Can any Christian explain Jesus Christ's teachings on objective ethics working without trust that an indirect authority can define what is and is not objectively ethical?  For example, because we must have faith that the men who wrote the Bible were being completely honest in their writings, objective ethics requires faith that what God said within the Bible, including his mortal figure, is the complete truth, which would then have to assume men with this kind of power can't lie.  Because if God speaks to us as to what is or is not ethical today, we would all come to the same conclusions on what is and isn't ethical, and yet we do not, which implies God has kept quiet about this matter since then.

So how could objective ethics function without first trusting that those who speak for the greatest authority weren't lying?  And if this cannot be accomplished, how do we compensate for the various other religions whose objective ethics clash with Christianity?--e.g., if ethics are objective, they should not clash any more than 2 + 2.

Furthering this point: is this faith being placed in the lord, or ultimately in the men who wrote of him?

Hey there; glad to see you're so excited about Bitcoin   What draws you to it?

I got this great idea: let's denominate our BTC in whichever way is most understandable at the time.

I am glad we have resolved this, OP please lock thread.

Windows 7; it's the worst operating system, except for all the others.  Win8 is too tacky and I couldn't believe its apps had ads; official windows apps with ads.  Microsoft pls

Then XP is aging not so well and slowly losing support.  I don't even want to talk about Vista.  OSX only works on Macs and I don't feel like dropping all that cash just to dick about on a Mac.  Linux works great if all you do is surf the web or write software; otherwise it's still a bit of a jungle and there's no guarantee what you're trying to do can be efficiently or comfortably accomplished with Linux software; besides that, I would be using Linux if all the software that's written for Windows was on it.

Still rooting for Linux, though; Ubuntu has come very close to being complete enough to compete with the big dogs, but it's still not there.

TF2 deserves a spot for absorbing thousands of hours of people's lives.

I don't even...

The Beatles didn't say anything about this one.

I believe it begins with education; 14 years of education can either produce a thinking, skill-bearing human being, complete with the ability to differ between right and wrong and a clear understanding of the functions of law, or we can produce what's being pumped out now, people with their dreams bloated and souls crushed, with hardly any chance in the job market for having no skill in anything but the liberal arts, which, as we know, doesn't get you far.  I believe a school should teach a person not how to do this or how to do that, but teach the person the very tools they need to understand anything and everything; a school should teach a person how to think, not how to listen, for the latter produces a dependency effect where the individual feels they cannot understand anything without first being fed the knowledge by an approved official; this squashes much outside-the-box thinking that we find so commonly with intuitive types.

This begins by taking the state's power to both mandate and control education, for they have a vested interest in keeping healthy minds ignorant of government functions to ensure the state always appears not only wanted, but absolutely vital; it is very rare to find a teenager interested in their government because "politics are stupid and pointless", as I can attest to with my mediocre education.  To ensure that an individual's education is not being tampered with, the provider of such education must have no bias, not toward any religion, nation or other governing entity, interested only in producing intelligent human beings.

This is handled perfectly fine by the free market; take, for example, schooling through taxation: if the logic follows that schools can be paid for and regulated by the state, it should also follow that those same schools can be paid for privately, and without state regulation, at a much lower cost.  So the idea that, if the state didn't pay for schools there would be no schools, simply doesn't follow for we all agree that if we want schools, and we're willing to pay for them, there's no need for state involvement (at least, not anymore.)  This comes with the added effect of education being just that: not indoctrination, not propaganda, but honest, unbiased, beneficial education.  This is assuming modern methods of education, such as through the Internet, are not sufficient, which is consistently proving to be false; though I can claim to have become far more capable as a thinker through autodidacticism on the Interwebs, I am curious to see if children are also capable of self-knowledge; I don't believe the assertion that a child must have the knowledge beaten into him, but just the opposite, that children are naturally curious and starving for knowledge and it is that which is stolen through mandatory education.

However, pushing even further back, for this reform to happen, you would need parents who want better for their children than what's currently being provided.  So the true start of this whole process is in parenting; there must be a paradigm shift in the way parents view their children and the methods children are raised before any of this can come to fruition.  This is why, though we may see the truth, it takes so long for these changes to occur; society can't be changed on a whim, and the ideas some people hold dearly, e.g. "beating your kids is the only way to get them to listen" and "schools have to be funded by the state because anyone who thinks differently hates education", just don't go away very easily.  So I agree with you; technology is playing a massive role in this change.  The Internet has turned me into an atheist libertarian, and this is a very common trend; there is no school on this planet which will lead a person to this very conclusion about religion and politics, but I see it as the rational end-of-the-line with these two subjects after deciding I would understand the two on my own.

I have a lot of faith riding on the generations being raised with the Internet, where one can find knowledge, the universal good, very easily and efficiently; this is producing the peaceful people we need, despite many violent upbringings, to begin the revolution of parenting, to begin the revolution of education, and thus a global revolution of how we perceive government and the roles it should play in our daily lives.  The Internet is bringing us all under one roof, a global community named mankind, and so does Bitcoin and its derivatives unite us under one economic banner.  The beginnings of a society are in its people, not its government; the government comes only to represent the people (and though many of us disagree on how much government should govern us, none of us, not even the most ardent followers of the state, agree that it should control our every action i.e. communism and fascism); this means, no amount of political activism will help us if we're ill equipped to even govern ourselves.  If there's a fundamental problem with the society, the system will naturally represent these problems; changing the system cannot change the people, only the people can change themselves, and if the system is not working, it is because we have failed at some level, and we cannot blame the men who persuade us with false promises if we're incapable of recognizing them.

The only way to completely stop an idea is in its infancy, and so our only plan of action as of right now is to ensure this technology remain unhindered by any governing body; the pieces will naturally fall into place from here on out; the truth always floats to the top.

Check out this critical analysis of our current educational system and where we're headed: here

If they had gotten their way, there would be peace; peace only for white blonde Aryans.  Alas, consequentialism falls apart when virtue ethics are trashed; "The end justifies the means" doesn't mean much when it involves slaying most of the world and enslaving the rest, and so the means are incredibly important, in fact the only part that truly matters.

Until there is secular rationalism, we're always going to be at the whims of whomever is the most aggressive, for they will always have an army of frightened ignorami to back those most violent in the hopes that soon, not today but someday soon, they can have safety and security.

This is a common argument: "if the government doesn't provide it, nobody will."

The state doesn't build any roads; the state pays people to build roads.  If you've ever given somebody money for or to do anything, you've accomplished what the state is capable of.

Now consider how a business usually functions:

Group A wants/needs something.
Group B can give/perform that something for a profit.

Ergo, business; this is especially true when Group B does not gain, except for profit, for helping Group A, such as building roads they'll never drive on.  So the question is: if the state no longer held a monopoly over road building, would nobody, not a single person, not even the road builders who are paid by the state to build roads, step up and form a business around building and maintaining roads?

I would like to believe, after so many successful businesses surrounding far more trivial matters, we're capable of roads.

Who was the merchant?

Maybe we should rethink how we profit from our work without relying on copyright laws; we obviously don't agree with them so it comes as no surprise that we don't follow them.  No matter how severe the punishments, a law we don't agree on is just that.


I'm in it to win it

Yes, I do find we are always in complete agreement; what you're saying is the truth.  There is no such thing as a necessary evil, there is only the good we cannot see.  But to be frank, I can't think of any evil that didn't consider itself necessary; humans always believe the evil they're doing is necessary or else they wouldn't do it.  Behind every villain is good intent and a winding road to hell.

In the case of democracy, the necessary evil is propagated in the idea that a law passed by majority vote is moral, when in reality it can be anything; if 6 out of 10 people agree that rape is lawful, it doesn't become any more moral than before.  If the foundation of law is morals and ethics, then democracy is, by its very nature, an invalid form of government, for there is a paradox in democracy: if the people are knowledgeable enough to effectively participate in a democracy to ensure that all laws are ethical and justice is upheld, they would have no need for a democracy; they would be anarchists.

To sum up your post:

"Give up, it's not worth it."

At least you have admitted to there being a problem

Not saying anyone should go away, just making clear that pointing to an issue is not the same as solving an issue; if the dissenters of the way this site is run want a solution, they would do better to make their own website with increased regulation than make endless threads whining about it.  The second forum, if superior, should naturally have more users than this one over time.

But it's a necessary evil

You also can't remove the work people do that machines can't, or won't be able to for a very very long time; for example, if writer Joe needs artist Jill to draw his new comic book, writer Joe will need money to give to Jill for her efforts.  What people seem to mistake in an RBE is that this kind of work people will want to do for free, but it's not so; no commercial artist will want to work with all the authors that come to her with ideas for comic books (and aren't they plentiful?)  So, in order for Joe the writer to get his ideas to come to life, he has to compensate the artist in some way who otherwise wouldn't want to perform without self interest; I believe we are all driven by self-interest, and the prospect of the artist improving by working for the writer is as good as the artist improving by working for himself; certainly, if the writer had such great work that the artist would be dying to be the one, it's a great pairing, but this assumes all writers are masters at the art and this is simply not true, nor would it be in line to say the writer would be perfectly willing to work for any person with a story to tell just because the writer enjoys his own work; the writer wants to be compensated for the work he's doing for others.

Likewise, no chef, no matter how much he loves cooking, is going to want to bake for twelve hours a day just because he likes cooking so much; certainly, he'll enjoy cooking for himself, but not necessarily for everyone else nor would he be expected to reliably.  So this creates a disparity between people who really want this chef's food and people who don't care, because those who really want it would pay for it, and there's always going to be people who enjoy the finer points of life and a human hand to compensate where a robotic hand may not perform so well.

Furthering this point, there is the services industry (which I believe these last two careers fall into), jobs which machines perform poorly.  If people want help from other human beings, they should be expected to pay the individual for their time or expect to spend the thousands of hours it takes to become good at the thing they want done.  This includes doctors; in the example of those who want free health care, they should expect to be able to give free health care, and the vast majority cannot.  This can be trumped with the idea that machines can do all the work a doctor can, even surgery, but for the purview of our own lives, trained medical professional aren't going away for they are necessary.  It would be unfair to expect a man to slave day in and our for free just because he can perform a job few others can perform; though it would be great if he did so voluntarily, if he decided he no longer wanted to do favors, we'd be up shit creek.

With the idea of education professionals, we can potentially replace these people with technology such as the Internet, but there are plenty of people who would like to be taught by humans and plenty of humans who would love to teach.  At first glance this seems like a great match; simply get the knowledge-seekers with the knowledge-givers and no trade needs to occur.  This is assuming all teachers and learners are alike; as many of us can attest to, teachers come in many different methodologies and varying qualities.  The teachers which are the absolute best at the work they do should be expected to be with the most wanting of their services, and the easiest way to gauge this is by how much the individual is willing to part with their cash to study beneath the wings of these people.  Lower-quality or beginning teachers, on the other hand, would be naturally paired with people who don't want to pay as much or cannot pay as much; either that or they cease to exist when those people could get a better education by themselves.  One might argue that the best teachers should be paired with the highest-graded students, but I don't pair the best chefs with the best tasters so I don't see why I should here; besides that, the interaction could then be involuntary.

We might argue that we could simply trade our services for theirs but then we might as well just trade with money, since that was the entire purpose of money to begin with.  An RBE moves aside the need to work for a living, but it doesn't remove man's desire to work nor will it eliminate the divide between the men who are good at their work and the men who are great.  I will always see a use for money, I just see it being used for different reasons than it is now.

I'm awfully excited, and the video was done very well.  Really looking forward to this extension.