Conversations with God

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And slavery was an attitude, too. Slaves should have just stopped letting that slavery vibe run in their head.And if poverty and slavery are just attitudes, why not diseases like diabetes? It's all in your head, Phat.How about we dump you (or any of us) on a street in New York City with no money and see where you are in a year. Or even ten years. You certainly won't be living in a nice apartment and working at Trader Joe's. It's amazing that someone intelligent enough to compose mostly grammatical sentences could be so confused about almost everything else. Ringo is just reminding you of what Jesus said. If you find it in conflict with your behavior then it is you with the contradiction, not ringo (you labeled it incorrectly - it's not a double standard).For you Christianity is a buffet where you only select the items you like.--Percy

You're just sloganeering off your YouTube videos. You don't actually understand any of this. For example, you say you don't want an authoritarian government, but guys you like just ruled that people have no constitutional right to an abortion, and other guys you like who are in charge of state government rushed to enact laws that make abortion illegal. That's pretty authoritarian. You're all fine with it now as long as they're telling woman what to do and not you, but in all likelihood they'll eventually get to making up rules about something that affects you.And if we increase our use of petroleum based products, who's going to pay for the resulting havoc wreaked by increasing climate change, like the fires caused by the heat waves in the US and Europe, or the increased electricity consumed by increasing use of air conditioners.About the deficits created during the pandemic, they helped keep the country going economically.And one more thing. You've been in discussions about deficit spending before where a great deal of information was provided to you. Why are saying this as if those discussions had never happened? Does everything ever said to you truly just bounce off? Does every discussion with you about any subject always have to start at square one as if it had never been discussed before? Sure seems that way. Taking care of those less well off than us is a responsibility that the rest of us already accept. The actual point is that you reject the way that Jesus said you should do that, which is to give up all your worldly possessions. You're the one who believes in him, not us, so don't admonish us for not following him. It's the responsibility of those who believe in him to follow what he says, and they shouldn't selectively choose which of his commands to follow the way you do.You just don't like the thought of anyone telling you what to do, whether it's the government or Jesus, and you just make up justifications for doing whatever the hell you please, no matter how much it contradicts what you say you believe. That is not a double standard (which isn't a formal name and isn't capitalized). Look up double standard. You're talking nonsense when you say we "want all of us to adapt to your government model," but if this was something someone wanted, it is not a double standard. Asking everyone to follow the same model is the opposite of a double standard.But concerning "government models", ours is democracy. What's yours? Freedom is not a government model. All forms of government constrain what you can do. We've been over this. And in a democracy the people elected by the voters decide on public policy. Your democratically elected officers might decide that it is the best use of public funds to assist the homeless. When those democratically elected officers are not the ones you voted for and they do things you are not in favor of, that's called democracy, not authoritarianism. If you're not going to remotely address what you quote, why quote it? You're the one who believes in Jesus, not us. Why should we do what some mythical person you believe in says. You're the one who believes in him, so why aren't you doing what he says?It's also worth mentioning that in terms of compassion for your fellow man you are by far the least Christian person here in this conversation. Jesus is just a convenient excuse for people like you so that you can tell yourself, "I'm not the horrible prick my attitudes and behaviors make me out to be because I believe in Jesus." Why not? You have far more in common with him than anyone else who might run.--Percy

It's been a few days and you haven't replied, so I'm going to add a couple thoughts.First, please don't pretend my reply never happened so that sometime in the future you just repeat your original arguments from scratch all over again as if they hadn't already been responded to numerous times.Second, the reason almost no one follows Jesus's admonition to give up their worldly possessions is because it's unworkable. It assumes a large community of people who are unconverted to the cause but are otherwise sympathetic and will give to Christian beggars. And since one's worldly possessions include whatever means one had to make a living, one is now destitute. If one owned a business, the employees are now out of a job.Acts 4:32 describes a perfect reverse pyramid scheme guaranteed to bring widespread poverty to any region:

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³²All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. ³³With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all ³⁴that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales ³⁵and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.
  —Acts 4:32

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Of course no one follows this because except at the very beginning it is devastating to economies, but this was the behavior that was evidently demanded, because when Ananias and Sapphira held back some of the money from the sale of a property they were struck dead. Any rule for which the penalty for disobedience is death is an extremely serious rule. And what was the result of this rule? Was it peace and love? No. Here's what the Bible tells us this rule did:

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Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.
  —Acts 5:11

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Evidently the God of the Old Testament pokes through into the New Testament now and then.--Percy

What Theodoric said was, "Why do you reopen topics just so you can get your racist, entitled white ass thumped again? Some sort of persecution complex?" Could you take us through the reasoning you used to conclude this somehow reveals Theodoric is as racist as you? Are you saying that you've been behaving badly here just to get a rise out of us? That's despicable. Is there anything you do or believe that is remotely Christian?
​ Theodoric said nothing remotely like this. What post are you responding to? Ringo is only making clear that Christians do not live by what they believe are the actual words of Jesus. The reason the supposedly perfect Jesus makes demands that would be devastating on all economic levels is because he never made them. They're just words the Bible's authors put in his mouth.
​ We're arguing in circles because you keep restarting discussions from scratch. At every turn you reveal your negative attitudes toward "others" and your rejection of what the Bible says.--Percy

Can you point us to these facts? Are loitering and sleeping in public places among the crimes you're counting?It says a lot about you that when your employer's profitability is threatened by crime and the homeless that you abandon all Christian sensibilities and endorse cruel solutions like encampment sweeps and justify it by making up stories about what horrible people the homeless are, that many are drugged up while committing many crimes.Homelessness is a difficult problem. Communities employing punitive solutions will end up fighting homelessness forever because it doesn't address the underlying problem. Homelessness rises and falls with prevailing economic conditions, but it's always with us. Real solutions that make a difference like providing actual housing (not homeless shelters), childcare, transportation, training and jobs are expensive, but that's what it will take.But these are the kind of the solutions that people like you seem to hate most because of their cost. When governments use tax revenues to help the homeless too much they complain that government is stealing their money and has become authoritarian. They cite their philosophy of self reliance and boast how they succeeded by virtue of their hard work. They describe the homeless as possessing all manner of negative traits such as laziness, shiftlessness, immorality, lack of motivation, and on and on. They don't consider the possibility that people become homeless through a combination of circumstances that include environmental factors and ill fortune.Here's an example. A child grows up in the system, a long series of foster homes. At age 18 they leave foster care and have to make their own way with whatever they learned in high school. There's no job in a parent's business, no trade school, and certainly not college. This is not a recipe for success. Adults who come through the foster care system are four times more likely to end up homeless. This isn't their fault. This is the fault of a system that has failed them. Foster children have many fewer of the advantages that other children have.But foster kids are just the most obvious of many examples of how homelessness happens. Mental illness does play a role in some homelessness, but most homeless do not want to be homeless and worked tirelessly to avoid it, but much of the country works paycheck to paycheck, and things like unemployment, illness and rising rents can throw a major monkey wrench into one's plans.The homeless living out on the street are people just like you who didn't have many of your advantages, one major one being bequeathed a wholly paid for apartment. Were it not for that my bet is that there's a good chance you'd be out on the street with the rest of the homeless that you detest so much.--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

My understanding is that Phat inherited his mother's fully paid for condo. I'm sure there are condo fees and taxes.--Percy

You most certainly are. This is absurd. Instead of moving the discussion forward you're making us remind you of what you just said in recent messages. This is you in Message 419: I challenged this statement in Message 424 and guess what? No response.I grant that your statement contains some ambiguity and is open to a couple interpretations, but when presented the opportunity to clarify what you meant you were a no show. Of course Theodoric called you out on your lack of compassion for the homeless and the poor. Then, right after responding that you're "NOT criticizing the poor" you continue criticizing the poor and homeless by including thieving in your characterization: This subdiscussion began about the homeless, so don't leave the homeless out of the discussion. You originally said "homeless and poor", and now you're ignoring the homeless and are just referring to the poor. I'm not sure if you're just using the poor as shorthand to refer to both the poor and the homeless or whether you're actually trying to remove the homeless from the discussion. I'm fine with talking about both the poor and the homeless, but not with removing the homeless from the discussion. So just to be clear, we're talking about both groups.When you say you have more empathy now for the poor (and the homeless), it's apparent in your messages. You might think you're hiding how you really feel, but you're not. You're lumping two very different problems together. One is that raising taxes on the rich is very difficult because they lobby Congress for favorable tax treatment, and they can provide a level of monetary support that helps get people elected. Only getting money out of elections would allow tax policy to become more fair, but that's not going to happen.Helping the poor and homeless is another matter. Do you like turning your grocery store into a sort of bunker? If that's your preference then continue voting against the more costly solutions that would actually put a serious dent in homelessness and poverty. But if such policies were put in place then you wouldn't need all these technological defensive mechanisms.Let's see how far your compassion has come. Trump in his speech yesterday said he wants to remove the homeless from cities and put them in tent cities in "large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities." I hope this is a solution you reject because it is the opposite of compassion. It's also fantasy wishful thinking. There are no "large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities." Where do you think the nearest parcel of inexpensive land is to New York City? Or Denver? Tell me where the "large parcels of inexpensive land" are outside Denver. I bet you'll have to go way outside Denver to find cheap land, like up by Wyoming or something. So the idea is completely impractical.But it's impractical for another reason. Let's say a tent city is set up for the poor and homeless 50 miles outside Denver. What would you say temperatures at night are out on the prairie in the summertime. You know they can dip below freezing in the summertime and that in the wintertime it's far worse, right?And what about the economy in this tent city? Where are they going to get jobs? Food? Water and electricity? Garbage pickup? Policing? Healthcare?Then there are the authoritarian aspects. I don't think we've done anything like this on a large scale since we locked up Japanese Americans in internment camps during WWII, not to mention confiscated their possessions and businesses.All the authoritarian ideas come from your conservative buddies, like anti-abortion laws that all the conservative states have implemented or are in the process of implementing. They're criminalizing pregnancy. And they're also doing it in a racist fashion, because minority women whose pregnancies end prematurely are charged with crimes far more often than whites. You conservatives are such wonderful people, and you know that's true because it's what you keep telling yourselves.Anyway, the tent cities idea leads to another issue, that the problem with too large a segment of conservatives, and you're one of them, is that they hear some cockamamie idea on a YouTube video or in a speech by someone who makes it sound convincing, like Trump, usually involving urban and surrounding areas because that's were most people live, and they get all gung ho about it and ask, "Why aren't the Democrats implementing this solution?" because tend to be the dominant party in more urban areas. The truth is that in many cases conservative politicians don't have a solution, they just have a story that many of their constituents find convincing and is often very authoritarian. But, like you, they accuse the Democrats of being authoritarian. Conservatives seem to think authoritarianism is anything the Democrats do after winning an election. The actual point was that if not for that condo you'd be on the edge of homelessness, just like the people you detest. Most poor or homeless people if given an apartment free and clear would be doing fine.You mention debt ceilings and the global financial system, but they aren't part of this subdiscussion. Don't change the subject, especially not involving something you know little about except what you hear on YouTube videos. Despite how much journalism has suffered over the past decade or two, there are still gold standard sources of information out there that you're not availing yourself of. You know which ones they are. They're the ones conservatives call "fake news media."--Percy

You posted about it in Message 145: The French and Indian War was very costly to Great Britain and doubled its national debt. Conventional wisdom at the time was that the debt must be paid off or at least paid down, and they felt it only fair that the American colonies be taxed to pay for that war. This alienated the American colonies and resulted in the Revolutionary War, which doubled their national debt again.There are two lessons here. One is that debt can be a good thing. For example, debt allows people to buy a house and live in it for years before paying off the mortgage. Of course there is such a thing as too much debt, but as I've explained to you at least several times (and received no response), the United States is nowhere close to having too much debt right now. There is no solvency issue.You have to stop listening to YouTube videos, or at least start examining them critically. All those YouTubers are in competition with each other for audience, and they do this by trying to tell the most compelling stories possible, which is only possible if they make stuff up. "The election was stolen" is compelling stuff, it's got a third of the country all riled up, but it's a lie. "We have a fiat currency backed by nothing" is another compelling story, which happens to be true, but everything they say about the dangers of fiat currencies are lies.The second lesson is that when solving problems you shouldn't adopt solutions that make the problem worse.--Percy

There you go again, ignoring Message 441 with its rebuttals. In some future message you'll again raise the same points as if they hadn't already been rebutted. Hey, no problem. Have we told you how much we love how you keep resetting the discussion to square one? Or how great we think it is that discussion with you on this and related topics never makes any progress? Can you tell us again how so many of the poor and homeless are drugged-up thieves, and how important it is that we return to the gold standard? Oh, wait, don't tell us, post videos. We love your videos.Sorry for the sarcasm. Here's an article I thought might interest you. It's about shoplifting becoming an increasing problem for retailers and the strategies they're employing. Interestingly it mentions crime rings, but not the poor or homeless: I don't know which of those products is weirder to lock up. 50 years ago I once wore Old Spice on a date and my girlfriend told me never to wear it again because it reminded her of her grandfather, who I think was born in the last decade of the 1800s. How is Old Spice still around?It occurs to me that I probably haven't been clear about my position on shoplifting. I'm of course against it, and I'm for punishing the perpetrators. But I'm against scapegoating the poor and homeless, and I very much doubt that having been unable to make a decent living or retain adequate living quarters that they then suddenly become clever and relentless criminals. Naturally they're part of the crime equation because that's what desperate people do, but I'm against punitive conservative solutions that are either counterproductive (criminalizing being poor or homeless) or absurd (tent cities on cheap land just outside the cities).--Percy