Hello, everyone!
(Questions are at the bottom, but the intervening text gives some context, which you might want to read)
Before I begin, I just gotta reflect on things. It's amazing, you know? To think that, almost a decade ago, a little over a month before my 14th birthday, having recently shed my Christian dogma and converted to Deism, I had come to Sciforums under the username "Rokkon," and I gave the Cosmological Argument, an argument that I didn't even realize had already been made, in order to "disprove Atheism." One heaping dose of awful articulation later, and the whole thing went out of control. After the dust had settled and things had calmed down, I sifted through the threads, and found a post from pretty early on, one that I must have missed, showing that the premise of "only nothing can come from nothing," which the Cosmological Argument depended upon, wasn't quite true. With my one reason to believe in any deity taken away, I realized that there was no reason keeping me from being an Atheist myself.
For a while after that, I laid low in the world of online debating, wearing a mask of conformity so I could survive my high school years, and when I graduated, when I was free to be myself again, when I could explore the world, discuss things, and eventually take up the sword of reason and slay the trolls that keep invading Atheism-themed Facebook pages, I didn't know who I was any more. To this day, at 23 and a half years old, I'm still not sure who I am or how my whole mentality can be so far removed from the human norm, and all the psychological theories I can find can only identify a few scattered bits of anything recognizable to established psychology...
Ah, but I'm not here to explore the mysteries of my freakishly anomalous mind. I'm here to get advice on copyright law!
You see, I was debating a religious troll on the Atheist Republic Facebook page a few days ago, as I often find myself doing, and apparently I was doing pretty good at it, because I got this guy to give me an actual case to back up his preaching, the first time he ever did anything like that. He posted a video of a recent debate between Dr. Turek (Christian) and Dr. Shermer (Atheist), and after finding the video to be unbearably long, I instead did some research on the debate, and not only did I find the summary of Turek's argument, I also found that he was in fact using Hastings Rashdall's Moral Argument. Looking that up, I recognized the rationale from plenty of Christian claims of various degrees of formality, and I realized that this argument was the very prototype of the ones I had encountered before. This was an argument that no other Atheists wanted to touch, no matter the format of the debate. It was an unstoppable "silver bullet" against Atheistic morality, but even with the informal versions, I knew what the problem was. I knew why no one else could refute the arguments (it was mostly due to what appears to be a unanimously collective implicit memory, which led everyone else to a false definition of "objectivity" that arbitrarily limited itself to purely physical things). And even better? I could refute the arguments. And so, I did, each and every time I found them. At that point, once I had found the prototype, refuting Hastings Rashdall's Moral Argument was as simple as typing up the text.
After that, I've tried to confirm the magnitude of what I had just done, by researching for any refutations of Rashdall's argument, prior to my own. Which brings me to my first question:
1. Has anyone made a refutation of Hastings Rashdall's Moral Argument prior to my own? I just want to make sure I'm not coming up with something that's been done before (like I did when I first came here, so long ago). I haven't found anything myself, but I could have missed something.
And, more to the point of this thread:
2. I want to put a copyright license on my refutation for publishing purposes. However, while rewards would be pretty nice, that's not why I made the argument. No, this is a gift from me to the world, a contribution to humanity's progress, and so on. At the same time, however, I'm not sure I could trust a plagiarist to present and/or represent any moral argument of mine, and I'm also aware that many would try to manipulate my words to suit an agenda contrary to my own. As such, I've been looking at some of the licenses by Creative Commons, and I'm not sure if there's a combination of licenses that fits my goal here. The Attribution license looks pretty good (to protect against plagiarism), but I'm not sure about the rest. I want to make sure that people don't misrepresent what I'm saying, but I'm not sure if the No Derivatives and/or Share Alike licenses would be what I want, or if they would go too far. I don't want my ideas to be misrepresented, but if someone thinks they can improve on what I've done, I don't want to stop them. Therefore, I must ask: What copyright license should I use?
(Questions are at the bottom, but the intervening text gives some context, which you might want to read)
Before I begin, I just gotta reflect on things. It's amazing, you know? To think that, almost a decade ago, a little over a month before my 14th birthday, having recently shed my Christian dogma and converted to Deism, I had come to Sciforums under the username "Rokkon," and I gave the Cosmological Argument, an argument that I didn't even realize had already been made, in order to "disprove Atheism." One heaping dose of awful articulation later, and the whole thing went out of control. After the dust had settled and things had calmed down, I sifted through the threads, and found a post from pretty early on, one that I must have missed, showing that the premise of "only nothing can come from nothing," which the Cosmological Argument depended upon, wasn't quite true. With my one reason to believe in any deity taken away, I realized that there was no reason keeping me from being an Atheist myself.
For a while after that, I laid low in the world of online debating, wearing a mask of conformity so I could survive my high school years, and when I graduated, when I was free to be myself again, when I could explore the world, discuss things, and eventually take up the sword of reason and slay the trolls that keep invading Atheism-themed Facebook pages, I didn't know who I was any more. To this day, at 23 and a half years old, I'm still not sure who I am or how my whole mentality can be so far removed from the human norm, and all the psychological theories I can find can only identify a few scattered bits of anything recognizable to established psychology...
Ah, but I'm not here to explore the mysteries of my freakishly anomalous mind. I'm here to get advice on copyright law!
You see, I was debating a religious troll on the Atheist Republic Facebook page a few days ago, as I often find myself doing, and apparently I was doing pretty good at it, because I got this guy to give me an actual case to back up his preaching, the first time he ever did anything like that. He posted a video of a recent debate between Dr. Turek (Christian) and Dr. Shermer (Atheist), and after finding the video to be unbearably long, I instead did some research on the debate, and not only did I find the summary of Turek's argument, I also found that he was in fact using Hastings Rashdall's Moral Argument. Looking that up, I recognized the rationale from plenty of Christian claims of various degrees of formality, and I realized that this argument was the very prototype of the ones I had encountered before. This was an argument that no other Atheists wanted to touch, no matter the format of the debate. It was an unstoppable "silver bullet" against Atheistic morality, but even with the informal versions, I knew what the problem was. I knew why no one else could refute the arguments (it was mostly due to what appears to be a unanimously collective implicit memory, which led everyone else to a false definition of "objectivity" that arbitrarily limited itself to purely physical things). And even better? I could refute the arguments. And so, I did, each and every time I found them. At that point, once I had found the prototype, refuting Hastings Rashdall's Moral Argument was as simple as typing up the text.
After that, I've tried to confirm the magnitude of what I had just done, by researching for any refutations of Rashdall's argument, prior to my own. Which brings me to my first question:
1. Has anyone made a refutation of Hastings Rashdall's Moral Argument prior to my own? I just want to make sure I'm not coming up with something that's been done before (like I did when I first came here, so long ago). I haven't found anything myself, but I could have missed something.
And, more to the point of this thread:
2. I want to put a copyright license on my refutation for publishing purposes. However, while rewards would be pretty nice, that's not why I made the argument. No, this is a gift from me to the world, a contribution to humanity's progress, and so on. At the same time, however, I'm not sure I could trust a plagiarist to present and/or represent any moral argument of mine, and I'm also aware that many would try to manipulate my words to suit an agenda contrary to my own. As such, I've been looking at some of the licenses by Creative Commons, and I'm not sure if there's a combination of licenses that fits my goal here. The Attribution license looks pretty good (to protect against plagiarism), but I'm not sure about the rest. I want to make sure that people don't misrepresent what I'm saying, but I'm not sure if the No Derivatives and/or Share Alike licenses would be what I want, or if they would go too far. I don't want my ideas to be misrepresented, but if someone thinks they can improve on what I've done, I don't want to stop them. Therefore, I must ask: What copyright license should I use?
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