The thing that I keep noticing about the way you construct your arguments, wound, is that they suffer from a lack of internal consistency. You seem to be able to do an awful lot of compartmentalisation, while the discussions you engage in twist and turn as much as you modify your positions to meet your opponent's'. They are pitted and rotten with contradictions.
To give you a facetious example, here you're saying that you don't trust book learning:
All I know is that truth comes from experience. A book can never show anyone truth, but it can help in understanding personal experiences.
And yet you're a believer in
prima scriptura. Surely this is some kind of inside joke you're having with yourself?
You guys already know that my beliefs are often quite controversial, but that is only because I have rejected contemporary dogmas. The best thing that we can do for our civilization in this regard is to get rid of health insurance and Social Security programs. People will have to be nice to each other for a change. Parents will have to keep the respect of their children so that they will take care of them in their old age. People will have to live and die by the consequences of their personal health and/or birth deficiencies.
Otherwise known as "let mother nature do what she is best at, and quit screwing things up for her.
Apart from the obnoxious lead-in to this case (about you 'rejecting contemporary dogmas'), you invoke both
civilisation and
nature as if they share the same 'goals' somehow. Imputing some kind of teleological purpose to 'nature' is just very odd, and I don't get it, but equating that with the purposes of civilisation is even weirder.
Either you have a very personal eschatology which sees these two things as part of some kind of divinely ordained process of evolution (like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in fact), or you've committed the
appeal to nature fallacy.
What is natural is not necessarily good, and what is good is not necessarily natural. And in the same vein - the progress of 'civilisation' often runs counter to 'nature' (heck, nature seems to be trying to wipe us out right now).
Indeed, we could say that 'universal healthcare' is a marker of civilisation itself, and this speaks to the main difficulty I have with parsing your arguments - your terms are very woolly, imprecise, and ill-defined.
It was tried and worked successfully for millions of years. Why fix something that ain't broke?
This is bizarre. Please note that the other species of
Homo (and for that matter, most of the less technologically developed human communities) are now all extinct because they did not advance sufficiently into 'civilisation'.
The other thing to add here is that altruism has proved to be
exceptionally adaptive. Even in recent history we have people like Stephen Hawking, who would have been left to die under your system, but under the altruistic systems of 'civilisation' was able to advance our understanding of black holes, &c.
You're thinking in the very superficial terms of individual selection, whereas human beings don't work like that - we're driven principally by group selection, and it was keeping alive the frail, elderly and
wise that has allowed our culture to develop to the point of global dominance. Without altruism for the less able, such old wisdom and knowledge is rapidly lost from communities, who are then out-competed by more altruistic societies.
I think it is interesting that nature is seen to be "evil" in this respect, but I say it is the greed of people based on their inherent fear of death, that makes them want to defy natural order.
Do you believe that natural order is evil? If so, then explain why people care so much about the environment?
When I speak of truth, I find that most people often bury their heads in the sand, unwilling to look at themselves in the mirror. Now wouldn't it be better if people would just look at truth for what it is, and then use this clarity to help determine laws?
Again, this is an appeal to nature. I don't see what's so inherently 'right' about this 'natural order', and in any case human beings wanting to help each other
IS the bloody natural order. We're hard-wired for altruism, and now that we have the technical means to roll it out more completely, most of the developed world has done exactly that. Only in the United States do we have a populace so servile and cowardly that they'll willingly go along with the greed of their worst, most unproductive elites to propagate a system which
defies the 'natural order' (human beings' inherent altruistic tendencies).
Don't label your opinions 'truth' either, that's just crass.
Government cannot provide this, it can only come from the individual.
Many men die every year on the job, even though there are rules and laws protecting them. Ask any job foreman who's responsibility it is for your own protection, they will tell you it is yours.
Ask any employeur in an interview if they provide means for your ability to be self sufficient, and they will probably laugh at you.
LOL. LOL. LOL. LOL. LOL.
Says you, the beneficiary of the most intricate structure of state security in history. Men are not lone-wolves, we're social animals. Denying this is ridiculous in the extreme.
