Poverty didn’t exist before there was property, and there was a historical time before the fall when there was no property. **[/QUOTE}
Look, even animals have a concept of “property”, so i would expect ever since we crossed the line unto snrient, we had “property”.
And, JC was MOST definately respecting others property when he tossed the moneylenders out. They were trespassing in his Dad’s house, remember? And he did not destroy their good, just evicted them, rather violently.
Note, the Celtic Church does not accept “original sin”.
I don’t see how we, not being animals, can comprehend what animals conceptualize. Animals are territorial, but I just can’t see that as being the same thing really. But ultimately, as I mentioned previously, I’m just running into a language barrier. I think it can be said animals do not have mammon.
I thought the Celtic and Roman Catholics patched things up at a Synod back in the 660’s. They haven’t gone all protestant now have they?
I tell you that there are people who can drink arsenic and cyanide and it will not kill them. Don’t believe me? Well, I can’t show you these people, link to articles about them, offer anything besides my word, but if you sell all your possessions and look really hard you will find these people and you too will be able to drink poison without dying. Does this constitute valid and convincing evidence that people can drink cyanide and aresenic without dying?
If you say mixing chemicals A and B together makes them turn purple, but you cannot cite studies or objective reasons why it would be so, cannot show yourself or anyone mixing these chemicals with such a result, and it costs all my possessions and a complete and total lifestyle change for me to even check and see if this does actually happen…do you blame me for being skeptical? Personal testimony has some slight weight, but people personally testify to seeing Elvis, aliens, perpetual motion machines, 300 mpg carburators, etc., and unless they can back their testimony up with evidence it is not terribly convincing to anyone besides a true believer.
I think we shall have to. As I have not seen sufficent evidence that it does exist, I will lack belief in it, although it’s possible it does.
And where did you get this statistic?
So are you saying it was not one big fall with the concept of property, that back in WWII it was kill or be killed, but now it’s because of jealousy? I don’t quite follow you here.
I’m not saying man is basically evil, or even basically good. I am saying that, from what I have seen, man is capable of both evil and good behavior. In individual humans you may be able to make a reasonably good guess as to whether they are mostly good or mostly evil, but to guess as to the inclination of the whole of humanity is a bit more of a step than I am willing to take. I simply point out that assuming people will always choose good or always choose evil is not supported by the evidence of man’s actions, and therefore using an assumption of either perfectly good or perfectly evil behavior when formulating a theory of social interaction will give you poor results.
Well, Abel may be hopeful that he can get Cain to respect his property rights. And the cost of Cain’s support would likely be shared by the entire community that desires that all people can respect each other’s property, yet does not wish to kill to enforce it.
No, I am arguing that man is perfectly capable of evil. Man is also perfectly capable of good. But when you are testing the practicality of a system, you must take into account both aspects of humanity.
How did you jump to the conclusion that people are property? I do “want things just to have it.” Why do I paint? I certainly do not need to, I just want to make a painting, and then have it once I’ve made it (I certainly don’t throw them in the trash when I am done, if they’re any good). If we only wanted what we needed we would not have cars and spaceships and art and books. If someone wants my painting, and they have something I want, what is immoral about trading? I would like to see where Judaism condemns this practise; I won’t argue about Christianity since in your Chistianity it is condemned, although most Christians (as most other people define the term) do not condemn this.
I don’t follow you here.
The businesses produce cars. The people who help to produce them are given money, which they can use to buy food.
Agriculture is generally a bit more complex than “throwing some seeds on the ground”. Perhaps the rich man worked hard to irrigate and fertilize poor land.
Your argument rests on too many “ifs” for me to accept it, personally, although it’s no skin off my nose if you do. IF the punishment for original sin (toiling for unfair rewards, death) is due to property and “turning from God” and IF long ago we were all happier, one with God, and generally better off than today and IF 10000 years ago man turned from God and IF man has never found his way back in the meantime and IF your interpretation of Jesus’ words is correct and IF Jesus Himself was correct about the way back to God and IF the concept of “property” does more harm than good and IF the lack-of-property community is viable and IF it can therefore resist and convert the less “enlightened” and IF this leads to all mankind turning back to God and lack of toiling for unfair rewards and IF we do not lose the technological advances that seem spurred by the concept of “property” (well, that’s mostly me not wanting to see advanced medicine, etc., go by the wayside; it does not refute the “cure” of “original sin”, just makes us lose out on some rather nice things)…sure, I can see how you can argue that that will fix “original sin”–at least your interpretation of it.
Science is never about evidence because evidence can always be manufactured. I can take a digital picture of the sky, use photoshop to turn the color of the sky to green, and email you the bitmap. Does this constitute valid and convincing evidence that the sky is green? Only if you are not willing to run the experiment (looking up) and getting results for yourself (the sky is generally blue). And so I could probably convince you that the sky is green, and I’d be doing you a real disservice.
No, I don’t blame you for being skeptical. I heard the story (PBS?) that there were these scientists doing all these acheological digs to find ancient copies of the Gospels, presumably to discover if what was written now was what was written in the first place. They eventually did find a small fragment that was (still is?) the oldest found to date, which ironically contained just one sentence, as uttered by Pontius Pilate, “What is Truth?”
Pilate (who is one of my favorite characters in the story) and Jesus had the exact debate about the Kingdom as we’re having (er, forshortened anyway) and Pilate basically came to your conclusion:
Hence Pilate, even though he condemned Jesus to death, wrote above the cross “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” So at least he had an open mind.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make statistically was a lot of people in the world live in communist, socialist, or fascist countries where you can’t exactly go on strike, and hence they are very much more slaves than people in capitalist countries. So i guess if I had to rate the US on a scale of one to ten, one being, well, heck, 1st century Judea, two being 12th century France, three being Nazi Germany – I’d give us a six or even seven. This is a good place and time to be alive.
And the other point I was trying to make, is that while perhaps there have always been evil, murderous people is now these people have increased control to make people who don’t really care either way to carry out their tasks. I suspect. Maybe. It is a tough point to make.
I think you are correct. People are basically lukewarm.
There is none good but God, as the saying goes. But, somehow, I think the evil people are – well, you can see old churches in Europe with stained glass images of a dog chasing it’s own tail, representing the devil. There’s nothing evil people can do to Christians to make them suffer. The lukewarm people are the ones who get the short end of the stick under most systems I am familiar with.
What community? Look, this is a morality play here – two characters. A fable. The fox could just get his friend the elephant to reach up and get him the grapes but then you are missing the point. Abel says he owns it. Cain says he doesn’t. Who is to say who is right? Might makes right. Work in Abel’s field, take little round stones in payment, turn them in for bread, or Abel’s going to have to kill you, one way or the other. Of course, if you have eternal life through Christ, that shouldn’t be a big deal.
Oh never mind. I am wrong on that whole coveting thing anyway. I was trying to make an analogy to another ten commandments which are supposed to be the bedrock of western civ (yeah right). But I’m conceding you are making a good point here:
What is immoral (in xtianity) about it is insisting for something back for what you have given. If you want something, ask for it. Offer to trade, by all means. But if someone wants something from you, you should give expecting nothing back.
Well, just in the Ten Commandments. I don’t know. Jesus basically gave something superior to them anyway. See how silly just this one commandment is once you think about it for a while?
It is not my Christianity. I mean, if you want to use the text of the gospels as a guide to what Christ taught, and I don’t know where in God’s name else you are going to get this information, I think what is written there is plain as day. It is not my fault that people go around claiming to be Christians without ever having read a bible apparently. Like I said in the other thread: if I want to get 200 million of my closest friends to wear funny hats all day, and when asked why they do so to say it is because they are devout Muslims until everyone (except real Muslims and a few in the know) believes that Islam is about little more than wearing funny hats, that still does not negate the fact that Mohammed didn’t teach his followers to wear funny hats. (Well, actually, I don’t know that for sure.) Truth isn’t democratic. Repeating the same lie over and over again doesn’t make it true. I’m trying to fight ignorance here, and I presume I am in the right place.
You can choose not to work for money if you don’t want to. This is important. Because if you insist everyone must work for money to survive, you cede power to those who control the money. Then, you are at their mercy. I don’t want to argue ad hitlerem but, just as one example, there’s the story of the concentration camp guard who told one of the prisoners he was very sorry he had to do this, but he hadn’t worked in years and he had a family to take care of. And he wasn’t killing anyone – he was just holding people there to be killed. And somewhere there was a farmer who was growing food to feed the guard too. Was he a bad person? That same situation is repeating itself in various corners of the globe to this day.
I know here today in America we are of course very optimistic that our capitalist economy will remain stable forever and that our republic will remain strong and just. And that somehow, we’ll be able to spread this system into other parts of the world. Meanwhile, my tax dollars go to pay to kill fetuses and prisoners, who might be innocent, and build and maintain nuclear stockpiles capable of wiping out the human race, and secret wars, and not so secret ones. Not that I care much. And people who are upset about these things go online and whine a bunch and I guess that’s fine if it makes them feel better. Doesn’t change anything. I’m making good money off communist slave labor ultimately myself and good for me. If they are too cowardly to do anything for themselves, why should I care?
There you go; now you are getting the picture. But you said somehow that if these people did not work making cars or whatever that they would all starve. Do you think if I quit my job tomorrow, Farmer Johnson is going to go out into his field and torch whatever crops and slaughter whatever animals he has that are meant to feed me had I kept working. Of course not. The food is going to be there whether I work or not.
I understand.
This would be my only point of contention – if property spurred technology somehow we should have had MRI machines 9000 years ago or more. Total red herring to try and draw some sort of correlation here. I would think that in a free society, the “economy” would work more efficiently than one in which people are essentially slaves – but that is only my opinion.
I know it is a lot of ifs. Love is always a gamble, they say. Somehow I think maybe humanity will make it anyway, but that’s probably my pride more than anything and pride is the most deadly sin.
here is a point for which I can provide a genuine fact:
The oldest fragment is, according to Kümmel’s **Introduction to the New Testament,
(The Nestle text is the standard recension of the NT that reconciles all the disputed passages, providing the identification of any document that disagrees with the standard work. By saying B52 agrees with Nestle, it means that all the words that are on the fragment appear in the majority of accepted texts in the same order.)
Rendered in English (using the KJV), would give us:
Then:
My reference does not indicate how much of the text is quoted beginning at verse 37. It is possible that the verse ends part way into verse 38, leaving “What is truth?” as the last phrase on the text. :::shrug:::
If that is true, it is not true that the fragment bears only the words “What is truth?”
Regardless, unless one is to posit a freaky God who leaves strange clues around like a Victorian British Eccentric, the best that can be said of the text on the fragment is that it is coincidental to any weird theories that have arisen since it was written.
