Personally, I think the question of whether or not some religion is actually true is a pretty interesting one. From your tone I'm going to guess you've already decided that none is, though.
That's making a whole lot of assumptions about the definition of religion, what (if anything) it means for a religion to be "true", and what my opinions on the subject are.
I have been giving the matter much consideration here.
On the specific topic of religion and sex, I'm working in a chapter about that. Suffice it to say I'm taking a rather different tack than Matthew.
I mean that religion has often perverted the human sexual drive for it's own ends.
Matthew 19:12: "...and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake."
"Chastity...the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions." -- Aldous Huxley
The idea that if you have sex outside of the teachings of religion X, you'll anger god(s) - that you'll be sent to the Region of Thud if you and your lover don't get a permission slip from a priest - is a perversion.
And believe it or not, science tends to progress over the years. Decades ago doctors endorsed cigarettes, but no one even tries to cite that as a counter to the idea that cigarette smoking causes cancer and heart disease.
There was a brief spike of "OMG ice age!" stories in the popular press in the 1970s. Why? Because we had some nasty winters (at least on the East Coast) in the 70s, so the idea of an ice age (proposed in a minority of papers based on inadequate data) captured the popular imagination.
The idea that there was scientific consensus - or even a strong suspicion - in the 1970s predicting an ice age is pure bunk.
Unless we radically cahnge our economy-- empower government, and ultimately live life the way they want us to.
Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Your right to pollute the air ends where my lungs begin. Neither of these concepts requires a overly-powerful government to enforce.
We now understand that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are a form of pollution that damages the biosphere.
Monogamy actually appears in a number of different animal species.
Not so much. The idea that many animals "mate for life" seems to be romantic wish fulfillment on the part of scientists. It's being contradicted more and more by DNA evidence which shows that, for example, the Papa Bird that Mama Bird shares the nest with, is often not the Baby Bird Daddy.
...the only animal species I know of in which we can be really confident that monogamy is a lifelong activity, is a peculiar flatworm that lives as a parasite in the intestines of fish. And in this one particular species, the two individuals meet while they are still adolescent, and their bodies literally fuse together, and from then on of course they remain altogether true to each other, until death do they not part. But the reality is that as we look at other species, the more we look at them, the more it is revealed that they do engage in what we call 'extra pair copulations'.
Consider that if ~ 50% of married people are adulterous, then there's a huge fraction (~ 50%) who are monogamous.
Only if those all of those ~50% of married people are on their first marriage, and never had pre-marital sex. Even then, we can only say they've been monogamous so far.
We're not counting "serial monogamy" as a genuine form of monogamy here. After all, screwing your mistress tonight, your wife tomorrow, and your mistress again on Friday is just a very rapid form of serial monogamy...
Despite the perversions introduced by religion, the number of people who are truly life-long monogamous is rather small. According to the CDC, men 30-44 years of age report a median of about 7 sexual partners in their lifetimes; women, about four.
Genes may have some effect, but if the result is not acceptable to the thinking part of me, they are simply over-ridden.
The point is that the genes determine, or at least influence, what the "thinking part" of you find acceptable.
You are not consciousness inhabiting a body. You are consciousness generated by a body. The nature of that consciousness is determined by the nature of the body. The nature of the body is determined by genetics and by environment.
Which would you rather be: 1) the guy that sleeps around with lots of women and gets lots of kids, or 2) the guy that stays with a single woman and gets taxed to death to support all the single mothers, left over from the first guy.?
How about 3) the guy that sleeps around with lots of women and has no kids?
and all of this for absolutely NO GUARANTY of a result of ANY KIND!!!
If someone comes in waving a gun around, there's no guarantee that it's real, that it's loaded, or that he's going to shoot. And if you dive for cover, you'll get dirt all over your new suit, incurring annoying cleaning bills - and there's no guarantee that you won't get shot anyway.
Nor had the state taken over flood control. The Army Corps of Engineers was still working on flood control projects in the area, though they were massively underfunded.
In 2004, USACE requested $11 million for the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project; Bush's budget requested only $3 million. Congress increased the amount to $5.5 million. In 2005, the Corps requested $22.5 million - Bush, $3.9 million, and Congress approved $5.7 million.
Investigative articles by the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of the Iraq boondoggle as a reason why funding for the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project dried up in 2003. $250 million in crucial projects was left incomplete, including work right at the site of the main breach.
The failure of the levvies, and the lack of resources at the state level to deal with it, were the results of deadly incompetence at the federal level.
But it was federalism that allowed the democrats in power in the 20 years before Katrina...
Democrats in power for 20 years? Where?
On the federal level, we had a Republican in the White House from 1980-1992 and 2000-2008. From 1994 to 2006, there was GOP control of the House. 1994-2001 and 2002-2006, Republican control of the Senate.
At the state level, Louisiana had a Republican governor 1980-1984, 1991-1992, and 1996-2004.
Do you expect the feds to show up when your house is on fire?
If you will read more closely, you will see that the poster to whom I was responding didn't specify "the federal government", just said "zero assistance from the government."
And if my house was on fire due to failure of a system built by the federal government to maintain trade routes for interstate commerce, fsck yes, I would expect federal aid. The New Orleans disaster wasn't Katrina, it was the failure of the levies that were built by the feds as part of an effort to keep the Mississippi navigable.
Compared to the American Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War, the crackdown on civil rights has been tame
And compared to Joe Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer was a piker at murder. Your point?
I'll also note that WWI and WWII were actual declared wars. We are not in a state of war with any nation at the moment.
compared to the dangerous faced with new asymmetrical weapons and tactics.
More people die from drowning every year than were killed on 9/11; to claim that we face a terrorist danger necessitating that we abandon our civil liberties is ridiculous.
So aircraft flying into some of the tallest buildings on Earth, and one flying to the largest office building on Earth and leaving 3,000 dead is an "idea"? No, that is a tacit act of war.
No, it is an act of mass murder. It's was no more an act of war than the Oklahoma City bombing was.
The story submitter could have just as easily linked to *both* stories about illegal arrests before both conventions.
Anyone who RTFA would see the author's observation that "...Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether."
So if the submitter had an agenda to conceal that abuses happened in Denver, he did a crappy job of it.
However, the Denver abuses seem to have been mostly garden-variety police thuggery; these Minnesota raids involved the FBI and included months-long espionage and infiltration. One of the groups specifically targeted is "I-Witness Video", a group that did a great job capturing exposing thuggery and perjury by police during the 2004 Republican convention.
However, I fail to comprehend why someone in Arizona should be paying into a fund to support flooding in Louisiana.
For the same reason I, living outside of Baltimore, Maryland, pay into a fund that supports the the military defense of people living in California, Arizona, and Louisiana. It's the nature of a nation - common defense. That defense includes not just the threat of foreign invasion, but natural disasters, pandemics, and domestic insurgencies.
I have a "go kit.".. I *expect* exactly zero assistance from the government.
Self-reliance is all well and good, but doesn't change the fact that government action should be expected also. I have smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and an home escape plan, but I still expect the fire department to come if my house is on fire. I have guns, but I still expect the army or state militia to be deployed if the British attack Baltimore again. I have first aid supplies and training, but I still expect the EMTs to show up in an emergency.
It's below sea level in one of the most hurricane prone places on earth. Why are rebuilding and living there?...Use the money to permanently relocate the population, not rebuild their soon-to-be blown away homes again.
Are you going to do that for everyone living along fault lines in California? In tornado-prone areas of the the midwest? There's not going to be anywhere left...
Remember that the damage to New Orleans three years ago was not from Katrina, but from the incompetence of the USACE and contractors in the construction of the levies.
e-voting can be just as secure as, or perhaps even more so than, paper ballots.
No, it cannot, because it cannot be as transparent as the use of paper ballots.
who needs a political aristocracy to legislate public policy for us when we have the technology to allow every citizen to vote from the convenience of their own computer on policy issues?
Anyone who wants the people who develop policy to be informed individuals of above-average intelligence and education.
I don't want a "political aristocracy", but I do want legislation to be crafted by people who have the time and expertise to analyze all the relevant issues, not people voting during the commercial breaks in "America's Top Model".
I'm all for town meeting and direct democracy on local issues. On issues of national import, though, we don't need mob rule deciding on our energy policy, or how best to avoid nuclear proliferation. We need policy wonks.
Just remember that the only difference between the government and the Mafia is that the government controls the schools.
..and enforces property rights. You want the deed to your house to mean something, you need the government that issued it to be funded. That means taxes.
The government also builds roads and other vital infrastructure. You want to be able to travel the country on paved streets, you need the government to be funded. That means taxes.
Is government too intrusive? Verily. Can we get rid of it? Not before Universal Enlightement.
Repeat after me, ALL taxes come from the consumer. There is no such thing as a "corporate" tax. They just apply whatever taxes they have to pay to the cost of their goods.
In response to a tax, a corporation can raise its prices, it can cut its dividends, or it can slow its investment in expansion. In a functioning market, the corporations that raises prices will lose business and the ones that cut its dividends or expansion will gain business.
If corporate taxes cause prices to go up, that's a symptom of market failure.
I know whining about taxes is as American as apple pie, but the issue here is not whether states can impose taxes, but whether they can make merchants collect them.
Are you changing the meaning of "conservative"? What is your definition?
Let's look at the party circa 2000 via the Clinton legacy.
Clinton was an economic conservative, such that Alan Greenspan said he "was the best Republican president we've had in a while". He favored policies like NAFTA, and telecomm and financial services deregulation, that benefited the interests of the investment class over those of workers and consumers.
He was also a social conservative who was willing to institutionalize bigotry with his "don't ask don't tell" bullshit, willing to implement capital punishment, willing to bomb the shit out of other nations to advance American interests, and to continue Nixon's "War on Drugs" (even as he admitted to his own drug use).
It's no surprise his wife was president of her chapter of the College Republicans.
This is the legacy that Gore would have apparently continued; little wonder many liberals or progressives found the possibility less than inspiring and stayed home or voted for Nader.
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Well, I did date a rocket scientist for several years...
That's making a whole lot of assumptions about the definition of religion, what (if anything) it means for a religion to be "true", and what my opinions on the subject are.
I have been giving the matter much consideration here.
On the specific topic of religion and sex, I'm working in a chapter about that. Suffice it to say I'm taking a rather different tack than Matthew.
I mean that religion has often perverted the human sexual drive for it's own ends.
Matthew 19:12: "...and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake."
"Chastity...the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions." -- Aldous Huxley
The idea that if you have sex outside of the teachings of religion X, you'll anger god(s) - that you'll be sent to the Region of Thud if you and your lover don't get a permission slip from a priest - is a perversion.
Power over sex is tremendous power over people.
Except, no, they weren't.
There was much less data available three decades ago (duh!), but even still there 7 peer-reviewed papers in the 1970s predicting global cooling. There were 42 predicting warming.
And believe it or not, science tends to progress over the years. Decades ago doctors endorsed cigarettes, but no one even tries to cite that as a counter to the idea that cigarette smoking causes cancer and heart disease.
There was a brief spike of "OMG ice age!" stories in the popular press in the 1970s. Why? Because we had some nasty winters (at least on the East Coast) in the 70s, so the idea of an ice age (proposed in a minority of papers based on inadequate data) captured the popular imagination.
The idea that there was scientific consensus - or even a strong suspicion - in the 1970s predicting an ice age is pure bunk.
Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Your right to pollute the air ends where my lungs begin. Neither of these concepts requires a overly-powerful government to enforce.
We now understand that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are a form of pollution that damages the biosphere.
Only if you're assuming one man per woman. No reason for that; there're lots of poly women out there.
Not so much. The idea that many animals "mate for life" seems to be romantic wish fulfillment on the part of scientists. It's being contradicted more and more by DNA evidence which shows that, for example, the Papa Bird that Mama Bird shares the nest with, is often not the Baby Bird Daddy.
As researcher David Barash explains:
Only if those all of those ~50% of married people are on their first marriage, and never had pre-marital sex. Even then, we can only say they've been monogamous so far.
We're not counting "serial monogamy" as a genuine form of monogamy here. After all, screwing your mistress tonight, your wife tomorrow, and your mistress again on Friday is just a very rapid form of serial monogamy...
Despite the perversions introduced by religion, the number of people who are truly life-long monogamous is rather small. According to the CDC, men 30-44 years of age report a median of about 7 sexual partners in their lifetimes; women, about four.
The point is that the genes determine, or at least influence, what the "thinking part" of you find acceptable.
You are not consciousness inhabiting a body. You are consciousness generated by a body. The nature of that consciousness is determined by the nature of the body. The nature of the body is determined by genetics and by environment.
How about 3) the guy that sleeps around with lots of women and has no kids?
Effective birth control exists. Use it.
If someone comes in waving a gun around, there's no guarantee that it's real, that it's loaded, or that he's going to shoot. And if you dive for cover, you'll get dirt all over your new suit, incurring annoying cleaning bills - and there's no guarantee that you won't get shot anyway.
Still, only a fool does not dive for cover.
The American Society of Civil Engineers faulted the Corps's levee design, and the Corps has admitted their failure. That has nothing to do with any actions taken by the state.
Nor had the state taken over flood control. The Army Corps of Engineers was still working on flood control projects in the area, though they were massively underfunded.
In 2004, USACE requested $11 million for the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project; Bush's budget requested only $3 million. Congress increased the amount to $5.5 million. In 2005, the Corps requested $22.5 million - Bush, $3.9 million, and Congress approved $5.7 million.
Investigative articles by the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of the Iraq boondoggle as a reason why funding for the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project dried up in 2003. $250 million in crucial projects was left incomplete, including work right at the site of the main breach.
To add insult to the injury, 35 percent of the Louisiana National Guard had been deployed to Iraq, thus making them unavailable to, you know, Guard that part of the Nation.
The failure of the levvies, and the lack of resources at the state level to deal with it, were the results of deadly incompetence at the federal level.
Democrats in power for 20 years? Where?
On the federal level, we had a Republican in the White House from 1980-1992 and 2000-2008. From 1994 to 2006, there was GOP control of the House. 1994-2001 and 2002-2006, Republican control of the Senate.
At the state level, Louisiana had a Republican governor 1980-1984, 1991-1992, and 1996-2004.
If you will read more closely, you will see that the poster to whom I was responding didn't specify "the federal government", just said "zero assistance from the government."
And if my house was on fire due to failure of a system built by the federal government to maintain trade routes for interstate commerce, fsck yes, I would expect federal aid. The New Orleans disaster wasn't Katrina, it was the failure of the levies that were built by the feds as part of an effort to keep the Mississippi navigable.
Federalism is no excuse for the failed federal response to Katrina.
Really? What country do you live in?
I live in one where the black prison population per capita is six times higher than for whites, and the poverty rate for black children is more than twice that for white children. Racial profiling ("driving while black") remains a pervasive problem. Women still don't get equal pay for equal work, and efforts to criminalize abortion - and even birth control - continue apace.
Are things better than they were in this regard 100 years ago? Sure. But that's damning with faint praise.
And compared to Joe Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer was a piker at murder. Your point?
I'll also note that WWI and WWII were actual declared wars. We are not in a state of war with any nation at the moment.
More people die from drowning every year than were killed on 9/11; to claim that we face a terrorist danger necessitating that we abandon our civil liberties is ridiculous.
No, it is an act of mass murder. It's was no more an act of war than the Oklahoma City bombing was.
Anyone who RTFA would see the author's observation that "...Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether."
So if the submitter had an agenda to conceal that abuses happened in Denver, he did a crappy job of it.
However, the Denver abuses seem to have been mostly garden-variety police thuggery; these Minnesota raids involved the FBI and included months-long espionage and infiltration. One of the groups specifically targeted is "I-Witness Video", a group that did a great job capturing exposing thuggery and perjury by police during the 2004 Republican convention.
For the same reason I, living outside of Baltimore, Maryland, pay into a fund that supports the the military defense of people living in California, Arizona, and Louisiana. It's the nature of a nation - common defense. That defense includes not just the threat of foreign invasion, but natural disasters, pandemics, and domestic insurgencies.
Self-reliance is all well and good, but doesn't change the fact that government action should be expected also. I have smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and an home escape plan, but I still expect the fire department to come if my house is on fire. I have guns, but I still expect the army or state militia to be deployed if the British attack Baltimore again. I have first aid supplies and training, but I still expect the EMTs to show up in an emergency.
Are you going to do that for everyone living along fault lines in California? In tornado-prone areas of the the midwest? There's not going to be anywhere left...
Remember that the damage to New Orleans three years ago was not from Katrina, but from the incompetence of the USACE and contractors in the construction of the levies.
No, it cannot, because it cannot be as transparent as the use of paper ballots.
Anyone who wants the people who develop policy to be informed individuals of above-average intelligence and education.
I don't want a "political aristocracy", but I do want legislation to be crafted by people who have the time and expertise to analyze all the relevant issues, not people voting during the commercial breaks in "America's Top Model".
I'm all for town meeting and direct democracy on local issues. On issues of national import, though, we don't need mob rule deciding on our energy policy, or how best to avoid nuclear proliferation. We need policy wonks.
Fonts themselves are not subject to copyright in the U.S., and given that we have a plethora of them, it seems no promotion of `science and useful arts' would be served my making them so.
It is argued that computer fonts are actually computer programs and thus subject to copyright.
..and enforces property rights. You want the deed to your house to mean something, you need the government that issued it to be funded. That means taxes.
The government also builds roads and other vital infrastructure. You want to be able to travel the country on paved streets, you need the government to be funded. That means taxes.
Is government too intrusive? Verily. Can we get rid of it? Not before Universal Enlightement.
In response to a tax, a corporation can raise its prices, it can cut its dividends, or it can slow its investment in expansion. In a functioning market, the corporations that raises prices will lose business and the ones that cut its dividends or expansion will gain business.
If corporate taxes cause prices to go up, that's a symptom of market failure.
Sure they have. The whole "physical presence" thing comes out of caes like Bellas Hess and Quill Corp. v. North Dakota
I know whining about taxes is as American as apple pie, but the issue here is not whether states can impose taxes, but whether they can make merchants collect them.
Let's look at the party circa 2000 via the Clinton legacy.
Clinton was an economic conservative, such that Alan Greenspan said he "was the best Republican president we've had in a while". He favored policies like NAFTA, and telecomm and financial services deregulation, that benefited the interests of the investment class over those of workers and consumers.
He was also a social conservative who was willing to institutionalize bigotry with his "don't ask don't tell" bullshit, willing to implement capital punishment, willing to bomb the shit out of other nations to advance American interests, and to continue Nixon's "War on Drugs" (even as he admitted to his own drug use).
It's no surprise his wife was president of her chapter of the College Republicans.
This is the legacy that Gore would have apparently continued; little wonder many liberals or progressives found the possibility less than inspiring and stayed home or voted for Nader.