panpareil

The young men are not all poor. Some are just angry enough to risk death to destroy our civilization and replace it with a global caliphate. It is not heaven they are looking toward but a society where they are significant.

I would consider going if it was an act of homesteading. In other words, to claim the territory I explored for my own. Otherwise it is a waste of lives. What is to be gained for their families by the sacrifice of their lives. Explorers have usually been rewarded by a share of the discovery. Which in this case would be the property rights to Mars.

The paper this article is based on is titled "Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief", by Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, published in Science, 336(27), Apr, 2012, pages 493-6. This study does not test belief in general, but specifically belief in the predominant Western God. The methods tested are ways to diminish this belief, my assumption is this is an a first step toward a program of diminishing this particular belief in public schools.

Actually Santa is a god. He is the remnant of the horned god that got grafted into Christian tradition. Santa is very old and can be traced back to the paleolithic.

Feeling insulted and someone insulting you are two separate things. Only the later is an action against you. Whereas reacting to the former can be a means of passive aggression, which is an act comparable to the later. So in essence, when one claims to being insulted one can justify attacking another, even if they where never attacked. Blame throwers create the mud that progress spins its wheels in.

I cannot get this out of my head.

And the fact that a man has died. Also contemplate the fact that no matter how bad you think some foreign dictator is there is always someone in that country who is worse to take his place. Most dictators are like scabs on a wound. Getting rid of them may make the wound heal or it may just become an infected bloody mess, like Iraq. A wound must heal from the inside out or it will never heal at all. When it is ready the scab will be sloughed off. Now that the king is dead, Iran and the terrorists will be moving in on Saudi Arabia, to create their great terrorist caliphate, and then to move on the west.

They are the same metaphor by a different name, but represent a real undefinable condition, like Jazz.

And being accepted into the kingdom of god as the consequence of being "forgiven", as was stated in the opening question. My point was forgiveness is not necessary to enter the kingdom of god, but instead doing what is necessary to reveal it is all that is required. Sin is irrelevant. Original sin is nonexistent.

The kingdom of god is everywhere. All you have to do is lift and turn over a stone. But, God does not lift it for you, nor does he impede you from lifting it yourself.

More interesting is the link in this article to an article about the Gospel of Jesus's Wife. (Ever feel like you're on bus next to a guy with a tinfoil hat talking to himself.)

Perhaps it would be better as some religious adherents believe to cut their little heads off for not showing the proper deference to God? On the scale of current world affairs this is jaywalking.

I agree that all know what is right. It is what one finds acceptable in the way others act toward oneself.

Quotes from THE BUFFER ZONE. There is a framework here that while admirable suffers from internal inconsistencies and deficiencies. It seems to be libertarian in nature but does not grasp the workings that would realize the goals it desires and espouses. That said, the ULC is the closest religious concept to perfection.

A few more titles where the readers have caused the misery and death of hundreds of millions of human beings: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson What Every Mother Should Know, by Margaret Higgins Sanger I would also add the work of W.E.B. Du Bois although I have found no seminal work that outlines his pro-socialist anti-capitalist elitism.

What cannot be separated when discussing fairness is the equity of what is given in relation to the equity of what is returned. The equity of what is received only stands when there is an equality in what is given. When nothing is given or when giving does not have a relationship to what is being received then the focus is on the equality of what is received. But when what is being given has an effect on what one is receiving then what becomes important is the ratio of what is being given and received. In other words, It is fair to receive the same when all give the same or when giving is not relevant to what is received. Otherwise fairness requires all to give the same to receive the same.Everyone gets the same portion at a free lunch. But when there is a bill what one gets is equivalent to what one pays.

All you are saying is the book that is read the most is the most evil.

Check out the thoughts conveyed in this little tome. They are just not right.

The most evil book I have ever read or yet come across is Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse also known as Comte de Lautréamont. Very thin, very hard to read not because of the difficulty of the language but because of the difficulty of the imagery.

I understand the problem, I understand the proposed solutions, and I understand the limits of the solutions proposed. I am perfectly willing to accept what works, especially what works best. It is fair to oppose what does not work or what works less efficiently when it concerns my life and the lives of others. I would be more amiable to consider proposals with previous real world results. If something will work on the whole of society it will work just as well on a small piece where copious metrics can be gathered for an appropriate period of time, which for something like Obamacare would be over a whole lifetime, since it has lifelong effect. This instead of the usual "it sounds good to me lets try it and see what happens, we can always tweak it later". This is a sandbox, a controlled sub-environment that can be tested. The entire environment cannot be sandboxed or controlled, which is why empirical snapshots of partial data are not informative. Deductive logic is required to solve problems that cannot be sandboxed. Actually Wal-mart guesses, and adjusts their guess when it is wrong. They are unable to correctly project with certainty. I would expect no more in an indeterminate world. Which is why certain things are expensive, you have to pay to share in the results of others' risks. But only if you want a share, others who do not seek a share have no ethical responsibility to pay. It's like someone delivering something to your house and expecting you to pay for it even though you didn't order it. You are not required to pay for it or even to ship it back, in fact you could demand payment if your property is damaged in the process. My archetype for those who demand payment for supposed service is the squeegee guy who jumps on your car when you are trapped at a red light. He smears oily muddy news papers all over your windows and then demands payment for his "service". Sometimes the value of a mans effort and work is less than zero, even if he thinks it is more. Coercive force is not fair unless it is counteracting coercive force, and only then when it serves no other end. I would also think that science that requires coercive force is no longer ethical science.

I have a personal theory about ignorance driving a persons or a groups acting with or describing the rest of the world. It will reveal it when it is complete. This article is helpful. I'm not the type of person to say things cannot be done. I'm more the type of person that does things other say cannot be done. (With a substantial sense of relish I might add.) But there is nothing that would lead one to believe that knowing the desires of humanity could be done, except lack of information. There are 7 billion disparate separate people ever dying and being replaced, speaking hundreds of different languages with a sense of desire that is constantly changing, driven by individual circumstances on unique personalities. On top of this each of the attributes for this system contains a certain amount of unpredictability due to miscommunication and misunderstanding, and an element of inherent randomness as does every other physical process. Even if it were possible to take a snapshot of all the information presented therein, it would never repeat again, and would have no predictive value greater than random. In any event if one chooses to undertake the challenge feel free, but do so by allowing all others to be equally free not to participate, and utilize ones own resources instead of wasting the resources of others. That would seem to be fair, no. Besides, to force people into a situation that attempts to read their desires queers the results, would it not. The real problem is to not disturb the freedom. The prime directive.

What I am claiming is that the desires of all individuals is information that is diffuse and ever-changing, and there no current mechanism to gather, hold, much less analyze this information. It is known as the knowledge problem. And the complexity of this task is in continual growth. It is also the primary reason why centralized control has no means of fulfilling the desires of the populous, because it can not know what they want. So, at present, fulfilling the desires of the populous is not a process that can be carried out by any government devised. Nothing so far devised has an efficacy greater than random.

The "Everything you know is wrong" moment is a very nice one. But it is hard to hold on to. Good luck.

Not ignorance of a knowable, but knowledge of an unknowable. Apples and Oranges. Sharing is not fair. It is compassionate, it is empathetic, it is self serving for emotional and social reasons by assuaging ones guilt and enhancing ones social status. But it has nothing to do with fairness. Fairness implies balance, equity, reciprocality, in essence a two way exchange. Sharing is a one way transaction, a gift, charity. These meanings of fairness have no functional connection with the meaning associated with sharing here. The focus is on the distribution of material assets and labor, which is associated with transactional fairness. Of course transactions do not happen in a vacuum. They happen among all the other transactions in society, which is how market value is established. The clearing value at which a transaction can voluntarily happen and both parties benefit is the value that is equal to or greater than the value someone else is willing to transact. You either accept that or you forgo the transaction. It is your valuation of what you will receive that dictates the limit of what you will pay. If the buyer pays more than the seller asks that portion is charity. If the seller takes less than someone else will pay then that is also charity. Of course no one can know what someone else will pay unless they are a current bidder for the item. If you are unaware of what someone shares with you how can you ascertain what is fair to return, or if your obligation has already been met? Marriage is a voluntary socialist state I have entered gladly. At this level, socialism works just fine. Property is shared and everyone's contribution to the family unit is evident. In society at large the contribution of others is not evident, leading to a reasonable reluctance in sharing. As I have just said there is no way to ascertain if someone else has contributed to my well being as my family has. Without this information, sharing resources that belong not just to myself but to my family, with a stranger could be a detriment not just to myself but to my family, with which I have a previous and verified fiduciary relationship. This is why to diminish the standard of sharing with family or those who have made a verified contribution in favor of a strange who has not is in itself unfair. Sharing instead of trading leads to a system of inequity and unfairness simply due to the fact that a strangers level of contribution is not available information, and that hides those who take more than they receive. Just the same as the evidence of large assets does not reveal whether a stranger gives less than they receive. There is no evidence that a society based on sharing is any fairer than a society based on trading. It does not even make sense. Fairness is not in anyway dependent on selflessness. One can act fairly and be selfish. Acting fairly yields benefits which squares nicely with selfishness, regardless of the benefit for others. There is only one meaning of fairness that applies to the distribution of goods and services.

“These findings call into question the standard assumption in economics that preferences are innate and stable,” The above quote from the article is illustrative of why non-Austrian economists have it all wrong, and why empiricism does not work in economics. Even with essential goods and services you can never know exactly what people will want, it is always a whim of the moment. So, a controlled market driven by even the brightest will fail more than the free market which is driven by and therefore responsive to these whims. Also, this article is conflating fairness with sharing, which are two different things. Fairness is the perceived equity and balance of giving and receiving among all parties. In sharing there is inherent imbalance and inequity in giving and receiving. Sharing does not lead to fairness, but is dissonant with fairness. I also disagree that fairness corresponds with community. Fairness is just as possible among strangers as it is with perceived family. The stress on the necessity of community is due to the authors conflation of sharing with fairness. With sharing a sense of community is necessary since the action is one way. And fairness is not antagonistic to selfishness, only when one is ignorant of the personal advantages of fairness in a given situation. Understanding fairness is less confusing when one focuses on equity of actions, instead of results. I can understand why that is because results are more easily understood than the complex actions necessary to produce them.