Christianity

[promethean75]

"I don't profit offa The State."

how do you get your potable water, your electricity, phone landline, paper mail and packages? do you need paved roadways or do you prefer a horse or a four-wheeler? what would you do if there were no state vehicle inspection regulations and you rearended some schmuck with no working brake lights? what if you bought gasoline from the arabs down the street and found out it was watered down nonsense? or if you bought an old ass chicken from the grocery store and got sick as a muhfucka after eating it?

these are rhetorical questions HQ because i know what you'd do. you'd bring out the bazooka and handle shit.

but u see my point. what you want to say is 'i, henry quirk, am prepared for and would go willingly into, an anarchistic (non)state arrangement.... but seein's how that'll never happen, I'll use the county's publically funded resources and utilities becuz wtf else am i gonna do?'

[Age]

No, you. Name one.

You cannot.

All your ancient "preachers" are gone and forgotten. None of them had any impact at all. You can't even remember one name.

But Jesus Christ...that's a name you won't forget. And after all this time, you should ask yourself why...

Because people like you keep using that name.

Our whole culture, our literature, our ethics, our history, our conversation, our art, our social structures, our foreign relations, even our science and medicine, and our religiosity are all rife with mention of Him, far more than anybody else.

And in OTHER cultures, literature, ethics, history, et cetera they are all 'rife' with mention of "others", like, for example, "muhammed". "He" is mentioned FAR MORE than ANY body else.

Only in your OWN tiny little culture, literature, ethics, history, et cetera "immanual can" is the OTHER one mentioned and talked about, as much as 'it' is.

Even when our crude folks swear, they resort to His name...precisely because it's the most sacred thing they can purport to defile. Ironic, isn't it?

That you would think this way, and bring it up now, could be 'ironic', or just plain STUPID.

So it isn't just "people like me." It's everybody in Western culture, and a whole lot of other people, too.

LOL

EXACTLY as I said, 'people like you', "immanuel can". As I have just SHOWN and PROVED True.

Oh, and by the way, WHY did you 'bother' this time, and NOT the other times?

Also, and if you will NOT answer and CLARIFY this question, I WILL INFORM the readers the reason WHY you did 'bother' this time and NOT the other times is because you could WITHOUT CONTRADICTING "yourself". Although in responding THIS TIME you have REINFORCED and PROVED my point MORE TRUE.

[promethean75]

what guys like you'n me need, Henry, guys who'r the real deal holyfield anarchists (tho for different reasons), is for folks to understand that we ain't no goddamn armchair renegades who really need and want the state but pretend not too cuz it makes us feel manly.

we ain't no goddamn proud boys, Henry!

*fires shot into bar ceiling, mutters something unintelligible, takes shot if whiskey*

[Immanuel Can]

Because people like you keep using that name.

Our whole culture, our literature, our ethics, our history, our conversation, our art, our social structures, our foreign relations, even our science and medicine, and our religiosity are all rife with mention of Him, far more than anybody else.

Only in your OWN tiny little culture, literature, ethics, history, et cetera

No, actually. Jesus Christ is literally the most famous human being on the planet, in all of history. Nobody has been more influential...certainly in every place where Western civilization has any influence, which today, means everywhere. In North and South America, in Canada and all of Europe and Australia, in the Middle East and even in China (which likely has the most Christians in the world) and Korea (that has the highest per capita rate). Even in Islamic lands, Jesus Christ is held to be a prophet, second only to Mohammed; and they call him "Issa."

So you're just plain wrong...again. And if you were out of high school yourself, and could travel the world, you'd see I was right.

[promethean75]

duddint matter how many people end up being your fans after you're dead, but how many fans you acquire while alive, and how fast you acquire them.

be that as it may, jesus could never compete with Elvis or Michael Jackson.

[Immanuel Can]

"I don't profit offa The State."
how do you get your potable water, your electricity, phone landline, paper mail and packages?

All things not invented by government.

do you need paved roadways

Okay, we'll give you that one...they didn't invent the paving, but they do have some (notoriously inefficient) role in planning and seeing it gets done...using our money to do it.

state vehicle inspection regulations

Small-government conservatives are not against a limited role

but u see my point.

Not really.

Give anything to government...anything...and it will do it badly. It will waste tons of money, and spend it on loads of things you don't think are worthwhile. The more local, small and accountable to you a government is, the more likely it is to be efficient and serve your interests; the larger it is, the worse and more wasteful it is, and the larger the incursions it will make on your freedom.

I'll use the county's publically funded resources and utilities becuz wtf else am i gonna do?'

The county is local government.

Nobody says "no government" is a possible or desirable situation. But small government, locally-accountable government, and minimal big government, limited to dealing with things like diplomacy, the military, national security and borders, is the desirable situation. Still, as you can see, big government won't even do those things well.

[Immanuel Can]

jesus could never compete with Elvis or Michael Jackson.

If that were true, it would be a sad, sad commentary on both our values and our moral state.

But in point of fact, it's not true.

[promethean75]

You could put Jesus in a studio for a month and he wouldn't come up with something as good as this, IC.

[Alexis Jacobi]

What I know is: I'm a free man with a natural, inalienable, right to my, and no one else's, life, liberty, and property.

What I know is: I didn't create The State, I don't support The State, and I'm not responsible for the actions of The State and its agents.

What I know is: I don't profit offa The State.

So, seeds, my good, good friend, you can peddle that wagonload of manure elsewhere cuz I ain't buyin' it.

Nature in no sense offers ‘freedom’. Nature constrains, ropes a given organism into needs & necessities that are inescapable. And Nature insists that every organism will eventually become another organism’s lunch.

Nature gives no ‘inalienable rights’. Except to function, rather like a slave, within the constraints of ecological systems.

Obey or perish . . .

Man’s culture begins to offer a facsimile of freedom-of-a-sort. But usually (or exclusively?) to those at the apex of (what we call) exploitive arrangements.

Examined more closely, you (and all of us) are both victims of exploitation and exploiters.

Yes, you did not create the State. Yet you participate in its existence and benefit, as all do, from it.

To deny complicity (on so many levels) seems to me a false piety.

What a curious problem we face!

[Harry Baird]

Even when our crude folks swear, they resort to His name...precisely because it's the most sacred thing they can purport to defile.

That's nothing compared to the gross defilement of sacredness and slander against divinity that is your claim that God would consider it either just or loving to under any circumstances condemn any sentient being to an eternity of inescapable, unimaginable torment, let alone that God would actually do such a thing. With this, you paint God not just as the sickest and and most depraved monster imaginable, but as the worst avatar of the evil to which God is actually opposed. And that's your choice. You have to live with it.

No, I'm not letting this go, because I know that soon enough you'll be back to your old ways of making disgusting threats to various forum members that God is going to do exactly that to them personally if they don't join your club. What a foul and despicable thing to say about God. You utter blasphemer.

[Immanuel Can]

...your claim that God would consider it either just or loving to under any circumstances condemn any sentient being to an eternity of inescapable, unimaginable torment, let alone that God would actually do such a thing.

Hi, Harry:

You're back, are you? I'm fine with that.

But I have to ask: are you any more willing to discuss this rationally? Or are you still locked into the accusatory, hostile mode?

I'd like to talk this through with you, and point out all the things your summation gets wrong...or forgets completely. But I suspect right now that would just occasion more fevered hostility.

So what do you want to do? HIss, or talk?

[Nick_A]

ONLY the human being.

However, the Thing, which the God word once referred to, is NOT hypocritical, NOR contradictory, AT ALL.

Quite true. Did Man create God or did God create man? Most secularists believe man creates God. You believe that God creates man. I agree. But to make any sense out of it we must pursue deductive reason rather than inductive reason used by science. Deductive reason must begin with the question "what is God?" and work its way down to individual phenomenon and see if it makes logical sense proving an intellectual belief in the source of man and the universe.

Good luck with that Nick! Spinoza did it and very few bother to follow Spinoza's deductive reasoning.

Spinoza was one of those rare ones who understood that everything in our universe is connected. These people do not argue beliefs but try to understand laws which verify meaning.

" Spinoza holds that everything that exists is part of nature, and everything in nature follows the same basic laws. In this perspective, human beings are part of nature, and hence they can be explained and understood in the same way as everything else in nature."

Einstein wrote:

"Humanity is going to require a substantially new way of thinking if it is going to survive. The basic laws of the universe are simple, but because our senses are limited, we can’t grasp them."

That's the problem. When contemplation of laws is ignored in favor of arguing beliefs based on ignorance, what is possible other than what we see?

"To restore to science as a whole, for mathematics as well as psychology and sociology, the sense of its origin and veritable destiny as a bridge leading toward God---not by diminishing, but by increasing precision in demonstration, verification and supposition---that would indeed be a task worth accomplishing." Simone Weil

Simone understood what both Einstein and Spinoza did; that science has the potential to reveal the truths the heart is searching for. But like Einstein suggests, our senses limit us.

Of course I am partial to Gurdjieff. I would never want to be without the complimentary nature of science and the essence of religion I have been fortunate to learn.

But there are those, past and present, still capable of deductive logic serving the awakening of humanity and freedom from Plato's Cave. There is hope.

[Harry Baird]

You're back, are you?

I never left, nor said that I was leaving. I just gave up on getting a straight answer out of you in particular. On reflection, though, I've realised that if you are to remain a presence in this thread (which is the only one I've chosen to participate in this time round), and if you are to continue promoting offensively irrational beliefs, and threatening the rest of us with eternal damnation based on those beliefs, then it is necessary for me to hold you to account for those beliefs.

You could see it as a sort of tough love if you like: a certain firmness that is required to cut through your tangled web.

I'd like to talk this through with you

Then start honourably: finally answer directly and honestly the question (as amended) that I've put to you repeatedly. Start with "Yes", because that's obviously the answer you endorse. If, following that, you care to explain your endorsement of an absurd, sick contradiction in terms - of a shameless insult to God - then go ahead and try to defend the indefensible however you choose to, at whatever length you choose to, in whichever manner you choose to. But don't try to engage me in a condescending pseudo-Socratic process of questioning in reverse. Just say what you have to say. Make whatever case you think you can make.

Here the (amended) question is again:

Is it either loving or just to condemn a person, for finite crimes or even simply for mere inheritance of some supposed "original sin", to an eternity of a hell which is, in your own words, "considerably worse than most people can even imagine"?

[Harry Baird]

Sticking with the theme, here's a hypothetical scenario for the reader - one in particular, who will know who he is - to consider:

You move to a new town. Only after moving there - you are down on your luck and can't afford to live anywhere else - do you discover that living there already is a group of idealists with strict ethical standards to which they are seeking for all townsfolk to adhere. According to their strict ethics, life is a communal, collective journey, and one should live for one's brothers and sisters, with everybody sharing everything they have with everyone else (personal effects such as private diaries, photograph albums, family heirlooms, etc, excepted).

They approach you enthusiastically, expecting you to endorse their ethics given that you have moved to their town. You tell them that, no, you don't endorse their ethics, and you choose to live a life for yourself, on your own terms, and you ain't sharin' nothin' with nobody.

They warn you that there are consequences for that choice. Those who live (what they see as) selfishly in their selfless community without repenting after being given ample time to do so are eventually castrated so that they cannot propagate their selfishness into the next generation, all of their possessions which they refused to share freely are taken from them by force, and, finally, they are locked up in isolation in a confined space for the rest of their lives - because, being selfish, they now get to live with themselves all alone.

You tell them to stick it.

They warn you again of the consequences of choosing (what they see as) a selfish ethic. They further warn you that you are under watch and will be prevented from leaving town. You thus have two options: adopt their ethics, or suffer the consequences.

You tell them again to stick it.

They keep on warning you.

You keep on telling them to stick it.

Eventually, you end up castrated, owning nothing, and locked up alone in a cell for the rest of your life.

But hey, *YOU* chose it. You were given every opportunity to live by the ethical standards that were imposed upon you, but you didn't. Thus, it was *YOUR CHOICE*, and you've nobody to blame but yourself.

That's a fair assessment, right?

[Lacewing]

Can anybody believe this guy?

No.