Another poster maybe a month ago had a lot of his comments deleted as spam. A pain. I haven't heard of that phenomenon as being common on other sites that use disqus, but maybe it is.

I think there is a length limit. Was your recent comment notably long?

I'm at peace with writing things that nobody reads, but if it can't even make the page I might as well turn off the computer and talk to myself. If you don't respect your site enough to get technology that works, I have to join you in such disrespect.

Good luck to all of you, and if you ever get a real website I'm hoping someone might track me down and let me know. Thanks for the chats!

Yes, but on the other hand, the Jewish authors who wrote and redacted the first three chapters of Genesis had no idea that there were billions of years of natural evil before the origin of human beings. Neither did the early Christians who formulated the idea of Original Sin.

Yes, because many beings, lacking consciousness and/or reason, have no sense of self-value.

Things are good in their being because God created them out of love and they have a value in and of themselves.

Is that "value in and of themselves" different from the empirical sense in which living organisms value themselves?

Rather, they and we would be preserved from natural evils, like sickness, accidents, and death.

Can you see how, to a skeptic, it seems awfully convenient that, right when the story calls for a miraculous departure from the previous several billion years of natural evils, the story has an "excuse" for why the naturalist status quo just kept on going as it always had?

Thanks. I did not mean to imply that you were "coercive" in the sense of violent. I did mean that we should not necessarily assume that the solution to every problem is passing more laws.

Anyone addicted to anything can know his addiction is a bad thing

They can know, yes. But they don't always know. None of us knows everything we can know, and there are many reasons. Sometimes our ignorance is due to simple dishonesty.

but he can keep going back to the addiction regardless of what his intellect tells him.

I know from experience exactly what that feels like.

OK. Thanks for clarifying that.

I agree.

That is a subtopic of the wider and just as fascinating topic of how human beings are different than other animals. Also the very enlightening topic of what we share with other animals.