we'd ever assess that. Not to mention the system would be exploited as soon as possible to channel power.

We could of course, stop pointing fingers and forgive them, for they know not what they do, and it'd probably have about the same effect.

Plastic is what's making everyone gay! Lol

JK I know people have always been gay. We will probably just get cancer from the plastic

I think we're pretty far past 'may' at this point since they're finding microplastics in blood and lungs.

And then how long does it take for decades of lead from exhaust on basically every roadside and garage in the world to make its way through the ground, into the groundwater, into water supplies and crops, into people and animals, and ... back into the ground again.

"Everywhere" should be a superfund site.

I believe the authors of the first Freakonomics book did delve into this phenomenon.