Sunday, May 30, 2010

Socialism Vs. Capitalism

No pure system has ever worked, what's best is a Capitalism/Socialism blend the flaws inherent in Socialism also exist in Capitalism (see the book "Bad Samaritans"for an in-depth treatment) - especially when it ignores the Free Market it claims to use by using copyrights, patents, business licenses, etc. to limit competition and market entry.

Both Liberals & Conservatives espouse Socialist agendas, Liberals intending to help the poor and working class; Conservatives socializing corporate losses (as in "tort reform" which will transfer BP's liability to taxpayers) while privatizing Corporate profits.

Basically, there are problems and benefits with both Socialism &; Capitalism, but, in the current climate, it's necessary to promote a fair hearing of Socialism to get the blend we need.

Socialism Vs. Capitalism

No pure system has ever worked, what's best is a Capitalism/Socialism blend the flaws inherent in Socialism also exist in Capitalism (see the book "Bad Samaritans"for an in-depth treatment) - especially when it ignores the Free Market it claims to use by using copyrights, patents, business licenses, etc. to limit competition and market entry.

Both Liberals & Conservatives espouse Socialist agendas, Liberals intending to help the poor and working class; Conservatives socializing corporate losses (as in "tort reform" which will transfer BP's liability to taxpayers) while privatizing Corporate profits.

Basically, there are problems and benefits with both Socialism &; Capitalism, but, in the current climate, it's necessary to promote a fair hearing of Socialism to get the blend we need.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Voice: "Hello. We need twelve vehicles in the parade square immediately. Two of them must be limousines."
Reply: "What are the limousines for? To haul those fat-slob generals around in, I bet"
Voice: "Soldier, do you know who this is speaking?"
Reply: "No, I don't"
Voice: "This is General Watson."
Reply: "Do you know who this is speaking, sir?"
Voice: "No, I don't"
Reply: "See ya 'round, fatso!"
It seems the previous pastor was a paragon of virtue. He lived up to all the people's expectations and was willing to live on a very low salary, to boot. And he loved to work around the manse and keep both house and grounds in repair.

But the new pastor wasn't that type. He hired someone to do a lot of these chores, including the mowing of the manse and church lawns. Naturally, this cost more money.

This change of pattern was of concern to some of the elders of the church. One day one of them approached the new pastor and tried to bring up the matter tactfully. He said to the new pastor, "You know, our previous pastor mowed the lawn himself. Have you considered this approach?"

The new pastor responded, "Yes, I'm aware of this. And I asked him. But he doesn't want to do it anymore."
First pelican : "That's fine fish you have there."
Second pelican : "Well, it fills the bill."
A little boy forgot his lines in a Sunday school presentation. His mother was in the front row to prompt him. She gestured and formed the words silently with her lips, but it, did not help. Her son's memory was blank. Finally she leaned forward and-whispered the cue, "I am the light of the world."

The child beamed 'and with great feeling and a loud, clear voice said, "My mother is the light of the world."
Teacher: Johnny, why weren't you at school yesterday?
Johnny: Our cow was in heat, so I had to take her to the bull.
Teacher: I'm sure your father could have done that.
Johnny: No, it has to be the bull.
Teacher: What is the plural of "man"?
Dusty: "Men."
Teacher: What is the plural of "child"?
Dusty: "Twins."
"You look pretty dirty, Susie."
"Thank you. I look pretty when I'm clean, too."
Mac : "How much candy can you eat?"
Jock : "Any given amount."
Shoe salesman who had dragged out half his stock to a woman customer: "Mind if I rest a few minutes, lady? Your feet are killing me."
What would you find if you put your finger in Johnson' ear?

Johnson's wax.

If you think the following are quotes from the Christian Right:

  •  Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction.
  •  We have abolished the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions.
  •  My Christian feeling tells me that my lord and savior is a warrior.
  •  By defending myself against the Jew [Hispanic, Black, etc], I am fighting for the work of the Lord. 


You'd be wrong.

Maybe this will help:

“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.” - Adolf Hitler


From his words, we can see that Hitler was one of the Founders of the Christian Right.

If you think the following are quotes from the Christian Right:

  •  Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction.
  •  We have abolished the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions.
  •  My Christian feeling tells me that my lord and savior is a warrior.
  •  By defending myself against the Jew [Hispanic, Black, etc], I am fighting for the work of the Lord. 


You'd be wrong.

Maybe this will help:

“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.” - Adolf Hitler


From his words, we can see that Hitler was one of the Founders of the Christian Right.

Wal-Mart Makes Splashy Price Cuts To Get Mojo Back


We get paid every two weeks so, to budget carefully, we sit down and make a menu. From that menu, we make a list of things we need. Then we take that list and go to Aldi's. If Aldi's doesn't have something, we go to Walmart.



When we need cleaning supplies, we go to General Dollar Stores, if they are out of something, we go to Walmart.



IF we need electronics, we go to Best Buy, maybe Office Depot because they often have sales on blanks CDs - but NEVER to Walmart - they are way too expensive there and, if you do buy something, often don't carry accessories (printer cartridges, etc.).



So, with the exception of electronics, Walmart usually has the second best price - which, I suppose, could be a slogan.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Muslim Miss USA: Progress Or Immodesty?


Both the New Testament and the Qu'ran call for women to dress modestly. What determines what modesty is is culture. The Burka or Niqab are not requirements of Islam but of Arabic Islam which, by the way, represents a minority of Muslims.



Miss Fakih is a beautiful young woman. Why her religion has anything to do with anything is a sad commentary on our times. But, perhaps, she can be a reminder that, just as not all Christians are Fundamentalists, neither are all Muslims.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Texas, the Death Penalty, and the Will of God

Capital Punishment, as practiced in the United States owes nothing to the Bible. America convicts on a standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt," but the Bible required a minimum of two eye-witnesses who, themselves, faced execution if they provided false testimony - in other words, a standard of "beyond ANY doubt."



I'm not completely opposed to capital punishment - in the case of premeditated murder, child molestation, and other heinous crimes, I would support Capital Punishment if the standard was "beyond any doubt" but it's not, so I can't support it.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Ground Zero Mosque Overwhelmingly Approved By NYC Community Board: 'It's A Seed Of Peace'


Ground Zero needs not only a Mosque, but also a Buddhist Temple, Synagogue, and Christian Chapel - preferably in the same building.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Rand Paul and the Souls of Some White Folks


I recently enjoyed the audiobook of Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors in which the spread of mankind across the globe is studied through the study of DNA and the human genome.



All human beings are descended from a group of about 125 Black hunter-gatherers that lived in Africa. We're all the same species that have evolved different coloration in response to our environment.



Every person in America is descended from immigrants, the "Native Americans" immigrating some 15,000 years ago.



To me racism makes no sense.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Will Atheism Replace Religion in America?

Religion, of course, served an evolutionary purpose (recommend The Evolution of GodThe Faith Instinct here), religion allowed mankind to live in groups and form societies.  It provided the first laws beginning with the hunter-gatherers.  As such, religion has not been eliminated as much as it's being replaced by other things that achieve the same purpose.

In its broadest definition, everyone has a religion (in the strictest sense, all people are members of a religion of one, since no two people believe exactly the same thing).  Religion is simply the sum total of one's beliefs concerning "first cause" etc. and one's sense of morality. 

Atheism is, of course, a-theism, not a-religion.  Zen Buddhists being an example of an a-theist religion.  According to Karen Armstrong in The Case for God, "Atheism is therefore parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seems to eliminate."  In other words, atheism doesn't exist in a vacuum, American atheism, for example, is opposed to and shaped by Christian Fundamentalism.

To me, and I imagine many others of the Liberal and Progressive religious ilk, contemporary atheists are at least as irritating as Fundamentalists because they share the same zeal for evangelizing and the same dogmatism.  Therefore, I don't see atheism replacing theism any time soon, if ever, more likely, since most people care a great deal less about religion than either atheists or Fundamentalists, I see organized religion dying a quiet death to be replaced by "personal beliefs" and quiet agnosticism.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Is Print Dead?

I love my Kindle, buy the occasional e-book, but also enjoy the thousands of books available on Gutenberg.com. (the "mobi" format works with Kindle)

Even as a kid, I spent most of my allowance and lawn-mowing money on books, and now that I'm older, the ability to increase the size of the print and not have to carry 3 inch thick large-print books (when available) is very convenient.  As is the ability to just highlight a word and see the dictionary definition or flip over to the basic browser and look something up on wikipedia or online - looking forward to being able to highlight a passage and post to Twitter or Facebook.

I have donated thousands and thousands of books to libraries and church rummage sales over the years when my bookshelves threatened to collapse - now I can carry a thousand or so with me and store more books on a hard drive than the library can hold.

And, as my eyes continue too age, the Kindle works well with Audible.com's audiobooks or, for most of the books, I can simply turn on txt2speech and rest my eyes.

I'm sure there will always be tree-ware collectors, I treasure my tree-ware copies of a few books I read almost 40 years ago in Junior High that I bought from used book dealers, but as the readers become more affordable and widely available, tree-ware will become a niche market as I read on my Kindle and look for some book scented potpourri.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Why Are So Many Christians (sic) Conservative?

The short answer, of course, is they are not.  Christians, I mean.  Jesus was one of the greatest Liberals who ever lived (God and Other Famous Liberals: Recapturing Bible, Flag, and Family from the Far Right - out of print: used copies available on Amazon). How can Conservatives even dare to think they follow Him?

"Christian" means "Christ-like."  To be "like Christ," one must try in our imperfect way to copy his compassion for the poor, sick, oppressed.  One must "pick up one's cross," or sacrifice oneself, and one's time and treasure to help those Jesus helped.

Conservative Christianity is a religion that teaches that Jesus taught the virtues of the "root of all evil." (1Ti 6:10)    As such, it is the polar opposite of "Christ-like." 

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

A Pyrrhic Victory

When the SCOTUS declared that the Cross in the Mojave Desert was a secular symbol, the Christian Right won a court case, but lost the Cross.

Should We Eliminate Religion

Religion served an evolutionary purpose - it's partially responsible for what man is today and allowed us to transit from hunter gatherers to create societies.  (There are numerous books on the subject - Evolution of God, Before the Dawn, The Faith Instinct: are a few).  As such, it's ingrained - even atheists attack theists with religious fervor.  To eliminate religion is impossible for that reason, religion can't be eliminated, it can only be replaced with something that serves the same purpose.

What needs to be eliminated, therefore, is Fundamentalism (Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, etc.) which generally arises during periods of uncertainty and among people who feel themselves to be wronged or oppressed.  I have read the scriptures of every religion for which I can find an English translation: The Bible, The Qu'ran, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Gnostic Gospels, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Tao te Ching, etc. more than once.  All these religious texts have some things in common but, while Liberals emphasize those things, Fundamentalists emphasize the differences.  Certainly, as a Liberal Christian, I see value in the things Jesus taught, but I recognize in the Qu'ran an attempt to reform what Muhammad saw as failures of Judaism & Christianity in practice - such as the failure of both religions, in spite of their scriptures, to provide for the poor.  And I see in the "Red-letter" verses that record Jesus' words echoes of the Dhammapada and Tao from centuries earlier.

How to defeat Fundamentalism then?  The most effective way is to use their own scriptures, for example, the Bible mentions feeding the poor in over a thousand verses, it mentions miscarriage or abortion in only one and yet Fundamentalists emphasize the one and ignore the thousands.  Interestingly though, both abortions and Fundamentalism are reduced when people have opportunity for jobs, housing, health care and adequate food. 

Having had the opportunity during my time in the military to travel in both the Middle East and Europe, I found most people to be similar.  We all want a mate, children, a way to provide for our families, a little extra so we can feel we're not just working to survive, and a hope of improving our station.  With these, we are usually content and less likely to embrace extremism.  Religion, of course, can provide hope and societal cohesion.  Whether religion serves a useful fiction, or, as believers believe, is true - in either case, it gives us hope and common ground with our neighbors.  Which isn't always a bad thing.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

The Myth of a Christian nation

Our Founders were a mixture of, yes, Christians, but also Deists and Masons. One thing we do know for certain, there were no Fundamentalists. Dominionism (the belief that the US is a Christian nation) is a1970s offshoot of Fundamentalism which is a late 1800s, early 1900s (named for a set of pamphlets published by an industrialist in 1910) offshoot of Dispensationalism which arose in the early 1800s – all too late to be considered “Founders.”


If we were to declare a national religion based on the Founders’ beliefs, the closest we would have would be Episcopalian and Unitarian Universalist.

It is Deism that gave us the concept of “inalienable rights. Individual political liberty is never proposed nor advocated in the Bible, rather the New Testament teaches self-subjugation of individual liberty in service of others.

Finally, “Christian” means “Christ-like.” If America were a Christian nation, when was that? When we gave pox-infected blankets to Native Americans? when we enslaved Africans? When we denied women the right to vote? When we forced children to work in factories? When?