If that's not sarcasm, you should vote in this thread.

This is a bit of a tangent, but seeing something about the movie Avengers Endgame just now make me think of this thread. With the way time travel works in that movie, time lines tend to branch chaotically if Infinity Stones are removed from them, but with the Infinity Stones in place changes to the past get somehow subsumed in the flow of history and cause the future to turn out unchanged. That seems to me like somehow the stones generate strong attractors that keep history converging to the same outcomes, and without them butterflies reign.

That's why I brought up that rationality is not the criterion for not killing animals. Ability to suffer is. This seems to be the predominant opinion in philosophy today; see e.g. Peter Singer.

I'm very close to a survivor of a suicide attempt. In her case, the motive seemed to be what I would characterize as existential ennui. Her life wasn't horribly painful, she had a roof over her head and a steady job and all the basic amenities of life, but it was her parents' roof and a boring job with no prestige or hope of advancement, and she had little particularly worth living for, like romantic love or passion projects or anything. From what I gather it seemed to her that life was just a tedious chore with little to no reward, a job she was obliged to do and not something she wanted to do for its own sake, so at some point she just tried to quit. Even today, when she's not like that anymore, she vehemently doesn't want to live forever, even though she's got a lot more good in her life to live for now; she seems to be just trying to make the best of this obligation to live until she is naturally dismissed from it, and the prospect of being stuck in it forever having to fill infinite time with something that feels worthwhile seems to horrify her.

This year, as I've been suffering my own existential crisis, I've had some experience of that same kind of feeling, but also coupled with a terrifying fear of death, even a ridiculously distant death (for the first six months of so of this crisis, I was fixated on figuring out some potential way for life in general to continue forever, rather than being doomed by the heat death of the universe in trillions of years or something). I've since come to the conclusion that there is a non-rational feeling of meaningfulness or meaninglessness that people can have, what I call ontophilia or ontophobia (love or fear of being), and if you are full of that feeling of meaningfulness, you neither fear death nor feel like living is an obligation that you have to fill with distractions because you're just grateful to exist right now and that can go on for as long as it does; while if you're full of that feeling of meaninglessness, you either (or both simultaneously) fear the prospect of ever dying, and feel like having to exist is an oppressive tedium that you have to distract yourself from by filling time with something.

That is fascinating to hear about fish sex and gender, but I don’t see how it relates to rationality, and in any case there are good reasons not to kill other animals for food or otherwise that are totally independent of both rationality and fish sex.

Metaphysics and epistemology are what you end up doing when you try to justify an argument that you shouldn't do them and should just use science instead.

I am critical of those workplace hierarchies, but they're a different topic than this question of financial independence. If there are other factors keeping someone tied to their job and unable to quit it and find a better one, those are problems too. But for the vast majority of people, the biggest factor is if they go even briefly unemployed they will be almost immediately homeless, because even if they drastically scaled back their consumption, they still owe money just for existing somewhere. So a family who has that squared away is way, waaaaay ahead of the game compared to almost everybody else.

I've been the starving guy who can't find a job and can barely afford to eat, and while that was awful, I at least had a free roof over my head at the time (barely... a tool shed, but it was something), and it doesn't hold a candle to the abject horror of the prospect of not even being able to sit and starve in peace one I lost that and had to constantly pay a huge chunk of my income just for the right to be somewhere. I've spent my entire life since then trying desperately to get back to a point where I don't have to be afraid of going temporarily broke, a point where there is some kind of rock bottom to hit and rest upon as I try to pick myself up again, and not just an infinite gaping void below me waiting to swallow me up if I slip up for a moment. That terror is what has made me chained to jobs and working myself to death (and avoiding every possible risk, and consequently opportunity, that could jeopardize that fragile stability) my whole life since, way worse than just having to skimp on food made me do. And the realization that it's probably going to take me my entire life just to get back to that point, and I'm doing better than 75% of Americans according to the statistics, is what made me turn to socialism from my more libertarian roots.

ETA: Also, see again a few posts back where I described my ideal world, wherein everyone, like this example family we're talking about, would have a small investment portfolio, equivalent in value to if they owned their own small owner-operated business, and how that's like everybody distributing the risk of their individual businesses among each other. That is how investment should create the safety net that seems to important to you. And that's a form of socialism: widespread individual investment in many diverse businesses is a way of having the means of production owned by the public. But that's very very different from a tiny handful of people owning most of everything.

Would you call these people financially independent? They work for what they have and they owe nobody. — BitconnectCarlos

Yep. I live a very comfortable life that I could afford on a minimum wage job if it weren't for having to pay rent and save like a mofo in the hopes of some day being able to afford stop paying rent. Getting by when you don't owe anything besides to pay for your ongoing consumption is pretty easy, and it is a lifelong uphill struggle just to get to that point. People already at that point young in their lives don't know how good they have it.

Additionally, would you call someone with $10M in assets and 500k annual income who rents a $1500/month apartment and has $1000 left on his car debt in a financially worse place than the aforementioned family? Who do you think is in the better situation here?

EDIT: To clarify, the 500k income is from passive investments not from working a job he hates. It is from multiple streams of income. — BitconnectCarlos

That person is financially better than the aforementioned family because not only does he not owe anyone anything, they owe him, on balance. Yeah he's renting an apartment and borrowing for his car but he's getting way more income from other people paying him rent and interest than he's paying out on it, and at any time he would pay off the car and buy out his (or an equivalent) apartment and still have loads of money that other people are paying him to borrow, so he's not stuck owing anyone rent or interest, he's just (for some reason) choosing to pay it when he has the easy option to not do so without losing anything.

As much as you might speak down to investing it is part of the road to wealth and financial independence. — BitconnectCarlos

I don't speak down to investing across the board. I have investments myself, and a few posts above I described my ideal world and how investments fit into it. I'm against rent and interest, and against a tiny fraction of the population holding most of the wealth (which they are of course investing, as anyone with wealth to spare would). I want to see that wealth more spread out and more people owning smaller investments and gaining financial independence. And what is "financial independence" if not freedom from debt and rent, not owing anybody anything just to keep what you already have, only needing to pay (and work to earn that pay) if you want something more? The world I want is a world where everybody has that, and where it's not a nigh-impossible lifelong struggle to achieve it.

However, the poor won't just spend the money on things that they need... they'll just spend it. — BitconnectCarlos

They'll spend it on whatever they think is most worth the money, whatever their highest priority is, whatever gives them the most value in their lives in exchange for it. Who are we to tell them that what they value is wrong?

(Mind you, having babysat my poor mother's financial life for years now, I have strong feelings similar to yours that some people just don't realize what's really going to be of most long-term value to them, but I only cared about that when it meant that she was going to be nagging me for money to cover her necessities when she blew what she already got on luxuries. But now that I've made it clear that I'm not going to do that, that she has to decide whether she wants a shiny bauble now or to still have food at the end of the month, she gets that the consequences of her spending habits are up to her, and if she wants to make that sacrifice she can and I'm not going to tell her no, she can learn that lesson herself).

The lender is taking a risk with the borrower — BitconnectCarlos

The borrower is also taking a risk, many times a greater risk. If you take out a mortgage to buy a house, and the market changes, or you lose your job, or have to move, or any other risks, you can end up losing all of the money you put into that effort... and the bank still has a house. Risk is real, but it goes both ways, and doesn't entitle the lender to more than it entitles the borrower to. The lender just has the leverage to force the borrower to cover their (the lender's) risk, because the lender has something the borrower needs.

The landlord needs to worry about constant upkeep and the highs and lows of the real estate market. — BitconnectCarlos

They would need to worry about that if it was their own home too. None of that is the renter's fault, so why should they pay for it? (Yes, renters can damage homes, but landlords can charge the renters for such damage. They only cover the upkeep that they would need to cover anyway, which is just to maintain the value of their own property, not out of some kind of generosity to their tenants).

I don't know about you, but I would never want to live in a world where the ultimate determinant to making wealth was how many hours you worked. — BitconnectCarlos

I didn't say the number of hours. Working smarter instead of harder is still a valuable thing, and that's the thing that has really advanced humanity's standards of living over the centuries. But Bill Gates didn't work millions of times smarter or harder than the average American.

It would be like slavery. Investment helps you escape this. — BitconnectCarlos

I almost don't know how to respond to this, I'm so flabbergasted. This sounds to me like a feudal lord saying "I would never want to live in a world where how much you eat depended on how much you farmed! It would be like slavery! Having serfs helps you escape this." But having serfs is like being a slave master. You sound like you're saying a world where you can't be a slave master would be like slavery.

Having to work to support yourself is the natural state of being for all creatures. And it sucks, yeah. There are two ways to reduce the work needed to support a given quality of life: technological improvements, working smarter instead of harder; and coercing other people into doing your work for you. The first of those is the legitimate way to escape from having to work so hard. The second is basically slavery.

I don't know what you're going to think of this, but those who don't work don't necessarily deserve to be poor and those who do work long hours don't necessarily deserve to be rich. Would you agree? — BitconnectCarlos

Nobody deserves to be poor. If we could effortlessly make everybody rich then we should. But it's not effortless. The question is how to distribute that effort and the rewards it pays off. And while I wouldn't blanketly say that those who put in the most effort deserve the most reward (not just because of the smarter-not-harder factor, but also because e.g. disabled people who just can't put in such effort still deserve a good quality of life, and other chance circumstances need to be accounted for too), it definitely is not the case that those who already have more deserve to get more reward for less effort, which is what capitalism gives them.

Deserve" has a place when it comes to morality and justice, but we need to be very careful with it when it comes to economic status. — BitconnectCarlos

Economics, and politics, are closely related to morality and justice. They're all about value of some kind. (It was actually my childhood interest in politics and economics that lead me into ethics to begin with). And general principles of morality and justice apply just as much to economic and political activity as they do to any other aspect of life.

Rich people generally don't horde their money per se any more, if you mean that to be contrary to investment, because inflation means uninvested money loses value over time. People with enough money that they're not going to need any time soon generally store it in investments that generate some kind of return that at least compensates for the loss due to inflation, if not to generate even further profits on top of that. Inflation is purposefully created by the government specifically for this reason, to keep money from being horded and put it back into the economy again.

But yeah, lots of individuals investing the same money still achieves the same investment results, the proceeds from that just get paid out to more people. I'm not at all against investing in the sense of owning stock, which is fundamentally different from lending or renting. In my ideal world, everyone would have a small diversified investment portfolio about equal in total value to an owner-operated small business, which would financially be like a world where everyone is their own boss (runs their own small business), except we could still have the efficiency of big organized businesses, and our risks would be spread out among each other instead of each of us sinking or swimming on our own. There just wouldn't be one class of people who own everything and don't have to work, and another class of people who do all the work because they don't own anything.

If we do not have rich people who can invest in our capitalist system, we sure as blazes will not have a high standard of living with all our technology and wonderful hospitals. — Athena

If we do not have the riches, we will not have those things, but we don't need those riches to be in the hands of just a few people. And economically speaking, "trickle down" is pretty much conclusively disproven. Economic activity is driven from the bottom up: poor people spend more of their incomes than rich people, so if you put money into the hands of the poor, it will immediately be spent on whatever they actually need, funneling that money into businesses generating actual value for actual people (who will then hire more people to meet that increased demand and so on). If you put that money instead into the hands of the rich, who already have everything they need, they will "invest" it meaning lend it out to or buy stock in whatever businesses they bet will be able to pay them back the most money. Rich people gambling on who they think will make good returns for them is a less efficient allocation of resources than poor people directly paying the businesses that provide goods and services people actually need. That's the efficiency of the free market right there.

1) What religious conspiracy theories are you referring to? — leo

I would guess it was the part about powerful leaders of foreign countries worshiping evil deities. That sounded a little weird to me too.

People like you are making this a wonderful experience! — Athena

I'm glad to hear that. :-)

I grew up in California and I thank God I do not live there. How can you live there and doubt the problem is overpopulation? — Athena

Because there are more unoccupied homes than there are homeless people, and still tons and tons of undeveloped land. I live in a place with mixed suburbs, rural orchards and ranches, national forests and other nature preserves, and so on, and it's still ridiculously expensive to live out here on the edge of nowhere... and there's always lots of fabulous houses for sale, and lots of people living in trailers and sharing run-down slums because nobody from here (like me) can afford the real houses, it's just rich people from elsewhere who want to live close to nature and so jack up the prices and stall any further affordable development to keep their property values high.

It's not a matter of there not being enough resources to support this many people, it's a matter of the resources being artificially restricted by systemic factors so that the people who control them gain more wealth and power, at the expense of a whole lot of other people that they couldn't care less about.

Mind you, I do think that overpopulation exacerbates the problem, and in places where nobody wants to live (which are subsequently sparsely populated) you don't see these problems because there is so much unwanted excess. And there certainly is some point where the world can't support any more people. But we're not there yet.

And once again, best of luck with your troubles to come.

But coercion is never the solution, coercion is what got us there in the first place. — leo

Coercion has to be acceptable in order to prevent coercion otherwise there would be unrestrained violence (e.g. we need to be able to use force as necessary to stop people from murdering, for an obvious example). But yeah, the ultimate goal is to de-escalate and minimize coercion, so if there are non-coercive solutions those are preferable.

The wealthy won’t let themselves be coerced into distributing their wealth. — leo

That's like saying that the mighty won't stand for anyone else to gain any strength. And it's true they'll usually try not to, but that doesn't mean we have to just let them get away with it, and oughtn't fight back.

fighting fire with fire doesn’t stop fire. — leo

Literally speaking, it actually does. That's why that's an idiom: backfires are a firefighting technique used by real firefighters, and (speaking as someone living in the only unburned area in the middle of the footprint of the largest fire in California history) they work.

And when there is a revolution through force, fundamentally things don’t change. New people get in power, and those in power are more easily corrupted, often they start feeling like they deserve to be there because they fought for it, and then they start feeling superior to others, and so on and a similar system gets perpetuated only with new individuals at the top. — leo

I agree with this, and that's why I don't advocate a total revolution, but a careful evolution of what we've got toward what we should have.

As for the rest of your post and the followups with others, setting aside the religious aspects of it, I also agree that the ultimate solution has to be a reform of the people themselves and their sense of morality and justice. Governments are a reflection of the people who make them up, and the only way to get better governments is to have more and better people with more power and the initiative to use it. Even an absolute monarch or dictator only has that power because people allow him to: if few enough supported him and enough opposed him, he would be powerless. So the ultimate solution is to ensure that people support good things and oppose bad things. But that starts with figuring out what's good and bad in the first place, what we should support and what we should oppose.

But an omniscient god would know that he is a god, otherwise he'd be ignorant of something. — Bartricks

If he really is a god. That's the point of the comparison I made to Tolkien elves and magic: the elves are totally doing a thing that humans call magic, so "magic" as humans mean it is totally real in that world, but the elves who do it say there's no such thing as magic, while doing it, because they know it's not actually magic.

Likewise, it's possible that a being humans would call "God" could exist, who would know that there aren't any such things as gods, if that's actually the truth. That doesn't mean that the "God" we're talking about doesn't exist, just that he doesn't think of himself as a god.

You could combine those two things for a real world example in cargo cults. Giant metal birds descend from the sky delivering bountiful food, when some strange people wave their arms around in funny ways. It's magic, summoning gods! But the people doing the "magic" built the "gods", and know that it's neither magic nor gods: it's semaphore landing coordination of airplanes. Yeah, people really are doing the hand things and it really is helping to bring down big metal flying things full of food, but it's not "magic" or "gods" in the eyes of the people actually doing it.

If I may try to paragraph @jorndoe's overall point, as I understand it:

"Hey God(s), if you're up there, a bunch of people keep telling me contradictory things about you, and I don't know which of them to believe. Since you're all-powerful and it'd be super easy for you, would you mind letting me know yourself which if any of them I should listen to? ...hello? Are you there, God? It's me, Jorndoe..."

In other words, the conclusion isn't God(s) don't exist, it's that if they exist they apparently don't care to set the record straight as to who if anyone is speaking on their behalf, and so probably aren't authorizing most if not all of these contradictory proselytizers to speak on their behalf at all. If they even exist.

Rent is coercive for exactly the reasons you describe. You are not free to just exist somewhere except on someone else's terms, payment or otherwise, unless you have enough wealth to own a place that is yours. That means that people who don't own land of their own, as a class, have to do whatever those who own enough land to lend out, as a class, want, which is not freedom. Yeah, I'm not forced to pay my landlord in particular, unless I want to live on his land, but if I don't live on his land I will live somewhere else, and have to pay someone else to live on their land. Even if I want to buy land of my own, if I don't already have an equivalent amount of wealth to trade for it, I have to borrow from a bank, and pay them rent on that money -- interest -- if I want to continue living in "my" house, which makes it really their house. I cannot avoid somehow or another owing someone money just to be allowed to exist in some place, just to be left alone. Which leaves me severely disadvantaged when it comes to saving money with which to buy a place that's truly my own, because I have to pay so much to borrow someone else's place in the mean time.

Land is the primary example, because you cannot help but exist somewhere at all times and so always are in immediate need of some place in which you are allowed to exist. But all manner of rent and especially interest, which is just rent on money, enable a coerced transfer of wealth from those who have less than they need to those who have more than they need. That's because the lenders necessarily have more than they themselves think they need (if they have enough to be renting or lending out and so not using themselves), and the borrowers necessarily have less than they themselves think they need (if they're willing to be exploited like that to get it immediately instead of saving however long it would take to buy outright).

It's coerced and exploitative because it is not a straight-up equitable trade of one thing for another. At the start of the transaction, the lender has whatever he's lending out and the borrower has nothing. At the end of the transaction, when the lease is expired or the loan paid back, the lender has what he started with plus the rent or interest payments, and the borrower still has nothing, minus what he paid in rent or interest. But because the lender has enough to lend, more than he has to be using himself, and the borrower is in immediate need of it, the borrower has no choice but to accept those terms.

And that mechanism where the whole transaction moves wealth from those with less than they need to more than what they need is what breaks the naturally distributive nature one would naively expect form a free market. It's supposed to work so that the rich buy labor from the poor so that they don't have to work so much themselves, and the poor labor for the rich so that they can get richer, until the hardworking poor have wealth enough that they only need to labor to fund their ongoing consumption, and the idle rich lose wealth until they run out of excess to sell and have to start working to fund their own ongoing consumption too. If the rich want to stay rich, they'd need to work as hard as the hardworking poor do. That's how it's supposed to work in a truly free market, wealth goes to those who are doing the work, and if you slack off you lose it. But with rent and interest, so much of what the poor "buy" with the proceeds of their labor just gets returned to its rich owners, who can then use the proceeds from "selling" that "service" of lending it to pay for more of the labor of the poor, who then spend that back on rent and interest again, and so on, so the rich can sit idly forever making money off of the same wealth lent out over and over, while the poor keep working and working forever never making any headway.

If the gap between them is big enough, at least. If the difference in wealth is small enough then extra hard work or extra good luck or some combination thereof can surmount it still. But the point is that the existence of rent and interest systemically transfers wealth from the already-poor to the already-rich, in the process creating a pressure away from the middle class (defined here as those who have exactly as much as they need, and are neither lenders nor borrowers). That increases the gap between rich and poor more and more and makes it harder and harder for more and more people to cross it.

So long as that pressure away from center exists, some kind of counter-pressure toward the center is warranted. Ideally, there would be neither, but we're far from ideal right now.


Put another way: rent and interest enable what's basically a multi-nodal feudalism. Instead of working on one lord's land to generate profit (crops) only to then have to pay that same lord most of that profit in exchange for the right to have land to live and work on, we're "free" to work one "lord's" "land" (some employer) for our profit, only to have to pay most of that profit in exchange for the right to live on some other literal lord's land. We're still serfs, we've just got multiple lords now. We're not free until we own the things we need to work and live ourselves, and don't have to borrow them from others at interest.

If I'm understanding @jorndoe's point correctly, it's not about the credibility of reports of direct revelations, it's about how, if you take religions' own accounts from their own holy texts at their word, it seems that the gods therein are perfectly content to let people go about not knowing about them, because those texts never give accounts of someone who didn't know anything about the gods directly finding out about them from the gods themselves.

Jacob and Isaac, as you say, heard about God from Abraham first. All of the other names you list were Hebews who would have been raised in cultures that worshiped him. Abraham sounds more believable since he founded the Abrahamic religions that worship that God, but I'm not remembering Abraham first learning about God's existence, just God giving him some commands and Abraham seeming to already understand who it was talking to him. Can you find me the passage where Abraham first meets God and learns of his existence?

Those are such broad questions, it'd be paragraphs to answer, and I've already got those paragraphs written: the relationship between wealth and freedom is discussed in On Teleology, Purpose, and the Objects of Morality, while the relationship between private property and freedom is discussed in On Deontology, Intention, and the Methods of Justice.

It's not dead, it's just resting, but glad you woke it up anyway. :)

Do you believe in forced redistribution though? — BitconnectCarlos

Not ideally, but while there are still other less direct but still coercive wealth redistribution systems running in the opposite direction (like rent and interest) it's an acceptable stop-gap measure. I'm a libertarian socialist, opposed to both the state and capitalism, but also a pragmatist, and while we're stuck with both states and capitalism I'd rather they be balanced against each other than in cahoots together.

Should there be a wealth cap? — BitconnectCarlos

No. Not by law at least, but in effect people should not generally end up owning things they aren't using that other people are or could be using instead, so if there are people who own wealth thousands of times more than they're personally using, and controlling other people's lives because of that, then something somewhere has gone wrong, and that needs to be addressed.

It's treated as revealed truth. — Wayfarer

In the active religion it is, but in the holy texts of such religion it is not. In the holy texts, everyone just already knows that God exists. Nobody ever has a moment (that I can recall... open to Bible quotes showing otherwise) of suddenly having the existence of God revealed to them by himself.

Do you have a better alternative? — BitconnectCarlos

Some form of socialism. I have my own thoughts fleshed out near the end of my essay On Politics, Governance, and the Institutes of Justice.

There are no accounts of people who were aware of Newton's Laws of Motion before Newton published them. — Wayfarer

Besides Newton himself. In contrast we don't even have an account in the Bible of the first person who learned of God's existence. It's always treated as obvious to everyone that God exists, and just a question of whether or not to obey and worship him.

But also, we don't expect the laws of physics to even be able to have personal desires and do personal actions like telling people about themselves. We do often expect that of gods, and as you've pointed out, there's lots of accounts of them doing personal things like that, speaking to people, expressing wants (by way of issuing commands, at least), and so on.

From what I recall there are nefarious motives behind a lot of Bill's charity, like it somehow helped his own investments, but I don't recall the details on that and they were from like two decades ago so I won't argue that right now.

Assuming instead that all of his charity was legitimately charitable, then that's nice of him, but the fact that the world is dependent on him being nice because so much of the wealth of the world is at his command is a symptom of a much larger systemic problem than a single billionaire.

I'm reminded of a bit I recently saw about all these news stories about things like "teachers, staff, even janitors donate sick days so fellow teacher can take time off to visit his daughter during her cancer treatment" spin that as being all about the loving charity of those people helping their colleague out, completely washing over the bigger story of "teachers normally aren't allowed enough time off to visit their children during medical emergencies". Yes, a bunch of individuals did a very nice thing, to plaster over one corner of an enormous systemic injustice.

Even a painless death is a harm to someone who is still alive and facing it. If we were living in a simulation as uploaded minds and there was a way to simply delete a person from it, causing no effects in the simulation except the sudden instantaneous disappearance of their body (no process of dying, just ceasing to exist), that is still something that we in the simulation would have reason to avoid.

I'm not sure who you're referring to when you reference this "tiny fraction." Dictators? Billionaires? — BitconnectCarlos

Yes. The few people who own or otherwise control all the abundant resources that could be saving the lives of many but aren't.

"Atheist" can be an adjective to, and his name is obviously a joke.

(Though it also reminds me of the Elves of Tolkien's legendarium, who insist that there is no such thing as magic while doing magic, because to them what they're doing is not magic, because they actually understand. So, possibly, the being humans call God, being so much more knowledgeable than us mere mortals, knows perfectly well that there are no gods, and that we're wrong for calling him one).

But the grammar does remind me of a confusing bumper sticker my neighbors have, that reads: "Which religion is God?" My first thought on seeing that was "uh, no religion is identical to a god, even if gods existed, this is a category error", but on re-reading I realized it's asking "to which religion does God belong", i.e. "is God a Catholic or a Buddhist or a Shinto or a Mormon or what?"

No problem.

Looking back at the OP again, I think @jorndoe's point in bringing this up is that whatever god or gods there might be, they apparently let people carry on having never heard of them (until other humans show up to tell them) when they could, being all powerful, immediately and directly inform everyone of their existence themselves; which then raises doubts about whether they care for people to be informed of their existence in the first place.

Paul knew of Christianity prior to converting to it, as he had been actively persecuting Christians for their beliefs before adopting them himself.

My point is just that @jorndoe didn't say there are no accounts, credible or otherwise, of gods ever appearing to people, but that there are no accounts of gods appearing to people who were not already aware of those gods because of being part of a culture where people already believed in them. Gods, it seems, only appear to people who were already aware of them, according to their own holy texts.

I'm not sure what his point was in saying that, but accounts of gods appearing to their preexisting believers isn't a counterexample to it.

Moses was a Hebrew. Yahweh was already their god. The Burning Bush wasn't the first time Moses had ever heard of him.

Who said the religious left are not spending their money on the needy? You really seem to love your straw men.

Religions often operate social services. That's a good thing I don't think anyone's complaining about. Some religious people might be perfectly happy if the state also operated social services. But there is also a clear motive for religions to oppose state-operated social services, so that religion is the only place to turn to for social services, and so more people turn to religion. That would be a motive more for people who are concerned about their religion "winning" over alternative worldviews and lifestyles, and less for people who see other religions and the state providing those same things as allies in a common cause. In other words, the right vs the left.

The "...without them already having been informed thereof by other humans" part is important. Off the top of my head I can't think of any accounts in the Bible of God showing up to talk to someone who was previously completely unaware of his existence. That's the point about Jesus showing up to the Americas being a potential counterpoint, if those accounts held up.

My sympathies. I haven't been through anything nearly as objectively bad as that, but I think the past five years or so of constant family and work crises leaving me "constantly perceiving immediate, imminent danger" (even if that perception was an overreaction on my part, I still felt it) is possibly behind the existential breakdown I've been having for the past year or so, where most things in my life have gotten a lot more stable at last but I still wake up feeling like it's the end of the world (because "the unrelenting stress changes the chemistry of your brain and your whole sense of reality begins to warp") and then spend all day just trying to feel normal again before I need to sleep so that the anxiety isn't keeping me up all night fearing the next morning. It's probably post-traumatic stress, but I haven't seen a therapist since it started, just my MD because I initially thought it was physical in origin.

This exactly. There are several times more unoccupied homes in the United States than there are homeless people in the United States. Likewise with food surpluses in the world and hungry people in the world. We have so many resources available to us as a species now that it would be pretty trivial to meet all the needs of every person in the world at a comfortable standard of living. We just don't, because a tiny fraction of people are allowed to decide whether we do, and they gain some tiny advantage in their already-splendid lives by letting other people starve in the streets.

I think the core issue in political philosophy isn't so much power, but authority. That is, it's not so much about who has the ability to force others to do something, but who has a legitimate moral or ethical right to command, and conversely everyone else a duty to obey them. That does have an effect on how power ought to be distributed, because whoever has the power is the one who's going to be commanding and being obeyed.

As a philosophical anarchist -- one who thinks nobody has a legitimate right to command, or duty to obey -- I think power in the sense that you mean (which is a more specialized sense than the one sushi is on about above, social power specifically, the ability to coerce) needs to be distributed as evenly as possible, so that it remains balanced between people, and consequently nobody has more of it over another than they have over them, leaving everybody with effectively zero, relative to anyone else. I have thoughts on a structure that I think could help to approximate that, detailed in my essay On Politics, Governance, and the Institutes of Justice.

Being happy and being struggle-free are not synonymous. Some people can manage to keep their spirits up amidst struggle and that's great for them. That doesn't mean they're not struggling.