I am from a single-parent family, and Bitter Crank, I find your comments and others like yours very offensive. — Sapientia

Of course I didn't intend to offend you, and I am glad that your single parent did a good job raising you, and he/she deserves a great deal of credit, as all good parents do. Most children in single parent families grow up normally. But...a quarter to a third (in the US) have bad outcomes, which is much higher than bad outcomes for two parent family children. It's a significant difference.

I'm sticking with the judgement that single parenthood in general is not an advantage, is a great burden to the single parent, often results in untoward outcomes, and should not be encouraged through policies. In the United States (with it's diminished and grudging social service system) single parent-headed families are at a significant economic, psychosocial, and educational disadvantage and experience more difficulties than two-parent families.

Just for example...

Adolescent Well-Being in Cohabiting, Married, and Single-Parent Families
Authors
Wendy D. Manning,
Kathleen A. Lamb
First published: November 2003
Abstract

Cohabitation is a family form that increasingly includes children. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to assess the well-being of adolescents in cohabiting parent stepfamilies (N= 13,231). Teens living with cohabiting stepparents often fare worse than teens living with two biological married parents. Adolescents living in cohabiting stepfamilies experience greater disadvantage than teens living in married stepfamilies. Most of these differences, however, are explained by socioeconomic circumstances. Teenagers living with single unmarried mothers are similar to teens living with cohabiting stepparents; exceptions include greater delinquency and lower grade point averages experienced by teens living with cohabiting stepparents. Yet mother's marital history explains these differences. Our results contribute to our understanding of cohabitation and debates about the importance of marriage for children.

Growing Up with a Single Parent. What Hurts, What Helps.
McLanahan, Sara; Sandefur, Gary

Using information from four national surveys and a decade of research, this book demonstrates the connection between family structure and a child's prospects for success. It shows how divorce, particularly with often-attendant drops in income, parental involvement, and access to community resources, diminishes children's chances for wellbeing. It is revealed that children whose parents live apart are twice as likely to drop out of high school as those in two-parent families, one and a half times as likely to be idle in young adulthood, and twice as likely to become single parents themselves. Additionally, data show that some of the advantages often associated with being white are really a function of family structure and that some of the advantages associated with having educated parents evaporate when those parents separate. The concluding chapter offers recommendations for rethinking our current policies. The authors explain why it is imperative that more of the costs of raising children be shifted from mothers to fathers and from parents to society at large, as well as why universal assistance programs that benefit low-income two-parent families and single mothers must be developed. Appendixes contain data and variables from the studies, bivariate probit models, and sex-difference factors statistical tables.

from a Slate article:

Take two contemporary social problems: teenage pregnancy and the incarceration of young males. Research by Sara McLanahan at Princeton University suggests that boys are significantly more likely to end up in jail or prison by the time they turn 30 if they are raised by a single mother. Specifically, McLanahan and a colleague found that boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity. Research on young men suggests they are less likely to engage in delinquent or illegal behavior when they have the affection, attention, and monitoring of their own mother and father.

But daughters depend on dads as well. One study by Bruce Ellis of the University of Arizona found that about one-third of girls whose fathers left the home before they turned 6 ended up pregnant as teenagers, compared with just 5 percent of girls whose fathers were there throughout their childhood. This dramatic divide was narrowed a bit when Ellis controlled for parents’ socioeconomic background—but only by a few percentage points. The research on this topic suggests that girls raised by single mothers are less likely to be supervised, more likely to engage in early sex, and to end up pregnant compared with girls raised by their own married parents.

A likely story...

If you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans.

http://magazine.foxnews.com/love/cheating-statistics-do-men-cheat-more-women for example this. — Agustino

Really, Agustino, you have to reference better sources than Fox News Magazine.

Your proposals seem dangerously close to conservatism though BC :P How does a Marxist explain this? — Agustino

What contributes to healthy, nurturing families does not vary greatly from left to right. (Marx himself, as you no doubt know, was not exactly a paragon of familial propriety.) That so many couples in the United States ((which is what I am familiar with) are having serious difficulties maintaining relationships and healthy and strong families doesn't seem entirely mysterious. three points:

1. It takes community to create healthy nurturing families, and community has been collapsing for decades.

2. Shrinking and maldistributed economic resources degrade individual, community, and family capacity to succeed. It isn't just that large numbers of people have less income than they need, it's the psycho-social effect of large income disparities communities. Inadequate income from work means more time spent at work for both spouses, which short changes everyone in the family.

3. The expectations of very large numbers of individuals are altogether out of sync with what they can reasonably achieve.

Is everything falling apart? No. If you look at healthy, economically stable communities you can find healthy families. You can find some healthy families in communities that are falling apart too. But on the whole, the proportion of communities and families in economic and psychosocial distress are perhaps the majority.

Very-large-scale changes in western culture are probably beyond any sort of remediation. The controlling role of religion in society probably is not going to return, which I view as more a blessing than a curse, but there is definitely a downside.) Communication technologies, world economic shifts, and a host of other factors have a role to play in the difficulties individuals experience.

I may sound conservative here, but some of the old-fashioned virtues have survival value in a rotting capitalist state.

His point is that given these 'outs' people should be held accountable before the law if they breach what he claims is the legally binding contract of marriage. — John

Agustino did battle on this topic in the old Philosophy Forum. It was lively. This time around, let's spend less time figuring out how to punish people who commit adultery and spend more time figuring out how to help families be successful.

Adultery in the context of the usual marriage vows is unhelpful, contradictory, and often destructive. What I consider important is that IF a heterosexual marriage leads to children, then the parents should endeavor to keep their relationship healthy and centered on raising healthy, productive and reasonably happy children. That means avoiding adultery, addictions, irresponsible debt, desertion, and the like.

We (American society) do not do a very good job of helping parents succeed, and truth be told, a good many people who think they should become parents ought to be strenuously discouraged from committing much effort to that goal unless they get their act together.

Successful families need:

• to live within modest material budgets so that their resources can be directed toward good parenting.
• to receive enough income that between them, parents can provide 1 FTE parent. Maybe families need to be subsidized to make that possible. Both mother and father should have time to interact with children.
• education in good, traditional child-rearing practices. Many adults have not benefitted from being raised in a healthy large family and they simply do not know what healthy family life looks like. They need training to achieve it. And on-going support.
• Families need good pre-natal health care, good delivery service, and post-natal followup health monitoring.
• Families need functioning communities in which to live.

Single parenthood (as a starting plan) should be strongly discouraged.

But I think the underlying rationale of individualism has shifted enormously in the last few generations. — Wayfarer

The pendulum has definitely swung, but I'm not sure it is just "too much individualism" that we are suffering from. Some of what passes for individualism is alienation, anomie, atomization, disrupted community, dysfunctional families, and so on. Many individuals have nothing to fall back on but individuality, and that alone is not enough. Individuality that develops in the context of solid family life, fully functioning communities, and with learning is worth pursuing. Unfortunately, a lot of people's individuality is that of an aquarium of fish tossed out in the street. Their "individuality" is the privilege of dying alone.

Is the ascetic justified in their actions? Can they really say that what they are doing is "better" than what everyone else is doing? For the ascetic himself, asceticism might be seen as a kind of personal salvation, but to everyone else, could it come across as obnoxious? Can we criticize the ascetic for this, or are they free of blame here? — darthbarracuda

We could, I suppose, judge them by the sort of fruit they bear. What good is it doing them, or anybody else, that they are ascetics? It Jack finds salvation by living in a monks cell, silently meditating, praying ceaselessly, and eating little, more power to him. That doesn't mean everyone should get themselves a similar bare concrete block cell and follow suit.

On the other hand, we could also judge the hedonists by the fruit they bear. What good are they doing themselves or anyone else? Maybe some hedonists have found a way of doing good in the world. We can raise the bar a bit for their evidence, but it's possible they bear good fruit--which they probably then eat.

It is insulting in the same way that somebody listening to classical music is insulting — andrewk

I have listened to classical music for many, many hours, trying to insult my fellow citizens. And you know what? It just didn't work. None of them were insulted. In fact, they didn't give a rat's ass that I was wasting my time listening to that crap. They were all listening to the latest thing coming out of the pipe and were totally indifferent to my condescending, insulting slanderous taste in music.

But the answer is NOT that 'all opinions are equal', nor that everything is simply a matter of opinion. — Wayfarer

Not only are not all opinions equal, many of them are not even wrong. Many opinions are just plain stupid. What is important is that you be certain of the rightness of what you know and believe.

It's possible that large numbers of one's fellow citizens make flawed judgements about a number of things. — Wayfarer

It is not only possible that large numbers of one's fellow citizens make flawed judgements, it is a dead certainty that they make flawed judgements. Worse than that, sometimes even we (!) make flawed judgements (every little once in a while).

I think one of the difficult things about modern life is that not everyone can be right. — Wayfarer

Just out of curiosity, what age was it when everyone could be right?

The ascetic is one who rejects worldly things in pursuit of a higher transcendental plane of existence, or something to that effect.

But isn't this kind of insulting to those who aren't ascetics? The ascetic, in virtue of his actions, is essentially telling the rest of the rabble that what they like to do is inadequate, insufficient, or not worthy of praise. — darthbarracuda

We rabble, bless us, give limited admiration and a wide berth to the ascetic holy man, but we ourselves have no intentions of starving, freezing, or abstaining from all pleasures and necessities. There is little enough for us as it is. We rabble understand that some people think cold water, stale bread, and a bed rags on the ground comprise the royal road to holiness, but 99.938% of us lack any intention of following that path.

Amused slightly, perhaps, or appalled. A little grateful if the holy man's privations shed some grace on us. Insulted, no.

The term "sacred" means nothing to you. It's a hollow concept that fools insert into sentences to create meaning where there is none. — Hanover

I agree that "sacred" and other words are thought to add weight to airy sentences. However...

Luther thought ordinary work was sacred and holy.

[In Luther's time] The division between the laity and the professional priesthood was stark during this time period. The idea of the priesthood of all believers, prominent in the New Testament, became marginalized.

This was the historical context for Luther’s rediscovery of the biblical doctrine of work. Luther was one of the first theologians to spark renewed interest in reconnecting faith and everyday life. In his book How Then Should We Work? Hugh Whelchel writes that, "It was initially through Martin Luther’s efforts that the sixteenth century Reformers began to recover the biblical doctrine of work."

Lee Hardy summarizes Luther’s contribution to a more robust theology of vocation in his book, The Fabric of This World. According to Hardy, Luther expanded the idea of vocation to include: Domestic duties, civic duties, and employment. Luther then argued that everyday work is imbued with spiritual significance.

He wrote in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church that "…the works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they may be, do not differ one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks…all works are measured before God by faith alone."

The first part of the quotation ("If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered") has not been found anywhere in Thomas Jefferson's writings, to Albert Gallatin or otherwise. It is identified in Respectfully Quoted as spurious, and the editor further points out that the words "inflation" and "deflation" are not documented until after Jefferson's lifetime.

...

This first known occurrence in print of the spurious first part with the two other quotations is in 1948, although the spurious portion actually appears after the two other quotations.

From here...

I don't think the banking situation of 1813 is quite analogous to the banking situation 200 years later.

There has been a dispossessing the property of The People, but the desperadoes who were doing the stealing were people in the wealthy slave- and land-owning class to which Jefferson and other founding fathers belonged, as well as banks and corporations.

I agree with a lot of what you say, but I think the idolatry is the key problem that I take serious issue with. — saw038

I think idolatry is a key problem too. I just don't think contemporary Christian idolatry is directed toward 'graven images', statuary, and the like. The OT prohibition on graven images was a reaction to their contemporaries, Baal worshippers and others, who thought their gods and the graven images were one and the same -- the way some Hindus think that the god and the statue of the god in a temple are one and the same. The statues of the Virgin Mary or the four Evangelists or whoever are visual references, not representations. (And if somebody didn't explain who the statue was of, a lot of people wouldn't know whether it was St. John, Aristotle, or their congressman.

The idolatry of modern Christians is the emotional and capital investment in bricks and mortar. "This church is us and God's house at the same time. God lives here. We are on good terms with God here. Without this edifice which we maintain, God would be homeless, and so would our faith. Maintaining and beautifying this structure is the heart of our faith, the most important thing we do here."

No Christian would articulate such an idea, of course, but if you look at church budgets, church fundraising efforts, church giving -- the building, the organ, the stained glass windows, etc. -- are the heart of concern. That is an idolatry.

Most churches send money to food shelves, world missions, Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities, etc. but it's a pittance compared to the expenditures on building and it's contents.

The idolatry is revealed in the action, not in a superstition about graven images.

Do you think that this is a form of worshipping false idols? — saw038

You didn't ask me, but more to the point, the luxuries of the church building for the Christian is better addressed by Mathew 6:19-21, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal... because where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

The edifice complex.

Many churches become real estate operations because as young churches they needed space to grow and run their programs. Then they matured, and over time tended to shrink. Now the congregation is small, and the needs of the building (which has become both an old "treasure" and a damned nuisance) soaks up most of their resources.

This is the American situation: many denominations, many congregations covering the same territory, and secularization has left many a church building empty. The state is not responsible in any way for the maintenance of churches.

There are solutions, but very, very few congregations are willing to merge. They don't want to share space, either, most of the time. Even churches in the same denomination have difficulty cooperating in minor ways, never mind nearby churches in different denominations.

Yes, it is a sort of idolatry.

On a day-to-day basis I'm not much worried about a nuclear apocalypse, though post-apocalypse fiction is a favorite genre, if it's well done. It's the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that set the doomsday clock at 3 minutes before midnight, not I. An even more likely cause of a nuclear war (they note) is misinterpretation of signals, telemetry as well as human words and actions.

masturbation (pardon my French) — jorndoe

But "masturbation" isn't French. Masturbate is from Latin masturbatus, past participle of masturbari. If the French had had a French word for jerking off, mentally or other wise, we would probably be using it. I read somewhere that the French never engaged in masturbation of any kind, so they didn't have such a word. It was probably in the same book that said "People are stupid."

The golden rule works because most people are alike. The same is true for subjective morality. We all tend to think the way other people in our society do, and societies across time have a fair amount of similarity and continuity.

Our similarity doesn't prevent us from acting in various different ways. Most people would say it is wrong to physically attack your boss just because you have a disagreement with him or her. People understand that one can wish harm on a superior, maybe even feel ready to deliver the harm. But, because we are similar, we will generally find that attacking bosses is a very bad policy because it leads to worse consequences for the attacker.

As a labor negotiator put it, "Write the savage letter to your boss, say everything you want to say, then delete it."

We recognize this as good policy--not because we think bosses are so special that they must be protected from very negative feedback--but because we understand that employees are far more vulnerable than bosses are.

Nuclear war will almost certainly not begin with a considered, thoughtful analysis of the international situation by the central leadership, supplemented by experts in think tanks. Rather, a nuclear war will more likely begin by some country, like Pakistan, losing command and control structure under the assault of insurgents. The insurgents, being fanatics, aren't going to hesitate to resort to nukes if their perceived enemy (India, for example) is seen as a heathen threat.

Pakistan attacks India. India retaliates. Maybe the Israel decides to get rid of threats. It attacks 2 countries, india attacks Pakistan. China or Russia decides to attack the USA, and then the curtain falls.

Oppressors and oppression has been supplied in abundance. But liberation requires two steps, not necessarily in this order:

# liberate one's self from internalized oppression taught by the oppressor
# liberate one's people from external oppression enforced by the oppressor

Different forms of oppression require different approaches. People with significant physical / emotional disorders are sometimes "taught" that they are unable, insufficient, not good enough for... and so on. The oppressive society may be quite solicitous of handicapped people, while inadvertently teaching them that they are really damaged goods.

Once upon a time, most gay men thought they were deviant, sick, diseased pariahs not worthy of manhood. The Gay Liberation Movement changed that for most gay men who experienced this self-liberation, though some guys miss the comfortable closets they preferred to live in.

Whether you are objectively oppressed or subjectively self-oppressed, it is your job to do something about it. The oppressor has no interest in unbinding your chains. The oppressed have chains to lose and a world to gain, so get on with it.

Many women are oppressed. So are many blacks. It is not the job of men or white people to liberate either group. Liberation means concerted action, on the one hand, and taking responsibility for one's existence on the other hand. A woman, for instance, can not join her boyfriend in getting drunk during Oktoberfest, and then claim that he disrespected her by having (or trying to have) sex with her while she was passed out. He was drunk too. Why should his decision-making ability be in working order when hers wasn't? Accept the consequences of getting drunk with your boyfriend (or husband), or don't get drunk.

Blacks can't do a horse shit job of raising their children, and then blame the schools for being racist because their kids arrive at pre-school already developmentally stunted. You can't belittle a black peer for acting white because he's a good student, and then claim you are a victim of racism because you can't express yourself in passable standard English.

Blacks have to end their self-oppression and must conduct political, social, and economic actions to make oppressing them a losing proposition. At one time (into the 1970s) blacks were making good progress. The community lost its way. It's not too late to get back on the right track.

So what about the place divinity holds in your views? — Mongrel

Divinity, divinity, divinity... drums fingers on table. What place?

I've tried several methods of incorporating divinity into the physical system.

The divine (God) infuses everything. The divine and the material interact.
The divine (God) is utterly apart from the physical world. No interaction.
The divine (God) and the physical world are side by side, but do not interact.

Mostly now I think God doesn't exist. No divinity, the material is all. This is not an entirely happy conclusion. I had liked the presence of God in my universe.

Yes, change is the only constant. The climate will change. What is significant about THIS climate warming (or changing) is the speed at which it is happening. Normally losing or gaining a few degrees of average surface temperature takes thousands of years. We're getting noticeably warmer by the decade.

It has taken us about 200 years of burning stored up carbon (from coal and oil) that was removed from the atmosphere about 150,000,000 years ago or so (I'd have to look up the dates for the Carboniferous layer of geology). What was unique in the Carboniferous period was that the wood produced at that time did not rot -- the organisms which are good at breaking down lignin hadn't evolved yet. So the wood pilled up and eventually was buried -- permanently (until recently) reducing carbon in circulation. Trees that die now rot, and give up their carbon back to the air, or they are turned into something before rotting.

Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed?

How did we get where we are as a country? It was built on that alone, meaning power hungry cocky assholes. IE the Rockafellas/Vanderbuilts/Morgans/Carnegies and many others of the same. — kenhinds

That's a very good question, but the answer is complicated.

First, the country was built on the backs of two despised groups: white trash and black slaves. From the very beginning, (1620 and earlier, even) the English ruling class loathed their poor white English people, and thought that the shipping as many of them to the colonies would be a way of improving them. It wasn't that they thought that North America was paradise: they didn't. The colonial masters thought of the continent as an unimproved waste land, and that it was a good place to use waste people.

Over time, the descendants of the colonial masters became the founding fathers. They didn't like poor people either, like poor white Americans. Their preferred type was obsessively hard working, thrifty, an economically ambitious climber, an accumulator of land, farm animals, etc. The type they preferred was fairly abundant, and became the real "middle class" -- not the top notch elite, but the professionals, businessmen, large farmers, etc.

Then there were the slaves. Black slaves became the largest single type of asset in the country, outweighing the value of land, buildings, and machinery. They were chattel: meaning they were property, without rights, without dignity. They were in the same class as farm animals. You could beat a horse without penalty, and you could whip a slave to death without penalty. The Civil War was not the sort of liberation of black people that some think it was. Poor--now free--blacks were even more loathed than poor whites. Well, maybe not -- hard to determine who was at the bottom of the inverted aristocracy of loathsome people.

But one thing was crystal clear: blacks were not going to rise. They were going to be kept on the bottom of the social pyramid by whoever much violence it took to keep them there. And they were, from 1865 to 1965, more or less.

As for white trash, there was never any intent on the part of the American ruling class to allow American white trash to rise too much either. Rise some, yes. Rise a lot, no. Of course: Some poor white trash became rich white trash, and if that happened far enough back, one could eventually pass one's self off as high quality. Maybe even become ruling class.

So, we have the country run in the interests of the small ruling class--whose interests tend to be supported by the much larger middle -- professional, entrepreneurial, academic -- class.

Most white trash never developed a sense of being an exploited, oppressed group. They were sold the bill of goods that everybody was going to get rich, but was just currently out of cash. Going to be rich but broke lasts generations.

So white trash are racist, quite often. White trash need the theory of racial superiority to explain how they are actually better than black trash, cuz in the dark at the bottom of the heap everybody looks pretty much the same. [My background is solidly white trash. I'm a WASP -- White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but my parents were poor and I never made much money. Too stupid and trashy to know how.]

Who believes that we are on the verge of a massive paradigm shift? — saw038

I don't know whether we are on the verge of a major paradigm shift or not, and we might not know it until it has actually shifted. I don't think the conflicts in the Middle East are unusual. Unfortunate, but not unusual.

Are we on the verge of World War 3? — saw038

What makes it likely that we are on the verge of WWIII is the fact that Russia, US, China, Pakistan, India, France, UK, Israel (presumably) and NK all have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to at least some targets (like South Korea or Japan for NK). A lot of the risk is in the arsenals of Russia and the US. True, we reduced the number of bombs available (largely because we both had more than we needed) but the nuclear-missile subs are patrolling the oceans, the missile silos are ready to launch.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has their doomsday clock currently set at 3 minutes to Midnight -- the moment of doom. A few years ago it was at 6 minutes before Midnight, The End.

Naturally nobody knows at this moment how a nuclear war would begin. My guess is that Pakistan or Israel might launch an attack. Either a massive counter-attack would happen, a rapidly escalating counterattack would take place, or (least likely) the exchange would stop.

On a planet that is already experiencing global climate change, even a fairly limited nuclear war could escalate the process. Massive fires, social disorganization, abruptly shifting priorities, and so on would likely lead to a sudden increase in carbon loading of the atmosphere.

We would be totally screwed in yet more ways.

Without you, there is no me. It takes other people to be a self. We have to assemble the components of our selfhood, and while some of that comes from interacting with the objects, spaces, environmental conditions and so on, a great deal of our self-construction occurs while interacting with other selves, in varying degrees of completion.

Our playmates might be as unassembled as we are, while our parents, uncles, grandmothers, and so on are likely to be finished and polished selves. We benefit from interacting with all kinds of people.

Other people never cease to be critical. Our selves are not sufficient to easily survive solitary confinement in prison over a long period of time. We tend to shatter, eventually. People who are isolated (but at liberty), like immobile old people or psychologically fragile adults who avoid social contact, don't do well over time, physically or psychologically. They die at a much higher rate than people who are connected with others, everything else being equal.

I always think philosophy gets lost in heady speculation and neglects the nuts and bolts of human existence -- eating, playing, mating, emotions, working on cars, (or bikes, or quilting, whatever) the long hours at work, family, pets, etc.

you spend a lot of time in what is essentially a socialist household — swstephe

Reminds me of a scene from Mel Brooks' Twelve Chairs. The character is searching desperately for a chair that has jewels sewn into the upholstery. He arrives at this one house and gets on his knees and begs for information. The lady comrade says "This is a soviet household. There will be no groveling`

Do you easily and naturally believe that the outcome of a thought experiment can tell you something important about the world? If so, you, along with Leibniz, Newton, Spinoza, and Einstein (among others) lean toward rationalism.

Do you tend to squint an eye at grand theories and prefer instead to be guided by good quality studies and experimentation? Then you, along with most doctors, engineers, and John Locke, lean toward empiricism. — Mongrel

Either may be the best approach, depending on the problem and the resources at hand. I suppose I lean towards empiricism. I'm a simple peasant and I like evidence that can be cut and dried. Rationalism is probably way over my head.

1. Was Jesus' resurrection only a work of literature with no physical grounds that such a thing occurred? — saw038

Whether Jesus was raised from the dead is a secondary question. The primary question is, "Does God exist?" If God exists, Jesus could have been raised from the dead, because God could put life back into a dead body if he chose to do so. Of course, it is possible that God exists and Jesus wasn't raised from the dead. Maybe the Jews were right: God exists, but the Messiah has not come yet. Jesus was a great guy, but not The One, maybe.

If the Christians were right that God exists, but wrong about Jesus being the Son of God, then they were in deep trouble when the guy they thought was incarnated God (if they actually thought that -- they might not have at the time) was crucified, died, and on the third day was still totally dead. The disaster was Jesus' death, not the lack of a resurrection. He doesn't seem to have had time, as far as we can tell, to build up a deep following to take over for him upon his demise. The 12 apostles and followers had only had Jesus for 3 years--not very long. Even if he was God incarnate, the material Jesus was working with was not the finest grain of wood. Even as the endgame crisis approached, they kept drifting off into la la land.

The Gospels, and Paul's letters, were not written to be literature. Sure, one can read/teach the Gospels and the Old Testament as literature, and some of it is just fine as literature goes, but the Bible is best understood and appreciated as the faithfuls' account of God's actions in the world.

2. Was Jesus' resurrection a true story that transcended the realm of physical laws as we currently perceive them? — saw038

If Jesus was resurrected... yes, it was a very scandalous violation of the universe's rules and regulations. How DARE God pull a stunt like that on us -- who does he think he is?
Oh, well, I see ...

I don't think God exists, and therefore I can't think God raised Jesus from the grave. If I were changed back into thinking that God does exist, then it would be quite possible to believe that For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

I liked this piece from The Guardian "A world without work is coming – it could be utopia or it could be hell".

It touches on a number of the good observations made here.

It would be helpful if everyone listed their obsessions in their profile. That way one could more efficiently dismiss posters whose obsessions are not a good match with one's own obsessions.

You didn't give that impression. There are children present who might have fastened on to panaceas like automation or the infinite don't-be-evilness of Google. I was just heading them off at the pass.

That is to say that women would only have equality if men allowed it. — m-theory

Ah, but if women are responsible for their own equality, a lot of that spilt ink about oppression goes down the drain.

My gut feeling is that we would all (men and women alike) rather be other-oppressed than be failed self-liberators. If we fail in our own liberation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If we fail at overthrowing our oppressor, well, they were just too oppressive to beat. Not our fault!

Does this not also apply to other oppressed groups? Many blacks, gays, latinos, asians, poor whites, etc. claim that they FEEL oppressed, that they are forced to be second or third rate persons by THEM. Blacks and gays both made a lot of progress when they got together in groups and asserted their black and gay pride to one another, then began acting on the premises of that pride. "I'm just as good as you are."

That police kill a disproportionate number of blacks is not a problem of insufficient black pride. The number of blacks killed by each other is.

That organisms communicate isn't in doubt. Birds, for one, noticeably communicate a lot. Plants communicate -- chemically. They issue simple relevant messages to like kinds, "being chewed on". Communication requires only mutually recognizable signals, not language. While clicking aphids may communicate, they don't have a language of clicks.

Going up the evolutionary ladder to dogs (who are more amenable to neurological study than dolphins), we find they are closer to us than mere signaling. When you talk to your dog, it's left and right hemispheres are processing what the dog can make sense of in the same way that we do -- emotive loading in the right hemisphere, word meaning (sit, speak, lay down, good dog, drop it, shut up, etc.) in the left hemisphere.

The chapter goes into detail on these four demands — Moliere

Great. But it isn't just old fashioned, out-of-date old-leftist-fogies who say the first demand that needs to be met is "Hand over the keys and the cash." Taking possession of society's wealth (mostly in the hands of a tiny minority) is the only way to assure that the basic income is high enough, that working conditions are good for all workers, especially those doing the dirty work that is necessary but not worth automating, and that automation is in the interests of the workers and consumers.

Let's not think that Apple, Google, and Uber have our best interests in mind, or if McDonalds brings in the all-robot-fast-food operation, that we should all say "hallelujah".

#2 and #3 could be implemented tomorrow - theoretically. The current national representative government (House/Senate) isn't able to wipe it's ass, let alone pass progressive legislation. Neither item is particularly radical -- both were floated in the 1960s -- Milton Friedman thought a guaranteed income was a good idea.

Automation has been introduced into all manner of work, from surgery to soy beans. The technology has been developed far enough to eliminate a large share of the jobs the work force performs IF owners of work places decided to restructure their operations to eliminate 70% of their workers.

We could practically achieve the first three points of the plan by... oh, maybe 2036. That's only 20 years down the line and with a very large investment to get the technology in place, everywhere. (Successful automation doesn't require state-of-the-art equipment in everybody's back pocket.)

Automation will eliminate jobs. Indeed, that's the whole point of automation.

Beware. Automation hasn't been wielded by workers for their own good. It has been wielded by management for command and control and cost reduction. Even if work sucks, that doesn't mean that having no work will be better. Even the suckyest work place is likely the source of many people's vital social relationships. It's often the very suckyness of work that has bound people together.

Replacing the workplace as a critical social institution is going to take a lot more than weakening the work ethic. (One doesn't have to be a reprobate republican to wonder about how strong the Protestant Work Ethic even is. I see some evidence of it, but not lots of evidence, not everywhere.)

Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is mind-opening — Pneumenon

Maybe I heard this before, don't remember. But I fetched it up on YouTube. It's "hard music" -- one has to attend to it; hear it several times. Think about it.

For this piece, I think it helps to see what they are doing. Video #1 is the Alban Berg Quartet



Video 2 is a recording with an animated score -- it's an impression of the score, not a rolling copy of the printed work. I thought the animation added something -- something to look at, for sure. I tried following the actual score, but this was a bit over my head for that. Might not be for you. The recording is maybe not so hot--think of this version as a 'study' experience.

. . . I can't say I understand this as a response to my post, but okay. — Terrapin Station

I didn't mean to offend. Or confuse, either.

I was in a flippant mood and felt like saying something disparaging about "fine art". Actually, if I were very chilly (not in danger of freezing), there are still works by masters (I guess they are masters) that I would burn rather than shiver. I'm thinking of paintings with lots of fat little wingéd cupids, maidens in ecstasy (or severe pain -- hard to tell, sometimes), nauseating pastel colors, insipid angels, etc. I'd save a second rate Jackson Pollock over those.

And then there are works by masters for which it might be better to die in the cold than burn. Actually, there are quite a few of those works.

"Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work"... Didn't read it.

Saying "Post" something-or-other makes it sound like the writer has perceived a major turning. Maybe. Some time, maybe 25 years ago, a socialist group I was in was batting around the idea that workers were becoming unnecessary. automation and robotics have been around quite a while. An unnecessary working class flies in the face of the orthodoxy that labor creates all wealth. It also screws up the model of the economy where workers produce and buy, pumping money through the economic plumbing.

I have no problem with mechanized, electronic systems replacing many workers. The crappier jobs (a majority) could, should, and damned well ought to be replaced by machines and electronics.

There are two big problems with the guaranteed basic income idea: One big one is that maybe a majority of the population are not prepared--mentally, physically, or emotionally--to have decades of life without work. For a substantial percentage, life-without-work is more of a nightmare than a joyous future. It's sort of like disability: having the status of "unable to work" becomes an additional disability.

The other big one is whether there will be enough wealth available -- and granted to the unoccupied, unproductive population to maintain a life worth living. The capitalist class is rather stingy.

Were the revolution to have occurred, and the capitalist class was disposed of (nicely -- turned into ordinary people) the problem of the stingy ruling class would be eliminated, but then we would enter the unexplored, uncharted territory of an economy based on altogether different principles than what we (anybody) has dealt with so far.

That said, I've always enjoyed time without work -- on unemployment, living on savings, and early retirement. There is a reason why people are paid to work: nobody would do it for free. I had a couple of jobs which were so interesting I would have done them for nothing (for a few months, not years) but most jobs are devoid of intrinsic reward. A majority of jobs are flat, unsatisfying, dull, vaguely humiliating [it's not the work, it's the staff], unstimulating--and it goes downhill from there.

Work might be more satisfying under a different model of work. Working on the railroad that workers own might be better than working for Warren Buffet on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. Working in a retail coop should be better than working for Walmart.

...art ...Provides conversational fodder, leisure activities . . . all sorts of things. — Terrapin Station

A room full of large, fine oil paintings with heavy wooden frames could be broken up and fed into the fire, keeping away the chill. Adding the original hand-written scores of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and the Beatles to the fire might allow one to heat up a large kettle of bath water, provided one had had the good sense to first rip up some silk tapestries to plug the holes in the wall first. Pieces of the Bayeux Tapestry would make a nice wash cloth, bath towel, and bathroom mat set.

Just Joking he said.