Put a 100 marbles in a jar, 14 blue marbles to represent the population of the West, and 86 red marbles to represent everyone else. If you draw a marble, blindly and at random, from the jar, you have a 14% chance of drawing a blue marble. This how @justalexoki sees the moment of conception. He thinks he is a random generic soul, fresh from the Well of Random Generic Souls, drawing a marble from the jar. 14% blue, 86% red. But you don't draw the marble. You are the marble. A blue marble only has a 14% chance of being selection in a random draw. But, in or out of the jar, a blue marble has a 100% chance of being blue. This is the Seagull Test, which is an inversion of the Breakfast Test. The Breakfast Test requires you to describe a hypothetical timeline where you skipped breakfast this morning, to prove you can imagine hypotheticals. The Seagull Test requires you to reject the question "What if you were a seagull?" as a nonsense question, to prove that you understand the difference between valid and nonsense hypotheticals. You can skip breakfast and still be you, but there is no version of you that can be a seagull, and no seagull that can, in any meaningful way, be you. To pass the Seagull Test, you must reject the question and refuse to answer, or, better yet, reframe the question so that it asks for the intended information in a coherent way, i.e. "What does it feel like to be a seagull?" Which is a very, very different question. I can, with good observational data and some intelligent speculation, possibly understand the thoughts and feelings of a Pakistani brick layer. But I cannot be one in any coherently possible universe, because I am, by definition, me. A blue marble.

@Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki This only works from a materialist frame where you only are your physical body. If you believe in a soul, and the possibility of God situating you elsewhere, then thinking about your chances of being born in this spot in the world, at this point in history, makes a lot of sense.

If you think more carefully about it, that turns out not to be correct. Regardless of the substrate of identity, identity traits are heritable. We know this. Therefore, the "choice" of who your parents are is not, cannot be, cannot be described as, random. Children are matched to parents by DNA. We know this because we looked, and it's dumb to pretend otherwise merely to avoid offending some people's religious sensitivities. Our civilization is in trouble precisely because we have avoided certain truths because they hurt people's feelings. This is a serious mistake whether those people are left- or right-wing. Avoidance of clearly obvious truths always has negative political consequences. But even if children were matched to parents by some completely different mechanism, children would still be matched to parents. Ergo, not random.

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@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Even in a religious frame, this doesn't work. We are who we are and I couldn't have been born to anyone other than my parents in any other body than the one I have. We aren't randomly assigned bodies based on probability.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Oh fucking great let's abandon the idea of a nation and caring about our countrymen more than some random punjabi because religion MIGHT be real.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki All the religious beliefs in a soul that I am aware of either say "your current life is a result of your past lifes actions" (Hindu, Buddhist, Mormon) or that God knew you before you were born, and therefore put you where he wanted you (Christianity AFAIK)

Bodies are fairly pervasive in nature. Jesus was born of a particular mother (Mary) by the power of the Holy Spirit. There was a real genetic and historical binding to his human lineage (and he was bound by the physics of his body and died). We are born into the material world, and we can track backwards in time through many generations because they are physical, observable occurrences. Our lineage lends a lot to defining who we are. This is evident in the Old Testament, where entire chapters are spent on genealogies. If our exit from this world begins in the spiritual realm (awaiting resurrection in the new creation), that is an event that occurs forward in time, and we can’t look there.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki This is a gnostic view of the soul, and not how Christians should think about it. God didn't take a soul and put it in just any body. He created YOU who are a combination of soul and body. There can be no other you besides what God created.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki That relies on a huge and false assumption: That the body of a child is made in the image of the father's body but the spirit inhabiting the body is not made in the image of the father's spirit. You're bodily and spiritual lineage are one.

Why assume God plays dice with your soul? It's not just a materialist perspective to think you're given the body you're given because in God's perfect plan it's the one place he has for you. Perfection assumes there is no other way - your place is determined. Whether by the material properties of the universe or by His will is immaterial to the argument and you're using religion in the most annoying way like a cudgel to try to win it.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Incorrect. x.com/Immpresario/st…

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki That is retarded. There is not some pool of souls that gets fished into when a child is conceived. A human body and soul are products of two people coming together, they did not exist beforehand.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki What if souls aren't stored in a heavenly warehouse waiting to be randomly assigned at birth and are instead created at conception? Unique to the vehicle which was inevitably itself instead of lucky.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Not really, if you are genetically clustered with your people it could make sense that your soul is clustered with those people too in a way.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki This is gnostic, a human person is both body AND soul, not just a soul that is in possession of a random body.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki If you believe in God and the soul you wouldn’t sit around thinking about possibilities because there was not one other possibility. God put you here

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki That’s not the Christian view. Men are not pure spirit, we’re also our bodies with everything that entails. The soul is not a random ghost inhabiting a meat-machine; the two elements are integral. It’s therefore not at all “materialist” to say I could not be other than who I am.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Absolute nonsense. What evil deeds would you have to do in your previous life to become Indian in the next. God might make you a heathen rapist at random - ridiculous.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki No. Because when god made your soul, he had this body in mind.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki That only works if you’re a heretic who believes in dualism

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki No it absolutely does not assume a materialist frame. Your soul is knit together from the souls of your parents just like your body. This was the view held by ancient Christianity and many, many others.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Only if you separate soul from the body and the physical. You may do so, but a Christian worldview certainly doesn't.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Then it’s still not random chance but providence.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Try again reading the line on the seagull test. You failed it before. You failed after reading it. Just try again until you do get it right.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki God is omnipresent. When he formed my soul he formed my body simultaneously. He was not debating whether or not to throw me into an indian

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki This is not true by classic Christian metaphysics. Aquinas for example would say that each soul is created for a specific body, and there is no pre-existing soul prior to its particular embodiment. The person is a body-soul composite, not a soul that incidentally has a body

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki "and the possibility of God situating you elsewhere" This is not a possibility, you can tell because he didn't.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Predestined to be White award

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Christians don’t believe in the pre-existence of souls. That’s a condemned heresy.

It is not inherently materialist to apply a predictive sense of "body" to a soul, since there is no argument made that God did not create reality or your self and body specific to you. In fact materialism would imply this IS entirely random and there's no reason to inhabit ANY body at all, the soul or notion of "self" cannot exist in a materialist framework because materialism implies itself.

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki The Christian belief is that you’re ensouled at conception, so no you’re not a random drifting soul that managed to luckily inhabit the fetus of your parents. Your material and immaterial sides of yourself are inexorably linked

@Knightfall21 @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki There's another link that explains it better. You are not ur soul and you are not just your body. What makes you is both ur soul and body, they are inseparable, except in the first judgement after death. So God, outside of time, has both ur soul and body picked out from eternity