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Apparently it came about that God has to share his throne with the Devil. Can you believe that? Yes I know, I was also totally blown away.
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the Devil. He is not all together that much different from God himself.

in Judaism Satan is an agent of G-d, created by G-d for a specific purpose, and something very good. Satan is simply an agent of G-d, just as all the other angels are simply agents of G-d...

If we take a look at Isaiah 45:7, we see that Hashem is the creator of everything, as the text says, “bringing forth light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil, I am G-d who does all these things.” In the Jewish bible, everything is under the jurisdiction of G-d and under His power – all forces, even evil forces. Everything comes from G-d, He created everything, good and evil. That being the case, Satan is not a rival of G-d, he is a messenger of G-d and unable to do anything outside of G-d’s will.

In contrast to Christian literature, where Satan is understood to be an evil force, the enemy of G-d, in Jewish literature, he is seen as a blessing to the Jewish people. Why? Let’s consider for a moment what Satan means. As mentioned before, the word not only means an adversary, but a stumbling block or an obstacle. What exactly is an obstacle? It is something which is put in our path requiring us to overcome it. Obstacles in this life give us opportunities to stretch our muscles and to grow.

Let’s take a look at what Judaism has to say about Satan. In the Genesis account of creation, we are told that G-d saw that each day was good, but on the last day it says that G-d saw that everything was VERY good. The Talmud teaches that this refers to the Evil inclination, which it equates with the Satan. Why is this good? It is the Evil inclination that provides our passions and desires, it is the evil inclination which is responsible for not only all the evil that transpires in this world, but also for all the good. For if we did not have passions, appetites and desires, we would also have no motivation and we would accomplish very little, either good or bad in this life.

If you look at the use of Satan in the Hebrew bible, you find that as a concept, it is much more about an experience than a person, an experience where G-d has put a roadblock in front of us. This is Satan, this is an adversary. So why is this a good thing? Because if we were to go through life without ever experiencing these roadblocks or adversaries, obstacles in life, there would be no potential for virtue in the world. For if we were never tempted to do the things that we are not supposed to do, then not doing them would be of no value to us. It is only in coming up against a desire to do what is wrong and overcoming this that we grow as spiritual people.

This evil inclination, or Satan, provides friction. Can you imagine a world with no friction, no resistance? Think about a car, how does it go? It is the friction between the tires and the road that allow the car to make progress, to go forward. Now, to the tires the friction is not necessarily a positive thing, the friction slowly destroys the tire, and yet without the friction, the tire is worthless.

If there is no resistance to overcome, we have no environment for growth. When we come up against an obstacle, either we crash into it and fall (definitely a negative experience – the evil inclination) or you have to climb over it, and by climbing over these obstacles in life, we develop our spiritual muscles, so to speak. If we never exercise our muscles, we atrophy. So these forces in the world, these experiences, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable, are positive and important.

To reiterate, in the Jewish bible, everything was created by G-d, both good and evil and everything is under G-d’s control.

That is not true. Agriculture suffered busts due to the cyclic calamities, droughts, etc of mother nature.

The currently fashionable attitude toward the business cycle stems, actually, from Karl Marx. Marx saw that, before the Industrial Revolution in approximately the late 18th century, there were no regularly recurring booms and depressions. There would be a sudden economic crisis whenever some king made war or confiscated the property of his subject; but there was no sign of the peculiarly modern phenomena of general and fairly regular swings in business fortunes, of expansions and contractions. Since these cycles also appeared on the scene at about the same time as modern industry, Marx concluded that business cycles were an inherent feature of the capitalist market economy. All the various current schools of economic thought, regardless of their other differences and the different causes that they attribute to the cycle, agree on this vital point: that these business cycles originate somewhere deep within the free-market economy.

Releasing God, the hardest thing I've ever done.

I guess forget and forgive too, right BADecker? Sounds easy as pie, I'll give it a try.

Literally babbies first argument against fractional reserve banking. The money-multiplier theory has been debunked time and time again. AGAIN, it's simply called LEVERAGE. You're trapped in circular logic.


Conveniently you leave out the part where the bank splits the earned interest with depositors.

Also FRB != central banking & interest rate manipulation. You guys keep trying to tie those two things together when they are completely separate ideas.

This is a thread on Armstrong's work isn't it? One of the most critical aspects of his entire thesis is that you people who rip on FRB and can't see the inherent flaws of commodity-backed currencies (and how unnecessary they are in the first place), are just as lost as anyone.

Austrian theory is NOT INFALLIBLE, and that's saying a lot because I have immense respect for their school of thought. There are PLENTY of others who share that same respect and yet agree when these critical flaws are pointed out in classical Austrian theory.

Capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information itself is best defined as surprise: by what we cannot predict rather than by what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery. The economy grows not by manipulating greed and fear through bribes and punishments but by accumulating surprising knowledge through the conduct of the falsifiable experiments of free enterprises. Crucial to this learning process is the possibility of failure and bankruptcy. In this model, wealth is defined as knowledge, and growth is defined as learning.

That new economics—the information theory of capitalism—is already at work in disguise. Concealed behind an elaborate mathematical apparatus, sequestered by its creators in what is called information technology, the new theory drives the most powerful machines and networks of the era. Information theory treats human creations or communications as transmissions through a channel, whether a wire or the world, in the face of the power of noise, and gauges the outcomes by their news or surprise, defined as “entropy” and consummated as knowledge. Now it is ready to come out into the open and to transform economics as it has already transformed the world economy itself.

Let us imagine the lineaments of an economics of disorder, disequilibrium, and surprise that could explain and measure the contributions of entrepreneurs. Such an economics would begin with the Smithian mold of order and equilibrium. Smith himself spoke of property rights, free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation as crucial elements of an environment for prosperity. Smith was right: An arena of disorder, disequilibrium, chaos, and noise would drown the feats of creation that engender growth. The ultimate physical entropy envisaged as the heat death of the universe, in its total disorder, affords no room for invention or surprise. But entrepreneurial disorder is not chaos or mere noise. Entrepreneurial disorder is some combination of order and upheaval that might be termed “informative disorder.”

Shannon defined information in terms of digital bits and measured it by the concept of information entropy: unexpected or surprising bits...The accomplishment of Information Theory was to create a rigorous mathematical discipline for the definition and measurement of the information in the message sent down the channel. Shannon entropy or surprisal defines and quantifies the information in a message
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In the Shannon scheme, a source selects a message from a portfolio of possible messages, encodes it through resort to a dictionary or lookup table using a specified alphabet, then transcribes the encoded message into a form that can be transmitted down a channel. Afflicting that channel is always some level of noise or interference. At the destination, the receiver decodes the message, translating it back into its original form. This is what is happening when a radio station modulates electromagnetic waves, and your car radio demodulates those waves, translating them back into the original sounds or voices at the radio station.

Part of the genius of information theory is its understanding that this ordinary concept of communication through space extends also through time. A compact disk, iPod memory, or Tivo personal video recorder also conducts a transmission from a source (the original song or other content) through a channel (the CD, DVD, microchip memory, or “hard drive”) to a receiver chiefly separated by time. In all these cases, the success of the transmission depends on the existence of a channel that does not change significantly during the course of the communication, either in space or in time.
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ANSWER:They probably will to some extent, but it will be very limited. Gold and silver have lost their mobility. You can no longer hop on a plane with a briefcase full of metal. The more likely outcome is that gold and silver will simply be a hedge against government. It is unlikely that everyone will simply be using them at the local Starbucks.
Government will make transactions in gold or silver illegal and equivalent to money laundering.

There's no more reason to ban the practice of fractional reserve banking because it can go wrong any more than there is reason to ban ownership of guns because they can be used to murder innocent people. The problem is, like always, a LACK OF COMPETITION. So no, SOCIALISM with it's never ending amount of state borrowing is what got us into this mess. Government intervention in the housing market is what got us into this mess. Government monopolization of the banking industry is what got us into this mess.
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Rather than questioning it, you're just trying to twist history and reality to fit your presupposed idea that there's something inherently wrong with fractional reserve banking, which is why, as iamnotback said, you are simply "conflating orthogonal issues".

Credit creation makes it appear as if the supply of "saved funds" ready for investment has increased, for the effect is the same: the supply of funds for investment purposes increases, and the interest rate is lowered. Borrowers, in short, are misled by the bank inflation into believing that the supply of saved funds (the pool of "deferred" funds ready to be invested) is greater than it really is.

The Christian West has been and continues to be very far from ideal. If one reads even a little about the treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans especially the treatment of Native Americans by Spain it is pretty grim stuff. I am less knowledgeable about the treatment of the Australian Aboriginal people but I am sure there are parallels.  

We cannot change the past so how do we help these people now? ... Here are some thoughts.

Race/Ethnicity, Religious Involvement, and Domestic Violence
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077801207308259

Alcoholism Risk Moderation by a Socio-Religious Dimension
http://www.jsad.com/doi/abs/10.15288/jsad.2007.68.912

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This information suggest to me these cultures (more than 400 distinct Australian Aboriginal peoples) came a god damn long way on their own, without the interference of the Christian West.

But now, we see this, also from wiki (under Aboriginal Australians) :

Aboriginal Australians have disproportionately high rates of severe physical disability, as much as three times that of non-Aboriginal Australians, possibly due to higher rates of chronic diseases such as diabetes and kidney disease.
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Aboriginal Australians suffer from high rates of heart disease

Due to the complex nature of the alcohol and domestic violence issue in the Northern Territory, proposed solutions are contentious
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It seems to me the Christian West did a tremendous job in fucking up these intracately formed, finely balanced, NATURAL cultures.

The authors explored the relationship between religious involvement and intimate partner violence... They found that: (a) religious involvement is correlated with reduced levels of domestic violence... this protective effect is stronger for African American men and women and for Hispanic men, groups that, for a variety of reasons, experience elevated risk for this type of violence.

Results: Findings indicated that (1) parental alcohol history robustly predicted increased offspring alcohol-dependence symptoms, (2) religious rearing appeared protective (offspring exhibited fewer alcohol-dependence symptoms), (3) religious differentiation accounted for most of the protective effect, (4) other religious variables did not account for the differentiation effect, and (5) black religious adolescents were more frequently raised with differentiating affiliations and exhibited greater protective effects.

You seem to be forgetting my thesis, which is that the leftists are destroying the Industrial Age and culling themselves. It is a necessary creative destruction to usher in the Knowledge Age.

Refer to my post in the Martin Armstrong thread (and click all my links there):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1082909.msg17458485#msg17458485

If one accepts the premise that the economy is a noosphere (a mind-based system). It follows naturally that it can revive as fast as minds and policies can change. The concept of large scale selective culling of the population or generations of Sisysphean effort become redundant. All that is needed is the free competition of ideas. It is only the bad ideas that need to be culled. The concept of the economy as a noosphere is conceptually true if your prior essay Information is Alive is true for the ideas presented are more or less synonymous.

It will never happen, unless you want a static universe. They tried banning usury in the Middle (Dark) Ages, and economic growth became static or declined.

I do not feel like explaining. Assemble the puzzle based on my past writings (but I've seen that you haven't quite assimilated all my writings).

It depends on your definition of slavery. My definition is broad and that is humans will never be equal, so some will always be subservient to others. Society can mask this as social obligations, slave level wages, or whatever, that is still slavery in my definition. I am a tax slave to Uncle Sam. People who think they are free even when they are not, are a form of satiated slave (Stockholm Syndrome being another example of that phenomenon).

No man can divide and conquer quite as effectively as the ethical "Monotheistic God" can. Look at how exceedingly well "Ethical Monotheistic God" has conquered for his kingdom right across the globe, through the religions that originated in the mid east, a multitude of beautifully organized NATURALLY formed indigenous cultures. Look how much more wonderfully integrated and balanced these cultures, who have existed for thousands of years on their own, have become since "God" has enacted his astoundingly magnificent ethical kingdom into their hearts - all across the globe. It is by far the best testament to his abundantly overflowing love and respect for the diversity (of cultures) he himself has ordained eons ago.

The ancients could kill you in a million different ways and give you a million different reasons why it needed to be done. In much of the pre-modern world, ritual sacrifice was framed as necessary for the good of the society at large — the only way to guarantee, say, a plentiful harvest or success in war.

But the priests and rulers who sanctioned such killings may have had another motive, a new study suggests. An analysis of more than seven dozen Austronesian cultures revealed that the practice of human sacrifices tended to make societies increasingly less egalitarian and eventually gave rise to strict, inherited class systems. In other words, ritual killings helped keep the powerful in power and everyone else in check.

That finding might seem intuitive — societies in which some members are habitually killed probably value certain lives over others — but it has broader implications, the researchers said in the journal Nature. It suggests a “darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies,” they write, in which “ritual killings helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors and the large, stratified societies we live in today.”

The motivation and method of the killings differed across cultures, the researchers explain in a piece for the Conversation: Sacrifices could be demanded for the death of a chief, the construction of a home, the start of a war, the outbreak of disease or the violation of a social taboo. The victims might be strangled, drowned, bludgeoned, burned, buried, crushed with a newly built canoe, or rolled off a roof and then decapitated.

But the link between the sacrifices and social hierarchies seemed to transcend those differences. The victims were almost always of low social status, and the more stratified the culture was, the more prevalent ritual killings were likely to be.

This finding supports the “social control hypothesis” of human sacrifice, the researchers said. This idea suggests that ritual killings are a way to terrorize people into submission, allowing the religious and political leaders (and in many cultures, those were one and the same) who ordered the killings to consolidate power unopposed.

Nihilnegativum I have had time to consider your argument in greater depth. My response to you is that nihilism is incompatible with your goal of advancing knowledge. The arguments to show this are extensive and complex and I do not want to post them all here so I will link to them.

The Foundations of Contentionism:
Cycles of Contention
The Rise of Knowledge
Entropy is Information
The Math of Optimal Fitness
The Limits of Science
Religion and Progress
The Nature of Freedom
Morality and Sin
Knowledge, Entropy and Freedom


This is a complex topic and I do not necessarily expect you to read all of that but I think you would find the logic interesting. In the 8 links above I (and others) describe the relationship between knowledge, freedom, entropy, and progress. Once this relationship is understood it follows that nihilism undermines the fundamental drivers of knowledge creation. Thus nihilism does not advance knowledge it destroys it.

A very brief and incomplete summary of the argument for those without the time to read the links follows: (Going from top to bottom of the above links)

The argument starts from the premise that empiric knowledge exists or at least appears to exist. It goes on to define information in the context of entropy and knowledge in the context of information. It further argues that information (degrees-of-freedom) cannot be infinite or it would not converge to become knowledge. The nature of empiric knowledge as necessarily incomplete is reviewed as is the requirement for apriori. The apriori assumption of theism is explored and its functional role as the primary driver of knowledge growth. The nature of freedom is explored and its role as the functional intermediary between theism and knowledge growth. Consequences of the rejection of theism are reviewed. Sin is discussed in the context of wrong judgment or noise. The argument concludes with observation that ethical monotheism appears to be a the minimum constraint needed to ensure convergence of information to empiric knowledge. Thus the apriori rejection of theism (nihilism) is incompatible with the growth of empiric knowledge over time.

To understand society we need to understand what our options are. There are only two ways to build and sustain a large and complex society. The first is oppression and slavery. Using oppression and slavery one can enforce control through violence. The second and far harder path is to build a free society but this path is challenging and slow as humans are not inherently designed to function in large groups.

 

Yes and that's why  no god  ..

If you didn't have the ability to turn $1 into $100 there would be a huge credit crunch. So we need to unravel the mess by slowly shifting away from the leverage and allowing banks easy profits off of the free spread between central and commercial banks off of the interest rates. I'm not sure but in a cryptocurrency world would there still be a need for a pyramid of interest rates to create insensitives for banks to lend, or are we are own banks and we can lend with some type of escrow or insurance to others earning interest in a decentralized scheme?

Let's start simple:

Take an agrarian society surrounded by hostile nations. Go in there and forcefully abolish slavery. The result? War, bloodshed, hatred, prejudice, poverty and eventually, a return to slavery until the underlying conditions change. Which is pretty much what happened in the American South when the semi-industrialized North imposed their laws upon the agrarian South. And in Texas when Mexico attempted to abolish slavery among the Anglophones there.

Not a good idea. Better idea: Place humane restrictions upon the institution of indentured servitude. Yes, it's still ugly, but in the meantime, you'll teach people compassion and kindness. Educate. Make workshops... Eventually, things change and slavery becomes an anachronism for such a society.

Which is pretty much what happened to Jewish society. Note this: At a time when Romans had literally thousands of slaves per citizen, even the wealthiest Jews held very modest numbers of servants. And those servants, the Talmud tells us, were treated better by their masters than foreign kings would treat their own subjects.

Torah teaches us how to run a libertarian society--through education and participation. Elsewhere in the world, emperors and aristocracy knew only how to govern a mass of people through oppression. Look what happened to Rome.

Getting Real Change

...If G d would simply and explicitly declare all the rules, precisely as He wants His world to look and what we need to do about it, the Torah would never become real to us. No matter how much we would do and how good we would be, we would remain aliens to the process.

So, too, with slavery (and there are many other examples): In the beginning, the world starts off as a place where oppressing others is a no-qualms, perfectly acceptable practice. It's not just the practice Torah needs to deal with, it's the attitude. So Torah involves us in arriving at that attitude. To the point that we will say, "Even though the Torah lets us, we don't do things that way."

Which means that we've really learnt something. And now, we can teach it to others. Because those things you're just told, those you cannot teach. You can only teach that which you have discovered on your own.
History bears this out... As much as Rome ruled over Judea, Jewish values deeply transformed Rome. One of the results was the legal privileges eventually granted to slaves and the gradual recognition of the value of human life.

@ Lateralus - Fractional reserve banking. Your earlier post covered quite a bit of ground,
and I won't claim to have the answer to everything economic, but just for the laughs, lets
suppose we are fractional reserve bankers. I'm the Bank of England and I have £1 in gold,
and that means I can lend you £10. You are the Federal Reserve Bank, so if we have £:$
parity, you can lend me $100. With that as a reserve .... you can see where this is going.
:-)

To have fractional reserve banking, you need to be working on a Gold Standard, or a near
equivalent. That's not how todays banks work. So what constrains bank lending?
Risk. More precisely, Perceived Risk. Which is why I wrote up the thread
"Unlimited Banking and Problem Banking" which got too long, but you may want to skim
through it.

I'm trying to put together something on Banning Usury, but for the moment that solution
looks worse than the problem that needs fixed, so no rush to finish there.

Atheism is irrational unless it is absolute nihilism this is simple fact.
I am a non believer but one day we will make our own new world or find another ..

Atheism is irrational unless it is absolute nihilism this is simple fact.?
So what you just said is a lie?.. I have just proved you wrong

Atheism is irrational?..
Make our own new world find another new world.. Is what i say absolute nihilism?..

So as an atheist how am i irrational..

Make our own new world find another new world..A PURPOSE ..

Why do you think i keep saying science is the key to life?..It gives us a purpose..
You wont find it rattling bones praying or voodoo..
we have found out through science one day this planet will blow up or the sun will die?..
What's our purpose?..

So as an atheist what i said is it absolute nihilism..And is it useless to want to find new worlds or make
another?..

Metaphysics is ontology and epistemology, not morality. Biology has nothing to do with truth, sequoias live for hundreds of years and learn nothing. Anthropological arguments are the only pertinent, but I'd say we're already overpopulated given our capability for wealth distribution.

I think they will be achieved from a framework of theism, but in a slow way, that will leave behind piece by piece the spiritualism from theism, until it is reduced to the pure belief of transcendent perfection without content. That kind of theism would be compatible with nihilism and the two could coexists as mutually agnostic. The problem is that traditional theism brings spiritualism, and that spiritualism is just a more primitive type of thought, and that its bad when applied to knowledge, or morality. For example its hard to understand and artificially reconstruct the mind, if people think its an eternal substance completely separate from matter. Basically, I don't really care what anyone believes, as long as it doesn't determine knowledge, but because spiritualism practically always does, I'm against it.

He categorically predicted the complete collapse of BTC and XMR.