: And how, exactly, does being religious negate what you've just said? The
: statement stands by itself, whether or not it is spoken by a religious
: person.
Because of the "first mover" or "first cause" argument for the existence of God, and other similar arguments. It's basically that if motion is only caused by something in motion, then there must have been some ORIGINAL something which was moved only by itself, which caused all other motion. There are many variants, all basically going off of the notion that, if causality is universal, then there must have been something which was not caused, or which was its own cause, at the beginning to start the rest of the chain of causality.
(The fault in this argument is that it assumes a finite, or at least terminal, universe along the temporal dimension, i.e. there was a beginning, and time isn't just infinite in both directions. If the latter is the real case, then there need be no first cause, and indeed the whole notion of "first" at all becomes as silly as a "most negative" number).
So, Vid Boi is saying it's silly that if all sentience, in the S'pht worldview, requires the mechanical intervention of previous sentience, then what of the first sentience that wasn't mechanized, or which mechanized itself? And then he says it's somewhat hypocritical of himself to think that that is silly when he (presumably) holds an almost identical belief himself.
(Of course, the way I've phrased it, it's easy to see how the S'pht's beliefs are not so silly: the Jjaro could have been organic to begin with, and like humankind, 'spontaneously' with no outside intervention become sentient on their own, then [possibly] mechanized themselves into cyborgs, and then built other sentient cyborgs [the S'pht] who kept building more of themselves. In that sense, the existence of organic, emergent intelligence would be a sort of supernatural miracle to the S'pht, the same way the existence of God is to many humans. In fact, the spontaneous emergence of organic intelligence is still considered a miracle itself to many humans. Makes you wonder what impact meeting the Pfhor had on S'pht religion... I mean, aside from that whole decimating their entire culture thing).
