From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Tue Jan 07 2003 - 10:24:24 MST
"Jeff Davis" <jrd1415@yahoo.com>
> John, your comment was facetious.
Yea I admit it, that's true;
>You're not genuinely interested in anything I have to say.
But that's not true.
> I have no strong feelings about communism one way or
> the other.
Then you suffer from a serious moral blindness because you should have
strong feelings about a system that murdered many millions of people and
brought misery to billions more, you should have very strong feelings
indeed.
> I don't blame communism for Stalin
Ok, you are not impressed that in the 30's Stalin murdered millions of his
own people but what about the 20's when Lenin forced people to abandon their
private farms and go to huge corrupt monumentally inefficient collective
farms with the result that millions died of starvation. Ok, you shrug that
off with a wave of you hand but what about the 50's when Mao did the exact
same stupid thing in China in the name of communism and at least 30 million
ended up dead, or how about the 70's in Cambodia where the communists
murdered a greater percentage of their population than any regime in the
history of the world. Ok, maybe all that is ancient history to you but how
about the 90's in North Korea, a nightmare country as bad as anything
George Orwell could dream up, caused two million to starve to death while
South Korea, a country with the same culture and language but without
communism became a would economic powerhouse. Exactly what would
it take for you to blame communism for anything?
>any more than I blame the Spanish Inquisition on Jesus.
Well, why don't you blame Jesus? First of all the man thought he was God and
so was clearly insane, second he had no tolerance for those who disagreed
with him even slightly, for example "You serpents, you generation of vipers,
how can you escape the damnation of hell". I can't see Buddha, Lao-tse,
or even Socrates saying something like that, they had a more enlightened
attitude toward those who disagreed with them, and they had it 500 years
before Jesus.
Far worse was the fact that Christ believed in hell. He talked with glee
about "wailing and gnashing of teeth" and "these shall go away into
everlasting fire". He thought that torturing somebody not for a billion
years but for an INFINITE number of years, would be an amusing thing
to do to somebody he didn't like. I think cruelty on this monstrous scale
shows that Christ of the bible is morally indistinguishable from Satin
of the bible.
>The idea of voting as a means of confirming that consent seems to
> me feasible and equitable.
Elections are dumb, an idiotic way of communicating your wishes, there are
much better ways. Every day I send hundreds of exquisitely precise messages
to the Free Market telling it what I want it to do. I also get to compare
brands, I can't do that In a democracy because I'm not voting for goods or
services or even policies, I just get to choose between two grab bags of
promises every 4 years.
When I "vote" in the economy by making a purchase I am sure to get it, I
always win. When I vote for the grab bag I may or may not get it. At any
rate, the chances that my vote will influence things is so small that it's
not worth my time to study the issues very deeply, the result is that the
politician with the best hairdo gets to make the decisions.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
"Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate but at last was
complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have
never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion
was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish
Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text
seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would
include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be
everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine." - Charles Darwin
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