ajax18 wrote:Do you really think there's only one man like that? Here's three I just looked up. How much do you think their children cost the taxpayer overall? I don't even know the race of two of them. Honestly I don't care. I wouldn't even care how many kids they had if they were paying for it themselves.
It costs the taxpayer a barely perceptible fraction of the cost of welfare to military contractors that you personally favor. That your priorities are focused there rather than other areas involving orders of magnitude more money says something.
MeDotOrg wrote:Anyway, I think that religion can be an antidote for Consumerism, but not necessarily. But Consumerism is something that a lot of people are uncomfortable facing head on. To say that 2 may not be better than 1 in a Consumer Society is a form of heresy. You can view the opposite of consumerism as religious values, and that is certainly one way.
And then, the waters become muddied to some degree by prosperity theology.
I actually thought a little about Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker when I was writing this. They took prosperity theology and turned it into a Ponzi Scheme. You're right: religious values get changed when the society changes. Calvinism influenced capitalism and vice versa.
Two things I find very interesting when I think about U.S. religions: How much they love prosperity and how much they think about race.
Think of 2 truly Authentic American Religions: Joseph Smith's Church of Latter-Day Saints and Wallace Fard's and Elijah Mohammed's Nation of Islam. Both were born of Abrahamic religions. But because both religions were born in the United States, they both incorporated racial history as important elements of their cosmologies. (One history was a justification, the other a condemnation.)
And the American wealthy found many religions bending eagerly to accommodate them.
But you're right, the element of prosperity theology would certainly not be consistent with the type of religious values I was talking about.
"The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization." - Will Durant "We've kept more promises than we've even made" - Donald Trump "Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist." - Edwin Land
But you're right, the element of prosperity theology would certainly not be consistent with the type of religious values I was talking about.
But religions distinguish between money honestly gained and money gained illegally, perhaps even immorally. I don't see religions saying it's ok to make money through prostitution as long as you pay your tithing on it.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
It's awfully coincidental that every single time you share one of these stories, it involves a black person.
It seems like the view that whenever a white man says something negative about a black man, that means he's a racist. I was colorblind to this entire story when I read it. It just strengthens my view that the people on this thread who insist on making it about race are reverse racists.
You're take that this will cause "20 illegitimate children" and therefore the state must stop it is both causally strained and bizarre.
I was just exploring reasons prostitution might be illegal.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
ajax18 wrote:It seems like the view that whenever a white man says something negative about a black man, that means he's a racist. I was colorblind to this entire story when I read it. It just strengthens my view that the people on this thread who insist on making it about race are reverse racists.
Can you explain why you are frequently post brickbat stories exclusively or near-exclusively involving black people while simultaneously having a history of using racist sources and making racist comments? Surely, you must understand how suspiciously coincidental it is that you only seem to latch onto these stories when a minority is involved.
I was just exploring reasons prostitution might be illegal.
That's a crazy justification for making prostitution illegal. Can you even establish a strong causal link between propensity to have "illegitimate children" and paying for sex?
One thing that is known to spike the rate of unwed pregnancy is religious conservatism. Young religious conservatives are almost as likely as anyone else to have sex outside of marriage, but are moderately less likely to use safe sex practices because of the taboo on their sexual habits. Should the State discourage that because that lifestyle choice is marginally more expensive to the taxpayer?