The Intersection of the Gospel and Politics Part I

[_Droopy]

Does extensive/explicit value-neutral sex education in the public schools

Value neutral???

Yes, as has been quite well known and documented over the last forty years.

On first blush it does seem like capitalism is more of a value free force than collectivism which would make it fit right in with the strawman version of secularism. Maybe that is why Ayn Rand loved both secularism and capitalism so much.

"Capitalism" is just economic liberty. Nothing more. All forms of collectivism are systems of social and economic organization imposed by coercive force.

But in reality there is nothing value free here. Capitalism values profit and personal gain.

Human beings value profit and gain (as they must, if they wish to rise above hunter-gatherer/agrarian subsistence). Democratic capitalism does nothing more than provide an open, relatively unhampered melieu in which agency can interact with environment under conditions of ordered liberty. It allows human beings to pursue their own rational and moral self-interest and, in so doing, pursue that of all others in the society as an inherent feature of pursuing their own economic independence and security.

It is money that makes the world go round. Perhaps we can agree on that. But while you seem enchanted by it, I am reluctantly accepting of it in the same way I accept the reality of death, disease and war. It is mammon. The average man cannot step outside of this money based society anymore than he could fly.

What's wrong with money?

[_Droopy]

Capitalism is driven by the love of money. Nothing more, nothing less.

Threadbare, emotive leftist tropes and shibboleths. This isn't even remotely serious, KT.

The poor are desperate for their crumbs. The rich delight in seeing them beg. They throw their hands up in mock desperation, "wishing" that they could offer more, while they hoard and hoard.

As it stands, roughly 125 - 130 million human beings, most of them poor, and many desperately poor, lie buried all around us at the hands of self-anointed, utopian moral gasbags who saw the world exactly as you see it and decided it was their calling to save and redeem it. The grand, gnostic secrets of human reconstruction and redemption they created are still with us, as are those susceptible to to the syrup on the Sundew plant.

In the meantime, free-market, democratic "capitalism' raised from penury to prosperity and from poverty to affluence the vast majority of those living within its precincts and immeasurably improved the lives of even the poorest among those living under such conditions, and especially in America, where capitalism has been allowed, until recently, to flourish relatively unhindered (in point of fact, the attack on economic freedom began in the thirties, and was only stalled for a while by the hiatus of WWII and its immediate aftermath).

I grew up in a well to do family, by the way. I saw this behavior all around me.

Wonderfully irrelevant, but continue...

Upward mobility is a lie. We are almost always born into the income tax bracket that we die in.

This is patently false and easily shown, by a cursory look at the empirical and historical record, to be nothing more than a sanctimonious emotional jerk of the socialist knee.

[_Bazooka]

I'm suggesting that you are a rather typical, intellectually disheveled anti-Mormon polemicist and provocateur who is bound and determined to make a fool of himself in public.

However, as you are anonymous, there is little keeping you from pursuing that chosen path.

And I think you owe me an apology for this attack on this thread.

Still waiting...

[_Droopy]

quote="Bazooka"quote="Droopy"I'm suggesting that you are a rather typical, intellectually disheveled anti-Mormon polemicist and provocateur who is bound and determined to make a fool of himself in public.

However, as you are anonymous, there is little keeping you from pursuing that chosen path.

And I think you owe me an apology for this attack on this thread.

Still waiting...

Let me know when your Social Security checks start coming in.

[_Tarski]

Value neutral
blah blah

You missed the point. Is being morally neutral or value neutral a good thing or not?

You held it out as a praiseworthy aspect of capitalism.

[_Bazooka]

Let me know when your Social Security checks start coming in.

Okay, you asked for it....