This is satire, guys.

It's not his fault and it's not stupidity. This person - like most religious adults - was indoctrinated during their formative years, long before they had developed the critical thinking skills necessary to discern truth from falsehood,  long before they would ever hear the phrase scientific method".

There's a reason every religious group forces their bullshit down the throats of young children. It's the only time they can. By the time any modern teen has been educated about science, getting them to believe in a god would be as difficult as getting them to believe in santa claus.

IMHO indoctrinating children into anything is a form of child abuse, and should be treated as such by the law.

Of course you didn't. Whenever a theist faces an impassable logical challenge, they reveal their intellectual cowardice almost instantly.

Here, learn how to create a universe.

LOL it's called game theory, look it up on the internet. You won't find it in bronze age books of fictional allegory.

Religion is on the decline, and that's not going to change. In fact it will almost certainly accelerate now that we are firmly in the information age. Sooner or later you're going to have to face reality.

rofl

I dare any intellectually honest theist (don't laugh, they exist!) to watch this 7 minute video.

Fail! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game

Like this.

Dear Christians,

In the following argument of nine premises, I will aim to convince you that Jesus of Nazareth was a fictional character, and not a real person. I do not intend to sway the beliefs of many of you, nor even budge them - I know this to be an impossibility, for if the religious mind is well-trained at anything, it is circumventing rational argument. I only intend to sew seeds of doubt, in the hopes that perhaps some of you will nurture them and let them grow. Here goes.

1. Much, if not most, of the Bible is arguably fiction. Quit being so intellectually dishonest, Christians - this is the twenty-first century. That means the burden of proof is on YOU. If you make a claim about the universe, it is up to you to prove it is true, not the other way around. It is not up to us, the rest of the world, to prove your claims false - that is not scientific thinking, that is anti-scientific thinking. Because I am a man of my times, and believe in correcting ignorance, what I am doing here is out of courtesy to YOU, just as if I were to argue publicly that there is a Flying Spaghetti Monster orbiting Venus preparing to blow up Planet Earth, one of you would probably, out of simple human decency attempt to correct me and point me towards the truth. This is my way of doing that. Now, back to the Bible being fiction... that part's easy. Find me a snake with vocal chords, water that is dense enough for a human being to walk on, or a chemical process that converts complex carbohydrates to fish. Until then, you're out of luck, sucker. The evidence wins, and the evidence sides with me. These are invented stories... fictional dramas meant to impart some moral lesson. They are not real.

2. Following point two: from an objective, scrutinizing view, there is no reason to believe one story in the Bible over another. We cannot honestly engage shades of truth here - either the books in the Bible are historically true or they are not. Since they almost ubiquitously contain material to make the scientific person skeptical, we can chance to say the same is true of the entire book: either it happened, or it didn't. Therefore, it is no less plausible to disbelieve the Jesus myth than the myth about Enoch the nine-hundred year old man or the creation myth wherein God pats the first humans out of clay. Here's a hint: humans, like all other complex organisms, reached their present condition by millions of years of natural selection through the self-preservation of certain greedy genes. We can observe this happening today; anti-biotic resistant bacteria are a good example. Plus, we've mapped the human genome - we know our ancestry, and it's simian. Even Pope John Paul II said evolution is a historical fact. People did not come from clay.

3. By definition, intellect, or "reason" is the ability to revise one's beliefs in light of better argumentation. Taking simple, empirical data from the the world around you should make it easy to determine that the physical laws of the universe DO NOT CHANGE. It therefore stands to reason that "miracles" can only possible be one of two phenomena: A, an outside agent actually interfering with the laws of the universe; or B, hyperbolized coincidences. Considering the Bible was written in a time when allegory was the most common form of journalistic reporting and most people still believed spitting on a wound was an appropriate way to cure it, it is far more reasonable to assume the latter.

*Side note: Seriously Hoss, let me clue you in on something: things that are impossible to do now - like walking on water, resuscitation after days of biological death, and wine magically turning into blood - were just as impossible 2,000 years ago. There's a much greater power in the universe than "belief." It's called "observation."

4. To believe these stories, you must create strange rationalizations that do not hold up to true intellectual scrutiny. This brings us to the issue of honesty. Without deluding yourself, can you honestly answer the following questions? Such as, why doesn't God heal amputees? He heals everyone else miraculously, right? But neither you nor I have ever seen an amputee grow back a leg. Oh wait, God has a special plan for them. But isn't he supposed to be loving and just? What's with the discrimination, man? Or how about Jonah surviving in the belly of that whale? Wouldn't he be partially digested after three days? Maybe Baby Balooga had a slow metabolism?

5. Following four, and this one is my favorite: if Jesus is the one true messiah, the only God, whom you shall hath no other gods before him, yada yada, how come so many gods DID come before him having nearly identical biographies? There are no less than two dozen god-men of the ancient Mediterranean whose birth was heralded by a bright star in the East (Sirius, for those who don't practice astronomy), who were also adored by wise men, walked on water, fed the hungry, resurrected the dead, were crucified and rose again, etc. Many even had the same birthday as Jesus - December 25th! Not coincidentally, this was the Roman Holiday of Saturnalia centuries before the clergy decided to call it Jesus' birthday. Surprise! Christians plagiarized earlier religions. I cannot spell it out any clearer than that. Knowing that, how can one believe anything Christian doctrine teaches? How do you even begin to separate what was invented from what was borrowed? You don't. The cold, hard truth is, it was an old story then, and it's an old story now. These messianic archetypes - the man that is god, the man who conquers death - existed long, long before Jesus came around. They were old news when soap was a cutting-edge technology, before written language was even invented. They are ancient fucking history. Jesus was not the antitype of these messianic figures, he was their distillation.

7. Following point 6. If you are skeptical of this information (and you should be, as doubt is the seed of all knowing), investigate the matter for yourself. One hugely recurring problem I find when debating with Christians is that they either know very little about other religions or are ignorant of their existence entirely. This is counter-intuitive to me, and perhaps my own fault in failing to understand the religious mind. Shouldn't it be fairly crucial to make the most educated decision in choosing a religion, if practicing the "right" one is important to you? For example, you wouldn't want to choose a religion based on plagiarism, would you? Or one that literally absorbed every earlier belief system it encountered through endless politicizing or the diplomacy of the sword? Well, better crack those books then - there's a whole heap of gods who fit the Christ mold long before Christ. I suggest you begin by researching Mithra of Rome, Attis of Frigia, Dionysis of Greece, Krishna of India, and Horus of Egypt. The last should be of particular interest to you, as his mythology is almost an exact carbon copy of Jesus', right down to the twelve apostles and three-day rebound time after being murdered by jealous clergy. Though, I should point out that Horus was worshipped nearly 1000 years BEFORE Christianity began spreading through the Hebrew-populated Roman colonies. This should come as no surprise to you, as it's written right in the bible that the Hebrews came out of Egypt.

8. On a more serious note. Western civilization may have been "built" on Judeo-Christian values (at least the "don't kill" and "don't steal" parts), but we have become a modern society and have adopted the scientific way of thinking. While the aforementioned values have indisputable merits, maintaining the dogma in its entirety is no longer necessary, especially when we consider the violence and segregation it has caused throughout the ages. Furthermore, philosophically speaking, Christian ethics are severely outdated. Since the Enlightenment, the Western World has seen far superior ethicists to Jesus of Nazareth. Kant and Mill, for example, created life-affirming ethical systems that can be applied to a wider range of people without destroying their culture or beliefs about where the universe came from and what kind of sex they should consider perverse. Truly, there is no reason to cling to the old way any longer. We have adopted science and reason in every other aspect of our lives... yet somehow we have retained Bronze Age ethics? It makes no sense. Why should we continue to believe it is better to be tribalists than to be humanists? This mentality is not compatible with a just, egalitarian society. Besides, Jesus may tell us to love one another, but he also says we should maintain the Old Testament in its entirety - no cherry-picking - which means we technically must condone rape, incest, slavery, and genocide (!). If we can do away with these parts (and we have), why not do away with the whole thing?

9. In the grand scheme of things, it would be generally permissible for one to believe in Christian ethics if it were readily understood that Jesus was not a historical person, and the story is allegory. However, if you are a Christian, you probably do believe that Jesus was a real human being. This is a threat to both the advancement of science and the absolution of religious conflict in the world, two issues that are paramount to our survival as a species as our planet nears carrying capacity and is dangerously on the brink of overheating. It creates too slippery a slope for other theocratic nonsense to take hold; for example, tthe mindset that human beings can literally live after death (how many soldiers would we send to die if everyone believed this is the only life?); or that preserving the existence of cell clusters which bear no conceivable human traits is somehow a better aim than alleviating actual human suffering; or that sex is harmful, but killing, bigotry, and total obedience to clandestine authority are healthy practices; or that blood sacrifice is a value modern societies should endorse. But Jesus WAS a real person, you say! There's a plethora of evidence! No, not really, outside of the gospels. And those hardly count as "evidence." They are secondary sources at best. Here's why: if a historical Jesus really lived and died between 0 and 33 CE, then we know beyond a doubt that at least forty years passed before the earliest gospel - the one written by Mark - was scribed. Because the aforementioned gospel discusses the destruction of Solomon's temple, we know it was written in or sometime after 70 CE. Given the lifespan of the period, that means the author or authors were at best infants or young children when Jesus of Nazareth was supposed to have been crucified. Moreover, the gospel writers are not themselves mentioned in the gospels, and they make no claim to actually having met Jesus. None of the apostles who walked with Jesus nor anyone who even met him wrote accounts to that effect. Granted, there are certain mentions of a "Christ" in the writings of Mediterranean historians from that period (not Justin Martyr or Pontius Pilate - sorry, but those are proven forgeries). However, if are a serious Christian, these should be of little consideration to you, as you know "the Christ" is really a title that simply means "the Anointed," and was taken up by many rabbis of that time. In not ONE of these documents is a man named Jesus, or Yeshua of Nazareth mentioned.

In conclusion, the gospels which discuss the life of Jesus of Nazareth are at best hearsay, almost certainly hyperbolized, and at worst complete fabrications. What we can determine beyond a doubt is that for at least four decades after his death, everyone in the world, including his sworn followers and students, simply forgot their messiah existed. If that doesn't cast on you a serious shade of doubt, then nothing will, and perhaps I'm not "the fool".

He's a president, not a king. Or at least, that's how it's supposed to be...  

I swear there used to be a difference..

Well yeah, they're his boss.

What's up bitcoin noobs? Just dropping in to remind everyone what a cool cat I am.

Still got 97.5% of my life savings in Bitcoin. Still coasting at 250%+ ROI from time of divestment from that worthless scam called fiat.

Yes we are. Because you haven't read any of the books or articles I've linked, you haven't taken the time to understand the hard science which demonstrates human beings are neuro-biologically wired for empathy, not selfishness, which is a temporary cultural obsession along with conspicuous consumption / materialism / narcissism.

http://www.narcissismepidemic.com/aboutbook.html

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-narcissism-epidemic

Does your computer control what threads you click without your consent? You should really get that checked out, man. Could be malware, or just typical user logic error.

"Despite the mounting research evidence that humans are wired for empathy and often express their empathic regard by engaging in altruistic activity, the naysayers cling to the defense that people act that way because they have learned, through past experience and conditioning, that helping another person mutes their own empathic distress and provides them a sense of relief and, on occasion, even pleasure, because they have been morally accountable. Hoffman points out that just because one feels better because he or she was able to help another in distress doesn't mean that it is the sole or even a major reason for being altruistic. The pleasure might be an unexpected by-product, but not a prime motivating factor, for engaging in altrustic behavior in the first place."
-Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization



https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_rifkin_on_the_empathic_civilization

One reason that radical capitalism, what some of you may erroneously refer to as "anarcho"-capitalism, has won the hearts of so many is that it is highly plausible; it sounds great. A world of abstract morality where the anonymous ‘market’ expertly and without pity, favoritism or error decides the ultimate value of goods and services and delivers those goods and services with maximum efficiency, the highest good. A world where shared ownership shifts corporate responsibility to a plebiscite to which the corporation answers; the interests of the shareholders will echo the interests of humanity. A world where capital flows continuously from the corporate class back to the entrepreneurial class, endlessly cycling value into new innovations that serve humanity.

Hell, I’ve almost convinced myself!

Each of those assertions is not just false, but diametrically opposed to reality. And reality is all we have left.

The Truth Within the Lie

While each of these assertions is false, each has some kernel of truth or potential for truth that tethers radical capitalism to reality enough for many people to overlook the obvious flaws and falsehoods in this religion, er, approach to economics.

So with the market’s ability to assess values, it’s true that a broad, robust, well-managed market can do this thing. But our current leveraged, opaque, unmanaged markets do just the opposite, as evidenced by the series of economic bubbles that have ruined our economy.

A hardcore radical capitalist intellectual would point out that, despite the bubble a true value was eventually determined. I would counter that a bubble can only exist when significant market players facilitate transactions that they KNOW to be badly valued. And I don’t mean once, I mean tens of thousands of times.

If a market can be manipulated, no price can be trusted. Nothing has any value.

Again, it is true that markets seek efficiency – stone cold truth. The mythical part is that efficiency is the highest good. In reality, efficiency is a dangerous, brittle approach prone to catastrophic failure. The opposite of efficiency is not inefficiency; the opposite is resilience.

Surely though, the broad base of shareholders can anchor corporate behavior within the framework of human betterment. Surely enough humans have the strength of character to say “no” to those practices that endanger employees or put our environment at risk.

I have no doubt that most humans have the broader human interest in their hearts. It’s just that “the shareholders” aren’t humans. The shareholders are other corporations. The idea that Johnny Puterbox’s 184 shares of GE somehow give him decision-making authority is laughable. Those votes count for nothing compared with the millions of votes the institutional investors get. And besides, it’s not like the board of directors has to do what the shareholders say. The directors do what they think is in the best interest of the shareholders, regardless of what the shareholders say.

If you did not know this, the current state of corporate boards of directors can best be described as the most expensive circle-jerk in the history of the species.

That leaves us with the capital itself. All that money soaked up by the institutions through all those bubbles, on top of all of those cynical transactions, after all that “value” has been wrung out of companies through the magic of profits…doesn’t that go to fuel the next wave of innovation, the new jobs?

For me, this is the piece de resistance of radical capitalism. A preposterous lie, transparent on the face of it and never once challenged on the basis of data. If this were true, no state, local and even now federal government would ever risk a dollar of taxpayer money on seed funds, loan guarantees or tax abatements. NEVAH! And yet any government that can find the money is putting into the venture space.

Here’s how we know that radical capitalist are cynical liars – every one of them knows that as wealth increase, the appetite for risk decreases proportionally. When money gets big, it gets notoriously skittish, fearing everything and seeking the safe haven. Big money is why bonds are selling like risk-avoidance crack. 0.25%…? SOLD! Only a microscopic portion of amassed wealth gets reinvested in the economy.

Occupy Reality

Right now, corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash. Oh, they’d help you out with your economy and all, but they’re a-scared. They’re worried that if they gave some of that money to the government in taxes they wouldn’t have it anymore.

And if they loaned some to you for your company, there’s a slight chance that they wouldn’t get 100% of the value they anticipated based on the amortized payment scheme in which you end up paying them far more than they actually lent you and they can’t not get 100% of anticipated revenue because they would already have leveraged 100% of the anticipated revenue 40:1 against corn futures.

But your landscaping business represents a serious risk. So they’ll just wait it out while you die. They have to look out for the shareholders.

This country needs to learn, once and for all, that capitalism is not perfect and that radical capitalism is destructive. Markets, trade, money, all the normal stuff is generally fine, but the special status afforded the Too Big to Fail club puts them beyond the law yet dependent on government to save them when they’ve gone too far. They get all the speech rights of an individual, only their speech is money and they have pretty much all of that.

This, my friends, is called “tyranny”. And it has got to go.

Perhaps I should have explained the reasoning for my militant anti-theism. It is based on 3 premises:

1. Our civilization is a zero-sum game between reason and violence. Where one flourishes, the other suffocates.  When one waxes, the other wanes.

2.  There is also a similar zero-sum game between reason and superstition. Where reason thrives, superstition suffocates - and vice versa.

3. As superstition is the enemy of reason, it is therefore the ally of violence. A more superstitious world is a more violent world. History strongly supports this. Our world has become steadily less violent since the dawn of the age of reason a few hundred years ago. Although this seems a bit counter-intuitive given the World wars, it's true.

Check out "the surprising decline in violence" on youtube. And check out The real God, an Epiphany.

Also check out Christopher Ryan's interview with reason TV. Human beings are sexually omnivorous,  he argues strongly. Monogamy is one of the myths we need to let go of, because the more we embrace our hyper-sexual nature, the less violent our species will become.

.Religion's rabid demonization of natural human sexuality is one of the primary ways it makes our world more violent.

People are largely constructed by capitalism. Their opinions are largely constructed by capitalist media, which will always denounce anything not in the economic interests of the owners, managers and clients of the capitalist media.

Actions against the interest of capitalists will therefore never gain popularity until the flow of capital is disrupted and capitalist normality is disrupted. This is why the internet has been so disruptive and why they are fighting so desperately to gain control over it by destroying net neutrality.

To all my younger readers: This is why your parents' and grandparents' generations seem so much more obedient, brainwashed, and stupid than your own. They grew up in the age of centrally-controlled media (radio & TV). You didn't. It's all unraveling now, and there's no saving it. The truth cannot be stopped.

To everyone else: They built your mind since you were a child. It's your responsibility to unmake yourself from their lies and rebuild your mind on a foundation of radical truth. This will be difficult and painful, yes. But essential, you deserve to live in reality.

Superstition is the end of reason.

No gods, no masters.

Regarding the "anti-labels" argument, I dislike this argument very much. Those labels do have meaning in that they represent where you fall on this:



For example, I identify as a social-anarchist, and when I take the test I fall almost on the absolute bottom left (collectivist) corner. Libertarians, by contrast, fall somewhere in the bottom right quadrant (neo-liberals).

If you're interested, you can take the test here and see for yourself where your values place your politics.


P.S.
All you libertarians should consider reading the very excellent book, A brief history of neo-liberalism.

That is correct, it's the McCarthyism hangover. I'll let Dr. Wolff explain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn6UJ2QcR7I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DW1ONyrPhQ

They have demonized this word to the point where people fear it more than they fear the word fascism. It's a tale as old as time, control the populace through fear.

This is precisely how the corporate oligarchs have been able to march America right into a fascist police state with shit like the Patriot Act.

"The measure of the state’s success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not. We are like those African slaves who believe that their master is their benefactor, or those Russians who still believe that Stalin was their guardian."
-Joseph Sobran, Anarchy without fear

This quote could be altered to read "The measure of the capitalists' success is that the word socialism frightens people, while the word fascism does not." and would be just as true.

No one gives power to the state, the state takes power - by force. Every nation on Earth was born in blood. If you don't believe me, go try taking back the power without using violence and see how far you get.

Oh wait, bitcoin is doing precisely that foir the first time in history!!! I almost forgot!

Good point! Some would argue that America has already mostly abandoned democracy in favor of fascism.

Corporations do not magically dissolve with the loss of legal status, any more than armies magically dissolve with the loss of their King / president / general.

The corporation is a monster we have created, and it is a monster we will have to slay before this chapter of the human story comes to a close.

Corporations derive their power from money.
The state derives it's power from money, indoctrination of masses, and monopoly on legitimized violence. If you remove the state from the equation but leave capitalism in place, all of a sudden there is no state monopoly on violence. That means violence will be sold to the highest bidder: the corporations.

Corporations, endowed with this new power - the ability to wield violence as sovereign nations once did - will quickly work to monopolize this violence and prevent citizens from wielding it. The result would be fascism and probably mass slavery and/or genocide.

The only way to truly make all interaction and exchange voluntary is to live in a world totally without violence. A world governed by reason and reason alone. This is not at all compatible with capitalism, which necessitates systematic violence as a prerequisite for its existence.

The path to a world governed by reason is providing the essentials for survival to all human beings as a birthright, and then allowing us to compete for everything else (luxuries and such). That means decent food, shelter, healthcare, and education must be provided to all human beings FREE, not one person excluded.

I've been sharing this video because it really cuts to the heart of the matter for why Bitcoin's dominance is a matter of when rather than if.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIVAluSL9SU