Des

I guess some communities without government, will adopt a basic redistribution system that gives each adult some income. It would help make decisions on additional charity start from the question: "Okay, why do you in your special case need more than the basic charity we all get?". To clarify, though, the BIG idea is the idea that we also give BIG to Donald Trump and Bill Gates (so they get a small [to them] monthly income - but they make a big annual/monthly contribution). Many people with high "net worth" {yuk, takes a shower after using the phrase}, make charitable donations and might voluntarily agree to a redistribution scheme which has low overheads.

The people in the voluntary community agreed to the rules of the community, in a written contract. You could ask why they would agree to such a contract in the first place, and I would guess: "Because they prefer a simplified and orderly system of charity to underpin the more complex, less orderly system of charity".

Pretty much atheist towards the one they prefer, also. They drive to work and eat their tummies full, don't just pray themselves to work or pray their tummies full. If I were to accept your definition from your initial post, I would also not call myself an atheist. It is not possible to know that there is no omnipotent being. It is possible to reason that an omnipotent being is undetectable by reason of his omnipotence, and his existence or non-existence cannot be factored into any predictions. It is possible to determine that all people who claim to both believe in the existence of an omnipotent being, and to also know any other fact, are merely wishing that both could be known at the same time. These are not people with whom one can have a rational conversation. One can type or speak rational words, but that is not a conversation. One who says: "There is an omnipotent being, and I am typing to you that there is an omnipotent being", is making an incorrect statement. He should say "There is an omnipotent being, and I think I am typing to you that there is an omnipotent being, but my thought on this second fact could just be a result of the omnipotent being messing with my neurons". This goes for more complex "second facts" like "there is a heaven and a hell", or "believers go to heaven and unbelievers to hell". I am atheist compared to those who say there is an omnipotent being, but neglect to add the qualifiers to everything else which they say. It is very manipulative of them to lie that they have additional information over and above the first fact they state. If the first fact were true, we would all clearly know nothing else, so what else they should be adding to that first fact, should (to be free of lies) be a beautifully sung, but meaningless lalalalala - else they are tricking us. Infer from that, a correct definition of atheism.

It is not possible for a government to honestly offer non-aggression (though non-aggression pacts are a thing - they intend to mean this government won't start a war with that government). So, yes, I want more people to recognise that governments are aggressive (by collecting tax, and in other ways), and that voluntary associations of people can honestly offer non-aggression for non-aggression, make the trade, stick to the deal, and get the benefit, for their voluntary members, of having a deal to which every person has made a commitment, in which each person has agreed to the remedies for aggressive acts.

Tit for tat is a good summary of the practical motivation for everyone to subscribe to a rational minimum ethic. Sure, I can't be sure of convincing anyone that there is no supreme deity - however - the olive branch looks like this: sign here to exchange your rational non-aggressive behaviour (towards me) for my rational non-aggressive behaviour (towards you). Alternatively, don't sign up for that, and maybe you won't like the tit-for-tat. Functionally, most people are atheist enough to sign up, given the opportunity to sign up for rational exchange of non-aggression. We have an internet. Why have we not emailed everyone, asking them to sign up for non-aggression? The replies would be valuable. What if a lot of replies came back saying the deity does not approve of this trade with unbelievers - then the originating group would reply to say: Okay, we'll be watching you. If you build or buy a weapon, we're going to come destroy it. Don't make weapons, don't come near us, then we'll leave you be. Of course one answer to my question in bold, is that it's silly to try trade non-aggression when you have a government that does aggression for continued existence.

Please edit your comment wrt the spelling of atheist.

Because the interests of most of the people (each of whom who prefers his nearer kin over his further kin [i.e. he has evolutionary inclination to prefer his nation over other nations]) - are actually better served by associating with non-nationals who follow compatible standards of behaviour. For example, If a small suburb had mostly people of one national group, as residents, most would serve their personal interests well by inviting in a skilled (but less closely-related) practitioner of some service they require, and offering in return, full membership of their association. Conversely, most of them would serve their own personal interests better by expelling a close kinsman who refuses to reform from his ways of armed robbery. With inviting in incompatible behaviour, there would be a trade-off, e.g. How badly does the community need a doctor? They are vegans, and the doctor is going to barbecue steaks in his backyard every weekend. The issue is incompatibility, in the case where each "citizen" is considering his interests wrt to available services and wrt upholding his preferred norms of behaviour.

The "has a right" viewpoint is misleading. Correct: Our current minimum objective standard of ethics/morality rests upon the pillar of a preference for being alive. Without that preference: an objective standard of morality / ethics could not be rationally computed to be what we now conclude that it is. A standard of ethics/morality constructed on the pillar of a preference for life, leads to the non-aggression principle as the non-optional or minimum ethic (the objective ethic / moral standard). All "lifeboat scenarios" are covered by the principle that you don't rationally expect a person who has agreed to trade his ethical behaviour in exchange for your ethical behaviour (because that is how he benefits from ethics) - you don't rationally expect him to fulfil his end of the bargain if doing that would end his life and with that end his hope of profit from the trade. [to clarify, his profit is that he has less risk of dying as a result of human aggression if he trades non-aggression for non-aggression, than if he does no such trade]

Okay, let's say that the ability to do the logically contradictory is a strawman. At some level of potency, the reality is a god-dependent reality, and logical contradiction is a feature of an independent reality. So, as most atheists say: "let us test the sense data in the independent reality, for evidence of some really powerful being within the independent reality". Any being within an independent reality is, in my scheme of definitions, either an earthling or a space alien, so if you find such, I'm not saying "hello God" (unless he has phasers pointed at me, set on "kill") . The potency ascribed to the christian god, includes the potency to do miracles. In a true miracle, the features of reality can be used to predict that (e.g.) the water of the red sea will not form walls, but the miraculous action of the very-potent being does what can be predicted: will not happen. If the resolution is that the prediction was incorrect, then the being is a space alien. If the resolution is that the prediction was correct, but reality was overriden, then we are in a god-dependent reality - we may as well quit making predictions, sit around and pray our tummies full. Christianity describes it, not as a miracle, but as a feature of reality, that a person lives after death. There is no sense data to support this feature of reality (I'm not saying miracle - seems to be in a different category). The evidence points toward the conclusion that it is essentially wishful-thinking - re-inforced by those who find it a handy device for manipulating the decisions of others.

Yes, I am aware that the definitions of "legal" and "created" make that question something of a trick question. My reading of what you said, agrees with my understanding. We put away the possibility that we are totally deceived, and we look for a methodology to detect and correct mental errors (partial deception). When Stef says "reason and evidence", my mind does not go "wow, what a revelation", it goes "thats what I understood before I found FDR". That's the title of my plan for detecting my mental errors: Reason and evidence. Would you care to comment on that?

I estimate the concept of omnipotence to be a trick concept, which manipulators allow to be loosely defined, to maximise it's manipulative value (and I am not accusing anyone of conscious planned manipulation - I am just saying it is really handy to be able to say that a being can do whatever the manipulator says he can do, but will not do what the manipulator says he will not do [for example, will not decide to send believers to hell and unbelievers to heaven]). The definition I have to work with, is "can do anything". If the being "can do anything except ..." then the being is kinda convenipotent. To repeat a point I have made on other threads: If the being is less than omnipotent, then such being is equivalent to a space alien with advanced science - and I am not atheist wrt space aliens. You give nice trick questions, and, though I get why some downvote you for them, I like this one. You wouldn't know if an omnipotent being had made a $20 bill, whether legal or otherwise, because you could not trust that the sense data that makes you perceive trhe $20 bill, has not been altered. If you thought you saw a state-owned machine produce the note, you would have to admit that this might be false sense data. I don't know the answer to your question. If the omnipotent being directly controls the governor of the federal reserve to issue one extra $20 bill, is it legal? If the omnipotent being makes lawmakers pass a law that accidentally-printed extra notes are legal tender, and then makes the machinery spit out one "accidental" extra note - is it legal? If the omnipotent being makes an extra $20 bill appear on the floor in front of you - it might not be legal - but we would not know - because he may have made it exactly alike to one he "disappeared" from someone's wallet. Now I know Descartes did not explain it as I explain it - but essentially the universe with an omnipotent being is the universe of Descartes' evil demon. We can in no way prove that we are not in that universe. Let's talk as though we are not, because then the talk makes sense.

Both in the academic sense of the word authority, and in the sense in which authority gives the right to command - there can be no authority if there is an omnipotent being. If there is an omnipotent being, no academic enquiry is valid because the omnipotent being can manufacture data or change upon a whim. If there is an omnipotent being, and if there is someone with a right to command, we can't know who has that right, because our academic enquiry into the validity of that command authority, is invalidated by the omnipotence, as mentioned above. Edit: In addition, the omnipotence invalidates our enquiry into whether or not a person agrees with a statement.

Oh, to clarify, I was not saying it will work, my meaning is that it only has usefulness for manipulation. If a person "plays" the god card honestly, they would say : "well there may be an omnipotent being, in which case there is nothing we can know, but let's pretend we know stuff, because we are going to make decisions, and let's make them on what we think we know, disregarding the possibility of omnipotence." - Kind of like I pulled it out for no reason, admit I have to discard it (which you could say, is not really playing it). An example of one playing the god card to manipulate, is my parents telling me the omnipotent being says I must honour my father and my mother. The effect of this manipulation is that I did not enquire further, to inform my decisions better, I conformed to what my parents expected of my 16-year-old self, though I had the physical and mental capacity to disregard them and go and support myself. In this, I have a complaint about the design of your question - because - I consented to be subject to the rule of my parents - but due to fraud - not because they convinced me (by honest means) that they had better answers than I could find elsewhere. Sure, I allow the people I know, to talk about god, because I estimate I will waste time trying to de-contaminate their minds. So then I disregard the deity stuff, and see if I still consent to the proposed co-ordination of action. The people around me act atheist (they drive to work, they pay bills [they don't try pray themselves to work or pray the bills paid]). Do you do what I do? I translate the god out of whatever people say, so "God bless you" means something about their good wishes toward me - hmm?

So, to emphasise the significance of how I derive, above, the definition of evil: If an act in a given category ("writing", "talking" and "looking" are good examples of such categories of action) - if an act does not have to be banned for the pact to have value (to not be rationally pointless), then by this definitional process, it would be incorrect to say that the act "is evil", and one should rather say that we agree that unwanted-looking of such-and-such specifics "is distasteful to us". The key question is: Why would you have to ban any of the subsets of writing, talking or looking, for the do-no-evil pact to retain value?

I have an issue with the term "abuse". The valid part of my issue with it, is that we don't have a way to determine motive with certainty. Sure, in court proceedings, we make informed guesses about motive. When referring to an adverse childhood experience, we are not ascribing motive to any actor in the event that creates the experience. Now, if we accept that an event occurred, and it happened in such a way that a person under 18 could have some experience of the event, then we need only deal with the less certain determination of whether the experience was adverse or otherwise. So we use some method to estimate that the experience was an adverse experience. If we say "abuse", then we must also show ill-intent on the part of some actor, and, although you might reasonably infer ill-intent in many cases, ill-intent is not an assertion capable of rigorous proof, it remains an informed guess. So, why complicate an already less-than-rigorously provable assertion of ACE, with another less-than-rigorously provable assertion of ill-intent? If we would prefer a person to adjust his actions, is the best approach to assert that we detect ill-intent on his part, or to assert that we estimate the consequences of his actions (if not amended), will cause harm (be adverse)?

The assertion "There is an omnipotent being" contradicts all other assertions. The assertions "There is an omnipotent being" and "I am" are contradictory. The assertions "There is an omnipotent being" and "I have a reputation around here" are contradictory. The assertions "There is an omnipotent being" and "sources to a general hatred of Christianity" are contradictory. The assertions "There is an omnipotent being" and "taking children away is mean-spirited of the doer and harmful to the children", are contradictory. Either there is an omnipotent being, in which case we all know nothing, may as well go pray silently, saying not a word to each other OR We agree to disregard that possibility and accept apparent knowledge based on sense data, as the real knowledge, and then we have something to discuss, relative to co-ordination of action.

The vigilance that I am advising, is that in all conversation (because all conversation is to some extent, to co-ordinate action [even if I say I prefer Rock music to Rap music, you might adjust your playlist while I'm in your home]), we should use the rule which applies in school debates: that the omnipotent being does not feature in the conversation (except to explain again why the omnipotent being should not feature in the conversation). The why is: because one can only haul out the god card to manipulatively co-ordinate action. One cannot feature an omnipotent being in any rational motivation for a change of behaviour. As I typed that, I tried to poke a hole in it. So, yes, maybe it you argue that a person believes (irrationally) in an omnipotent being, and should be treated specially as a result - So maybe distinguish between co-ordinating behaviour due to allegedly known features of a being who would be capable of obliterating his own/known features - and co-ordinating action due to the detectable apparent irrationality of minds (which can't be directly probed to verify actual belief or disbelief - so they could feign belief as a manipulative technique).

Um - longer life expectancy - I think if you are doing predictions of really long-term futures - you need to consider really ridiculously long life expectancies. If a person lives 1000 years, what percentage of those are spent raising children? How much incentive does a person have, to make children, if he is unlikely to be old or sick for any length of time, and will die when murdered or accidentally extinguished? How much incentive does he have, when the voluntary family concept is accepted (I predict it will be accepted because compulsory family ties are immoral). How much incentive does anyone have, to make the effort to control sexuality, when technology controls disease regardless of sexual behaviour? Does "Sorry, that option is immoral" win out in the end? I say it will, because trading moral behaviour for moral behaviour is the most efficient way to stay alive, when it is only accident or aggression/murder that can kill me. If a person has lived 1000 healthy years, will he still be swayed by irrational thoughts? Can a person live 1000 healthy years with other people living as long, and still not think clearly?

Now I have this thought experiment: Suppose there were a voluntary community, in which each citizen of a small territory with borders, agreed to this re-distribution system: Each year, you must auction whatever you own within the territory, and pay 10% into the communal fund. This fund is then used to pay each citizen a monthly stipend and the stipends are equal for that year (differ from year to year according to how much is raised each year). Now, I would expect citizens to extract resources quickly, and ship those resources out, and (if wealthy), live outside the territory. However, the parcels of land from which the resources are extracted, have value related to what profit can be made from the resource. This means that some money will be paid into the re-distribution system, whatever citizens do to maximise their return on voluntary, contractual participation in the system. What would people do to adapt to such a system? Would the result be attractive enough that the system would spread?

I was wondering if I could contribute anything, and as I was looking at something else, my subconscious popped up the above thoughts of yours, for you to ponder on, if you will. It does not read: The statements of x are generally well-researched and convincing, whilst y seems generally confused about how to make a logical statement. Up to you to reflect on whether it is your desire for others to view x as a gentleman and y as some dude, and/or what underlies those words.

Importantly, you can say: let us allow for the possibility that there is an omnipotent being, and now let us examine a historical series of events... I am going to suggest we do one or the other. Either, we start a discussion in which we allow for the possibility that there is an omnipotent being, and thereafter I will state that we now do not know anything, and I will bring all points raised, back to that absence of knowledge (e.g. we don't know that any events happened, perhaps god just made it seem to you and I, that the events happened, when they did not). Or alternatively, we start a discussion in which we mutually agree to disregard the possibility of an omnipotent being, on the grounds that if this were true, there would be nothing of value to discuss. To do both - allow for omnipotence and refer to agreed past events - I would be insane (yes, more than half the planet's people are insane. I'm sorry, I did not place the order for that).

You can't have any level of certainty if there is an omnipotent being, able to change anything from what you were certain of, to it's opposite.

Sure, a person can invent something for the love of discovery, also possibly for the love of a wealthy trader who offers well-paid employment. Yes, love of one's children, if one has hope that they may become wealthy traders and profit from use of the wheel. A point I am making is that there are restrictions to incentive that are specific to a pre-wheel society, and specific to societies that explain wealth differentials as witchcraft. If wealth gets people killed, you don't wish that on your children, especially if you love them. If you invent the wheel, but you don't happen to love (and be loved by) a wealthy trader who already pays you well, how do you get reward for your wheel-and-axle machine? Wealthy traders are (aggression-wielding) royalty where they first appear, and they'd have you killed as easily as rewarded. See, I am proposing rational explanations why people (with savvy), might sit on a mental innovation rather than build and display it - within other cultures - and there are different reasons within our own. I have a mental map of an extremely secure computer system. It'd be great for undefusable bombs. I'm keeping the mental map in my brain, rather than risk being blown up by my own great idea.

I see it as important to note that we are not at the stage where we can take rational, ethical, physical steps against aggressive people (in general [we are compromising, using unethical democracy to improve survival as far as possible]). When we have done all the talking and persuaded enough people to see what the solution is, then: whoever is still showing a preference for aggression - we assign minders to them, put them under 24/7 electronic surveillance, and aggressively destroy every missile-slinger they start work on, from catapult to ICBM. The minders intervene and disrupt every attack the minded-people make, but permit them to do whatever peaceful actions they prefer. I propose something along the lines of the above, for the small minority of aggression-preferring people, when the aggression-preferring people are a small minority. The post below has relevance to the above, it that I propose we first do as below, then as above.

While acting ethically, what could you do in reaction to such an event? I ask, because, although many here can tell you their thoughts, I think this question is a better way to reach an answer that is already in your thoughts.