Many people find raising a family more important than civil participation, especially given the futility of the latter.

Health instead of PE isn't ideal, but I can understand why a school would choose to do that given limited time in the school day.

I doubt your school board considers teaching sports important. I think they would agree with me that it's a side effect of playing active sports.

Matter and energy have nothing to do with consciouses. Consciousness if a particular human characteristic for which there is no reason to attribute it to the universe.

At it's best, pantheism is a way to say "the world is sooo cool".

At worst it's a personal relationship with something that is not anything like a person. It's having the universe as your imaginary friend.

Something being a religion to some people does not make the overall thing a religion in this kind of discussion.

I would also add to this that calling something a religion to someone is often hyperbole. Sports are a prime example.

Where is this dictionary with an essay on the nuanced meaning of religion that you are describing? That's certainly not what you quoted above.

What alternative could you provide for being physically fit during the school year?

Not receiving a passing grade in PE is exactly the same as failing. It amounts to a penalty for being injured.

I'm not under such an impression.

I'm just baffled why you think it's so important that kids learn the rules of sports.

You have proven that you understand basic logic and the idiot above who said "a suicidal person isn't necessary to themselves", even though inherently for that person to overcome suicidal depression and stay alive they obviously have to exist, is a perfect example of a shithead.

When people do not grasp what you mean despite it being blatantly obvious to you, it doesn't mean they're shitheads or idiots. It means you suck at communicating.

Living things don't view themselves as things. Life is an arbitrary line in the complexity of things that grow. Things are another arbitrary line people draw to organize the world. Living things are only a thing to beings with certain level of mental capability. Specifically, you need self awareness to have a concept of being a distinct living being. Being autonomously replicating and growing is not enough. Only if you are self aware can you then have a value of that thing you call your "self".

The first point here is that you need self awareness to have value, not merely life.

Then the second point is that being of value to yourself does not amount to being valuable objectively.

I feel like this it's important to separate these two points of contention.

A living thing is still a thing when it dies. The only difference is in what it's doing, not its nature.

I could just as well say crystal growth values its own existence, and dies when a crystal stops growing.

But the fact that there are biological or psychological factors that stop a person from ending their life does in fact mean that to some extent they value their life.

Does the fact that I jerk my knee as if wishing violence on the air when a doctor hits it with a mallet to some extent mean I hate air? Surely not. Yet a literal knee jerk reaction is a biological factor causing us to do something. And you can concoct a reason why at some level our bodies really do want to kick something. But we don't. We don't take much responsibility for this reflexive action. What we do reflexively does not suggest any deep values we have. Quite the opposite, primitive biological factors are a defense for allegations of culpability.

For some people, their biology may not work the way it does for everyone else. They might not have knee jerk reflexes. They might not have other preservation mechanisms working. We might call these people ill. But we wouldn't call these people as somehow having fundamentally different values.

Therefore, Value is a thing of the mind. Anything not of the mind, anything we call mindless is irrelevant to value.

You could say that gravity is necessary to the stability of planets, but at the same time that it's unnecessary to the stability of atoms. So which is it, necessary or unnecessary? You generally need to say necessary to what. But here we don't. When you don't do this you imply that there is some ultimate implied metric that is in some sense superior to all others. For example, I could say the only thing that's necessary is we remember that we are all people. That's saying something. Something that assumes a universal value. Something that is in contradiction to the claim that nothing is necessary.

Now I do agree that the the implied value of a broad statement like that is not necessarily "personal". But it is, by nature of how it's used, somehow ultimate.

The most basic thing that can replicate is a crystal growing from a seed. You could say it grows in size to gain more aligned atoms in it's lattice. It's not even life, but it loosely fits your definition of something that could value. Yet this is so far off from what comes to mind when we think of value that it suggests that you're describing something else entirely.

The definition you give is useful when one cannot know what someone actually thinks. It provides a way to judge if a person values something without getting in their head. But it doesn't mean it applies to things without heads, without minds. Your definition is more precise, but it's off target.

Value is a thing of the mind. You need a mind to value something, and like wise to be able to make choices based on values. Value is a hallmark of free will. Crystals and primitive life don't have values.

To say something is necessary requires a value system to assert what that thing is necessary for. The only value anything has is the value given by people. Another way to say this is nothing is inherently valuable. Therefore nothing is inherently necessary.

However, this is not the most clear turn of phrase.

Life is not of any value to primitive lifeforms because primitive life forms have no concept of value. Living things don't "try" to keep living. Things that perpetuate their own kind dominate by virtue of that mechanism, but this is the product of mindless chemistry.

To truly value life you at least need self awareness.

Slavery is actually illegal in every country today. The last country to abolish slavery was Mauritania in 1981. But otherwise this is a true characterization.

Also, no country is without some amount of human trafficking and slavery.

It could be excessive in another way, one that's not health-related.

Who gave you that impression? Are you sure it wasn't just a particular PE teacher who felt all his students should come out of his class with a proper appreciation of Sunday night sports?

More importantly, why do you think kids need to learn the rules of sports and physical games? Why should that be part of any education curriculum?

I remember PE activities also included games like sharks and minnows. Would those rules also need to be learned by kids?

Teaching the rules of football is not in any way a goal of PE. PE students playing football may learn the rules, but that's neither here nor there.

So teaching the rules of sports to substitute playing PE is even sillier. It's a waste of everyone's time to make sure injured students know the rules of sports.

The minimal sentence should be the one for the most severe offense. Also, sentencing should take into account how the punishment works.

Thanks for the welcome :)

If I have a collection of both true and false statements, and I discard the false statements, have I watered down the collection?

Ideologies tend to have some principles that are more critical than others. If you take out too many ideas from a unified world view, to say that the remainder is "watered down" is very charitable.

Sure, a society can function without everyone agreeing about why certain behavioral standards are maintained. Historically the explanation was "because we (the most feared authorities) said so". This morphed into the "divine command" meta-ethic, but it's basically the same thing. Fear of negative consequences is still the foundation of morality and ethics.

Fear of negative consequences does have a certain convenience for people in power, so there may be social reasons why it's popular. But I disagree that it is the proper foundation for morality and ethics, and I'm not the first person to say so.

Can you name some [philosophical underpinnings of ethics] that do and ... don't [rise to the category of religion], to illustrate?

My rule of thumb for if something is a religion is if it is more similar to Christianity or Ancient Greek philosophy. Buddhism qualifies as a religion because it asserts that you are reincarnated when you die and cannot end your suffering that way. Confucianism would be a philosophy, as long as you decouple it from ancestor worship and any specific rituals.

Do you think there was a time in human history that no one practiced any form of religion?

No, even nomads tend to have oral explanations of how the world works. I imagine such oral traditions didn't take long to form.

Yes it would be because it would put theists in the same category as agnostics. Theism is a gnostic position but this debate topic would suggest otherwise.