first let me thank both BRM and ryjkyj for reading my novella.very cool of both of you.i kinda put myself out there and you both didnt just outright laugh..i thank you both.
@BRM
i understand.
the reason why i wrote that short novella was to put forth an alternative idea of god,not to push any form of ideology upon you.while it may be an ancient concept,it is not exactly a popular one.the people who attempted to make a community based on that ideology were wiped out.
hopefully it accomplished two things:
1.not every idea of god is based on theology.
2.that i do not pretend to hold secret knowledge,nor am i somehow more special than you due to my faith.
my faith is not based on a book nor a old white dude with a beard who watches from afar judging us all.
my ultimate goal was to paint a picture where those i converse with on the sift could know that i have no religion to offend.i wont take some slight against my ideas as some attack on my god based solely on dogma.
because i adhere to no dogma.

consciousness is one of my favorite discussions and something i have spent a great deal of time thinking about since i was a teen.
what is consciousness?
this is an ongoing question and one i feel is vitally important.we are still learning and the subject fascinates me.
i find this discussion more engrossing and challenging with atheists and other seekers.fundamentalists tend to be quite boring with this subject for obvious reasons.

@Ryjkyj
i was just pointing out the literal translation but i understand why you would reject agnostic in a literal sense.as i stated.it does not really matter,i understand your point and desire for your position to not be confused in any way.
i am totally ok with that.

as for my thesis on god and the edict to "create".
you mention nuclear weapons.
good example.
let me add:murder,torture,domination,genocide.we could go all day.
conversely we could talk about:love,compassion,understanding,forgiveness.
my point was that the creator regards all these as the same,it is WE who deem them "good" or "evil".
that god experiences its own creation subjectively through us..all of us..while we experience gods creation every minute of everyday.
you being aware of this is not necessary because you do it naturally and is one of the main reasons why i would have been burned at the stake (and those that DID postulate this idea centuries ago were executed).religion becomes irrelevant with my scenario.
you are god..god is you and we are all connected.

we understand and relate to the universe through only FIVE sense...thats it..five.
our consciousness interacts with this universe using those senses.with the advent of more and more complicated tools which allow us to perceive the universe in a much more grand scale we have found that the universe keeps getting bigger,richer and far more poetic than any theology could EVER put forth.
evolution has more poetry and beauty then the book of genesis could ever think to muster.
(genesis is actually a metaphorical representation of kabballah)

i love science.
i am not particularly good at say bio-chem or the math of quantum physics (that math is beyond me)but i find each discovery a revelation concerning my faith.
to me science is the slow pulling back of the veil by way of exploration,curiosity and eventual understanding by way of testing physical evidence and/or repeatable,testable results.
these results tend to conflict with religious doctrine but totally coincide with my understanding of a creator.

consciousness is not a closed chapter but something we are still discussing,probing and attempting to understand.so when i use the term to describe god i do so in that light,not with any secret understanding.
so..according to my way of looking at things.if god created the universe from itself it would reside both outside time/space and also WITHIN time/space.
proveable? not a chance...hence=faith
we are talking about a consciousness that is literally the entire universe.a concept that would be hard for anybody to wrap their head around.
i do not pretend to understand this consciousness.how could i?
but i do know i see this consciousness manifesting all around me and it is constant.

i understand that both of you reject this ideology and i am totally ok with that.
in my eyes conversations such as these are more about sharing ideas than being right..or righteous.
my conclusions are my own and they are always changing as more information becomes available.
but i have to say that since i was a teen nothing i have read or learned has changed my position,in fact,it has strengthened it.

thank you both for being so kind and respectful towards my ideas.
i tend to avoid putting things like this out there because i get whacked by both sides..atheists AND religious.
you both have been very kind.
and i thank you.

Remember that these are terms we use to describe ourselves, so anyone using them is going to have their own individual... flavor.

The issue I have is that if you claim to know something about a deity, anything at all, even if you claim to know that there is no deity, them in my book: you're a theist. And I don't see how that reconciles itself with the term atheism.

If you pick up a dictionary from 30 years ago, it will most likely define theism as: the belief or disbelief in a deity beyond death. That definition has been largely re-written over the last decade or so, and it pisses me off. But the opposite of that definition is what I term as atheism.

My problem with agnosticism is that it implies that there IS some sort of religion-based deity or force or whatever you want to call it that is unknowable.

As far as your longer post above, it's very interesting. The first thing I think when reading it is that your god issued one edict: create. And what's our answer: "God, you'd be so proud of us, we've invented nuclear weapons." (God sighs) The second thing I think when reading it is that I cannot picture a consciousness existing outside of time, and then creating time. It wouldn't have a linear stream of thought you know? Coming up with problems and then solving them? I find that a little hard to imagine. Also, even if that consciousness created the universe, it seems like it would still exist outside of the universe. It wouldn't literally BE the universe. Not that I think what you have to say isn't fascinating.

I read your comment about being uncomfortable about the jingoist mob at the White House. I felt the same way when I watched some raw video -- I ended up in tears.

People died today. Men died protecting a man they loved and honored. Those men had families. They were passionate about what they were doing. They were wrong, but they didn't know that.

There is nothing to celebrate - grim work was done today.

And we Americans are waving the flag and singing war songs. Just like we did after 9/11 -- we seem to be incapable of understanding that we come across as childish, vengeful bullies, who have everything and want more.

This isn't going to end well, I fear.

My retired military brother has a different fear -- he fears that Pakistan will be destabilized, the government will be overthrown because it allowed our mission inside their borders, and that the crazies will end up with nuclear weapons.

This REALLY isn't going to end well.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

I don't recall anything about pacifism in his speeches, only non-interventionism and anti-colorization.

Right, that's basically my point. He doesn't seem to think war is bad because it kills people, he thinks it's bad because it conflicts with his ideology about the proper role of government.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
And he has frequently said that to just abolish the safety net is also a bad idea, so hardly an extremist. That is more of a straw-man representation of his views on transitioning to a more free market based society and less regulated.

All I hear in there is "he doesn't want to abruptly end them, he just wants to slowly phase them out", which if you were objective about it means that he's more worried about a popular backlash stopping the destruction of the social safety net, and not actually in favor of preserving them.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
I think it is important to note the difference in being anti-war being legal and not moral. Morally, we can't all agree anyway. Was our intervention in WW2 moral? Is killing ever good? A president can't answer those questions, and shouldn't, and nor should congress. What they should preside over is if a majority of people want war, we war, regardless of its moral good or badness. Morality is the charge of the citizens, not the congress. It is also their job, the citizens, to not let their congress take that charge from them. Good and bad shouldn't be a matter of law, that is the most dangerous of all ideas.

This is potentially the beginning of a really long conversation, but to be short about it, what is law for if not an attempt to create justice in a society? What is justice if not applied morality? Yes, no single person or institution should get the exclusive right to decide what is and isn't moral, but single people and institutions get to make important decisions that impact lots of people, and I think it's safe to say that we want them to make those decisions in a way that's compatible with the morals of the people who entrusted them with the power to make those decisions.

In other words, if Paul wants the codes to the nuclear weapons, Paul's personal code of ethics matters a great fucking deal if he wants me to achieve that power.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
Being skeptical is always good, but look as his company.

I do, and that's the thing that bothers me. Take John Tate, who runs C4L. Not a day goes by that I don't get e-mail from him that a) refers to the left as statists, socialists, or tyrants, b) lies about legislation that Democrats are or have proposed, and c) promotes a wide array of pro-corporate Republican policies.

Take Peter Schiff, who's lost his clients' a truckload of money betting on hyperinflation, and who goes on TV constantly to try to sell people on the idea that hyperinflation is around the corner, will destroy America as we know it forever, and that you can protect yourself by buying gold from his website.

Those are just the ones I recall clearly, but I remember there being quite a list of shady characters he'd brought into his campaign in 2008.

Yes, he sometimes "stands with" Kucinich or Nader on an issue, but it's never some positive proposal they want to try to work on passing together. Instead, it's always a case of Kucinich or Nader objecting to something the Democratic party is doing, and Ron Paul "stands with them" in an attempt to try to win some converts amongst liberals frustrated with Democrats.

IMO, he's very, very untrustworthy. I've had plenty of experience with sociopaths, and I quite seriously get that vibe from Ron Paul.

America is a superpower. Libya was one of Russia's major clients, and had launched terrorist attacks against American's. It had recently admitted to a covert nuclear weapons program. America would have to be the most naively inept and incompetent power in all of history to not have had multiple war plans and what if scenarios drafted up for Libya. I'd be utterly shocked if America doesn't have a war plan drafted up for invading Canada too, and you can be certain that securing Canadian oil fields figures highly in those plans.

This journalist and giving them coverage like this though is despicable!

Is seeing America advance some of it's own interests really so horrifyingly unpalatable that it must be vilified even when it includes stopping a genocide?

Gaddafi was undeniably in the last push to start the genocide he promised to commit when the UN finally voted for military action, after even the Arab League had begun requesting exactly that. Does the American conspiracy really run so deep that even the Arab League is in their pocket?

The intervention in Libya stopped a genocide. If you can't point out something far worse that it is causing, then you'd better not make bold claims about how much better things would be if the genocide had been allowed to play out. You sure as anything better not cry for having done nothing by invoking the lives of the Libyan people that would surely be dead already if that had been done.

wow.. nuclear weapons nowadays are pretty lame. I remember when a bomb of that type would create a devastating wall of pressure moving at supersonic speeds.

It seems now they slowly destroy a residential building giving people the time to go into the basement.


edit: yeah... I still kinda want to see the rest.

@GeeSussFreeK we're kinda talking past each other. I'm asking you how far your conception of this moral absolute goes. If I have no right to tell you that you can't own a revolver to defend yourself from random snake attacks, do I also have no right to tell you that you can't own a solar-system destroying device, or a mere nuclear weapon?

Should the NRA be fighting for Iran, North Korea, and Al Qaeda's right to bear nuclear arms?

@GeeSussFreeK

I didn't say GDP, I said GDP per capita. Both Finland and the US have roughly the same GDP per capita.

My assertion is that crimes are more likely to be committed by criminals who are empowered by guns. Suicide has nothing to do with this and that's why I didn't address it.

Murder rates are the only universally comparable measure when you consider various violent offenses are classified differently and with varying degrees of tolerance in difference countries.

I think it would hardly be a stretch to assert that guns allow criminals and delinquents to dish out far more death per violent incident - being a reason why crime is average/above average, but murder (especially by firearms) is astronomical.

Either way, I want to address murder singlehandedly as I think it's certainly still an important (and far less finnicky) topic to argue in and of itself, not crime generally.

Crimes again are classified and reported to varying degrees in different countries.

Again, I want to point out that my argument isn't about gun legislation but about gun ownership rates. I have no doubt that if you were to ban guns immediately in one state, there'll not be a chasm of a decline in gun murder rates. Arguments that look at gun laws ignore the blatant fact that US borders are very porous as far as I understand, and that even then, gun laws take years, decades perhaps to have meaningful effects on ownership rates and as a result, general availability at above minimal cost to criminals. Looking at the wikipedia page for California's gun laws, the only meaningful law I see is a 2005 ban in San Fransisco on all firearms and ammunition. Something like this would take at least a decade to have any meaningful effect though, I'm sure I would agree with you here when I say that smuggling guns into simply a city of all places (not a country with customs, or even a state) and selling them on the black market would hardly be difficult - where surrounding areas have no such ban.

I agree that no legislation will prevent a determined terrorist or capable individual from inflicting massive damage if nuclear weapons were readily available and manufactured in large amounts in one area of the world. A concerted and enforced gun ban on the other hand (with restrictions for hunting in some areas, target shooting, and potentially eased laws for protection in remote areas with low police presence) would do a great deal to reduce availability and reduce the incidence of gun murder by petty criminals which makes up the majority of gun deaths in the US.

Take for example our legislation in Australia. There's nothing exceptional about it, I'm just most familiar with it:

"State laws govern the possession and use of firearms in Australia. These laws were largely aligned under the 1996 National Agreement on Firearms. Anyone wishing to possess or use a firearm must have a Firearms Licence and, with some exceptions, be over the age of 18. Owners must have secure storage for their firearms.

Before someone can buy a firearm, he or she must obtain a Permit To Acquire. The first permit has a mandatory 28-day delay before it is first issued. In some states (e.g. Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales), this is waived for second and subsequent firearms of the same class. For each firearm a "Genuine Reason" must be given, relating to pest control, hunting, target shooting, or collecting. Self-defense is not accepted as a reason for issuing a licence, even though it may be legal under certain circumstances to use a legally held firearm for self-defense.[2]

Each firearm in Australia must be registered to the owner by serial number. Some states allow an owner to store or borrow another person's registered firearm of the same category."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia

There is a very good reason why this has led to a 5.2% ownership rate among citizens and a murder rate by guns of between 29% and 19% that of the US per capita depending on which numbers you use from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

If you want to come back to saying that people simply murder in different ways, then look at purely the murder rate - the number goes up just slightly to 35% (the rate of murder per capita in Australia of that in the US).

Gun laws aren't punishment. Just like nuclear weapon bans aren't punishment. Or Sarin Gas bans. They're good policy.

Just like making everyone buy basic health insurance to reduce risk among consumers and lower prices, where the poorest are subsidised. If you insist on using analogies, I think this compares incredibly well to a gun ban which makes allowance for recreation and hunting (and at least in my view, allowances of 'for protection' licenses in remote areas with limited quantity and strict restriction to avoid smuggling).

Just like the compulsory third party car insurance we have here, that ensures that if you are at fault and damage another car, the innocent party is guaranteed to have their car repaired.

What I hope you understand coming from a libertarian position (and this is repeating the first thing I said in this whole discussion to blankfist) is that libertarianism is not a flat and universal position on individual rights. You, just like anyone I would imagine, have limits to how far you go with individual rights. You recognize the validity of a system of laws to limit the impact of one's individual's actions on another, and the retribution they should receive for violating it. You simply draw the metaphorical line on rights further right on the ideological spectrum than I do.

Therefore you can't simply justify gun ownership by claiming individual rights and the notion that everyone's entitled to them as they are not presumed guilty. You have to consider whether it does harm in society or not, just like the rest of us.

I hope I've laid out a pretty convincing arguments based on the statistics (speculative of course, I have neither the time nor resources to do a rigorous analysis controlling for a multitude of variables) that gun ownership does lead to more (gun) murders. If we were taking about a 10-20% difference, sure it would be debatable, but we're talking about a 2 to 3 fold increase. Let's not kid around about what causes this.

If you think that individual rights are so incredibly important that they trump this palpably gargantuan increase in death (and suffering) then that is certainly a position you can take, but let's be honest about this if that's the position you want to take.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't think they are. I think the opportunities for self defense, the willingness to use a gun of most people, the willingness of normal and ration people to risk death for losing their property are small. The sheer empowerment and impetus a gun (easily available from a nearby store at a price anyone can pay) can give a criminal on the other hand is huge.

---

Just a quick recap on things I didn't cover.

If you want to demonstrate guns are less devastating than drugs then kindly provide data to support this. If you are referencing the drug war or even if you are not, this is totally irrelevant to the question I posed to you.

Comparing guns to drugs and referencing the opium war is just not a good analogy. Colonialism. Colonialism. Colonialism.

Yes cars kill people, so do airplanes. So do pretzels. In fact, just about everything kills people (although yes car accidents are far more significant than pretzels). We do have a plethora of legislation that increases car safety. Guns are of course unique in that supposedly (if you would believe people in the US), more guns and LESS gun legislation protects you from the more guns you now have and so on. Let's look at this objectionably just as I compared the benefits to defenders versus aggressors for gun ownership. Cars provide an obvious benefit and are fundamental to commerce and modern life (unlike guns 99.9% of the time for private defenders of civil liberty). More legislation and safety requirements can obviously reduce death rates. To me it seems pretty obvious how to proceed here.

@blankfist

Neither of us here is attempting to do a rigorous statistical analysis.

The question still stands though.

What explains your incredibly high gun homicide rates, and for that matter your incredibly high homicide rates overall? If it's not gun ownership as I say, what is it?

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita

Frankly, all I see is you dodging the question here.

@GeeSussFreeK

Yes you can still commit murder without a gun, and if you look at what you've linked to, you'll find that the US is 24th in the world by murder rate per capita alone. The next developed country down is Finland with 66% of your murder rate. That country in itself is an exception though, the next country with anywhere near your GDP per capita is France with just 40%.

So, what makes Americans more violent?

Could it just be possibly be that a gun empowers would-be criminals to commit a crime? Because basic logic tells me that guns stack situations in favor of the criminal.

In your average crime, say the armed robbery of a convenience store, the assailant clearly has the upper hand. He is mentally prepared, presumably somewhat desperate and has the gun out ready to fire. The victim, say, the counter attendant, who is being paid minimum wage has not the slightest interest or need to risk his or her life. At best he or she has a firearm stowed away under the desk, but in what position are they to use it? Would you really dispute that this is far more a typical situation than the reverse?

Is the shooting in Tuscon not the perfect example? Here was a congresswoman and her staff, some of which including her I would presume were pro-gun. Had they been carrying guns with them, do you think that they would have anticipated and prevented Loughner taking the first shot? Do you think any of them would have been mentally capable in that scenario (had they been carrying a gun) to use it to valiantly defend themselves before Loughner had emptied his clip? Because I kind of doubt it.

Now you could say that criminals will find a way to acquire guns on the black market. This is probably true. In a country like America with 89 per 100 guns, no legislation will magically change this reality. That's why my point is high levels of gun ownership among countries cause crime.

This is also why looking at slightly different gun restrictions in states is nonsense, no doubt message multiplied by the NRA. Do you really think with comparable ownership rates, and with ultimately porous borders between states as a whole that it matters two hoots whether one state has been tougher than another for a few years?

Analogies suck because they're not usually comparable. Replace drugs with private nuclear weapons like NetRunner mentioned. Do you still think it's a fair comparison?

The very reason that guns are entirely different to drugs is they are prone to impact a wider group of people. Soft drugs are generally innocuous. Hard drugs are largely self destructive but often have impacts on the individual's wider family. Guns are efficient, purpose designed, killing machines designed, and often enough used in mass violence. By that alone, the analogy is flat.

Oh, and if you're taking a libertarian position here with that analogy by the way, you first have to show me guns don't violate the individual rights of others, since as far as I'm concerned the numbers suggest they clearly do.

So again I ask, why are Americans twice, 3 times, or 4 times more violent than others in comparable developed countries?

Riposte?

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^blankfist:
And now imagine if he had no clip at all. That would be 100% fewer bullets. We'll just arm up our military and militarized police and get that under control. Heil Hitler! Godwined, bitches.

I'm still waiting for you to answer me on private ownership of nuclear weapons. Do you want that, or do you think there are reasonable limits on the level of weaponry that should be in the hands of an individual?


Your fighting a loosing battle there. It will only be a matter of time before doomsday level technology is smaller than a briefcase, and simple enough to make over the weekend, and sophisticated enough to erradicate entire populations. The problem about who gets what will be moot, as it already is...people have guns even where they are illegal. The real question is how do you keep humanity around and alive when a broken hearted teen can end all life in the solar system with a press of a button. That doesn't have an easy answer, and both lines of reason here fail to even cope with that, what I see as, inevitable eventuality. Weapons are only the symptom of a deep seeded violence in man, there is the problem, and only in addressing that problem will you find any true answers. Everything else is addressing leaves that blow in the wind.

>> ^blankfist:

And now imagine if he had no clip at all. That would be 100% fewer bullets. We'll just arm up our military and militarized police and get that under control. Heil Hitler! Godwined, bitches.


I'm still waiting for you to answer me on private ownership of nuclear weapons. Do you want that, or do you think there are reasonable limits on the level of weaponry that should be in the hands of an individual?

@blankfist, well, if the only thing you're going to say to what I'm proposing is to put words in my mouth (your favorite riposte!) and accuse me of wanting to ban all firearms, and then not even present an actual argument against your own straw man, I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do but mock you.

What sort of major offense to liberty would it be to limit the size of clips? Do you deny that it could at least lessen the amount of damage one man with a gun could do? Is that not worth doing, even if it only saves a single life?

For that matter, do you contest the notion that there should be some limits on private ownership of weaponry? Is it a crime against liberty that private ownership of nuclear weapons is banned?

@blankfist, we already took away people's rights to nuclear weapons and rocket launchers decades ago, surely nobody will be allowed to own knives soon.

@blankfist well, that's what makes it opinion and not fact.

As for "fear-based politicking", are you saying all statements that evoke fear are bad in some way? For example, I know this guy who likes to post videos about how the Fed is going to destroy America with hyperinflation. Is he doing something wrong?

Setting that aside for a moment, I didn't come away feeling afraid about anything listening to this clip. Instead, I came away feeling sorrow about the thought that maybe something could have been done to at least lessen the scale of the damage that Loughtner did. I didn't hear a recounting of some dire and immediate threat to me in what he said, I heard a pretty scathing admonition that my own indifference on the topic might have contributed to the death of a nine year old girl. That stung a bit.

I haven't really felt like I cared about gun control as an issue since I was a teen. Even then, it was more about being contrarian with my right-wing friends at school than really giving a shit about it.

It's a topic I think is worth having a debate about again. I'm not thinking anything radical here, maybe just simply limiting the size of clips on semi-automatic weapons again.

Since you're something of an absolutist about these kinds of things, I'm happy to hash it out in terms of me simply supporting bans on private ownership of rocket launchers and nuclear weapons.

If you find this interesting, I would highly recommend the book "Codename: Copperhead", the autobiography of Joe Garner - likely the first person to jump out of a plane strapped to a nuclear weapon. He talks in detail about that first jump and other Special Forces exercises with man-portable nukes.