They should be allowed to, because this is a free country, they just shouldn't actually do it, because it's not good for the kids.
I know, and I felt kind of bad because she really seems to genuinely want a cat-dog hybrid, but I just couldn't help myself. ;)
I couldn't sleep, so I came down here to get an english muffin.
Point redistribution differs from wealth redistribution in two ways:
- We won't die of starvation if we don't get points.
- Points are given out via a consistent set of rules that reward all members equally for equal participation. Wealth is distributed unevenly, in most cases justifiable rewarding hard work, imagination, or risk, but also often pooling in the hands of a few people by virtue of their position. (I know that's overly simplistic, but I'm just trying to point out that money is often not distributed evenly).
Personally, I don't believe in redistributing wealth, but I do believe in structuring society to distribute wealth more evenly in the first place, such as through minimum wage and labor unions.
P.S. I also think we need to have support for bulleted lists in these edit boxes. I totally tried to do this above using html tags, but they were ignored. :(
This particular data comes just from the UK, but I see no reason why it would be different elsewhere. However, if someone has this data on a more global scale, it would be interesting to see.
Not yet, but my cat and dog have been working on it for years. I'm sure they're close to getting it. ;)
Dang, I was going to say exactly that. You beat me by 50 minutes. ;)
but compare Christian secular giving to Muslim and Jewish total giving
Do you have a reference to back this up? I didn't see this explained in the article I referenced, so I'm wondering if you're pulling that info from another reference.
I don't think their tracking donations directly, they're doing a poll and asking people how much they donate and what their religion is. Therefore, assuming people are honest, the poll is really recording how much people think they donate, not how much they really donate.
Sorry. I think I was trying to be indirect or something. Clearly it wasn't an effective strategy. I changed the title to be a little more clear.
You guys are missing the point entirely, but I guess I wasn't completely clear either. The real point I'm trying to make is that Muslims give more to charity than anyone else. I think that's an important point to keep in perspective when reading all the negative news about Muslims.
I know there's a lot of controversy over GMOs, and it sounds like there's a large potential for bad things to happen (unfortunately, I don't remember what the issues are), but I think there's a lot of potential for good as well, and I don't think we should throw the good out with the bad. We may need to carefully monitor and regulate GMOs, but I don't think they should be abandoned completely.
I remember something along those lines being considered, but the idea was rejected for some reason, I'm not sure why. Perhaps it would be worth reconsidering that idea with the wisdom of hindsight.
I agree, the issue between the Kurds and Turkey is a little more complicated than the other areas, but given that the other areas were being broken up, something would have to be done with the Kurds, and I think giving them to Turkey is better than giving them to Syria or Iran.
I also hadn't thought about Baghdad, and don't have an answer for that, but I also don't think one city should block a resolution that is good for the rest of the country. Even though Baghdad is diverse, I think the land around it is mostly Shiite (I'm not sure of that, it's been a while since I last saw maps that showed this stuff), so I think Baghdad would go to Iran.
As for the oil reserves, I think they should just follow the land.
There will obviously be a lot of arguing over borderline areas, and this is probably one of the reasons they didn't go this direction. However, I think the biggest reason we didn't divide up the country was that we're enemies with Syria and Iran, and we didn't want to give them anything.
All in all, though, I agree with you that we could have avoided all of this mess had Iraq never been formed in the first place. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it obviously hasn't worked out well.
Yes, but who's going to take out the trash and kill all the spiders?
They say (okay, I heard it once on TV) that the strongest marriages, on average, are those in which the wife looks better than the husband, and the husband makes more money than the wife. The theory is that the ideals of the sexes are different, so they can both 'win' in the comparisons that are important to them, and they can both see value in each other.
In a same sex couple, there's no obvious distinction like that, so I would think competition would be a bigger issue.
On the other hand, there is also a lot to be said for couples having a lot in common with each other. I've always said that if it weren't for the whole sex thing, men and women would never hang out together.
It certainly does not go without saying. Saddam was a brutal dictator who murdered anyone who, in his paranoid delusions, posed a threat to his regime. But, under his "reign of terror", women enjoyed far more equality than they do today, and the country was considered safe enough to do business with, bringing in foreign capital. Also, during his reign, he murdered far fewer people than have been killed since through sectarian violence, not even counting the people who died in the war.
Our military is the greatest engine of destruction the world has ever known (I mean that in a good way), and they are very good at targeting that destruction on military targets and minimizing civilian casualties, but as a force for nation building, it, and we, totally suck.
And after the war, which never should have happened, Iraq should have been split up, with the Sunni portion going to Syria, the Shiite portion going to Iran, and the Kurdish portion either given to Turkey, or setup as an independent nation.
If god created everything and put all human into motion with pre-planned actions throughout every life then that means that everything any human does is his intention.
The Bible says God created everything, but it doesn't say he put all humans into motion with preplanned actions. Sure, if you take a physicists point of view, and you believe that if you know everything about the universe at any one point in time, then with enough processing power you could predict all future events, then you could argue your point, that if God created the universe, then how he created it would predict all future events, but I think the two theories are mutually exclusive. Or at least, if you believe in a God, and that each man has a soul, then the laws of physics can be thought of to only apply when elements of the spirit world aren't affecting it. From a Christians point of view, God created the universe, and man, but he created man with a soul and the power of free will, and that gives man the power to change his course of action.
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to push either a Christian or an Atheistic point of view. I just think that when you combine two different paradigms, like science and the Bible, then you're making a lot of assumptions about which elements you pull from each paradigm, and your readers aren't necessarily going to make the same assumptions. If you're going to convince people that you're right, then you have explain and justify those assumptions.
Weve evolved BEYOND his morality.
Our morality today is certainly much different than it was when the books of the Old Testament were written. Whether it's better or not is a judgement call. The world today is much different than it was back then. Today we have birth control, which allows us to keep our population more or less below what our resources can provide for. Without that, your only choices are war and murder or mass starvation. I personally prefer today's world, because I'm not sure I would have been one of the successful ones in the world of the Old Testament, but people don't get to choose when and where they are born, so you can't blame the people of the Old Testament for acting the way they did back then, or for projecting those morals onto their God.
The Bible doesn't tell us, but I think he created the moon first, but it didn't work. It didn't have a strong enough gravitational pull hold it's oxygen in. His second attempt was Earth, and that one worked much better, but he was still kind of sentimental about his first attempt, so he hung it up there in the sky for everyone to look at.
Also, it was pretty.
All Genesis 8:3 says is that the rain stopped and the waters gradually receded. It doesn't say anything about erosion. Also, as the waters receded, it would have washed soil down, not up. The Bible says that the ark came to a rest on Mount Arafat, so the mountains would have remained. As the waters pulled away from the mountains and valleys, they would have followed the low courses of the land, basically where the earlier rivers would have been. If anything, they would have dug the courses of the rivers deeper.
The article you quote mentions a redistribution of surface soil, but not a changing of the contours of the earth, which is what would be required to significantly change the course of rivers. The courses of rivers change in minor ways even today, but that doesn't cause us to change their names, so a much bigger change than that would have been required to justify a name change.
I'm not claiming to prove that the existing rivers would have reappeared, only that it's plausible that they could have. Also, there's still the possibility that people could have reapplied the old names to new rivers. Basically, I'm just saying that you're a long way off from proving that the flood was local based on these few sentences from the Bible.
