WasatchMan

Internet killed cables monopoly as the only content provider. Cable providers are also internet providers. They are attempting to re-coop lost revenue of cable substitutions by raising the cost of internet service.

Well if you think you are better at manipulating people than priests and the whole system of religion that have kept people under their yolk of the church for millennia, then go for it. Sounds like a waste of time to me. I have no interest in building a cult, I want to find a community of people that know how to think, no that are easily manipulated.

How is dedicating one's life to "the concept of creativity characterizing mankind as being in the image of the Creator" not just another way of saying a dedication to superstition?

Is your claim really that a philosophical civilization couldn't accomplish more than Christian civilization? I think it is pretty self evident that rationality will always accomplish more than superstition.

...and a girl with physical features that signify fertility is going to have more suitors to choose from. So what? As long as physical force isn't involved, this is just a fact of reality. There is nothing in philosophy that says equality of outcome is an ideal to aim for.

Thanks for the questions, powder. I appreciate the opportunity to clarify my position, and I think your questions really strike at the root of what I am trying to get at. So morality to me is not a description of effects or actions detached from a methodology. Morality and the methodology (ethics) used to reach moral conclusions are fundamentally intertwined to the point that I don't think the word "morality" should be used for conclusions reached not using a ethical framework based on and truth and universality. The reason why we can say "if you are not assaulting, stealing, murdering, or raping, you are living a moral life" is not because those are floating absolutes on themselves, but because they are conclusions reached using a consistent philosophical framework known as the NAP or UPB. You may be able to call them good pragmatic choices to make, but without the philosophical framework they should cease to be called moral conclusions. Therefore, if I am correct that morality can only be ascribed to behavior resulting from a true methodology, than we shouldn't be calling behavior that is reached through a false methodology, morality. Just like when Stefan, rightly, corrects people when they use the word "love" to describe relationships that should not be associated with that word because it destroys the meaning of the word "love", I think using words like "morality", "values", "virtues", etc. detached from a true philosophical ethical framework also destroys the meaning of these words. This is why I used Stef quote "we create the possibility of moral choice by communicating truth about ethics to people", because I believe the only way you can actually make moral choices is through a true, philosophical, ethical system. Choices made not following this methodology could be called religious, pragmatic, personal choices, but not moral choices, because just like "love" we shouldn't be using the same word to describe two different, and opposite, things, especially something as important is morality, values, and virtues. I hope this helps address your questions, and is not just my own tangent. Please feel free to dig in deeper if I am missing something, or you disagree with my assertions.

“You can't reason people out of beliefs they weren't reasoned into.” – Stefan Molyneux. As far as "spare the rod spoil the child" goes, that is a sick example, and would be my parody of why this idea is wrong.

I think the standard of true and consistent is the standard to aim at. Trying to make things propaganda proof is likely impossible. If people can't think no amount of framing the argument the right way will help.

I thought it was good. My response was to provide another point of focus. I have not had much success trying to debate definitions and meanings of capitalism with leftists, and quite frankly I think it is their strategy to get us into the fuzzy pragmatism of word games and histrionics. Instead I try to go back to basics and discuss the ideals that you and I mean we when say capitalism instead of trying to save the word. I am pretty sure the left have, unfortunately, destroyed all meaning in the word capitalism, and as you rightly point out, to the extent that it means the opposite of what it is suppose to mean.

While the idea of the singularity is not fundamentally flawed, it is not as probable or easy to accomplish in the way Ray predicts. This is because of the extremely low probability of human civilization being the first intelligent species to emerge in the universe. It is actually highly probable that intelligence emerged elsewhere in the universe 100s of millions of yeas ago. Therefore, given that humans are only about 200 years into its first industrial period, and lets say 300 years by the time Ray predicts them to create the singularity, it would have already been created thousands of times 100s of millions years ago and would have already permeated much of the universe. However, we see no evidence of an advanced exponential emergent technology permeating the universe leading me to conclude that while theoretically possible, a singularity in technology is extremely hard to create, and will not be created within the first 300 years of a civilizations industrial age.

I don't really care what it takes to get people to work for $15 an hour as long as force isn't involved. People have an incredibly diverse set of goals and needs. Who am I to tell people the minimum amount of money they should be willing to work for and how much employers are willing to pay for said work. As long as the interaction is voluntary, people should be free to choose. Money is also not an absolute value, it is relative based on what you can buy with it. If you increase the cost of production, you increase the cost of goods, and therefore you can't inflate one without the other. Reality and the production capacity of a market is the arbiter of the value of money, not what someone arbitrarily thinks others should be paid. Do you think going back and paying middle ages serfs $15 an hour would have brought them out of poverty? Also, the poverty line is a constantly upward moving bar, where people working under the poverty line are better off than upper-class people 200 years ago. Why is this? Voluntary trade.

The Golden Rule is a derivative of the law of non-contradiction, so it is treat other the way you would expect to be treated. It is also known as "whoever has the gold makes the rules", but that was a later spinoff as a play on words.

Especially when they live right next to a body of water (the Pacific Ocean) that covers 165 million square kilometers (about 1/3 the size of the earth), with approximately 660 million cubic kilometers of water.

Capitalism is a word, and people will always play word games with it. The ideal of capitalism is voluntarism in economics. I always try to get leftists to talk about the ideal, instead of slandering the word. Of course then they retreat to the ideal sounding great with the only argument against the ideal being it is not practical, and people with guns are required, but at least then you can talk about the gun in the room and the ideal of not using force to back-up opinions.

If what they do does not earn $15, then paying them $15 will mean operating at a loss and you will go out of business. If nobody is willing to do the work for under $15, then you will go out of business because the demand for what you are producing does not meet the cost of supply. There is no should in payment except the voluntary exchange of goods and services.

It is pretty evil not to save someone from drowning if you can. This is because of the law of non-contradiction, which has long been (since Aristotle) one of the major axioms behind ethical systems. Someone cannot expect to be saved by others, but not be expected to save others. Therefore, someone who would not help someone is holding a contradiction in their behavior because everyone would hope to be saved by others if dieing.

meh

Your situation does not conflict with, or change, the against me argument, it is actually the impetus behind the against me argument. That is a threat of force situation behind the against me argument. An institution that claims dominion over all property and services with no legitimate claim and tells you have a choice to pay, die, or go to jail, is not voluntarism, it is the gun in the room. Are they going to spin, and build propaganda, to make the "voluntarists" look like selfish free-loaders? Sure, but that is why Stef has always claimed that voluntarist society comes with the evolution of civilization and the acceptance of universal ethics, which is a multi-generational process of raising people better. There may be some rocky transition periods, but if the state is still able to convince the majority of people that "War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength" (1984) then we are still far away from a voluntarist society.

Well at least people are liking it...

"Consent, dammit" - King Obama

I think the point of the quote would be that you cannot connect with people over a shared delusion and therefore you cannot have a community around a delusion. That is not to say religious people cannot have a connection with other people. It means they cannot have a connection to other people based on a delusion, and therefore any connection they have is over things not to do with religion. I think religion gets a lot of of credit for the good left in people, and it is important not to assign value or virtue to evil ideologies based on good things people who claim to follow the ideology do. I would claim the good comes in-spite of the error, not as some accidental consequence of it, and therefore I do not see how a good community could be the accidental consequence of a shared delusion.

The statement is the title ("Religion is not a community, it is a shared delusion enabling isolation"), and the text was meant to be the background to the statement. I intended for the thread to be more of an open dialogue around the idea of Religion being a value as a community. Since this (in particular Christianity being of value as a community) was discussed in FDR2927, I am interested in digging deeper into the idea to see if it should be thrown out as an actual consideration.

From FDR2440:

911 happened when I was in High School. I believed all the propaganda and wanted to enlist after High School and help fight for "freedom". Instead, I went to college and became a Civil Engineer. Watching the towers falls from this new perspective was all I needed to know that it was a physical impossibility for things to have happened the way they were explained to the population. This knowledge completely changed my world view and put me on the path I am on today - that is how powerful this event is. If people on mass accepted the truth about 9/11, the world change overnight.