Here in the UK, we’ve had 14 years (hopefully about to end soon) of rule by fuck-you right wing capitalists. During that time, the UK has seen massive increases in poverty, inequality and corruption, and not only is life expectancy outside the über-rich here now falling, but 330,000 people have been sent to their deaths prematurely by fake “austerity” policies that have slashed social and infrastructure spending, while handing billions to fat rich bastards to hide from the taxman in the Cayman Islands. Indeed, both The Lancet and The British Medical Journal have published editorials devoted to the aforementioned death toll, along with articles describing Tory handling of the COVID-19 pandemic as “a dangerous and unethical experiment”.
The moment you let reich wingers grab the levers of power, everything turns to shit.
As a child I learned this insane bit of propaganda: If life were a thing that money could buy the rich would live and the poor would die, but god in his mercy has made it so that the rich and the poor must together go.
Life is indeed a thing that money can buy.
I’ll grant you that corruption can be found in all governments and business as well. It is my opinion that corruption is more prevalent in societies that espouse individualism over collectivism. This is not to say that corruption doesn’t happen in both given that there are are very few absolutes in the world we live in.
Interesting… I have nothing to base an opinion on.
"I do have experience here in Korea. What is fascinating about doing business in Korea is that what we consider corruption in the USA is just ‘Doing Business’ in Korea.
Kickbacks, Bribery, Special favors, Bigotry, and Prejudice is legal in Korea, ( South Korea is one of only two countries in the developed world without anti-discrimination laws.) Not a damn thing you can do for being kicked out of a bar, hotel, restaurant, school, or anyplace else, for being ‘white.’ It’s an experience!
I’m not alone - Posted : 2023-04-29 12:22Updated : 2023-05-23 15:25
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It’s just something you learn to live with… Move on and go to another hotel, another bar, another restaurant, another place to spend your money. No big deal. (I guess it is not that big of a bother because there are plenty of other places to go. Not all of Korea is the same. You just run into this sort of thing when you are out and about the town,)
Back to doing business… When I ran my school, I was forced to belong to the local “Association.” I had to pay my 'Association dues." I had to set my fees in line with the 'Association guidelines" and I was not allowed to undercut the other schools in the area by offering ‘special deals.’ I had a friend who owned a bar and he refused to join the ‘Bar Association.’ They stopped his liquor delivery. He drove to Seoul and bought his own liquor. They got pissed and burned him out. Business in Korea. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. I paid my ‘Association Dues.’
Yeah and the answer so many seem to come up with is Reform UK…nothing can possibly go wrong … er… what?
True. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and none of these idiots understand that they’re voting against their own and their nartion’s best interests.
That exactly parallels the situation here in the U.S. The real genius of the Republican Party over the last four decades has been their ability to convince the poor and the middle class that they represent their interests when the exact opposite is true.
It’s only gotten worse with the rise of social media. Some people say that Trump is the greatest threat to democracy in the U.S., but I disagree. The biggest threat to democracy is Fox News and their 24/7 gaslighting.
Yeah, not Fox (although one is owned by same f###!) but most of our tabloids are much the same. The Daily Heil (my pet name for The Daily Mail) is arguably the worst of the lot.
You cannot blame every christian for the choices and mindset of the few. Everyone is entitled to their opinions from both sides. I choose to do what Jesus said and help the homeless when i can. We should all help others. Spiritual people benefit spiritually from helping others.
Indeed not, but since no one seems to have done that, this seems like another straw man fallacy. We can however observe that people indoctrinated into blindly following beliefs, are much less likely to question the consequences of their actions, and religions especially christianity has lauded the virtue of blind adherence to doctrine, or religious faith, for centuries.
Did you know that Heinrich Himmler refused to let atheists into the SS? He reasoned that their lack of belief in a deity would make them less obedient, and thus less likely to follow orders, I am inclined to agree with him on that at least.
I try not to base beliefs on subjective opinions, but rather on a demonstration of sufficient objective evidence.
You have no way of knowing what (if anything) Jesus said, none.
Why is helping someone who needs it not a sufficient reason to offer that help on its own from you? It is for me.
A rather meaningless tautology, again why would anyone need to be told to help someone who needed that help, if they could so? It’s like the false idea that religions decrying acts of violence like rape and murder helps reduce those crimes, there is no evidence to support this of course. Nor are rates of such crimes less prevalent in highly religious countries, including (especially) the US of course.
Our empathy stems from our having evolved to live in societal groups, all animals that have evolved to live in societal groups exhibit morality, the ability to learn and understand the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behaviours.
If that were true then there would be more helping others and less trying to make everyone just like them. As humans aren’t we wired to pursue rewards, and intrinsic rewards (the ones that make us feel good) have been shown to be very powerful. So because there is less helping than one would expect it follows @Prycejosh1987 that your assertion is weak. I know that there might be spiritual people doing good but I kinda think they are the shrinking minority.
He doesn’t understand that it is not a person’s moral obligation to be altruistic. And giving money to religious salesmen is not something that would be beneficial for anyone. It’s the equivalent of taking your money and burning it, giving it away, or throwing it away. All in all, it’s a waste.
One must define “being helpful”. It means different things to different people.
In the Christian fundamentalism I grew up in, we didn’t help people materially. That would have been the dreaded “social gospel”. We believed that all anyone needs is Jesus. So we would proselytize them. That, to us, was the ONLY thing that was helpful, because we believed that 100% of personal problems are caused by not “being right with god”, at least in some “at the end of the day” sense. We also believed in the mythical “victorious Christian life”, etc. So making you a Christian would make you happy. Even though, truth be told, WE weren’t happy, lol.
That was of course just our belief. You have orgs that are somewhere from there on a spectrum all the way to no-strings-attached feeding the hungry, but my guess is that that sort of aid isn’t very large scale and doesn’t get at root causes. I’ve come to believe that only a government / society as a whole can lift people out of poverty and want and adequately support its most vulnerable members, because it’s a systemic issue, and not really all that much helped by band-aids.
There’s this guy who comes around to our men’s group at the senior center every Saturday morning just long enough to get a little bit of free food. He takes care of his older sister who is homebound and has some sort of disability. He has some sort of mental issue himself involving anxiety / OCD so they live on food stamps and food pantries. He was asking if anyone had a toaster oven they didn’t want and after a few weeks of that I just gave him $30 so he could get a used one at the local Reuse Center. Now sure enough a couple of weeks later he hits me up for $20 because his sister ended up in the ER and it’s just been a tough week.
What he really needs is a better social safety net, a more supportive community, quality healthcare and a lot more dignity. Me or someone else throwing a little (ore even quite a lot of) money at it isn’t really getting at the core issues.
However, some Christian groups (e.g. Christian nationalists and sympathizers in the US) bear a LOT of blame for terrible harms to society even if specific individuals in that group might be in some ways fine and/or well-meaning people.
And I note that an astonishing number of Christians are happy to characterize atheists as uniformly underhanded, scheming, conniving, god-hating commies or some such.
That of course doesn’t justify me doing the same to them, so I don’t. But I also don’t mince words, particularly when it comes to my former fundamentalist brothers.
