Testing The Christian Apologists

The entire thing is hogwash Phat - but it is Jesus's core message in your book. I'm not clear about how you can reject it as hogwash while still maintaining a belief in it?Of course the general message is good, 'love thy neighbour', 'do as you would be done by' etc. But you don't need all the rest of the clap-trap to lead a good and useful life.

But of course the whole rest of the world is not giving us the bill. The rest of the world is also paying the bill.No one on Earth will get out of paying the bill.No one.But the reality is that the US has built a reputation for always stiffing others for it's share of the bill.The US decided to defund the maintenance and upkeep and modernization of our infrastructure. No one else defunded the maintenance and upkeep and modernization of our infrastructure; we decided to do that.The US decided that education and health care should be profit centers. It was solely our choice, the rest of the world did not make us do that.The bill we are responsible for is the bill we chose to create, either actively or through willful ignorance.But that bill too will get paid.

Part of that "bill" is calling in the loan. The West has been taking and taking from the rest of the world for centuries - and now you complain that we have to give something back. What on earth do my beliefs have to do with it? I don't have to be a Mormon to tell you what the Book of Mormon says.

Do you know why? I think I see the big picture quite well.First of all, the apologists always supported prosperity and the favor of God. SO I can see why you never trusted them. Second, even though *we in the West* took and took for years, the wealthy basically keep and have kept most of that. Ordinary people like me, who perhaps benefitted a bit due to higher wages and cheap oil, now are asked to pay 23 trillion back. In a way, you are calling all of us (who claim to be Christian) out for not listening to Jesus and being good socialists supporting the up and coming poor impoverished masses. Hey i get it. You wont hold my feet to any fire, however, with the words of jesus. I'll throw it all away in a heartbeat and i will stand with the populists who say that Trump is delaying the bankruptcy and demise of America because there is no way im paying anything back unless several things happen.1) as jar says, everyone is paying. So that is a good thing. These other countries are becoming wealthier...let them help pay for global warming and infrastructure in global common areas. The United States is tired of being the sucker who pays the check for the whole table. And it is not impressionable on me that the West owes the world a payback loan. that will never happen without a major war. If I go down with the ship, the other ships will take a hit also. I'm just a struggling middle-class guy tryna retire. I'm not some noble Christian justice warrior giving everything away to help humanity.Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

As I said, that is not the case. You (we) are being asked to pay for a thousand stolen meals in the past. That would be stupid. Wars don't pay; they cost. What an insane reaction. Then you have no business talking about Jesus. Call the voice in your head Carl.

The other nations ARE paying; it is the US who opted out and said it would not pay its share. But the reality is that the US has never paid the check for anybody.

Are you kidding me? We pay the lions share of military protection for countries such as Kuwait. We pay 25% of the UN budget. Our military umbrella shielded former enemies Japan and Germany for years, allowing them to rebuild economies that rivaled ours. Its time we took care of ourselves and quit helping everybody else...except those poorest and in true need.Nobody will take care of us if we needed help. This whole globalism thing is rugged not to favor us, so why should we contribute?

Basics Phat. We did those things for profit and only for profit. We did it to keep our assets viable and to create markets for our products and for no other reasons.

That's how a capitalist economy works. We will help the world fight global warming if there is at least a break-even profit in it. What we won't do is throw money at the problem. At least not unless its a global tax that every person must pay their share. We are not gonna sock our people with a higher bill just because we have a higher GDP. Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

Then you will pay in pain.It really is that simple Phat.

Tell me how I won't experience pain either way? The fact is that my generation is being stuck with the bill. Whether we refuse to pay it or whether we pay it, we will suffer either way. What does the evidence show?I feel frustrated! On the one hand, you and ringo have convinced me of this argument that Jesus expects a lot of hard work with no promise of supernatural deliverance...an idea that enrages me. I won't allow myself to believe it. Then, should I decide to throw all that away, I am still faced with this idea that somehow we were owed this bill as a gift from reality and that we either pay it or suffer pain?I say that it is a bit like pushing us in a corner. The fact is that I didn't benefit that much from what the wealthy Robber barons did to the global population.

Have you considered that it might not be all be about you?It's worth remembering that in the lottery of life you're a winner, you've been born into a modern, wealthy Western democracy, the dice could have fallen very differently. The rest is up to you, you can waste your life whining about how unfair it all is and spending hours looking for hocus-pocus easy answers from a fictional god or just get on with it.

What you can do is fight the GOOD fight. Vote for only those willing to acknowledge the problems and also to address the problems. Do the little things you can do to make others lives better.Run the race. Keep on keeping on. Speak out against the folk like the current Republican Party and anyone who claims that Jesus is gonna step in and fix the mess. Learn the real facts that are today's reality, the mistakes and errors the US is making and made in the past and find representatives that will reverse those dumb decisions.

You really have to reconsider your beliefs. Life is not simply a lottery and chance does not entirely determine your fate.

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Imagine a line. At the left end of the line, we’ll write lottery. Lottery is a game of absolutely zero agency: you can take any two people in the world or throughout history, and they will have the exact same chance of winning a lottery. On the right end of the line, we’ll write chess. Chess is a game of absolutely zero chance: if you and I play a game of chess against each other and I lose, I’ve got nothing to blame but myself.

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Now, where shall we put life on this scale? I think most people will agree that we can’t put life very close to chess; life is certainly not a game without chance. But it’s also true that two people in the same set of circumstances may fare very differently from each other. It seems hard to say that life is *entirely* down to luck.

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I’d say that we would put life somewhere in the middle. Maybe not right in the middle; maybe not even really close to the center. I’m not sure exactly where on the line it would go, but I’m pretty confident that wherever it is, it’ll be a very close neighbor with Texas hold ‘em.

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In hold ‘em, you have no control over your hand. Zero. You can make decisions about whether to bet and how much, but the cards are going to be whatever they’re going to be. The very best poker players in the world only take a prize in about a fifth of the tournaments they play; a great deal of the game is simply beyond their control. But to prove that they do have some agency, and that skill does play some part in the outcome, you only have to remember that the very worst poker players take a prize in zero percent of the tournaments they play. The difference is that, whether their hand is good or bad, the pro players can make the most of it.

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So it is, I believe, with life. There is a great deal that is beyond your control. You had no influence over where you were born, who your family is, the color of your eyes or your skin or your hair. Maybe you want to play pro basketball, and you’re envious of people who are seven or ten or fourteen inches taller than you are. You might feel like you lost the height lottery, so there’s nothing you can do about it. But that’s not completely true: Spud Webb - Wikipedia

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You can’t change your hand, but you can play it well.

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GOD, if God exists did not set it up to be a rigged game of chance. He set it up more like chess. You protect the King. It is intentional.Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

How do you manage to take exactly the wrong message from what people are saying so often? You seem to read everything through a Phat filter.Where you are born and who to is a lottery, that governs an enormous part of what is possible for you. Being born an orphan in a refugee camp in Libya is not going to be as easy as being born to middle class parents in Scandinavia is it?After that it's all about what you can do with the hand your dealt.