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Notes -
Not aiming this at you specifically, but one thing I’ve very much seen is that people desperately want to be a ‘good person’ in whatever manner their society dictates.
I’ve watched sensible friends trying on a number of different post-hoc justifications for things that they wanted to believe. It was most obvious with trans stuff: they would try a number of historical justifications and get annoyed when I pointed out they didn’t work. It wasn’t that they disagreed with me, it was a ‘I want to feel justified fitting in, why won’t you let me have this?’
In a show of good faith I will point this at me too. This is basically how I am with Christianity a lot of the time. It’s also how I was with COVID vaccines and various non-COVID conspiracy theories - I had a very strong feeling of, “look, I believe enough heresy to get me in trouble already and I don’t want to go looking for more”.
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