Another list of failures from Joseph Stiglitz's book. Here goes :

1. War aint pretty. Soldiers who have been through hell need to be compensated. Thats what some of your taxpayers money is going to. Guess what? The government has yet to fully pay your vietnam war veterans. and the gulf war ones. dont even start to think about how much they owe the marines who lost limbs, minds, families etc. in this war

2. Because of how much money needs to be paid for the veterans, your taxpayer money is going more and more to the military. In terms of money, you spend more than the world combined for military R&D;, defense budgets and etc. The funniest thing is, the Marines didnt even come close to fully equipping and maintaining their troops on the ground. Body armor was of inferior quality, weapons have been reused for many cycles when they should have only been used for one before being sent to be refurbished, and vehicles are badly maintained as well

But its not fair to say the Iraq war was a total failure. Heres one.

1. Due to the huge amounts of money "gone missing" from the budget, when accountants finally examined the budget reports closely, they found that alot of double taking and inefficient spending had made the US Defense budget a joke of all budgets, as budgets usually are created to monitor spending, not the opposite. But in itself its a good thing. It has exposed corruption and the failings of bureaucracy yet again.

I believe the reason why we still are inately racist is because of fear. Think of it this way. If you live among a certain group of people exclusively, youll get used to living among them exclusively. the moment you see something different, youll find yourself dealing with the unknown and you get scared. Youll tend to treat people differently if they look different on the outside. Example, Im chinese. The stereotype goes that White people are more eloquent and more intelligent than Yellow people. Thus subconsciously I put on a false front and act more intelligent and refined in front of white people.

Also, the nature of human beings is unpredictable. Again due to fear, we dont like this because human beings tend to live on patterns. And the moment a wildcard is thrown into the equation, we get frustrated because we are afraid of the unknown. So, if we cant get CERTAINTY, we settle for second best - HIGH PROBABILITY. Seeing as movies show that all niggas are G's, we begin to put together a model of the black man. over time, we will have assembled our own perception of the black man, and we use this perception to paint ALL blakc people with a single brush. All because we are uncertain about how people act.

Solution? Only time and understanding. And thats asking alot from the animals we can be.

You are forgetting Capitalism vs Communism, which is STILL on going today. Just look at what happened to Georgia this year.

George Bush aboard aircraft carrier : "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!"

Present day, 4 years later, 4000 Servicemen and servicewomen have died after the so called victory of "Operation Iraqi Liberation" (OIL).

If that was not an epic failure, i do not know what is.

Word, my friend. Word.

Why not do a case study on modern day Christianity (which should include both Catholics and Protestants) and see then if your argument still holds up?

Here's some food for thought. Many of the opposition's arguments are founded on objective morals. The very fact that we all agree that things like honour killing etc. are inhumane and cruel. Yet, that we all abide by this similar innate conscience to deem the actions of others as ethical or unethical, to me, is indicative of the existence of a moral God, hence the existence of morally aware creation.

The real question is, can religion be seperated from God? If a religion comes about by divine revelation, the world cannot be a better place without religions if God cannot reach out to humans. All we'll see is increased depravity and immorality.

Four questions.

1) Is there a God?

2) Can you oppose religion without opposing God?

3) If the world "had no religion", what would it have? We would either languish in ambiguity with regards to the question of where the universe came from (assuming that it had a start point somewhere in the past a.k.a. Big bang) or we would just have an anti-religion religion.

4) Is it possible to debate this question based on what little we know of the religions being raised?

Well said!

"What? They got bigger penises than us? BOMB THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF THEM!

Its the reason why the bombs and the bullets and the Fighter jets all are shaped like penises. Its called projecting the penis into other peoples lives. In other words, its called SCREWING WITH PEOPLE!"

R.I.P, George Carlin. R.I.P....

You drive a hard point there. But yeah you are right. The Church during the Jesus era was really corrupt and even used bribery of Jesus' own disciples to get at him. (Judas) Ill have to agree on you on this one. However, organisations are made to manage a large group of people. To manage, you need power. And power tends to corrupt. For now, Ill just pray and hope that our Vatican isn't keeping anything from us.