Thank you for a more well thought out response than the simple ad hominem trope you gave me on December 4th in the other thread, but I find it hard to engage this response in good faith given the context of the prior one.

That said, I’ll try for now.

You say I don’t understand genetics, but outside of my omitting the nuances of epigenetics in the toolkit (which wouldn’t add much and only serve to muddle the point) I fail to see your basis.

You say I don’t understand religion, but I don’t understand why you think that, and I question whether your understanding matches the facts on the ground. For one, I was raised a Quaker, so I’m very familiar with the faith. They’re failing to grow because they are morally opposed to evangelism in basically all forms, period. I know nothing about Shakers. People definitely swap churches, and denominations, all the time. It’s quite common, so I don’t understand why you think it isn’t. That Minnesota Lutherans are Lutherans because their parents are Lutherans is geographical because (Minnesota). That parents indoctrinate children has everything to do with why religion is geographical. Go look at a map. Not a lot of Lutherans in Qatar.

SJ has adult converts, but so do other religions. The current rate of Buddhism in the USA is in no way explainable by Buddhists having Buddhist babies. And SJ parents will tend to indoctrinate their children with SJ principles as well, so the age of indoctrination provides us no differentiation here.

Progressivism is the product of religion. Abolitionists and the Women’s Temperance Movement were founded in religions.

This is very, very true, but I would argue against conflating century old progressivism with modern SJ. They are not only tremendously different in their teachings, they’re different at a fundamental level of principle. Most of the stuff in which SJ is rooted didn’t exist when the Anti Saloon League were marching to Onward Christian Soldier.

An argument could be made that progressivism in general is the sort of thing that easily attaches to religious minds, given progressivism’s history. But that argument would be difficult to substantiate fully, because everyone was religious back then, so I won’t attempt to defend it. That said, pointing to the religious origins of progressivism doesn’t support the idea that SJ isn’t a defacto religion. If anything, it supports it.

You complain that Social Justice is unscientific, yet you use cherry-picked examples, authority fallacies (you cite yourself), and false analogies instead of statistical data. For example, you have a list where you write Heretical = Problematic but you provide no rational basis for such a claim other than to state that it’s true.

That section was a reference to work by others, and serves as a summary and citation to them, and multiple others. The one citation back to a prior article of mine is no different than citing a prior chapter of a book. That article has citations within it, including to MLK and to Patricia Bidol-Pavda, one of the mothers of modern SJ thinking.

You do make some good points about academic nonsense, but again, nothing statistical, just a few cherry-picked examples that support what you already believe to be true.

I’m generally curious what sort of statistical analysis you’d like to see here. Would some sort of poll among SJ adherents determining whether they agree with Shay Akil McLean’s position be of value?

In retrospect, I think it would. I wish something like that were available. Do you know of such a thing?

Jesse Singal seemed to think this was a widespread thing. Recent articles have backed that up, that indeed this sort of thinking is widespread, systemic, and severely damaging the field of evolutionary biology.

edit:

I did see something spill across my feed yesterday by way of statistics. According to a recent analysis, the Communist Manifesto is the most taught “economics” book in the country. While not directly related to the science section in the article, it seems to me to at least be indicative.

Even your understanding of religion is off. Galileo was punished for going public, and not because he was going against the church. For example, Poggio Bracciolini criticized the church but because he did it internally and not publicly he wasn’t punished.

Galileo wasn’t against the church. He almost joined the priesthood. Galileo was deplatformed because the things he was saying were problematic to established church dogma. The parallels are obvious.

One last thing. You oranges in the tundra was a “you” it was just one guy in a totalitarian regime: Trofim Lysenko. You is plural. Lysenko is just one person. You’re using a weak guilt by association.

Lysenko was responsible for sweeping, nationwide changes in how the Soviet Union implemented agriculture on a massive scale, and his influence impacted every farmer in the nation, as well as a cool seven million dead people. He didn’t do this on his own, he did it at the behest of all of Soviet Communism. I could spend days quoting The Gulag Archipelago if necessary, but it would have bogged the article down, and distracted from the point.

I’m curious what your opinions were of the overall intent of the article, which was absolutely not to troll SJers about their beliefs, but rather to offer them an olive branch — a way to resolve their inconsistencies and roll out a more cohesive program to further their belief structures by admitting they’re based on faith. It would seem to me that this might be a lifeline given how they’re tearing each other apart right now.

I’m also curious whether you have any comment on the nature of crowdsourcing belief structures itself, as it seems to me that that sort of mode might be useful for any belief framework to adopt in the 21st century.