Mike Fleming

If a guy walked on water I would not change my views on religion. All that proves is that someone has found a way to walk on water. Maybe it is some super-advanced alien race who is doing it. Just because someone performs feats that seem beyond the reach of current technology doesn't mean that it won't be possible with more advanced technology that we have not reached. We would have to find out the means by which the feat was accomplished. Even if for some bizarre reason we couldn't with current knowledge, it's still only proof of a man walking on water. You can't make any further assumptions from it.

Is there any evidence or reason to think reincarnation is real? Nice theory and makes for nice stories in books and films but kind of ridiculous when you actually think about it. Just seems to be a relic of people thinking there are souls to me.

"We need to remember the true meaning of Christmas. The birth.... of Santa." Paraphrased from Bart Simpson. It's just the Winter Solstice festival really. The Christians just adopted it. Perhaps the reason they struggle to remind people of "the true meaning of Christmas" is because Jesus is simply not the true reason.

You're going to stand by and do and say nothing while your child attempts to put their hand in a hot oven? Or if your child wants to cross the road without looking while cars are constantly whizzing past? Be real and quit with the stupid shit questioning.

Good. These are the issues you need to resolve. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that you can force people to be good. Or thinking we just need to set up a system where everything is free and everyone will be happy. These are traps. Straighten this out in your head and the desire to control others will be removed.

I'm sorry you had problems with your parents. I did too. Many here have. You are safe to talk about it here. As for Stef's best job on Earth? Do you realise how incredibly risky it was for him at the start? It was an unproven business model. There was no way to know whether there was any longevity to it. He wasn't getting paid all that much compared to what he could get in the market. The amount of work that it has taken for Stef to get this far is absolutely enormous. I honestly wouldn't expect someone who wants everything for free to understand this though. Just more affirmation. You are telling us everything here. As the poster above says, prove that your emergent behaviour has relevance in this context. It's like talking about Quantum Mechanics. Everything is quantum when you get right down to it but what relevance does that have to the discussion we are having about human behaviour?

You don't get rights beyond those of individual rights when you join a group. I don't know how to simplify that more. Since when does peer pressure change your rights? "Oh, someone made me do this or someone said I should do this or everyone else did it so I just followed." None of these are excuses. I think people who can't accept the fact that government is basically, by any reasonable standards, a criminal organization, just don't want to accept these facts. You don't get rights by joining a group therefore people in government can't have the rights they claim to have. Simple . Done. Individuals can't violate the rights of other individuals. Voluntary trade does not involve the violation of rights, because they are choosing to trade. It turns out that this is the most effective way of providing resources to people and lifting people out of poverty. And it's logical when you think about it. People will work harder if they get to retain the fruits of their labour. The more work done, the more goods and services available to society, the better off is everyone in general. You don't need to make things more complicated than they are.

There may be a creator or creators of the universe, who knows? Although it seems unlikely to me considering what I know of science, I can't rule it out completely. But if such a creator did exist, it would not be God. God is self-contradictory. God was created by ancient, primitive, superstitious man. God is nonsense.

Now you are just getting needlessly abstract. The reality is that a human makes a choice. That is one choice. The market never does that. It's all the individuals making their choices individually that is described as the market. There is no market organism that can think for itself. We judge individuals on their choices. You go into a courtroom and you are not judged as part of a group, you are judged specifically on what your actions were. If one member of a group kills someone, that doesn't mean the other members of the group are guilty of murder. You have to assess each individual's actions on it's own merits. Assigning properties to a group of people, like say the government, is what gets us into trouble. The reality is, we, individuals, all have the exact same rights and putting people into a group does not change the individuals rights nor does it mean they are absolved of their actions.

This is very pertinent. Just because you call something a family does not then mean that the parents have rights beyond the children because it is a family structure. You still have to look at the actions of the individual actors to know whether they are right or wrong. You don't say, "oh, it's a family so therefore the children must respect the mother and father" for example. I mentioned above that the reason this is necessary is because the market is ascribed all kinds of properties by media and government, many of which are untrue. Just as the family is also in society. But people get away with it when they use the abstract grouping. To get to the truth you have to look at individual behaviour. . And also, people are essentially separate from each other, your body isn't. I can separate myself in space from other people, but it's not a good idea if I start trying to separate my body parts. The people who are separate from each other still function the same. Remove body parts and they will quickly die. Honestly, the difference isn't hard if you choose to actually think about it. This goes back to Stef's contention that RBE'ers are still children who feel robbed because they did not get their needs met as children and now expect some kind of external agency (in this case a computer) to look after them as an adult. It's because there are so many people like this currently in society that we have nanny governments.

Maybe you should go talk to your grocer and ask him about this power that he has. My guess is that he feels beholden to his customers and feels like he has to satisfy them in order to stay in business. That's the entire reason so many businesses, particularly big businesses (eg. banking) run to the government. They go there to get protection from their customers so that they can abuse and gouge their customers and don't have to play by the rules of free market competition. It's an easy way to get big profits. Government is happy to do so, but stipulates that the employees must get a certain share of these improved profits. This process reduces productivity and increases inflation and customers are the worse off.

A market does not exist in the way a forest does not exist. It is just a collection of trees. And that governments do not exist. They are just people stealing and killing. It's important to drill down to see what we are actually talking about. The word market is so abused in popular culture and made out to be like some mythical dragon or something. It's important to recognise that the market is just people trading with each other, just as the government is people stealing and forcing others to do things at gunpoint. When you look at things at that level it is clear that one is OK and one is not. It's also important to realise that central planners and the people who depend on them, academia and media particularly, will always be quite eager to denigrate the idea of the market because if you look at markets closely you realise that not only can they work without central planning, but all evidence and logic points to them working much better without central planning. Central planners, of course, don't want you to know this and want you to think the opposite. I'm pretty sure Stalin railed against the free market too. The services you talk about that are mainly paperwork are to do generally, though not always with government. Bookkeeping is an important part of the economy whether it is paper or computer based. I would argue that many of these services are not "just paperwork". There are all kinds of services that people provide in the local economy around me. Why not get ahold of your local yellow pages and have a look? Have a flick through and measure the thickness of it. You'll see most of the services provided are not book-keeping. You are still trading time. Even if you have machines doing the work you still need people to use their time to look after the machines. The difference is that with automation, people's time becomes more valuable. They can get paid more because their time is so much more productive. As this happens the economy starts to evolve and new jobs that weren't economically viable before now become viable and we are all better off. Or I should say this is what happens in a free market setting. Unfortunately, so much of the West has been weighed down with rules and regulations that markets aren't working very well at all. And so the economy can not dynamically adapt to fit the new circumstances. This is government doing it's best to hold back change. That's what it always attempts to do and has unfortunately been wildly successful. It's why the communist countries failed. And it's why China was failing until it implemented market reforms. People need to be free to enjoy the fruits of their labours. Otherwise, they lose interest in working. It turns out that our systems are only slightly more successful than the communists. They are failing for very similar reasons. Government interference. It just took a bit more time for the problems to pile up because our masters weren't as heavy-handed as the communists.

Atheism doesn't have any doctrines nor any authority so therefore it can't specifically be used to kill people. There is no atheism bible. There are no atheist leaders. It is not in any way shape or form a belief. If you are going to go the classic Hitler and Stalin route, the beliefs that killed those people were not "atheism", they were, respectively, democracy and communism. Two entirely irrational belief systems where people claim to have authority over others.

So why not pick any random book and pick and choose? What about all the other religious books? If you know what's right and wrong, why do you need the bible? If you don't know what's right and wrong, how is the bible going to help, since it can clearly and has been justified for evil? Many people here feel the same way about your God. Yes, he is a fictional character, just as the state is a fictional idea, but the erroneous belief in him causes a great deal of harm. He is the ultimate totalitarian dictator.

Just upfront, this is not meant to spark a discussion about free will. It's just a request. I heard Stef talk on a recent call-in show that you are looking to get a neuroscientist in who is at the forefront of research into free will. Or something like that. That is something that is very interesting to me. I subscribe to determinism myself but would definitely be interested in such a conversation. Are there any materials or website etc to look at in the meantime about this person and/or their research? Maybe a book on Amazon or something... Thanks.

Why is central planning required for the market to work?

The "market" does not exist. There are just people. We work and provide resources for each other. We do this because some of us are more efficient at certain things than others. Everyone wants and needs a certain amount of resources, but providing what we need just by ourselves is essentially impossible unless you have a poverty level existence. People and money involved in production instead of automation and resources? What on earth are you talking about? It's always been resources. You can't eat money. You can't do much of anything with money. And automation? It's been around for a long, long time. Wind and water have been used to automate physical processes for centuries now. It's not a new invention. It's just that we are getting better and better at it. The market gives us products but takes away our time? Of course. Because someone has to use their time to make them. This goes back to my point above about the market not existing and it's just people. It's a fair exchange of time for time. Money is the abstraction that allows this exchange to occur. Honestly, do you guys understand the market(people trading) at all? This is why we say free market = freedom.

People are doing those equations and making those calculations daily in companies all over the planet. And programming computers to do them as well. Why do we need a central mainframe when it's obvious decentralization is the way to more efficiency? We gave up those centralized kinds of systems decades ago. Perhaps you'd like to construct another strawman?

Dear e yer, It is quite obvious to any reasonable thinking person that the bible has a great deal of evil in it. Drowning people en masse for their sins for example. I haven't read Mein Kampfe, for example, but I bet there's probably a few good things in it amongst all the insanity. The bible isn't really any different. The entire problem that Christians seem to have is that they assume God exists. If God exists, then it's very difficult to have to conceive of him as being as evil as he is portrayed in the bible. That's why Christians lie to themselves and just pull out the good parts while ignoring the bad parts. Organised religion feeds this of course by not mentioning the bad parts to their congregation. The far simpler, and more rational method, is to consider whether this God actually exists or not. The answer that a rational person comes to is no. This God was invented by primitive, barbaric people and as such, the God is primitive and barbaric giving these people an excuse for being primitive and barbaric. Saying we should use this book as a basis for law? No. It should be mocked and scorned for what it is. We don't want a situation where people can justify bad behaviour by pointing to the bible. Kind of like how things are now. Sincerely. EDIT: if you'd like to know how law could be created in a free society this is a good lecture. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz0AvdqRVnI

You are the sum of your posts on the forum. That's all people know about you, apart from a few personal details like name, location, sex and such. It's similar to the way Stef talked recently about people being their arguments, or something like that. I'm paraphrasing from memory so it might not be completely correct. That their arguments aren't seperate from them. I think as well, for me, it is the fact that others are choosing, via the voting system, who gets "ignored". I think that irks me somewhat as I generally don't ignore anyone and certainly not people who I think have something to contribute even if I do find a few of their posts a little annoying. As for free will-determinism, I don't see how anyone can say it's resolved when it is still so contentious here and in society at large. And why should people like myself who didn't get a chance to contribute our thoughts now be censored? Although, it seems to me that in reality it isn't censored, it's just that some people wish it was. That should get me at least one downvote. I'm going for the red!!

The bible has a lot more to say than just love thy neighbour. Do we obey all of it's commandments or just that one or just the ones that you like? And if it's just the passages that you like doesn't that make you the person who decides what society should be like rather than God? Thereby making you defacto dictator?

Whether or not you make a rational argument or not can be very much in the eye of the beholder. Not everyone's standards are the same. And does someone deserve to get downvoted the instant they make a bad argument? Should there not be the chance for the conversation to continue a few posts before they are judged? And how long should that be? And this is a large board. How can you know for sure if an argument has been refuted or not? Maybe the search might find it maybe it won't. EDIT: sorry, while I am thinking about it, why should someone's posts in one thread be judged by what they have said in another by making their posts invisible? Maybe they are rational in one thread but being punished for irrationality in another thread.

^ Right. I mean I enjoyed Pulp Fiction, but apart from that, I think he might be a bit overrated. Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, I don't rate any of these. I caught a bit of Django but it didn't appeal at all.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I think positive feedback is very valuable. I used to frequent another forum where basically it just had a thanks system. If you appreciated/agreed with a post it would show your name at the bottom eg. the following users said thank you for this post : user1, user2, etc When I saw people thanking a post that I had made it made me feel good that I had posted something of value, especially when it was someone who I respected. Not being anonymous, you could tell whether it was just a habitual thanker or someone who used their thanks more sparingly. It also indicates to other readers that many people thought this was a good post. There was no negative feedback on this forum. I think the report button is should be generally used for people who are abusing the forum. Giving people negative reputation feels uneasy to me and indeed feels like it is just a popularity contest at school. If I start posting on determinism, which isn't popular here, am I going to get a bunch of downvotes just because most people here are free willers.?

You know it's this amazing thing. My mother and her brothers don't get along well with their parents and for that they blame the parents. They call them names or say things about them, all behind their backs of course, they don't dare say it in person. They didn't talk to them for months on end and even moved to the other side of the world, in my mother's case, to get away from them. But now they are all universally having the same kinds of problems with their grown-up children. Guess who's at fault this time? Not them, of course not them. Their problems with their parents are their parents fault. Their problems with their children are their children's fault. Well, I said it's an amazing thing at the start, but I guess it's logical in a perverted way.