Answers for Trans Day of Visibility Questions

I arranged a question-and-answer session on my Facebook profile on this year’s Trans Day of Visibility. My friends and other visitors brought up some amusing, interesting, and valuable questions. For posterity’s sake, that’s all here now.

  1. Isn’t having the superpower of invisibility the other 364 days of the year awesome?

It’s kind of disappointing, really. It makes it so much harder to get appreciation for all of these selfies.

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Answers for Trans Day of Visibility Questions
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Answers for Parents with Transgender Offspring

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A trans person, probably a trans woman, has parents. Those parents are a predictable yet incomprehensible medley of bigoted toward transgender people, ignorant of queer and transgender topics, and uninterested in learning more, and think “acceptance” means that the telephone shouting matches have mostly stopped and they haven’t severed all ties with their transgender descendant. There’s very little else they get right, and they think that their progress is measured in “time since they heard.”

There are a lot of specific things they get wrong, and they’re frustratingly defensive about getting corrected on any of them.

So here are some answers.

CN sexual assault, suicide, violence against women

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Answers for Parents with Transgender Offspring

Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist

TodayChristian.net seems to think they have a set of questions that “Atheist Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer! Which leads to some interesting conclusions…”  They’d better be very interesting to warrant that mess of capital letters and using the word “atheist” like someone who doesn’t know English very well.  Let’s see what these stumpers apparently are.
1.       How Did You Become an Atheist?
2.       What happens when we die?
3.       What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!
4.       Without God, where do you get your morality from?
5.       If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?
6.       If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?
7.       Where did the universe come from?
8.       What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?
9.       What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?
10.   If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?
Sigh.  Here we go.

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Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist

Messages from Creationists to Evolutionists Answered

Oh, I do grow tired of the word “evolutionist.”  It’s the kind of word only a creationist would invent.   The creationist / evolutionist dichotomy was designed at every stage to imply that the two ideas are exactly the same thing, implying the same level of slavish devotion to a doctrine and the same level of prima facie plausibility for both.  It’s one of the movement’s most obvious calling cards, and one that makes its adherents trivial to recognize.
With that in mind, the recent much-ballyhooed and much-derided performance piece between Ken Ham and Bill Nye provided the Internet with a variety of new bits of creationism-related entertainment.  One of the better bits of comedy to come from this event, besides the glistening fury of Ken Ham’s bat-strokes against the pulverized flank steak that used to be his dead horse, is this BuzzFeed list of questions posed by smug-faced creationists to their sensible brethren.  I’ve provided it here in text with the spelling and grammar corrected.
1.     Bill Nye, are you influencing the minds of children in a positive way?
2.    Are you scared of a divine creator?
3.    Is it completely illogical that the earth was created mature?  i.e., trees created with rings…Adam created as an adult…
4.    Does not the second law of thermodynamics disprove evolution?
5.    How do you explain a sunset if there is no god?
6.    If the Big Bang theory is true and taught as science along with evolution, why do the laws of thermodynamics debunk said theories?
7.    What about noetics?
8.    Where do you derive objectivemeaning in life?
9.    If God did not create everything, how did the first single-celled organism originate?  By chance?
10.  I believe in the Big Bang Theory.  God said it and BANG it happened!
11.  Why do evolutionists/secularists/humanists/non-God-believing people reject the idea of there being a creator God but embrace the concept of intelligent design from aliens or other extraterrestrial sources?
12.  There is no in between…the only one found has been Lucy and there are only a few pieces of the hundreds necessary for an “official proof.”
13.  Does metamorphosis help support evolution?
14.  If evolution is a theory (like creationism or the Bible) why then is evolution taught as fact?
15.  Because science by definition is a “theory”—not testable, observable, nor repeatable” why do you object to creationism or intelligent design being taught in school?
16.  What mechanism has science discovered that evidences an increase in genetic information seen in any genetic mutation or evolutionary process?
17.  What purpose do you think you are here for if you do not believe in salvation?
18.  Why have we found only one “Lucy” when we have found more than one of everything else?
19.  Can you believe in “the big bang” without “faith”?
20. How can you look at the world and not believe that someone created / thought of it?  It’s AMAZING!!!
21.  Relating to the big bang theory…where did the exploding star come from?
22. If we came from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?
As you can see, we have the classics here handily covered, along with some dishonest argumentation and a few reruns from my last visit to a list of creationist false controversies.
Let’s have a rather harsher look than that simpering accomodationist Phil Plait decided to take:

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Messages from Creationists to Evolutionists Answered

Investigating (Straw) Atheism

There’s nothing quite like a set of loaded questions from a believer to illuminate what being an atheist really means.  For all the increased and increasing visibility that celebrity nonbelievers like Daniel Radcliffe and Jodi Foster are getting us, and for all that atheist thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have rendered an exemplary case for non-belief as a philosophical position, we continue to suffer from a litany of stereotypes.  (Often, our most visible proponents do little to disprove them…)

And no set of questions is likely to be more loaded than the set that BornAgain_Believer (sigh) posted on MyNews24, reproduced here:
 
1.       Where do you come from?
2.       What is your purpose on earth?
3.       Does life have a meaning?
4.       What is just and fair for you?
5.       God forbids, if your child is murdered and the person is never caught and brought to justice, how would you handle it, seeing that life has no meaning and we are just here on earht [sic] to live and die. Where would you get justice from?
6.       An intelligent, thinking child brought up by atheist parents becomes a Christian how do you respond? Oh and becomes preacher and starts a new church, would you say your child has a problem?
7.       What about all the injustice in the world that goes by unreported, where must everyone else get justice from?
8.       How do you answer your own child that is searching for meaning and purpose in life?
9.       Why does research, discovery, diplomacy, art, music, sacrifice, compassion, feelings of love, or affectionate and caring relationships mean anything if it all ultimately comes to naught anyway?
10.   Is death the end of life?
I’d like to give this questioner the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re asking purely from a position of ignorance.  But when it comes to the privileged and often oppressive end of an unequal societal dynamic, that’s not a warranted assumption.  This fellow’s username says it all.  The Digital Cuttlefish and Nate Hevenstone (if you’re not reading him yet, start) have already taken this on, so I’ll add my two cents.
Investigating (Straw) Atheism

Clever Questions to Ask an Atheist, provided the Atheist is Very, Very Drunk

A LOT of Internet real estate is devoted to Christian zealots of various flavors claiming to have some sort of checkmate-level rebuttal to the steady increase of nonbelievers in the developed world.  One example in particular caught my attention.  I’m not sure where this list originated (I found it here), but its “cleverness” is, shall we say, overestimated.

The questions:

Dear Christians,
Here are some clever questions I have thought up for you to ask an atheist.  If you are on an atheist online chat, you can copy and paste these questions to ask them, or you can confront an atheist in public and ask the questions.  Just watch how they can never answer these questions:
Can you explain what happens when we die?
If we came from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys living today?
Is it okay to commit murders, rape, homosexuality, going to stripbars, looking at pornography, and other forms of rebellion if you think there is no God to guide you?
How can you explain the way a banana fits in the palm of the hand?
If Fox News is a dishonest channel, then why are the reporters such as Bill O’Reilly true Christians?
Did you know that there are biblical records of dinosaurs that were witnessed by men?
How did pond scum turn into us?
How did the eye form?
How did the Grand Canyon form?
If you call yourself an atheist in regards to God, then do you call yourself an atheist in regards to Santa and Bigfoot?
How did everything come from nothing?
If evolution is true, how come we never see frogs turn into birds?
Have you heard of the shroud of Turin?
Your’s [sic] in Christ,
Where to begin?  Most of these questions are veterans of the religious apologist circuit, frequently utilized in dishonest ways by prominent anti-atheist agitators like Ray Comfort.  While none of them is particularly clever, some of them require surprisingly interesting answers.
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Clever Questions to Ask an Atheist, provided the Atheist is Very, Very Drunk