I didn't say we were doomed. I'm saying that the available chemical compounds that make up our food are finite, even if we are barely scratching the surface of the available geothermal and solar sources. Having tons of energy available doesn't mean we'll be able to come up with a way to take inedible substances and turn them into food without some serious side effects.
The major point is that this is the only planet we know of in the observable universe that can support life as we know it, and while some may think that living in a concrete room on protein glop and having water fed intravenously in order to maximize the utility of those compounds constitutes living, I'm suggesting that we stop before we get to that point and preserve the systems that have been functional for hundreds of millions of years before we decided to overload them.
Every biological system is less capable of supporting life than it was the year before. Surely that's not something we want to continue... is there at least some agreement on that?
Thinking the world has some fixed population limit that we've passed is thinkingthat technologicl advancement has stopped. Not likely.
That's not the reality that I'm afraid of. The reality I'm afraid of is the absolute truth that every biological system on earth is in decline right now. How does your technology return the ability of our biological systems to support more life? How are you going to replace all of the world's collapsed fisheries or herd populations? How is technology going to make crop yields grow when you don't have enough oil to create fertilizer, or transport fertilizer, or power earth moving equipment, harvesting equipment, or get the food back to the cities where it's needed before it rots?
The earth is a closed system, and really isn't any different from a very large spaceship. Every indicator points to our life support systems being on the downward slope, and with the addition of the change in climate, all of our current models are getting less and less useful and certainly less predictable.
Since our largest economies are now based on speculative models, you're forcing people with virtually no money to compete with people who have virtually unlimited amounts of money. This will lead to huge price fluctuations which will cause societies on the edge of subsistence to collapse, and that's what, two billion people right now? When one third of the world doesn't have enough food to eat, or doesn't know how much bread will cost tomorrow or the day after, you can guarantee that instability will be a problem.
The earth will regain balance eventually, and our population, as a result of physics, will return to a sustainable size. The question is whether our civilizations will survive with the planet.
But if I were to show you a unicorn foal, and you responded "that CANT be a unicorn, because unicorns dont exist",
If you showed me a unicorn foal, you'd have a unicorn, and I could see if the physical properties of the animal indeed made it a unicorn.
then you would be begging the question. Your claim in your previous post was specifically that the Bible cant be true because the things in it (man rising from grave, etc) cant be true. If thats not circular, then I dont know what is.
No, I said there's no evidence to support the assertions in the bible. That's not circular reasoning. That's a statement of the facts of our mutually observable reality.
If you have any falsifiable hypotheses that can be tested in a mutually observable way to prove the existence of supernaturalism, feel free to provide it.
I am not aware of making or implying that claim in any of my posts. Just because miracles may not be falsifiable, does not mean there is not compelling evidence for the existence of God.
That's exactly what it means. Just because you wish the opposite were true doesn't make it so.
How you would prove the absense of miracles, im not sure. Certainly you are right that THAT is not falsifiable; that doesnt make it wrong.
It's logically impossible to prove the absence of something, since the entire universe can never be known from one point of observation. There are two ways of dealing with that reality: one is to pretend that the natural order can be suspended in your favor based on millennia old religious claims, despite all of the recorded video evidence in world history that says otherwise. The other is to accept the more likely answer that the claims of the bible are false.
Your post was specifically about how discarding faith in favor of "practical acts" was the way to increase prosperity, which I believe Soviet Russia did despite not being prosperous in the least. Certainly what Soviet Russia did was "practical" in the extreme.
Discarding the scientific method by choosing unproven farming methods that had already been discarded by the vast majority of agriculturalists is not practical, it's political.
In a nutshell, there was a pretty firmly established canon by the end of the second century. What you bring up is a myth.
Constantine's legalization of Christianity and eventual persecution of previous religions is the accident of history that led to the canonization of the Bible. Without his dogged unification efforts -- even referring to the Arian controversy as "trifling" -- it's unlikely that Christianity, or the Christian canon, would exist as it does today. Just listen to the man himself:
FORASMUCH, then, as it is no longer possible to bear with your pernicious errors, we give warning by this present statute that none of you henceforth presume to assemble yourselves together. We have directed, accordingly, that you be deprived of all the houses in which you are accustomed to hold your assemblies: and our care in this respect extends so far as to forbid the holding of your superstitious and senseless meetings, not in public merely, but in any private house or place whatsoever. Let those of you, therefore, who are desirous of embracing the true and pure religion, take the far better course of entering the catholic Church, and uniting with it in holy fellowship, whereby you will be enabled to arrive at the knowledge of the truth.
Constantine wiped out all competing sects of Christianity. We can debate about whether he was or was not influential on what dogma was -- of course the Church and Constantine's admirers in the Church would claim otherwise -- but there can be no doubt that without him, Christianity in its current form would not exist.
You are begging the question. There is no point in discussing religion if you have presupposed the answer.
That's not presupposing. Let's say you claimed that unicorns existed, and I said there's no evidence to suggest that they do. That's not begging the question. That's observing our known reality and giving your theory equal weight as I would to any other fantastic claim you could make.
I am taking the very falsifiable position that the existence of God is not provable in our reality, because by your own definition you assert that his existence cannot be proven. It may be terrifically convenient for you to fall back to the theology of unobservable magic, but that doesn't make it true.
To claim that our inability to do something makes it impossible is a bizarre claim indeed. Certainly that is neither supported by reason nor by science.
I don't understand your point here. If I tell you that a human being cannot lift a semi truck, it is absolutely supported by reason and science. If I tell you that a human being cannot rise from the grave after being dead for three days in tomb without any modern medical equipment inside of it, that is absolutely supported by reason and science. If I tell you that praying has zero effect on sick people when the sick person is unaware of the prayers, that's absolutely true and supported by reason and science.
It is backed up by bad science in the same way that many religious claims are backed up by bad theology. In neither case is the bad usage a case against the good usage.
You're failing miserably here. There have been reproducible studies demonstrating the null effect of homeopathy.
How could you construct a reproducible study of bad theology? The simple answer is that you can't, because the whole foundation of theology discards rationality and reality off the bat. You're arguing about the opinions of an invisible sky god who doesn't answer prayers. Like I said in my first post, there's no way to reconcile that with shared observation because there is nothing to observe.
Like in Soviet Russia! Oh wait.
The famines in the USSR are a direct result of discarding science. Just because they were forced to worship the intellect of the Party instead of God doesn't make the effect of irrational planning any less disastrous.
You are doing a gross injustice to history if you want to pretend that Roman violence against christians was about religion. It was about culture and submission; the Romans did not like that Christians refused to bow to the Roman traditions, and that they set themselves apart. To call it a war about religious truth is utterly ridiculous
I'll gladly concede that point if you'll admit that the formation of the canonized Bible was directed by the political desires of Roman Emperor and not by God, and that the content of the Bible was therefore an accident of history.
The official stance of Cuba, Soviet Russia, and China were / are all to reject faith like nowhere else, and it has not yielded the utopia your statements would lead us to expect.
There isn't much difference between religious faith and political faith. They're both based on assumptions and assertions instead of facts and mutually observable results. I'm not a Utopian, but I don't think that it's an accident that nordic nations have the least amount of fundamentalist religious ideas and the best quality of life if you value things like longevity, low crime rates, low violence rates, inexpensive and effective health care, the virtual elimination of poverty, good education systems, and charity per GDP that exceeds most other countries.
In my opinion, that is the result of sane policy based on science inst
Only 12 million were enslaved and brought to the Americas... I don't know why I thought there were orders of magnitude more, but I was entirely incorrect on that point.
Also, I did not mean to suggest Britain was any worse than other colonial powers. They all operated more or less in the same way: exploit and destroy local cultures and governments in order to profit from their natural resources. I have little respect for any colonial empire, and I still strongly disagree with the sentiment that the lives and cultures destroyed in the process in order to establish a Western way of life through simple-minded violence was at all justifiable.
I'm against all forms of colonialism. The reason the poster is a liar is because they claimed that colonialism has had a stabilizing effect, and that the subjugation of all of those cultures crushed by greed and hubris was somehow a moral action. Enforcing your way of life on someone else with violence and death is one of the most immoral acts a nation can collectively make.
I hold all colonial powers, from the Egyptian Empire to the Roman Empire to the American Empire, in equal contempt on that point.
So it is your opinion that any task which requires literary interpretation / analysis is a waste of time? What about discussions, which similarly rest on biases and assumptions--certainly you do not seem to feel that THIS is a waste of time, or you would not be discussing at all.
A task to examine a document that presupposes as true that people can rise from the grave, and presupposes that a human can drive demons out of the sick into pigs, is a waste of time. Again, you don't spend any time on the divinity of Zeus because we know that lightening bolts aren't thrown by some guy living in a cloud. I don't waste time squabbling over the specific pettiness of trinitarians vs non-trinitarians, or whether transubstantiation really exists, because it's quite obvious that they don't. Otherwise you would gladly show me how to detect a demon inside of a sick person and drive that demon out. Otherwise you would turn water into wine on television, because that would obviously bring more people to believe that the Bible has some truth to it. But you can't do those things, because those acts are not possible in the reality that we live in.
The fact that others will draw faulty conclusions from the book doesnt impact that in the least, any more than the existence of homeopathy supporters damages the credibility of modern medicine.
Homeopathy is not part of modern medicine because there is no science to support it, not because people draw faulty conclusions from the scientific method.
Wars have been fought over Torah vs Quran
Are they not religious documents?
People love to inflict their will on other people, and they love to use whatever they can as a justification for it. You can try to make this unique to religion, but you have to turn a blind eye to huge swaths of history to do so. For the record, for the first 400 years or so it was Romans killing Christians because of their beliefs (either in favor of paganism, or state worship-- not sure if it was ever in favor of atheism).
Right... for the first 400 years people continued to fight about whose opinion was correct concerning their guesses at the Gods who ran the world. It was a time of violence and widespread ignorance, which was not cured with more guesses on the motives of God or Gods, but by the practical realization that the only knowledge worth knowing was knowledge that could be shared and experienced by everyone, regardless of their political or religious affiliation.
In tens of thousands of years of religious nonsense, human mortality and quality of life rarely improved. Only with the introduction of the sharing of information and the wholesale rejection of faith acts in favor of practical acts did we get increased yields in crops, or better medical outcomes. Some of that knowledge was contained in religious documents, because that was our first attempt at passing on important information, but only after the arrival of the demands of reproducible results were we able to discard the true from the untrue.
So you question the reliability of the document, but then decide for yourself that some of the bits are reliable based on.....what?... See below. Also, the way those NON BIBLICAL sentences were written seems to hypothetically indicate an immediate audience-- this is something THEY would see. All irrelevant, because again, NON BIBLICAL.
You are arguing with yourself on that point.
Ill note that we generally try to be as "picky" with any important document, like the Constitution.
In the two hundred and thirty odd years since that document was written, no one has claimed that a part of it was not a part of it. That sort of foolishness is reserved for communities of faith.
Trying to get my theological answer to a question while assuming those two
They freed countless countries from despotism and replaced it with rule of law. They brought peace to unstable areas by providing a stable government.
Count them. Which invasions and subjugations of entire peoples have led to stable governments? Are you talking about Iraq? Egypt? Somalia? Sudan? Nigeria? Afghanistan? How are those former colonies faring these days?
They built up industries in other countries and brought them from a medieval or bronze age state, into the industrial age.
Name one British program to develop African manufacturing capacity. There are zero, or virtually zero, because the purpose of colonialism is to subjugate a population in order to steal their natural resources so the parasite nation -- in this case, the UK -- can take those raw materials and create wealth by processing them. Even in cases where manufacturing had to be located in the country occupied by the British, those factories were never owned or under the control of the native population. That's why they spent hundreds of years trying to kick the British out.
They championed individual rights and humane treatment, when most of the world's governments treated people as disposable.
The British empire enslaved hundreds of millions of people and then worked them to death in colonies across the world. They killed millions through their quaint "expeditions" on their hunt for the next civilization to exploit. Did you forget about slavery and war? I know those parts of British history only lasted for a few hundred years; maybe it just slipped under your radar.
No, you simply misunderstood what my argument was. My argument was focused on the fact that you can be dealing with interpretation, and still judge whether someone gets it right or not.... Regardless of the subject of the text you are looking at, you generally bring the same skills (critical thinking; deductive reasoning; context / audience / genre) to bear on it. I would hope you do not use rationality for one subject and irrationality for another; though the knowledge used may differ, the basic approach should not.
You can judge, but you can't arrive at a reproducible answer, because everyone will have their own biases and assumptions. That's the whole point of the enlightenment: to ignore those sort of activities for what they are, which is largely a waste of time and a waste of resources.
You are essentially arguing about what the ultimate truth is that exists in God's consciousness. The only problem is that depending on the answer and the person asking the question, it's possible that they will consider it moral to kill and/or harm others and themselves because they believe our lives are pit stops on the road to eternal bliss. There are virtually no other arguments about historical documents that can lead to such consequences.
You here (and in the paragraph that followed) seemed to imply that we can know Jesus lived, but that his words are untrustworthy; and yet they are worth treating as philosophical truth. I have trouble reconciling those.
I have the same opinion as Thomas Jefferson: picking out the philosophical observations of Christ out of the supernatural nonsense of the Bible is like picking diamonds out of a dunghill.
It also doesnt answer the question of why on earth you would take the words of a lunatic or liar as any kind of moral guide-- for that is what Jesus must be if not the Christ.
Newton was a genius and a complete crackpot. I can accept Newtonian physics and discard his belief that alchemy was possible.
(As an aside, your conclusion is what happens when supernaturalism infects a person's mind. It demands the individual discard basic rationality when it conflicts with superstition.)
its a "this is what you shall see"
Okay, where are the True Christians drinking poison, handling deadly snakes, and healing people with faith? How does one detect a demon? How does one drive a demon out?
If these claims weren't in the Bible, you wouldn't be wasting any time thinking about them. That's why you haven't spent any time at all examining the historicity and claims of Zoroaster, Mithras, Dionysus, Osiris, or Zeus.
More to the point, basically every modern translation marks that as "We're pretty sure this isnt scriptural"
So, I'm not the only one being picky about what to believe in the Bible, eh?
It regards sickness as some malevolent force inflicted on an innocent populace
Yes, all of those generations of infants dying of preventable diseases must have really deserved it. What kind of sick morality are you investing your time in?
When someone claims "Thoreau wrote this", they are making a claim that can be falsified.
That is a gross misrepresentation of the claims of religion. If Thoreau had claimed to have seen a dead man rise from the grave, ascend to heaven, and further assert that the individual was also born to a virgin and the son of an eternal, omniscient, omnipresent deity, then there would be some similarities. Thoreau never claimed his fiction was reality.
If they are doing literary interpretation it becomes trickier, but generally even there you can look at what Thoreau wrote and determine whether their interpretation fits with the genre, context, and writing style, as well as any tropes that he is wont to using.
Again, you're side-stepping the meat of your own argument. Attributing certain gospels to historical individuals does not mean that their words have any truth or value.
It is much the same with theology. It is generally a historical fact that the Bible was recognized as the source of authority. Even in the RCC, as I understand it, church tradition is itself subordinate to the properly interpreted Bible (though I may be wrong on this). That being the case, there is no reason to treat it differently: someone makes a theological statement while claiming to be Christian, their claim can be evaluated by the Bible.
There is every reason to treat it differently: the claims of a philosopher and the claims of a supernaturalist are two entirely different issues. One is observing human behavior and attempting to understand the underlying motivations of easily observable behavior, and the other claims that a Deity exists, and the Deity can be known, and they have proof of what the Deity knows as well as the values of that Deity.
If not the Lord, then a liar; and if not a liar, then a lunatic. The only way out is to start throwing away those historical records which displease you. I suppose that would put you in the company of men we have considered great, of course.
Even if one assumes that Jesus lived, and he was born of a virgin, and that he died and rose out of the grave, that does not mean that his teachings have moral value exceeding that of any other philosopher. If Lazarus had said that murdering Romans in their sleep was God's will after he was raised from the dead, the fact of his resurrection wouldn't make his statement true. In the modern world, no one follows survivors of technical death around with a notepad and assumes every word out of that person's mouth to be the truth.
I am not aware of any place in the Bible that it suggests you should forego the use of a doctor, so this seems to be a bit of a non sequitur.
"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."
If God wanted to heal sick people, why didn't Jesus talk about germ theory instead of faith healing? Why did Jesus tell his followers that they had the power to drive out devils instead of informing them that the diseases which terrified the whole world were merely bacterial and viral infections that could often be treated with simple, natural remedies? Why does the old testament tell lepers to sacrifice birds in a specific manner instead of telling them how to research treatments for the bacteria that cause it?
Either God didn't know about germ theory two thousand years ago, or God thought it would be just for billions of people to die miserably of easily preventable diseases in order to preserve the rules that he forced upon himself and his creation, or Jesus was yet another individual claiming to be the Messiah who was completely ignorant of incredibly important facets of re
The difference is that a scientist makes falsifiable assertions, so if someone is a quack, they are quickly disregarded as a poor scientist or just a lunatic. Their ideas cannot become science until someone else can independently verify their hypothesis. That's why all of the millions of calculations that allowed you to post your message ended up with a satisfactory result: it was based on science.
Supernatural claims cannot be scientific, otherwise they wouldn't be called supernatural. Since religious people refuse to submit falsifiable hypotheses, it is impossible for their views to leave the realm of quackery in any scientific sense.
Is it possible for religious traditions to provide insights on human nature? Of course -- it's one of the reasons I'm an admirer of Christ as a philosopher, and many thinkers who existed within the church, including people alive today such as Desmond Tutu.
However, that is where the utility of religion ends. The very nature of its asserted belief system leads to division, rancor, and violence, because there is no way to reconcile opposing viewpoints through rigorous experimentation. That's why there are tens of thousands of religions and largely one set of accepted scientific theories and laws. That's why in states with the necessary resources, such as America, even the most devout individual will forsake the advice of their religious texts for that of a doctor. The reason is because the doctor has the shared knowledge of millions of ideas based on what does exist, and their religious text can only contain asserted knowledge of what the writer hoped to exist.
What kind of prick does a minister have to be to believe and teach what the Bible says?
We could get into an interesting argument on why the evangelical movement pushes for constitutional amendments for a untraditional lifestyle choices like being gay, but not for other things in the two spots the Bible mentions homosexuality, like wool blends, not eating shellfish, etc.
We could have an even more interesting argument about why the importance of being non-materialist and helping the poor is called socialism instead of the fulfillment of the morality found in the Bible. Where is the constitutional amendment demanding that we help the poor?
But I think you'd rather type a series of exclamations and question marks.
Wait... Didn't Clinton sign the Defense of Marriage Act? Didn't Obama say that he believed that marriage was between a man and a woman? Why are you not wishing for them to die horribly in a storm?
I don't wish for anyone to die horribly in a storm, which is why I said nothing of the sort. I said it would be ironic if the storm hit Tampa for reasons that should be self-evident.
As far as Billy Graham goes, on the scale of evangelical leaders he's not the worst.
But he's also remained curiously silent while his son goes on rants claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the government, or that "[Barack Obama's] problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim."
And for the record, I'm a Republican and I don't know a single person who likes Falwell
The founder of the Moral Majority had no support within the GOP?
Captured on the tapes, Graham agreed with Nixon that Jews control the American media, calling it a "stranglehold" during a 1972 conversation with Nixon. He went considerably beyond that in offensive remarks characterized as anti-Semitic by Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and evangelical author Richard Land.
The Rev. Billy Graham urged North Carolina voters Wednesday to support an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage, a move that an observer said was highly unusual but another said was in keeping with the minister's moral beliefs.
"Watching the moral decline of our country causes me great concern," said Graham, 93, who lives near Asheville. "I believe the home and marriage is the foundation of our society and must be protected."
There are better men.
I don't know of a single Republican President who has ever sat in Falwell's church.
No, they are required to prostrate themselves at Liberty University -- founded by Fallwell and his friends -- for a commencement speech. Romney and Bush Jr paid homage, and McCain was even forced to show up in 2008 after calling Falwell an "agent of intolerance" when he ran in 2000.
The poster may be referring to the repeated statements by GOP celebrity favorites (Fallwell, Graham, B-list megachurch pastors, etc) who claim that disasters like Katrina and 9/11 are the fault of America's fall from the grace of the Christian God.
So, it would be quite ironic to see a hurricane battering the place where they are trying to hold a convention.
When Charles Swift, a Lieutenant Commander with JAG, went to meet his client and terrorist suspect Salim Hamdan, the jailers at Guantanamo asked him to take off his name tag, so the suspect wouldn't know who he was. Swift asked how he was expected to establish a relationship with his client if he isn't allowed to know his name, and eventually told them that he wasn't going to take it off.
Hamdan was laying in his cell, with his hands shackled to his feet in a fetal position. Once Swift convinced them to let him out of his chains, he then tried to shake Hamdan's hand as they were introduced, and again, the officials there said they weren't allowed to have any physical contact for national security reasons.
In the documentary Secrecy, he stated the following:
If you're to the point that you can be the executioner without telling anyone about it, and not having anyone look at it, and being able to do all that in secret, what's left? What's left?
If I can decide the reasons you will be held in jail for the rest of your life, and I alone get to know them, and I don't have to tell anyone, what's left?
When laid bare, their argument is, there is no limit on Presidential power. The President ultimately decides his power, and no one else. Yet, fundamentally that was what they had claimed for the commissions. Fundamentally, that was what they had claimed for interrogations for wiretapping, all of these things, and done it in secrecy.
But the Hamdan case had the opportunity to begin to pull back the blanket of that bare, raw assertion of power.
Never mistake the actual purpose of the TSA and the security state: it's a raw assertion of power of the Executive to ignore due process. That erosion of the foundations of our legal system represents a continuing threat to our democracy, and at least in my opinion, far exceeds the dangers posed by terrorism. It's literally eliminating the difference between our society and the society that totalitarian extremists desire; the only difference is in who has the key to our chains.
What happened to the Hamdan case? The Supreme Court ruled the commissions at Guantanamo lacked "the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949."
In response, the US Congress proposed a new law, the Military Commissions Act, aimed trying to give the President the power to create a commission that could ignore the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions. And it passed in 2006.
The United States has 700 military bases in over a hundred countries, far eclipsing the military presence of any other nation. The rest of the world has no choice but to pay attention to the elections inside the empire.
The police care because recording them violates their deeply held opinion that they have the right to do whatever they want without any threat of punishment. That attitude permeates government from the top all the way down, and unfortunately has the predictable effect of corrupting nearly every person who gets the slightest bit of state-backed power.
Now that budgets are being slashed, the fascist tendency towards punishment and extortion through fines for small offenses has only become more engrained in our culture. How are they going to pay for their tanks and UAVs without making every deviation from total conformity illegal and expensive?
This happens to most -- if not all -- closed off religious communities. When people are above the law, and they fear no prosecution because their followers will protect them even when they are caught red handed, they will abuse their positions of authority and victimize the weak. It's human nature.
That's why the civilized world aims to use third parties to administer the law equally, regardless of who the perpetrator is. It's an idea hated by religious people, because it often exposes their leaders as the flawed and sometimes evil human beings that they are. Once reality becomes your enemy, you're doomed to a life of obedience to the power structure that lets you live in a fantasy world, which can lead perfectly normal people to protect monsters. In their minds it's not possible for their rabbi or pastor or priest to be evil, because acceptance of that fact is too damaging to their worldview.
but I'm a business traveler and know how these things look.
You're defending the molestation of a four year old girl because the government thought she was a threat to national security because she wanted to say goodbye to her grandmother. This is one of those McCarthy era moments where I have to ask, do you have any sense of decency or shred of humanity left in your body? Or do you really believe that molesting children and the elderly makes you safer? Even if we pretend that's true, why in the hell do you find that acceptable?
The threats we should accept as the price to live in a free and open society are tiny in comparison to the injustice of living in a militarized police state. Giving the government more power to molest, imprison, search, and detain people with impunity are the real dangers to our democracy, not the memory of a single terrorist attack 10 years ago. We have locks on the cockpit doors. We have Air Marshals in the cabin. We can retain some reasonable security checkpoints. But when your society tells you that it's acceptable for an adult to put their hands all over a child because they are a threat to national security, you can be damn sure you don't live in a free and rational society.
I also travel for business, and I would rather die in a terrorist attack than live in a police state where people who want to travel are subject to molestation.
If you think the purpose of government is to concentrate power into the hands of unelected military men, then fine, there's no oppression to worry about. If you think the American experiment should be about having the freedom to know what our government is doing with our resources, and changing course if we think they are incorrect, then yes, the million or so people with the security clearances that allow them to know the truth are the oppressors. As we speak they are taking away our right to decide our own destiny.
The President now has the authority to indefinitely jail or assassinate anyone suspected of terrorism. No warrants. No due process. No jury. We are one bad election and/or disaster away from dictatorship, precisely because the truth is purposefully kept from ordinary citizens.
To quote another "non sequitur", those who trade liberty for security deserve neither.
"One great engine to affect this in America would be a large standing army, maintained out of our own pockets, to be at the devotion of our oppressors. This would be introduced under pretext of defending us, but, in fact, to make our bondage and misery complete."
israel probably did this, and they went to great lengths to make sure it was clandestine. we all know the horrible political repercussions israel would face from america if it were caught doing something as nefarious as killing scientists or hacking into power plants in a foreign nation with the largest minority jewish population in the middle east.
The same America that did nothing when they bombed Iraqi nuclear facilities in 1982? The same America that bombed those same facilities in 1991?
Why do you think we support Israel in the first place? We can train and equip them, and everyone once in a while they'll invade a non-aligned country, or carry out assassinations of suspected terrorists without having to get our hands dirty. They are a military client state that exists, for us at least, expressly for the purpose of carrying out matters of American national interest, including murdering people that we don't like.
"On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly... I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran, and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe."
I can only laugh at the people who flip out because they are fired/expelled/whatever because someone found something inappropriate in a facebook or twitter post. I mean, really... what did they expect?
I think they expected their employers to mind their own damn business. I'm not a huge fan of neo nazis working in hospitals, but there are some out there, and they have to separate their ideology from their job. I may not like the fact that they think certain things or do certain things when they are not at work, but as long as they carry on doing their work to the best of their ability, they are not (and should not) be fired.
Now, if you don't value freedom whatsoever, and you want to give governments and corporations nearly unlimited power to prowl all of the data on the internet and punish you for having thoughts, that's a choice. A stupid, shortsighted, but very effective way to eliminate any notion of freedom, if that's what you'd like to do. The internet is infrastructure, just as the mail and telephone system are, so why should we let the government search and seize that if they aren't allowed to tap our phones and search all of our mail? Conversations between myself and my friends, wherever they are and however we communicate, should be considered private and off limits without a warrant, period.
It is frightening to see these soft forms of fascism immediately embraced because, in your opinion, these people are "stupid." What happens when your political views become illegal? What happens if prohibition becomes law in your county, and the government starts jailing and harassing people who talk about drinking? If you allow power centers to take away the rights of others, do you honestly think they're going to stop when they reach you?
All of those projections are based on serious increases in health care costs, which may hold if the United States continues to be the only developed nation to have private health care and no public option. If you instead use the numbers from countries like Germany, where the per capita healthcare expenditure is something like $2500 per year, we would show a surplus.
And you're wrong; your shortsighted investment in oversized vehicles and oversized houses instead of energy efficient alternatives is certainly contributing to America's lack of efficiency, which will be a major factor for economic success in a future of energy scarcity.
Also, Greece has less per capita debt than the United States. They have problems, for sure, but if you think people in the United States aren't suffering, you're just not paying attention. At some point during the year, half the children in the United States will eat because they have access to food stamps. The two tier third world economy may be less noticeable here, but it's happening, and getting worse every day.
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I didn't say we were doomed. I'm saying that the available chemical compounds that make up our food are finite, even if we are barely scratching the surface of the available geothermal and solar sources. Having tons of energy available doesn't mean we'll be able to come up with a way to take inedible substances and turn them into food without some serious side effects.
The major point is that this is the only planet we know of in the observable universe that can support life as we know it, and while some may think that living in a concrete room on protein glop and having water fed intravenously in order to maximize the utility of those compounds constitutes living, I'm suggesting that we stop before we get to that point and preserve the systems that have been functional for hundreds of millions of years before we decided to overload them.
Every biological system is less capable of supporting life than it was the year before. Surely that's not something we want to continue... is there at least some agreement on that?
Thinking the world has some fixed population limit that we've passed is thinkingthat technologicl advancement has stopped. Not likely.
That's not the reality that I'm afraid of. The reality I'm afraid of is the absolute truth that every biological system on earth is in decline right now. How does your technology return the ability of our biological systems to support more life? How are you going to replace all of the world's collapsed fisheries or herd populations? How is technology going to make crop yields grow when you don't have enough oil to create fertilizer, or transport fertilizer, or power earth moving equipment, harvesting equipment, or get the food back to the cities where it's needed before it rots?
The earth is a closed system, and really isn't any different from a very large spaceship. Every indicator points to our life support systems being on the downward slope, and with the addition of the change in climate, all of our current models are getting less and less useful and certainly less predictable.
Since our largest economies are now based on speculative models, you're forcing people with virtually no money to compete with people who have virtually unlimited amounts of money. This will lead to huge price fluctuations which will cause societies on the edge of subsistence to collapse, and that's what, two billion people right now? When one third of the world doesn't have enough food to eat, or doesn't know how much bread will cost tomorrow or the day after, you can guarantee that instability will be a problem.
The earth will regain balance eventually, and our population, as a result of physics, will return to a sustainable size. The question is whether our civilizations will survive with the planet.
If you showed me a unicorn foal, you'd have a unicorn, and I could see if the physical properties of the animal indeed made it a unicorn.
No, I said there's no evidence to support the assertions in the bible. That's not circular reasoning. That's a statement of the facts of our mutually observable reality.
If you have any falsifiable hypotheses that can be tested in a mutually observable way to prove the existence of supernaturalism, feel free to provide it.
That's exactly what it means. Just because you wish the opposite were true doesn't make it so.
It's logically impossible to prove the absence of something, since the entire universe can never be known from one point of observation. There are two ways of dealing with that reality: one is to pretend that the natural order can be suspended in your favor based on millennia old religious claims, despite all of the recorded video evidence in world history that says otherwise. The other is to accept the more likely answer that the claims of the bible are false.
Discarding the scientific method by choosing unproven farming methods that had already been discarded by the vast majority of agriculturalists is not practical, it's political.
Constantine's legalization of Christianity and eventual persecution of previous religions is the accident of history that led to the canonization of the Bible. Without his dogged unification efforts -- even referring to the Arian controversy as "trifling" -- it's unlikely that Christianity, or the Christian canon, would exist as it does today. Just listen to the man himself:
Constantine wiped out all competing sects of Christianity. We can debate about whether he was or was not influential on what dogma was -- of course the Church and Constantine's admirers in the Church would claim otherwise -- but there can be no doubt that without him, Christianity in its current form would not exist.
But I suppose now you will subm
That's not presupposing. Let's say you claimed that unicorns existed, and I said there's no evidence to suggest that they do. That's not begging the question. That's observing our known reality and giving your theory equal weight as I would to any other fantastic claim you could make.
I am taking the very falsifiable position that the existence of God is not provable in our reality, because by your own definition you assert that his existence cannot be proven. It may be terrifically convenient for you to fall back to the theology of unobservable magic, but that doesn't make it true.
I don't understand your point here. If I tell you that a human being cannot lift a semi truck, it is absolutely supported by reason and science. If I tell you that a human being cannot rise from the grave after being dead for three days in tomb without any modern medical equipment inside of it, that is absolutely supported by reason and science. If I tell you that praying has zero effect on sick people when the sick person is unaware of the prayers, that's absolutely true and supported by reason and science.
You're failing miserably here. There have been reproducible studies demonstrating the null effect of homeopathy.
How could you construct a reproducible study of bad theology? The simple answer is that you can't, because the whole foundation of theology discards rationality and reality off the bat. You're arguing about the opinions of an invisible sky god who doesn't answer prayers. Like I said in my first post, there's no way to reconcile that with shared observation because there is nothing to observe.
The famines in the USSR are a direct result of discarding science. Just because they were forced to worship the intellect of the Party instead of God doesn't make the effect of irrational planning any less disastrous.
I'll gladly concede that point if you'll admit that the formation of the canonized Bible was directed by the political desires of Roman Emperor and not by God, and that the content of the Bible was therefore an accident of history.
There isn't much difference between religious faith and political faith. They're both based on assumptions and assertions instead of facts and mutually observable results. I'm not a Utopian, but I don't think that it's an accident that nordic nations have the least amount of fundamentalist religious ideas and the best quality of life if you value things like longevity, low crime rates, low violence rates, inexpensive and effective health care, the virtual elimination of poverty, good education systems, and charity per GDP that exceeds most other countries.
In my opinion, that is the result of sane policy based on science inst
Only 12 million were enslaved and brought to the Americas... I don't know why I thought there were orders of magnitude more, but I was entirely incorrect on that point.
Also, I did not mean to suggest Britain was any worse than other colonial powers. They all operated more or less in the same way: exploit and destroy local cultures and governments in order to profit from their natural resources. I have little respect for any colonial empire, and I still strongly disagree with the sentiment that the lives and cultures destroyed in the process in order to establish a Western way of life through simple-minded violence was at all justifiable.
I'm against all forms of colonialism. The reason the poster is a liar is because they claimed that colonialism has had a stabilizing effect, and that the subjugation of all of those cultures crushed by greed and hubris was somehow a moral action. Enforcing your way of life on someone else with violence and death is one of the most immoral acts a nation can collectively make.
I hold all colonial powers, from the Egyptian Empire to the Roman Empire to the American Empire, in equal contempt on that point.
A task to examine a document that presupposes as true that people can rise from the grave, and presupposes that a human can drive demons out of the sick into pigs, is a waste of time. Again, you don't spend any time on the divinity of Zeus because we know that lightening bolts aren't thrown by some guy living in a cloud. I don't waste time squabbling over the specific pettiness of trinitarians vs non-trinitarians, or whether transubstantiation really exists, because it's quite obvious that they don't. Otherwise you would gladly show me how to detect a demon inside of a sick person and drive that demon out. Otherwise you would turn water into wine on television, because that would obviously bring more people to believe that the Bible has some truth to it. But you can't do those things, because those acts are not possible in the reality that we live in.
Homeopathy is not part of modern medicine because there is no science to support it, not because people draw faulty conclusions from the scientific method.
Are they not religious documents?
Right... for the first 400 years people continued to fight about whose opinion was correct concerning their guesses at the Gods who ran the world. It was a time of violence and widespread ignorance, which was not cured with more guesses on the motives of God or Gods, but by the practical realization that the only knowledge worth knowing was knowledge that could be shared and experienced by everyone, regardless of their political or religious affiliation.
In tens of thousands of years of religious nonsense, human mortality and quality of life rarely improved. Only with the introduction of the sharing of information and the wholesale rejection of faith acts in favor of practical acts did we get increased yields in crops, or better medical outcomes. Some of that knowledge was contained in religious documents, because that was our first attempt at passing on important information, but only after the arrival of the demands of reproducible results were we able to discard the true from the untrue.
You are arguing with yourself on that point.
In the two hundred and thirty odd years since that document was written, no one has claimed that a part of it was not a part of it. That sort of foolishness is reserved for communities of faith.
Count them. Which invasions and subjugations of entire peoples have led to stable governments? Are you talking about Iraq? Egypt? Somalia? Sudan? Nigeria? Afghanistan? How are those former colonies faring these days?
Name one British program to develop African manufacturing capacity. There are zero, or virtually zero, because the purpose of colonialism is to subjugate a population in order to steal their natural resources so the parasite nation -- in this case, the UK -- can take those raw materials and create wealth by processing them. Even in cases where manufacturing had to be located in the country occupied by the British, those factories were never owned or under the control of the native population. That's why they spent hundreds of years trying to kick the British out.
The British empire enslaved hundreds of millions of people and then worked them to death in colonies across the world. They killed millions through their quaint "expeditions" on their hunt for the next civilization to exploit. Did you forget about slavery and war? I know those parts of British history only lasted for a few hundred years; maybe it just slipped under your radar.
You can judge, but you can't arrive at a reproducible answer, because everyone will have their own biases and assumptions. That's the whole point of the enlightenment: to ignore those sort of activities for what they are, which is largely a waste of time and a waste of resources.
You are essentially arguing about what the ultimate truth is that exists in God's consciousness. The only problem is that depending on the answer and the person asking the question, it's possible that they will consider it moral to kill and/or harm others and themselves because they believe our lives are pit stops on the road to eternal bliss. There are virtually no other arguments about historical documents that can lead to such consequences.
I have the same opinion as Thomas Jefferson: picking out the philosophical observations of Christ out of the supernatural nonsense of the Bible is like picking diamonds out of a dunghill.
Newton was a genius and a complete crackpot. I can accept Newtonian physics and discard his belief that alchemy was possible.
(As an aside, your conclusion is what happens when supernaturalism infects a person's mind. It demands the individual discard basic rationality when it conflicts with superstition.)
Okay, where are the True Christians drinking poison, handling deadly snakes, and healing people with faith? How does one detect a demon? How does one drive a demon out?
If these claims weren't in the Bible, you wouldn't be wasting any time thinking about them. That's why you haven't spent any time at all examining the historicity and claims of Zoroaster, Mithras, Dionysus, Osiris, or Zeus.
So, I'm not the only one being picky about what to believe in the Bible, eh?
Yes, all of those generations of infants dying of preventable diseases must have really deserved it. What kind of sick morality are you investing your time in?
That is a gross misrepresentation of the claims of religion. If Thoreau had claimed to have seen a dead man rise from the grave, ascend to heaven, and further assert that the individual was also born to a virgin and the son of an eternal, omniscient, omnipresent deity, then there would be some similarities. Thoreau never claimed his fiction was reality.
Again, you're side-stepping the meat of your own argument. Attributing certain gospels to historical individuals does not mean that their words have any truth or value.
There is every reason to treat it differently: the claims of a philosopher and the claims of a supernaturalist are two entirely different issues. One is observing human behavior and attempting to understand the underlying motivations of easily observable behavior, and the other claims that a Deity exists, and the Deity can be known, and they have proof of what the Deity knows as well as the values of that Deity.
Even if one assumes that Jesus lived, and he was born of a virgin, and that he died and rose out of the grave, that does not mean that his teachings have moral value exceeding that of any other philosopher. If Lazarus had said that murdering Romans in their sleep was God's will after he was raised from the dead, the fact of his resurrection wouldn't make his statement true. In the modern world, no one follows survivors of technical death around with a notepad and assumes every word out of that person's mouth to be the truth.
"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."
If God wanted to heal sick people, why didn't Jesus talk about germ theory instead of faith healing? Why did Jesus tell his followers that they had the power to drive out devils instead of informing them that the diseases which terrified the whole world were merely bacterial and viral infections that could often be treated with simple, natural remedies? Why does the old testament tell lepers to sacrifice birds in a specific manner instead of telling them how to research treatments for the bacteria that cause it?
Either God didn't know about germ theory two thousand years ago, or God thought it would be just for billions of people to die miserably of easily preventable diseases in order to preserve the rules that he forced upon himself and his creation, or Jesus was yet another individual claiming to be the Messiah who was completely ignorant of incredibly important facets of re
The difference is that a scientist makes falsifiable assertions, so if someone is a quack, they are quickly disregarded as a poor scientist or just a lunatic. Their ideas cannot become science until someone else can independently verify their hypothesis. That's why all of the millions of calculations that allowed you to post your message ended up with a satisfactory result: it was based on science.
Supernatural claims cannot be scientific, otherwise they wouldn't be called supernatural. Since religious people refuse to submit falsifiable hypotheses, it is impossible for their views to leave the realm of quackery in any scientific sense.
Is it possible for religious traditions to provide insights on human nature? Of course -- it's one of the reasons I'm an admirer of Christ as a philosopher, and many thinkers who existed within the church, including people alive today such as Desmond Tutu.
However, that is where the utility of religion ends. The very nature of its asserted belief system leads to division, rancor, and violence, because there is no way to reconcile opposing viewpoints through rigorous experimentation. That's why there are tens of thousands of religions and largely one set of accepted scientific theories and laws. That's why in states with the necessary resources, such as America, even the most devout individual will forsake the advice of their religious texts for that of a doctor. The reason is because the doctor has the shared knowledge of millions of ideas based on what does exist, and their religious text can only contain asserted knowledge of what the writer hoped to exist.
Is that a faith-based fact?
According to Gallup, American confidence in organized religion is at an all time low. Also, 7 out of 10 Americans see religious influence declining in America.
We could get into an interesting argument on why the evangelical movement pushes for constitutional amendments for a untraditional lifestyle choices like being gay, but not for other things in the two spots the Bible mentions homosexuality, like wool blends, not eating shellfish, etc.
We could have an even more interesting argument about why the importance of being non-materialist and helping the poor is called socialism instead of the fulfillment of the morality found in the Bible. Where is the constitutional amendment demanding that we help the poor?
But I think you'd rather type a series of exclamations and question marks.
I don't wish for anyone to die horribly in a storm, which is why I said nothing of the sort. I said it would be ironic if the storm hit Tampa for reasons that should be self-evident.
As far as Billy Graham goes, on the scale of evangelical leaders he's not the worst.
But he's also remained curiously silent while his son goes on rants claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the government, or that "[Barack Obama's] problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim."
The founder of the Moral Majority had no support within the GOP?
There are better men.
No, they are required to prostrate themselves at Liberty University -- founded by Fallwell and his friends -- for a commencement speech. Romney and Bush Jr paid homage, and McCain was even forced to show up in 2008 after calling Falwell an "agent of intolerance" when he ran in 2000.
The poster may be referring to the repeated statements by GOP celebrity favorites (Fallwell, Graham, B-list megachurch pastors, etc) who claim that disasters like Katrina and 9/11 are the fault of America's fall from the grace of the Christian God.
So, it would be quite ironic to see a hurricane battering the place where they are trying to hold a convention.
Here's something more pathetic:
When Charles Swift, a Lieutenant Commander with JAG, went to meet his client and terrorist suspect Salim Hamdan, the jailers at Guantanamo asked him to take off his name tag, so the suspect wouldn't know who he was. Swift asked how he was expected to establish a relationship with his client if he isn't allowed to know his name, and eventually told them that he wasn't going to take it off.
Hamdan was laying in his cell, with his hands shackled to his feet in a fetal position. Once Swift convinced them to let him out of his chains, he then tried to shake Hamdan's hand as they were introduced, and again, the officials there said they weren't allowed to have any physical contact for national security reasons.
In the documentary Secrecy, he stated the following:
Never mistake the actual purpose of the TSA and the security state: it's a raw assertion of power of the Executive to ignore due process. That erosion of the foundations of our legal system represents a continuing threat to our democracy, and at least in my opinion, far exceeds the dangers posed by terrorism. It's literally eliminating the difference between our society and the society that totalitarian extremists desire; the only difference is in who has the key to our chains.
What happened to the Hamdan case? The Supreme Court ruled the commissions at Guantanamo lacked "the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949."
In response, the US Congress proposed a new law, the Military Commissions Act, aimed trying to give the President the power to create a commission that could ignore the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions. And it passed in 2006.
The United States has 700 military bases in over a hundred countries, far eclipsing the military presence of any other nation. The rest of the world has no choice but to pay attention to the elections inside the empire.
The police care because recording them violates their deeply held opinion that they have the right to do whatever they want without any threat of punishment. That attitude permeates government from the top all the way down, and unfortunately has the predictable effect of corrupting nearly every person who gets the slightest bit of state-backed power.
Now that budgets are being slashed, the fascist tendency towards punishment and extortion through fines for small offenses has only become more engrained in our culture. How are they going to pay for their tanks and UAVs without making every deviation from total conformity illegal and expensive?
Silence and self-rule: Brooklyn's Orthodox child abuse cover-up
This happens to most -- if not all -- closed off religious communities. When people are above the law, and they fear no prosecution because their followers will protect them even when they are caught red handed, they will abuse their positions of authority and victimize the weak. It's human nature.
That's why the civilized world aims to use third parties to administer the law equally, regardless of who the perpetrator is. It's an idea hated by religious people, because it often exposes their leaders as the flawed and sometimes evil human beings that they are. Once reality becomes your enemy, you're doomed to a life of obedience to the power structure that lets you live in a fantasy world, which can lead perfectly normal people to protect monsters. In their minds it's not possible for their rabbi or pastor or priest to be evil, because acceptance of that fact is too damaging to their worldview.
but I'm a business traveler and know how these things look.
You're defending the molestation of a four year old girl because the government thought she was a threat to national security because she wanted to say goodbye to her grandmother. This is one of those McCarthy era moments where I have to ask, do you have any sense of decency or shred of humanity left in your body? Or do you really believe that molesting children and the elderly makes you safer? Even if we pretend that's true, why in the hell do you find that acceptable?
The threats we should accept as the price to live in a free and open society are tiny in comparison to the injustice of living in a militarized police state. Giving the government more power to molest, imprison, search, and detain people with impunity are the real dangers to our democracy, not the memory of a single terrorist attack 10 years ago. We have locks on the cockpit doors. We have Air Marshals in the cabin. We can retain some reasonable security checkpoints. But when your society tells you that it's acceptable for an adult to put their hands all over a child because they are a threat to national security, you can be damn sure you don't live in a free and rational society.
I also travel for business, and I would rather die in a terrorist attack than live in a police state where people who want to travel are subject to molestation.
If you think the purpose of government is to concentrate power into the hands of unelected military men, then fine, there's no oppression to worry about. If you think the American experiment should be about having the freedom to know what our government is doing with our resources, and changing course if we think they are incorrect, then yes, the million or so people with the security clearances that allow them to know the truth are the oppressors. As we speak they are taking away our right to decide our own destiny.
The President now has the authority to indefinitely jail or assassinate anyone suspected of terrorism. No warrants. No due process. No jury. We are one bad election and/or disaster away from dictatorship, precisely because the truth is purposefully kept from ordinary citizens.
To quote another "non sequitur", those who trade liberty for security deserve neither.
"One great engine to affect this in America would be a large standing army, maintained out of our own pockets, to be at the devotion of our oppressors. This would be introduced under pretext of defending us, but, in fact, to make our bondage and misery complete."
--Alexander Hamilton
israel probably did this, and they went to great lengths to make sure it was clandestine. we all know the horrible political repercussions israel would face from america if it were caught doing something as nefarious as killing scientists or hacking into power plants in a foreign nation with the largest minority jewish population in the middle east.
The same America that did nothing when they bombed Iraqi nuclear facilities in 1982? The same America that bombed those same facilities in 1991?
Why do you think we support Israel in the first place? We can train and equip them, and everyone once in a while they'll invade a non-aligned country, or carry out assassinations of suspected terrorists without having to get our hands dirty. They are a military client state that exists, for us at least, expressly for the purpose of carrying out matters of American national interest, including murdering people that we don't like.
"On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly... I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran, and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe."
--Rick Santorum
I think they expected their employers to mind their own damn business. I'm not a huge fan of neo nazis working in hospitals, but there are some out there, and they have to separate their ideology from their job. I may not like the fact that they think certain things or do certain things when they are not at work, but as long as they carry on doing their work to the best of their ability, they are not (and should not) be fired.
Now, if you don't value freedom whatsoever, and you want to give governments and corporations nearly unlimited power to prowl all of the data on the internet and punish you for having thoughts, that's a choice. A stupid, shortsighted, but very effective way to eliminate any notion of freedom, if that's what you'd like to do. The internet is infrastructure, just as the mail and telephone system are, so why should we let the government search and seize that if they aren't allowed to tap our phones and search all of our mail? Conversations between myself and my friends, wherever they are and however we communicate, should be considered private and off limits without a warrant, period.
It is frightening to see these soft forms of fascism immediately embraced because, in your opinion, these people are "stupid." What happens when your political views become illegal? What happens if prohibition becomes law in your county, and the government starts jailing and harassing people who talk about drinking? If you allow power centers to take away the rights of others, do you honestly think they're going to stop when they reach you?
All of those projections are based on serious increases in health care costs, which may hold if the United States continues to be the only developed nation to have private health care and no public option. If you instead use the numbers from countries like Germany, where the per capita healthcare expenditure is something like $2500 per year, we would show a surplus.
And you're wrong; your shortsighted investment in oversized vehicles and oversized houses instead of energy efficient alternatives is certainly contributing to America's lack of efficiency, which will be a major factor for economic success in a future of energy scarcity.
Also, Greece has less per capita debt than the United States. They have problems, for sure, but if you think people in the United States aren't suffering, you're just not paying attention. At some point during the year, half the children in the United States will eat because they have access to food stamps. The two tier third world economy may be less noticeable here, but it's happening, and getting worse every day.