Great post on Reddit about accepting atheism

my experience with young adult Christians is that once they get to the stage of caring enough to argue with you, they are a lost cause. Most young don't care either way, and will quickly get bored if you talk to them about such matters

generally act immortal anyways

This is a good thing? Acting immortal predisposes you for rationality how?

It's possible, I'm just not seeing a good connection.

Really it's just the inversion of Pascal's wager.

Very few people will inherently desire to follow the doctrine of whatever religion they happen to be; because of their beliefs, they choose to do things that they otherwise wouldn't.

Homosexuals, for instance, might submerge their sexuality; this will likely serve to decrease their overall happiness. A Catholic couple in Africa might catch AIDS because the church tells them condoms are evil. An impoverished woman might elect to carry a foetus to term, condemning herself to poverty and creating a person who grows up in circumstances that nobody deserves. One country might view another country as inherently evil by choice; these two countries might even welcome nuclear war as a fulfilment of divine prophecy. Somebody with multiple sclerosis might vote against stem-cell research because they think zygotes have souls.

Perhaps most frightening of all, humanity might never explore space because the universe is only there so that our planet Earth can exist.

All that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are even more dire threats that theism might blind one in acknowledging.

Hmm... I'd like to hear you elaborate on this topic; I can't say that I agree with you, but I'm not completely certain that I disagree with you either. Given that, I'll act as an argumentative foil providing three examples of Dark Art Atheist arguments that I believe are at the very least justified, and maybe even necessary.

1 Santa Claus: as a child I believed in him to an embarassingly late age. Though my innate curiosity drove me to set 'cunning traps' so that I could catch him filling the stockings, I never doubted the cached wisdom that he actually existed. I was testing the hypothesis, but regardless of the outcome I believed in the hypothesis. When a schoolmate finally told me that Santa Claus didn't exist it took me less than a second to reorient the data - of course he didn't exist! Heck, even a five year old possesses enough reasoning skills to figure out that it's a ridiculous concept, but few of them ever bother to crunch the numbers. With my own children (one day) I plan to use Santa Claus as an object lesson demonstrating how a million people can believe a foolish thing.

It is not intellectually honest, however, to equate Christianity to Santa Clause. [Insert Christian apologetic explaining that it is possible to be a rational Christian for reasons A, B, and C - I can write this if you wish, but I hope you'll grant it for sake of argument.] Comparing a silly story that every child - even the particularly thick ones - sees through by puberty, to a body of intellectual and moral consideration going back at least 1600 years, is certainly not apt. However I would tell it to my ten year old as if it were, and I would not bring it up in later years unless he specifically asked. The month spent lecturing about all the fine details could be better spent in teaching him how restore a DeLorean. If he goes to his cryogenic cylinder believing Christianity to be comparable to Grimms Fairytales due to my use of Dark A.. ahem a White Lie, I'll stand by the decision.

2 One of the criticisms levelled recently at Richard Dawkins (and others) is their willingness to debate Creationists. Over the past few years it's become evident that the Creationists are intellectually dishonest (they'll continue arguing points to their followers, which they admitted to be false during debate), and when you get down to the bones of the matter [see what I did there?] they don't even have a coherent... anything! Some people argue that debating them gives them undue prestige, incites public interest in pseudo science, and the smarter policy would be to ignore them as the cranks they are, and just write books about real science - not books disproving pseudo science.

But once again, this is a Dark Art using social stigma and ridicule to marginalize this group; it's not an intellectually honest response.

3 The Great Unwashed Masses: personally, I like to hang out at dive bars; the people there are the salt of the earth, and it's an environment I feel comfortable in. But as much as I love these people, most of them don't have the capacity (or the interest, anyway) to understand relativity, evolution, economics, and the importance of science. And because they don't really understand any of these things, they're equally susceptible to quackery... which matters when you consider that there's more of them than there are of us.

Sometimes (if it comes up) I'll cheerlead for science, just dropping some neat little factoid that will catch their interest; if they express interest in some sort of pseudo science then I'll offer a sneaky (and overly simplistic) argument that, while not embarassing them, allows them to laugh at the pseudo scientist; and if they ask something like "How do you know that dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago?" I'll look them straight in the eye and say "Well, carbon dating..." even though I have a High School understanding of how it actually works.

I am not going to give them my Bayesian probability estimate of the truth of some statement, I'm not going to go into detail about the nature of light cones and FTL travel, and if the 'fact' that I don't know as well as I like is closer to true than the 'fact' currently in their head, I'm going to state it as if it is the truth from on high.

Dark Arts? Absolutely! But when most people hear "the Big Bang probably happened" they think to themselves "Well, I guess that still leaves room for A Wizard Did It." If they pursue these topics they'll eventually get to science, but I can't teach them science in a five minute conversation. If I try, I'll just turn them off of it. What I'm doing is triggering their emotional/signalling responses to implant an idea in their brain that will hopefully blossom. It's the equivalent of telling children that "Math is Fun!" even though it clearly isn't for the first ten years.

Whew That was a lot of typing. I hope you have a chance to respond, Nerzhin.

indoctrinating children

Nor is preventing this the one such cause. :-)

IAWYC though.

I had assumed that microscopic reversibility and a large set of measurements were all that was required. Could you explain where my assumption is wrong ?

Depends on what you think of as a person. If you reconstructed someone based on your and other people's memories of them and whatever other record there exists, they may well be just what you remember. That might be enough to make you happy. Of course, the recreated person won't be the same as whoever they are modeled after.

A person is nature plus nurture, and besides, I'm not even sure if DNA alone would produce the same baby. Epigenetics, womb variation, and whatnot all have an effect even before a child is born.

Not very useful if you want to interact with the specific person you want resurrected. You also risk creating a lot of unnecessary suffering in the created persons.