[The succubus meets your gaze, her blood-stained lips stretching into a sweet smile.] «Are you really going to raise your weapon against me? I am Iomedae [a Goddess], after all!»
[The demon is trying to inspire a sense of sacred awe in you, but her efforts are in vain. You are an atheist, and that feeling is alien to you.]
«Pathfinder — Wrath of the Righteous»
Seeing things from different points of view is … rather difficult. Personally, there are speeches/talks/lectures, e.g., by people on the far left/right, or by some ideologists, that I find very hard to watch. Not only because I do not agree with their position, or that I don’t find their arguments convincing, but mostly because everything they say is build on assumptions that I do not share. In this case, it doesn’t matter what is said, the foundation is so fundamentally different that no understanding is possible. (Well, without addressing the foundation itself, which is a strategy in these cases.)
I expected the talk by Mary Rice Hasson to be in a similar vein. After all, not believing in God, basic assumptions like being created by God with inherent dignity fall flat. On the other hand, there is Kant and his imperative that people shouldn’t be treated as things. That human beings do have dignity. And changing to this perspective, yeah, it was able to follow her arguments — and her speech.
(And yup, it helps to see the argument for a God itself, after all, what men have given men can take away. Although given that God usually operates through operatives — pope, bishops, priests — I am pretty sure those men still could take that dignity away. After all, during the WWII, it wasn’t Rome that fought the Nazis, it were individual priests following their conscience.)
And perhaps that’s also a way to keep arguments, by changing the foundation slightly. By agreeing on a deep level that, yeah, we have dignity. If that is agreed upon, one can look at the arguments (save the personal experiences, nothing I haven’t heard before, but still interesting).
So, a surprisingly interesting perspective.