Excluded by. Not offended.

"Offended" is something that happens to white prissy suburban moms when they hear an idea they disagree with. How about we don't use the same word to describe what happens to parents after they are told that their child must agree to worship God, the Christian God, or be penalized by not receiving a western education.

It's not about Scouts. I do think it is immoral for a volunteer youth organization to discriminate on the bases of religious belief and sexual orientation, and it is (flat-out, no debate) inappropriate conduct for an organization which is receives public money and government sponsorship. That said, if the Scouts chooses to be a private association (instead of quasi-private) they should have the freedom to choose their members however they want.

My issue is with the attitude that Christianity is the default, a generic stand-in for your personal religious beliefs, and if you have a problem with that it just means you're crazy. So what if you're being forced to recite the Lord's Prayer? It's generic. Just pretend you're praying to Vishnu or whatever.

I've said this three times already. This **** is wrong.

Lol, I am sure it gets a little frustrating when you are saying things multiple times, but I do appreciate it. Not going to lie, it can be difficult to not be knee-jerk defensive about stuff on here, but i honestly do enjoy talking about stuff like this and finding out other peoples points of view.

Why is it so hard for people to just respect other peoples beliefs, ugh. Why are we so terrible when it comes to this specifically.
Repeat this question for sexual/gender identities, national identities, and political ideologies.

Largely because people are afraid of change. Additionally some people really are just bigoted douche bags. But, I would be willing to bet it is mostly because of genuinely not understanding (ignorance, but probably not like you think.) and fear often that has been passed down generationaly(is that a word?) or even culturally.

I don't think it is important to respect other people's beliefs at all.

Not institutionally suppressing, marginalizing, or what have you, sure.

I am personally under no obligation to respect anyone's opinions or ideas.

Jon, going back a bit, I am curious what you think the alternative to current education looks like.

I am also an Eagle Scout and would probably not fit in the organization very well anymore, in the LDS dominated Utah scouting scene or elsewhere. I did, however, learn a lot about taking way too much **** in your car to a marginally remote area to set up an impractical tent and a kitchen that replicates one at home. No longer my idea of fun.

Jon`C in charge of detecting sarcasm... D:

Really? You have to ask?

(example) If someone were to truly believe in what the bible says, then they'd be really damn aggressive to trying to get you to believe in it as well, because they'd want you to go to heaven as well.. Most people would have to marginalize their devoutness to be tolerant. And that's not what religion is about really.

To my knowledge (and I was employed by 4-H at one point), there is no religious component to the 4-H program. Nor has their been any nation-wide controversy with the prohibition against people of certain sexual orientations or religious beliefs joining 4-H. Perhaps more reasons why it's a better program.

I've often thought that this is one of the fundamental problems with religion. Like you said, one of the core tenets of many religions is that you need to work hard to "spread the word" to as many people as possible. It makes it really hard for everyone to respect each others beliefs when your own personal beliefs are that you are right, they are wrong, and you risk eternal punishment if you don't try to teach them the error of their ways.

I'm going to get flak for this, but I think it's not the least bit pragmatic to assume that every person is a perfectly blank slate able to be molded into whatever high-tech jobs there are available. You know better than anyone that it isn't all about nurture. Some people just aren't cut out for doing certain things. Now, working from this assumption, I think it's a little impractical to base our entire education system around this idea and hope it works out.

I think we should stop skirting around the real issue, which is this: sooner or later we will no longer be able to ignore the huge number of people compared to the small number of jobs. There will need to be a fundamental change in the way people make their livings in the future.

No, you're right, Freelancer. Eventually the non-owner class will have nothing to do due to automation and efficiency and/or foreign slave labor .

What we can't allow to happen, is for the dead weight to make school a living hell for those of us who've got a shot in hell in making a difference through hard work, creativity, intelligence, etc.

dead weight, huh

Perhaps not the best choice of words, but I didn't mean to disparage the unemployed, and I'm not a Republican. What I meant was that the U.S. ideal of full, productive employment is unrealistic, and that one of these days we will have to admit that not everybody is needed in the economy.

Any productive activity is considered a part of GDP. So I don't think it's right to say that people aren't needed in the economy. It's more right to say that they aren't needed by capitalists.

Hmm, my thinking there does seem to have been clouded by the assumptions of the capitalist establishment. Under the current system, an insane consumer culture greatly reduces people's productivity outside of their 9-5 job (working for 'the man'). The powers that be have done a good job of making us believe we should either be earning money or spending it.

Growing up, I experienced computers, the internet, and open source before the work world, and I had a hard time accepting many of the latter's serious shortcomings -- not necessarily from the perspective of morality, but efficiency!

I like how it's all the "powers that be" fault (I'm assuming you mean BIG FAT CORPORATIONS) that makes us believe we should be earning/spending. It's not, you know, your own personal choice, but it's obviously someone else making us believe this.

Also, I don't quite get what you mean by "reducing productivity" outside of your job. Both savings and consumption are contributing to a productive economy. Too much savings in today's economy could be a bad thing, if you are into Keynesian economics. It's the paradox of thrift. Japan in the 2000s is a prime example of this.

Working class individuals and those lacking the time / resources to educate themselves or organize / communicate as a community are highly vulnerable to the perpetual bombardment of advertising and manipulation by the media (whether this manipulation is deliberate, or just a a consequence of prevailing values that promote consumption, is irrelevant).

Obviously, your average, uncultivated individual will naturally be inclined to merely consume and procreate rather than pursue more noble things (that require creativity, initiative, and possibly intelligence). Still, just as large corporations need low wage workers to produce, they also need a large consumer class to sell to. Perhaps the economy is in fact more efficiently organized when we sell a simpleton a new toaster rather than provide the educational infrastructure that could lead to him fixing it himself; however, I think the balance between work/profit and education/freedom will always be skewed to the former in the U.S., simply because working families are too pinched and uneducated to do anything else than "buy their way into happiness". Economists might call this the "division of labor". I simply believe that dividing up the labor without educating and protecting the vulnerable members of this system is a recipe for a broken democracy, as well as rampant, (possibly inefficient) consumption.



Not all long-term productive activity can be bought or sold in dollars, unless of course the government is involved (grants of various sorts, National Endowment for the Arts, etc.), which is in ways a bureaucratic, top-down system of production, having its own host of problems. There are many productive activities that groups can participate in (c.f. the open source software movement) that defy analysis by old-school economics.

[quote=Reverend Jones]Obviously, your average, uncultivated individual will naturally be inclined to merely consume and procreate rather than pursue more noble things.[/quote]
http://xkcd.com/610/

I won't ask what metrics you use to judge the nobility of an activity or why you think you are more qualified than most everybody else to do so. (Because you might post a video like this and I would be forced to agree with you.)

What's really amazing about that video is how effective the post-process stabilization is.

Hah! Nice xkcd.

Consumption and procreation may have been the mode of existence for our evolutionary forebearers since 2 billion years ago, but I still have hope that we won't fall back into the Malthusian trap.

As far as my criteria for nobility, let's just say that education seems to be correlated positively with wealth and negatively with procreation.

Intelligence: The measure by which I judge myself after a night of hard drinking results in disaster, physical or otherwise.

I was just thinking the same thing.

I'm sure that observation is relevant for some engineers somewhere.

what a ****ing ****show.

Please elaborate.

The video.

Haha, I noticed that too.

The scary part is that it looks like there are plenty of phones to go around. Too bad for the "me first, the rest of you can go to hell" attitude everyone seems to be displaying.

DS, I may have reacted inappropriately, but I don't think that it was entirely without provocation. Jon'C has been exhibiting outright contempt for anyone who he thinks disagrees with him to a sufficient extent.

I mean, this whole post for example, is nothing but a non-stop barrage of pointlessly antagonistic straw men. Half the stuff he said I could have agreed with, but he simply characterizes people he disagrees with as morally reprehensible idiots and lays into them, without bothering to find out what they actually think. Judging, lazy stereotypes is *not* respectful debate.

Or here, there I can agree his overall points, but he states them in such an incredibly acerbic way that it's essentially a preemptive attack against anyone who dares disagree with someone. It's one thing to state a position, it's another to imply that anyone who disagrees with you is a "racist halfwit mouthbreather fundie". Wouldn't discussion be a lot more worthwhile if we took for granted that other people might not have considered all of the same points that we have, and at least give them a chance instead of skipping right to the rage?

Jon'C has this bad habit of getting really worked up, and then everyone has to just avoid discussing it any further or they get tied up in a moral pissing contest. It's frustrating, because while Jon'C is a smart guy, his tenancy toward judgmental attacks make even trying to discuss certain things with him nearly futile, unless you happen to agree with him already. It's an attitude that, to a lesser extent, seems to be shared by several other members of this forum. If people could just tone things down a notch or two, I think discussion would be a lot more worthwhile.

It is worth bearing in mind that unless someone is almost super-humanly objective, you won't change their minds unless you treat them with respect and empathize with them.

If someone proves that your idea was based on a false premise, it means you had a bad idea. It doesn't automatically mean they abused a logical fallacy to prove you wrong, regardless of how personally offended you feel about their tone.

A strawman is a specific type of argument. There is not a single strawman in that post.

This thread delivers now.

I voted for the person you hated the most. What now?

bro i think u mean ad hominem. But like, diet soda versions.

Yeah Jon'C has a nasty habit of pointing out poorly formed arguments.