One concern is whether the newly-minted atheist will subsequently prove to emself that black is white, and be killed in the next zebra crossing, as Douglas Adams put it.
For instance, if Alice is so taken with her newfound freedom from faith that she boasts loudly about it and gets herself disowned, expelled, and otherwise disadvantaged, that would kind of suck.
I really don’t see why. A zebra crossing is a sequence of black and white stripes. Exchanging the colours just means you start with white instead of black, or vice-versa. It’s the stripiness that’s important, not the ordering.
I was assuming you’d see both colors as the same. Then a zebra crossing would just look like an ordinary stretch of road. That wouldn’t kill you. What would kill you is to see an ordinary stretch of road as a zebra crossing. If that were to happen, though, it definitely wouldn’t be at the next zebra crossing.
One concern is whether the newly-minted atheist will subsequently prove to emself that black is white, and be killed in the next zebra crossing, as Douglas Adams put it.
For instance, if Alice is so taken with her newfound freedom from faith that she boasts loudly about it and gets herself disowned, expelled, and otherwise disadvantaged, that would kind of suck.
You wouldn’t be killed, you’d just fail to cross the street.
I really don’t see why. A zebra crossing is a sequence of black and white stripes. Exchanging the colours just means you start with white instead of black, or vice-versa. It’s the stripiness that’s important, not the ordering.
I was assuming you’d see both colors as the same. Then a zebra crossing would just look like an ordinary stretch of road. That wouldn’t kill you. What would kill you is to see an ordinary stretch of road as a zebra crossing. If that were to happen, though, it definitely wouldn’t be at the next zebra crossing.