what are some of your radical but controversial opinions

Not having been taught religion, or even having been actively taught by their parents that religion is false, they won't feel burdened to prove that they're simultaneously good people and atheists. As such, they'll have their own choice to make about morality: act like it's extremely important even though it's just a social construct, or do whatever they want?

It took two millennia of Christian ethics to get where we are.

I mean no sane person thinks that puberty blockers or seriously committal early transformations of any sort are okay. That stuff is extreme fringe cases in billions of people and will be cut out. People are just finding their feet with new ideas about gender.

Nor is any girl ever thrilled to be going getting an abortion. She's having something burned out of her. I mean some of the rawest stories I've ever heard in my life are about abortion pills where the girl has miscarried at home. We all know that abortion is an extreme thing. There's no woman ever going to have a late term abortion like it was nothing. It will be the most traumatic experience of her life. We just really don't need to be sticking our noses in that.

That’s true but who says they are sane lol. despite your generally low opinion of the country I think you underestimate how actually insane the US is. You can search “puberty” here and it will show you that the position is held by over a third of the US voters who had an opinion and 47% of democrats (with 25% not offering an opinion)…it’s absolutely a real policy position which is why it’s happening. And the great thing about the internet is that you can just go and have a look at who is talking about having “trans kids” and who isn’t. The results are…unsurprising. Most of them are pleased as punch to have a trans kid and follow a very similar political/moral creed

But like I said, it’s actually not out of the norm historically for things kind of similar to to this to happen. Families used to castrate their sons to send them to palaces to be eunuchs, or to preserve a singing voice, anything to bring money and status to the family. Doing the same in the modern day to prove you’re “woke” is little different. There’s nothing new under the sun. But is it a surprise that when Christianity wanes, the people resemble pre-Christian morality in many ways?

https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/bbui2643wn/econTabReport.pdf#page256

There are absolutely some who “shout [their] abortion!” (I didn’t make that phrase up) but yeah it’s not common. Crazy as you may think it elective abortion up to the moment of birth actually is the policy position of the Democratic Party. 

Think of it this way, the Christian position would be that the fetus is ensouled, has a relationship with God, is inherently valuable, etc. That isn’t at ALL the mentality people had towards babies historically let alone fetuses. Infanticide was common in almost all societies so the idea that you didn’t need to carry a child to term if it would be traumatic or you simply didn’t want it wouldn’t be foreign to them. Not a surprise to me that with the decline of religiosity there’s a change in how people view the sanctity of a fetal life. 

I mean I grew up on a farm thett. I've never seen a mother anything be anything other than extremely protective of its offspring. That claim defies pretty much everything I know about humanity and nature.

Religious people are, in general, shittier people than atheists.

We never needed morality; we already had humanity.

I mean it's a funny idea that atheists are only good because they've got something to prove.

Maybe it's just a religious person has dark things in his heart needing accounted for. 

I mean you only gotta look in the religion forum right here to find that religious people are hateful.

I think the failing here is to think religion is only taught. We find morality of our own ability to act in this world. Tie in love and empathy and we were always going to be complicated that way. 

 homicide was always at least 10x-20x what it is in modern times and people were likely to get away with it in a lot of cases

You inherited moral traditions from the religious or religious-until-fairly-recent society in which you were born. Let's not pretend otherwise.

This mindset, while it sounds nice, largely disregards history in practice.

The story of our species is a slow progression from brutal savages to mostly restrained modern people. Those who lived 3,000 years ago were just as human as you and I, but they were significantly less likely to "find morality in their own ability to act in this world".

Most people require some kind of structure before they can consistently choose to behave morally. That structure neither magically appears nor magically sustains itself without collective effort from societies.

I want you to name them.

I hold that society i.e. people around you is the civilising force.

Sex stuff?

So how will ever regress when today we have more structure and transparency than we have ever had before?

Don't steal. Don't kill. Don't lie. Don't mistreat other people. Rules that humans born and raised in an anarchic vacuum don't typically care much about.

Sure. But where did society get these values from, given that prehistoric and bronze age societies lacked them? And what's to stop society from changing for the worse?

People tend to blow off the sex stuff as unrelated to morality. But how many players sweet-talk a young woman, use her for a night or two of sexual gratification, and then coldly dump her though she has come to love him?

Sexual harassment of random women in the streets, to the point where said women might have to fear for their safety? How much underage pornography is floating around on Pornhub? 

How much of this could be avoided if Christian ethics were applied to sexuality?

All of this despite "more structure and transparency than ever before". Because structure and transparency only matters if people decide that these things are important. If there's no unquestionable religion-level significance ascribed to them, then some generation eventually won't. And if you do ascribe unquestionable religion-level significance to them, then you're quasi-cheating in calling yourself an atheist as you do hold to a secular religion. Perhaps not a religion that includes God but still.

I think that having 80% of people eligible to vote voting versus 60% isn’t necessarily better. It may lead to better results, and it may also lead to worse results.

I think getting hung up on this idea of democracy as a some axiomatic good instead of simply being a system that tends to lead to better outcomes is a mistake.

Who gets to decide what a "better" outcome looks like?

An individual and not the tyranny of the majority mob.

We're not a company, where every action can be objectively scrutinized by analyzing its impact on shareholder value. Elections determine who we are as a people, as a society. 

The more people left out of that process the less and less we can say that the people are determining their own fate, which is supposed to be the whole point of holding an election.

Ok, but hypothetically speaking in a vacuum, if we could half the poverty rate and half the amount of people voting, would you say that’s bad because the ‘people’ didn’t choose that fate?

There is no scenario where we could be guaranteed a particular outcome by getting rid of a large block of voters, unless the intent was to deprive that voting block of their prosperity or basic rights.