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4runner
ParticipantCounselor,
Thanks for the info…
ParticipantCounselor,
Thanks for the info…
ParticipantDon’t feel too bad for the borrowers. Everyone who put 0% down has a put option on their home. They only lose 1/3 of the real loss– in the tax on forgiveness of indebtedness income.
At some point, borrowers who are underwater are going to realize that forgiveness of indebtedness income is still income.
What truly amazes me is how legions of penny-ante frauds were able to dupe some of the brightest people on Wall Street…
ParticipantDon’t feel too bad for the borrowers. Everyone who put 0% down has a put option on their home. They only lose 1/3 of the real loss– in the tax on forgiveness of indebtedness income.
At some point, borrowers who are underwater are going to realize that forgiveness of indebtedness income is still income.
What truly amazes me is how legions of penny-ante frauds were able to dupe some of the brightest people on Wall Street…
ParticipantThanks Rustico. I enjoy airing it out.
I looks like we’ll just have to wear nametags with our handles at the next social…
ParticipantThanks Rustico. I enjoy airing it out.
I looks like we’ll just have to wear nametags with our handles at the next social…
ParticipantHey guys,
As for Sweden, a culturally homogeneous society with a strong Lutheran heritage that has been secular for what– 1.5 generations, at most??– and is currently failing to produce enough citizens to replace those who are dying hardly constitutes “proof” that religion can whimsically be discarded…
As for demagogues– there have always been stupid people who can be manipulated by others. Yes– religion has been used to manipulate people and it will continue to be used so long as there are stupid people in the world.
Discarding religion will not end the demagoguery. People will not suddenly become smarter when religion is removed from a society.
Please ask yourselves this question: If you were a self-serving demagogue who craved power, would you want to be in a society with strong religious roots or in a secular society?
As most demagogues go, most of them seem to oppose religion. Ask yourselves why…
Look– many, many moons ago, I pointed out that a large component of the traditional religions was a set of economic laws that had been developed, through trial and error, over generations. These economic laws represent cultural intelligence– the opposite of the stupidity which you decry.
Our ancestors may not have known how to build an i-pod, but they sure as hell understood human interactions. What’s more, with survival on the line daily, I suspect that they paid a lot more attention to what works in human societies than most modern-day, live-in-a-SFR-in-suburbia, bowl-alone, spend three-hours-a-day-watching-TV Americans.
Once again, you discard that intelligence at your peril…
ParticipantHey guys,
As for Sweden, a culturally homogeneous society with a strong Lutheran heritage that has been secular for what– 1.5 generations, at most??– and is currently failing to produce enough citizens to replace those who are dying hardly constitutes “proof” that religion can whimsically be discarded…
As for demagogues– there have always been stupid people who can be manipulated by others. Yes– religion has been used to manipulate people and it will continue to be used so long as there are stupid people in the world.
Discarding religion will not end the demagoguery. People will not suddenly become smarter when religion is removed from a society.
Please ask yourselves this question: If you were a self-serving demagogue who craved power, would you want to be in a society with strong religious roots or in a secular society?
As most demagogues go, most of them seem to oppose religion. Ask yourselves why…
Look– many, many moons ago, I pointed out that a large component of the traditional religions was a set of economic laws that had been developed, through trial and error, over generations. These economic laws represent cultural intelligence– the opposite of the stupidity which you decry.
Our ancestors may not have known how to build an i-pod, but they sure as hell understood human interactions. What’s more, with survival on the line daily, I suspect that they paid a lot more attention to what works in human societies than most modern-day, live-in-a-SFR-in-suburbia, bowl-alone, spend three-hours-a-day-watching-TV Americans.
Once again, you discard that intelligence at your peril…
Participant- I am also in my right to say that I have experienced a lack of nuance and circumspection in others arguments and that posters flat out avoid direct questions where their fallacies/prejudices would be exposed by answering them.Look just a few posts up this thread, where is 4runner?
Hey, I’m still here. I just started listening to all the complaints about religion and politics on Piggington. If you have any specific questions you want answered, please list ’em. I’ll be happy to address them.
The only one I see is the contention that people won’t start pillaging even if religion were eliminated. I disagree. I think that society is much more fragile than people want to recognize and that religion is the basis for that stability. In fact, it has been for generations and no long-lasting human society has ever been established without religion. Cyphire says that this doesn’t prove that religion is necessary. Maybe not, but I think that he bears the burden of proving that something that is present in every society can be discarded.
Indeed, I think that Cyphire and Rustico are quite naive in a charming sort of way. They are unable to conceive of people acting inhumanely toward others–unable to recognize how fragile society is. I think that this naivete is a measure of the success of religion.
Because humane behavior spurred by religion is the norm, we live under the delusion that it is the standard. Aside from personal experience, the only way I can illustrate this is our reaction to events. For example, after 9/11, the press got all hot and bothered about how “well-planned/well-coordinated” the attacks were. This is plain old wrong. Building the World Trade Center– that required planning and coordination. Building a 747– once again, it requires planning and coordination.
Destroying them was the work of child.
If there is no God and no religion, people are just meat. Yes– there are laws that that stop people from doing horrible things. Not only are those laws difficult to enforce, they are also subject to revision. Look- Hitler was duly elected. It was “legal” to kill people in Nazi Germany. It was “legal” to kill people in the Soviet Union. Hell– it was “legal” to execute prisoners on death row in Illinois before DNA testing proved that around 15% of the inmates on death row innocent.
Yet, when confronted with murder, we are all left with a deep-set feeling that it is “wrong”– independent of legality. It is in this feeling that I find religion.
Participant- I am also in my right to say that I have experienced a lack of nuance and circumspection in others arguments and that posters flat out avoid direct questions where their fallacies/prejudices would be exposed by answering them.Look just a few posts up this thread, where is 4runner?
Hey, I’m still here. I just started listening to all the complaints about religion and politics on Piggington. If you have any specific questions you want answered, please list ’em. I’ll be happy to address them.
The only one I see is the contention that people won’t start pillaging even if religion were eliminated. I disagree. I think that society is much more fragile than people want to recognize and that religion is the basis for that stability. In fact, it has been for generations and no long-lasting human society has ever been established without religion. Cyphire says that this doesn’t prove that religion is necessary. Maybe not, but I think that he bears the burden of proving that something that is present in every society can be discarded.
Indeed, I think that Cyphire and Rustico are quite naive in a charming sort of way. They are unable to conceive of people acting inhumanely toward others–unable to recognize how fragile society is. I think that this naivete is a measure of the success of religion.
Because humane behavior spurred by religion is the norm, we live under the delusion that it is the standard. Aside from personal experience, the only way I can illustrate this is our reaction to events. For example, after 9/11, the press got all hot and bothered about how “well-planned/well-coordinated” the attacks were. This is plain old wrong. Building the World Trade Center– that required planning and coordination. Building a 747– once again, it requires planning and coordination.
Destroying them was the work of child.
If there is no God and no religion, people are just meat. Yes– there are laws that that stop people from doing horrible things. Not only are those laws difficult to enforce, they are also subject to revision. Look- Hitler was duly elected. It was “legal” to kill people in Nazi Germany. It was “legal” to kill people in the Soviet Union. Hell– it was “legal” to execute prisoners on death row in Illinois before DNA testing proved that around 15% of the inmates on death row innocent.
Yet, when confronted with murder, we are all left with a deep-set feeling that it is “wrong”– independent of legality. It is in this feeling that I find religion.
Participant- Religion is NOT an inseparable part of every successful culture. It is a vestigial part of our society and brave honest men should try to remove it and replace it with something else. Religion reminds me of a military dictatorship which has to hold on – because if they don’t they will be tried by the people who have been injured by it. Look at our current culture in the US. What part of the country is religious? Is La Jolla still intact because of religion? There are so many sects and so many non-believers that I beg to differ.
Cyphire,
My point is that religion is so intertwined in society that you can’t separate it out. Please answer one question: without religion, why is it “wrong” to kill your next door neighbor so you can drive his BMW? Is it just uneconomical? Or is the legal prohibition of murder religious law enforced through secular means?
In this sense, La Jolla is incredibly religious. The BMW’s driven by a bunch of retirees are certainly ripe for the picking by any fool with a crowbar…
As for different religions, most religions are so similar at their core that, for the benefit of society, it doesn’t matter what religion people actually are, it just matters that they are religious.
Participant- Religion is NOT an inseparable part of every successful culture. It is a vestigial part of our society and brave honest men should try to remove it and replace it with something else. Religion reminds me of a military dictatorship which has to hold on – because if they don’t they will be tried by the people who have been injured by it. Look at our current culture in the US. What part of the country is religious? Is La Jolla still intact because of religion? There are so many sects and so many non-believers that I beg to differ.
Cyphire,
My point is that religion is so intertwined in society that you can’t separate it out. Please answer one question: without religion, why is it “wrong” to kill your next door neighbor so you can drive his BMW? Is it just uneconomical? Or is the legal prohibition of murder religious law enforced through secular means?
In this sense, La Jolla is incredibly religious. The BMW’s driven by a bunch of retirees are certainly ripe for the picking by any fool with a crowbar…
As for different religions, most religions are so similar at their core that, for the benefit of society, it doesn’t matter what religion people actually are, it just matters that they are religious.
ParticipantRustico,
I think that you discard religion at your own peril.
Practically speaking, there has never been a successful human society founded on atheism/agnosticism. For better or worse, religion is an inseparable part of every successful culture. I’m a big pragmatist– if society without religion has never worked before, you better give me a very good reason for getting rid of it now… Pointing to an occasional problem with individual policies/actors is not a sufficient reason for getting rid of the whole thing.
On a personal level, I don’t think that atheists have thought their position through to its logical conclusion. Do the John Lennon “imagine there’s no religion/god…” thought experiment. If so, we all are just piles of meat. In the absence of anything sacred/divine about humans, killing a human is no different from killing a cow. It may be impractical/uneconomical to needlessly kill a cow or a human, but “economic inefficiency” seems like a very thin basis for stopping me from slaughtering my next door neighbor so that I can take his BMW out on a joy ride. In particular, society tolerates all sorts of uneconomic behavior. As I said before, that line is pretty arbitrary. Yet somehow I feel that killing a human is different from killing a cow. The only logical justification that I can come up with is that humans are divine.
ParticipantRustico,
I think that you discard religion at your own peril.
Practically speaking, there has never been a successful human society founded on atheism/agnosticism. For better or worse, religion is an inseparable part of every successful culture. I’m a big pragmatist– if society without religion has never worked before, you better give me a very good reason for getting rid of it now… Pointing to an occasional problem with individual policies/actors is not a sufficient reason for getting rid of the whole thing.
On a personal level, I don’t think that atheists have thought their position through to its logical conclusion. Do the John Lennon “imagine there’s no religion/god…” thought experiment. If so, we all are just piles of meat. In the absence of anything sacred/divine about humans, killing a human is no different from killing a cow. It may be impractical/uneconomical to needlessly kill a cow or a human, but “economic inefficiency” seems like a very thin basis for stopping me from slaughtering my next door neighbor so that I can take his BMW out on a joy ride. In particular, society tolerates all sorts of uneconomic behavior. As I said before, that line is pretty arbitrary. Yet somehow I feel that killing a human is different from killing a cow. The only logical justification that I can come up with is that humans are divine.
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