Dear Squeers,

I think the most decent modern societies on the planet are the capitalist, welfare states of Scandinavia. They have succeeded in creating societies with a reasonable distribution of wealth - few very rich and few very poor - along with great political freedom. In Norway there is no political advertising allowed. Candidates are obligated to face each other in open debate. They all had much poverty about a hundred years ago. Many left to emigrate to the United States or Australia. They are not doing it any more. Their prosperity predates the discovery of oil resources in the North Sea. Brazil is also a capitalist state, but there are great extremes of wealth there - some very rich and many in dire poverty. Scandinavian style capitalism is worth emulating. Brazilian style capitalism is horrible. US style capitalism isn't too great either but much better than Brazil's. Scandinavia has produced more humane societies than any of those built on the Marxist model. There are different capitalist models.

My uncle was a Bolshevik before the February Revolution and Lenin's counterrevolution. He was arrested and imprisoned by the czarist police. In 1921 my father brought him to the United States. He was no longer a Bolshevik and was very happy in the United States. My cousin Rose was also brought to the United States. She used to get glossy magazines from the USSR extolling the glories of communism. She left Russia as a little girl and was not as aware of the actuality as my uncle was. As far as I am concerned we cannot have a decent society unless people have a degree of freedom from coercion. Coercion may be from state power as in the Marxist and fascist societies. It may be from corporate power. I think the Work Choices of the Coalition government was coercion. A worker by himself or herself does not have power equal to that of the corporation. The option offered to the worker under Work Choices was 'take it or leave it'.

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QUOTE
grateful wrote: "Perhaps a more useful question would be: What does Judaism, Christianity or even Islam lack which leads you to conclude that they are merely human invention, despite their claims to the contrary?"

Dear grateful,

All of the above lack any proof to substantiate their claims. Why 'even Islam'? Islam does not have a primitive humanoid god like the Romans and the Christians. It seems less unreasonable than Christianity.

UNQUOTE

But DavidF, as you agreed, you did not substantiated the claim that God is an invention.

Anyway, since you find Islam more reasonable in its claims than some other religions (and yes i would have to agree) then let’s stick with this religion. Let’s see how your argument plays out using Islam as a concrete example.

Your comments raise two questions:

1) You argue ALL religions have been invented. How would you argue Islam came to be invented and how would you substantiate your case.

2) You say that ALL religions lack ANY proof to substantiate their claims. What are the claims of Islam that you refer to and what would constitute proof in your eyes (i.e., what is the benchmark you are using to reach your conclusion).

Dear grateful,

There is absolutely no evidence for the existence of any supernatural. It is up to the one who makes an assertion to provide the evidence. I do not have to produce any evidence that the goddess Venus, the Jewish, Islamic, Christian God or the Spaghetti Monster does not exist. It is up to those who assert that Venus, the Jewish, Islamic, Christian God or the Spaghetti Monster exists to prove that it is not an invention.

Dear Squeers,

I do not know that any human being can fairly be classed as an idealist or a realist. I think all of us are a mixture of good and bad and a mixture of devotion to ideals and to pragmatic concerns. Obama is president of the United States, and you called him an idealist. He is very much a realist and a practical politician as exhibited by the fact that he is president. One does not become president by idealism alone.

I agree that an unequal distribution of wealth is not consistent with a sustainable society. However, I think it has to be greatly unequal to be damaging. The attempt to eliminate all inequality in my opinion must produce tyranny. I think the capitalist Scandinavian societies have done a good job in that area. They have reformed capitalism. We certainly cannot have perpetual growth. We must reach a balance.

bushbred wrote: "Yep, had a fair bit to do with capitalism, actually and naturally it was copied from a Jewish term early in the Enlightenment, interesting that the term sacrificial appears to be part of it."

Please expand your statement. What Jewish term do you refer to and where does the term sacrificial come in?

You want evidence . H Margenau ( reflecting a lot of physicists who believe in God ) in reviewing the impact of physics and chemistry research over then last 30yrs says
"Science deals with the laws of nature as they understood by man . Theories of knowledge using constructs, definitions and rules of correspondence lead us to all the laws of nature ,but it does not account for their origin .They surely could not have developed by chance or accident.( from Cosmos Bios and Theos 1992)"
From my point of a view as a practical ecologist, there is a tendency to confuse processes which operate well at one level to decscribe all processes. This is a matter of faith rather than something we can prove.

DavidF: "I do not know that any human being can fairly be classed as an idealist or a realist..."

Of course words are blunt instruments, either devoid of subtlety or aporetic.
Listening to Obama's memoir on RN, I was inclined to think him naive, and in that sense idealistic, since he would have to confront the ingrained prejudices of republicans and the wider hegemony which, to my mind, they still broadly represent. In a country that so reveres its leaders, or at least the position of leader, the disrespect accorded Obama is, I'm afraid, an indictment against the prevailing national ideology--a resurgence of conservative elitism.
On the GFC, Obama was surely an idealist in the other sense, and republicans the realists; in the sense that the trillions of dollars "conjured up" is farcical.
Yet capitalism has to be saved, reformed rather than overturned, since the infrastructure it maintains would collapse if the precarious balance was broken, as it nearly was. Capitalism really is too big to fail, it would mean death on a biblical scale (which of course is what the planet needs).
While I'm idealistic about changing the world, I don't have naive illusions about complete equality; life is fundamentally unfair and that's not going to change--indeed disparity and injustice, in all sorts of ways, is what drives human innovation, creativity and even transcendence, in the natural (evolutionary) scheme of things. The problem with wanton capitalism is its dehumanising effects, its tendency to nullify these very attributes (innovation, creativity, transcendence--and I don't mean in the positivist sense remote from our humanity), to turn aspiration into gross materialism, "acquisitivism", the pursuit of wealth and possessions for their own sakes.
Ironically, dehumanisation is the charge often laid against communism; and I agree that any system that enforces conformity kills creativity and love of life. Communist states do it by coercion and capitalist states by prescriptive living; homogenising, commodifying and denigrating what should, ideally, be for all a unique experience of life. Under capitalism, life for most is degenerate, while for the few who would transcend it, it's reduced to sheer patronage.

I think you'll find that the Scandinavian welfare states are starting to tighten up; the third way is proving unsustainable in a global free-market where humanism has little currency. We can't have sustainable welfare unless the new tigers have it as well. The republicans are right, the healthcare bill will send the US broke--too much money already goes to the coffers of the rich, into outlandish "Enlightenment" budgets (space programmes, foreign interventions etc.), and servicing already unsustainable debt. The only way forward is global reform, in my view. We already have a global economy that transcends national borders, and multiculturalism too makes a nonsense of nationalism. Assertions of Australian or American “values” are pure rhetorical parochialism--more assertions of "economic" borders--idealistically cherished by the masses as though they actually meant something. Heaven knows how such idealism will ever be defeated, or how, in that event, it woeld ever translate into action (the instantiation of a relative equality, I suspect), but we really do have to think “globally”, to use the cliche. Once again the disparity of wealth, this time between countries, is what makes this so ideologically repugnant to the petite bourgeoisie. Look at the way Monkton’s hysterical evocation of world government caught on! I'm afraid humanism is embraced in the West only so long as it remains purely ideological. World (or “cooperative”) government “is” the way forward and would, as I conceive it, paradoxically, restore countries’ "cultural" distinctiveness--as opposed to their currently "straightened" or "affluent" distinctiveness. At the moment it comes down to what you're worth!