Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

For me it comes down to nature/nurture. Are humans hard-wired for selfishness? Do we require the invisible hand of the market economy to keep things going? I hope not - but then Marx, Lenin, Guevera etc hoped not too. They also believed in the "oneness" of the people.

The experiment of communism failed precisely because human nature climbed into their beautiful machine and gummed up the works. Dachas on the black sea, Zil limos for party cronies. So much for "to each according to their needs".

I'm not a communist - but the abject failure of communism really depresses me. I'm waiting for the robots to take over- we need to take humans and our selfish, monkey-brains out of the equation.

Putin = Lenin wannabe. Poor Russia still can't shake that commie hangover.

"Not one of the religious types have been able to offer a compelling rebuttal using evidence and logic to support their reasoning." To your points:

1. Atheists are more annoying than Christians.

I tend to agree with you that this argument matters little and is tangential to the whole topic. However, you've supplied a fair amount of evidence for this point including inflammatory phrases such as "magical teapot believers", "nutjobs", "full of shit", "I think you know where you can store your advice", etc.

2. Atheists are more evangelical than Christians.

Again, I don't see it being too central to the original discussion. It is interesting, though, that you stated "Militant, in your face, logical, rational atheism is the only chance we have of salvaging the shambles you religious wingnuts have made of this planet." Sounds like you're out to "evangelize" change in the world then? Perhaps even applauding where militant atheism is applied? More on that in point #4.

3. All humans, both atheistic and religious, are irrational beings ruled by emotions with their beliefs as thinly veiled icing on a primordial cake.

A strawman argument that is so over simplified and incorrect that it isn't worth addressing.


4. Christians have not been responsible for mass genocide.

Nobody denies the crusade, inquisition, etc. took place, but the issue is whether these people are "Christian" or not. Did they call themselves Christian? Yes. Were their actions aligned with the words and example Jesus laid out for his followers and, therefore, what Christians are supposed to be like? No. You are assuming that all those who claim to be Christian are truthful representatives of Jesus and not self-centered, power-hungry, opportunists who saw it was fashionable to call themselves "Christian" given the power structure of the day. You are attempting to equate two vastly different entities and, therefore, the logic fails.

Is it fair to level the same charges against atheism by equating the actions of atheistic states to represent all atheists? 26.3 million killed in China under Mao Tse Tung, 66 million in the Soviet Union under Lenin/Stalin/Khrushchev, 2.5 million under Pol Pot in Cambodia, etc. If you are going to make the claim that Christians are genocidal monsters, it would seem that atheists are in the same boat. If you want to talk about current events, communist regimes with atheistic tenants (e.g. China, North Korea, etc.) continue to be highlighted for human rights abuses as they target those purely because of religious beliefs (do a search on hrw.org for examples). The problem here is that it is hard to argue that these leaders are not following the "beliefs" laid down by what you portray of atheism -- religious people are "nutjobs" and there is work to do in "salvaging the shambles you religious wingnuts have made of this planet".


5. God wants us to have free will.

Free will is a core point used against the logical "problem of evil" or "problem of hell" arguments. You've had your own ad hominem arguments to try and avoid it -- "That's some good old fashioned bullshit religious guilt if I've ever heard it."or "More rhetoric and no substance." You also attempt to claim that free will can't exist in the Christian view -- "And the Christian set of rules by which you must live is most certainly NOT free." You are trying to change the definition of free will with freedom from consequence -- again, another logical fallacy. Along your line of argument, free will should include the ability to choose to go to heaven. However, if heaven is a "perfect place", would it be perfect if anyone and everyone could be there? Free will cannot make logical impossibilities true -- can I choose to make myself invisible? score 5000 on the SAT test? etc.


6. Atheists use "old arguments" that have do not hold water.

Old argument? Yes. The core argument of the cartoon is "The Problem of Hell", a variant of "The Problem of Evil"/Epicurus' Riddle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_Hell) which is a logical argument that has been around for a long while.

Hold water. Not bad. You could say the same of the theistic ontological argument too. Atheists and Christians have used these for some time and, as such, it is apparent that neither side considers the other's logical "proof" so compelling as to concede defeat. I expect that you'd claim this to be more "bullshit", as you are fond of saying, so I'll be more direct. "Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent." is not true. Free will and yet being unable to choose evil are logically inconsistent. On one hand, you have free will with the potential for evil while on the other, no evil but no free will.


7. Well over 90% of the world is religious.

Arguing over a relatively small percentage seems to be silly -- the point that the vast majority of the population is religious isn't impacted by the difference. It seems equally ridiculous to claim that a majority is proof of something -- I'm sure that Christian and Atheist alike can site a majority opinion either now or in the past that we consider incorrect.


And to sum up what we've heard outside of these points:

1. Then I suppose Jesus and the old testament God are full of crap as well. Which I happen to agree with.
2. But it doesn't change the fact that the Bible is rife with examples of God threatening eternal damnation and hellfire to anyone who doesn't follow his rules.

For all of the times you've bashed people for lacking logic or evidence, where is it when you make these assertions? You've read what Jesus did/said and can comment specifically how he is full of crap then?


Although it has been interesting to watch the comments go back and forth on this and to jump in from time to time, I find the following quotation by Elbert Hubbard appropriate, "Logic: an instrument used for bolstering a prejudice." As this string of comments (along with hundreds like it scattered about the internet) shows, God is not going to be proved or disproved by logical arguments alone.

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> Paul Volcker is one such exception, but as you yourself pointed out - Greenspan made 180k per year. I don't know if you quite get this, but the average American makes around 33k per year.
Average American doesn't have Greenspan's qualifications. The point is that someone like Greenspan could make over a million per year by accepting a position in private sector. And a quick google search shows that Greenspan's family wasn't rich either.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/martin-greenspan.html



> "The Congress would always be pressured to lower the interest rates and stimulate the economy, regardless of long-term consequences."
> Here's one question for you - assuming the Congress took over control of the monetary system(as they have the right to do), what would be the purpose of an interest rate? The interest rate only sustains the profits and dividends of member shareholders of the Fed - operating costs are covered by the budget of money the Fed has allotted itself to print. So why would there be a need for an interest rate?

The Fed could loan money at 0% interest rate. Since the Fed can print money, that means it would hand out free money to any bank that asks. Surely you don't think that would be a good idea?


> FYI - I do not sustain any faith for the Capitalist system, as the end result of Capitalism is ultimately Plutocracy(which is what we are currently living under today - people that represent the richest 5% of the population control 95% of the population) - so, just so you know, I would have no qualms with abandoning the Capitalist system entirely.

Abandoning the system for what? Soviet-style Gulags? A lot of the inventions you are using right now are here thanks to capitalism. Take your computer for instance. Proof of concept transistor was developed in Bell Labs, and brought to the masses through capital ventures Shockley Semiconductors and Fairchild Semiconductors. Intel was one of the the child ventures. Those were all possible because of large investment. You need to have a workable alternative to capitalism, or admit that you don't care about progress. Neither communism, nor anarchy have proven themselves workable over long term.


> Bank runs are only a bad thing for the banks in most cases, because it shows, to their clients, exactly the level of corruption of a central banking system. Yes, people will lose faith - and they should. Yes, people will take what little money the bank has left for them out of the bank - AND THEY SHOULD.

It's not the banks that are hurt the most by bank runs, but the people who keep money in the banks. Banks are required to only keep 1/6th of the money it loans out on hand. So if everyone decides to take their money out, 83% of the people will be left holding an empty bag.

And when the people lose faith in banks and stop depositing money there, all the loan-takers will be hurt. How will someone get a mortage for a house? Or take an inventor with a bright idea who needs a large loan to develop it?

A worse thing would happen if public loses confidence in the Fed itself. The currency that we use are the Fed promissory notes. Without confidence in the currency, how will people continue their economic transactions? We could go back to barter, but that is annoyingly inefficient. Imagine having to find 2 goats, a hub-cap and a pile of dirt that someone wants in exchange for a new coat.


> They should be able to, as an exercise of power over the banks. In what is professed to be an ultimately Capitalist system, where is the competition to the banking industry that, should they mess something up, the public will exercise power over them?

What is the competition to the banking industry? The role of banking industry is to accumulate a large amounts of resources to direct into various areas of development. The capital is amassed because of people volunteering to store their capital is the banks. The main advantage of banking is that capital formation is done through volunteer means. One competition to this system is the Soviet-style system -- the government amasses resources through forceful means -- ie, by telling a million people to come together and dig a hole here and there. And if they don't want to dig a hole? Too bad, they should've been born in America.


> If there is to be a central bank, it must be addressable by the people themselves, SOMEHOW. The public themselves must be able to exercise some form of power over the bank in order to keep that very system in check...otherwise, the public is not responsible for what happens, and must not be legally bound to abide by such a corrupt system.


> Ultimately, if the banks are to be private, as the Federal Reserve currently is, the people should be allowed - encouraged, even, to create their own forms of currency to challenge the private form of currency.

What's stopping you from creating your own currency? Fed notes started by being promissory notes -- it was a note that you could exchange for a certain amount of gold if you brought to the bank. So likewise, you could hand out slips of paper, in promise to exchange them for something tangible if a person brings it back. In essence, shops handing out gift certificates are in essence issuing their own currency. There was a period of time in US when there was no universally accepted paper money. Each bank would issue their own promissory notes. However, because banks failed often, people would trust notes from bigger banks more. Eventually the "currency" from the biggest banks would outcompete everyone else.

> T-bonds/bills - what is a bond? The OED essentially defines it as an "Obligation," or a "promise to pay."

That's not the kind of bonds that government issues. The bonds are that the government issues are papers that US government promises to pay interest on. They don't promise to buy it back, and in fact, it's unlikely that the government will EVER buy it back. The government hasn't bought back any bonds since WWII.

> Can you imagine a form of currency that is not interest-bearing, that the people themselves CAN be held responsible for the rise or the fall of?

You really put a lot of trust in "the people". If people were so responsible, we could give each person a printing press and let them be directly in charge of the monetary policy. They would then rely on their superior knowledge of monetary policy and print more money exactly when it is needed. However, the reality of it is that people are greedy and irresponsible. In the scenario above, everybody would start cranking out money with no regard to economic harm that causes. That's a prime instance of the "tragedy of the commons"

The ideas you are advocating are far from new. People are by nature suspicious of rich people, especially bankers, and there have been many instances in the history when "the people" stepped in to "reign in their power of bankers." For instance, when Lenin carried out the revolution in then-capitalist Russia, his first targets were to take control of the railroads, the telegraph and the banks. The banks became the "property of the people", but that didn't help the people much when their savings have evaporated. My uncle worked as a pilot in Soviet far north for a decade and saved up an equivalent of $60,000 over the years, the savings that disappeared through governments mismanagement. Good politicians make bad bankers.

Or look at early American history. The ideas you are advocating are the credo of the Populist party, whose main ideal is to represent the rights of "the common people." Andrew Jackson was elected on the populist platform, and when he came to power, he destroyed the Central Bank by vetoing the renewal of it's charter. The government's money was then taken out of the bank, and distributed among various private banks. Needless to say it didn't work out too well, and US was back with a national bank 30 years later. You can read more about immediate effects here: http://www.maths.tcd.ie/local/JUNK/econrev/ser/html/destruction.html. Or read about "1837-1862: Free Banking Era" on "history of central banking" in Wikipedia.

The bottom line is that populist philosophy looks good in theory, but doesn't work well in practice, mainly because "the common people" are greedy and stupid. The current system isn't perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.


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I will look out for that Dalai Lama from now on. I mean, look at the 20th Century alone . . .Chinese Communists don't have a religion, the Nazis banned religion, the Soviets under Lenin and Stalin also were of the religion is the stupid opiate school . . .and they all racked up impressive body counts

And at the same time, OF COURSE there are many purely religious nutjobs who kill people and break things -- Charles Taylor in Liberia/Sierra Leone, Hutus in Rwanda, Muslims in Sudan and Congo, Bin Laden, name your favorite radical Muslim sect in dozens of countries in the Middle East, Zionist settlers, etc. etc.

But it, i.e. fucking the world, requires a number of elements beyond merely theism or atheism. It requires political, nationalistic, and military ideologies as well as a willingness on the part of other nations to look the other way to protect their economic interests. And what is so tiresome and lazy is this repetitive exchange:

Theist: You don't Believe in Jesus and I can't listen to you because you are damned to Hell.
Atheist: Well, you are stupid and you have fucked up the world.

Ad hominem ad nauseum

Waltz de Amelie, if that's what it's called.

If I had the CDs handy I'd just point them out to you - basically think of the song near the end of Lenin when they're driving about to get to the cottage or whatever - the exact same song.

I was in that "I know they reused it" state of shock at that moment. But I still liked it, of course.

This isn't actually Yann Tiersen playing this. However, I still give much respect to the person playing it. It couldn't be easy.

I don't remember any songs from Amelie soundtrack being used in Goodbye Lenin soundtrack. Which ones?

I still like Yann in spite the fact his songs were reused straight-up from Amelie in Goobye Lenin.

Still, why no mention of "Amelie" in the tags? I'll just make a quick edit. Hope you appreciate it

It seems like it's probably true, though this footage may be a re-enactment. :
"However, while the film could have been re-staged for the camera, it almost certainly depicts a series of real experiments. Bryukhonenko's work with canine circulation seems obscure today, but at the time was well publicized; his decapitation experiment even remarked upon by George Bernard Shaw.[1] Bryukhonenko's procedures are attested to in numerous books and medical papers, with some sources providing detailed technical information on the operations shown in the film. These texts also shed light on failures not mentioned in the film. For example, the severed heads survived only minutes in artificial circulation, while the resuscitated dogs often died after a few days.
Perhaps most importantly, Bryukhonenko's research was vital to the development of open-heart procedures in Russia. He was one of the leaders of the Research Institute of Experimental Surgery, where Professor A.A. Vishnevsky performed the first Soviet open-heart operation in 1957. Bryukhonenko developed a new version of the autojektor (for use on humans) in the same year; it can be seen today on display at the Museum of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Scientific Center of Cardiovascular Surgery in Russia. Bryukhonenko was awarded the prestigious Lenin Prize posthumously."
(wikipedia - though, especially in cases such as this, wikipedia warrants fact-confirmation; everthing else I've seen online points to this being true - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms)
Full video (20 min) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap1co5ZZHYE
http://time-proxy.yaga.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,851883,00.html
http://analytics.ex.ru/cgi-bin/txtnscr.pl?node=578&txt=460&lang=2&sh=1