The issue though is that your money, car, etc, is gone instantly and you're on the side of the road hitch-hiking home. No hearing, no evidence even.
The fact that a hearing is part of the process is largely irrelevant because other parts of the system to conspire to keep victims from reaching the hearing or getting justice.
They were the last to be visited by god, and had the most-recent prophet, according to whom their mortal leaders speak ex-cathedra. Mormonism is even growing faster than Islam. It is the ultimate(1) Abrahamic religion.
Mormonism is even truly a religion of peace. Its leader was under persecution at the time and he does not speak out for killing and injustice.
1) Judging all religions objectively by the same standard of proof.
Mormon religion is a case in point given the timeline of its emergence.
It's not clear what objective standard you have in mind, and whether any consensus can be reached on that purely through an exercise of argumentation where a lot of predispositions and other factors quite often lurk behind (it's rampant even in sciences, more so probably in soft/wet sciences: http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-an...).
The only objective standard possible, the words of the religions themselves, combined into one greater piece of theology. Everything is assumed true unless it conflicts a greater set of doctrine.
Thus we know mormon leadership speak ex-cathedra because Smith said so, and so forth. Where things conflict however, like Mohammed's statement that he's the last prophet, obviously he's wrong because Joseph Smith, etc, meet the same criteria.
Going by the truth revealed in each document, Mormon's are the closest to god - the latest, most direct, pipeline to the divine. It's essentially religious science.
Say, I claim Prophethood today, and therefore there is n+1 religions meeting the said 'objective standard' now. Well, that number is not quite correct 'now' that you are reading it though; it has to be n+k given other potential claims made in the meanwhile, and k remains effectively indeterminate due to the impossibility of a distributed synchronization.
The details of n+k don't matter as much. It's not just the latest, it's the latest that self-claims to be in a certain lineage, etc. Ultimate Abrahamic religion... And it has to make a non-self conflicting claim to be the definitive text.
Once you meet the rigorous standards of 1) writing it down and 2) claiming to override all previous prophets, yes. I'd count you. (However, this will void your membership in the CotFSM.)
I believe I, or anyone else for that matter, can do meet "your objective" standards 1. and 2. fairly easily (; you can help with clear points/texts and without cryptic acronyms). I mean there can be literally a billion 'fork' at will, which renders the whole thing meaningless.
I don't claim to know much of mormonism; however the conflicts in such notions as 'ultimate', 'objective' here are difficult to reconcile: mormonism conflicts with Vatican/pope with respect to the core of any religious thoughts, namely, the identity of God; hence it is quite strange to insist on a notion of non-conflicting ideas, which is both logically impossible and non-existent. If mormonism was not correcting some ideas, which necessarily implies that there are conflicts, why Mr. Smith bothered to bring mormonism in the first place? Isn't it redundant, as long as it is not claiming to fix something (=>conflict)?
And if you concede the possibility of other valid new prophets and religious claims possible in the future following this Mr. Smith, how can you even choose to use the word "ultimate"? You see the logical contradiction there is too glaring to work out, no?
Please make sure that the reasoning remains reasonably sound. Thanks and bye.
Sure you can. It's a low bar. That's the point. In the absence of any possible evidence we have to work with what we've got. As for cryptic - if you can google it I don't consider it too cryptic. lmgtfy
And I only mean ultimate, now. Compared to the other religions we could be squabbling over. In a future religion, god could be all that + offer you a pony. We'll never know. But for now, of the choices, they're all obvious losers compared to Mormonism. Literally, you could upgrade a catholic or a muslim by giving them Mormonism.
As for Smith's motivations, who's saying he wasn't fixing things. He just didn't feel the need to get all stabby and make killing a sacrament.
And it conflicts nothing - it tells it how it is. The pope is god's voice, there's no conflict. Perhaps the pope is the missing element in islam. As the ultimate religion we can only assume it has not just a point, but a great one.
The article claims the recording devices were placed to catch bidders colluding in a real-estate auction. That particular moral high ground is unavailable here.
I believe he or she is pointing out that, while there is currently no evidence that the FBI has violated a defendant's legal rights, their actions could very easily have had this result and that was probably their intention.
Not really, because the proposals aren't to go to no encryption but to go to government-backdoored encryption. To an observer you've still just a random stream of bits until someone tries to decrypt it with the backdoor key. Pretty easy to hide in unless we're monitoring every message.
And terrorists would be smart - they'd employ non-backdoored encryption, hide that in "legit" communications, and encrypt that with the proper back-doored government encryption. They'd appear to be a totally normal snapchat user, or whatever.
If we actually meant to give up all encryption, card-kiddies would destroy civilization in three weeks.
Surely you mean "the next Impact Team" (those behind the Ashley-Madison breaches) because Snowden actually went through painstaking lengths to not reveal stuff that would put the public at danger like that.
The right answer? Kill Assad and help the people take back Syria. We should have done it three years ago before much of the moderate resistance was killed but it still needs doing.
And as for your Israel jab, they're better to the Palestinians than the Arab states in the area are. And none of the Israelis I've talked to seem to have inherently racist beliefs but many of the recently middle-eastern Arabs do. (About the Palestinians.)
Right? Just like killing Saddam and Gadafi stabilized the region. I'm sure nothing bad would happen. It's not like something worse than Al Quaida can happen again.
Europe fully deserves the migrant crisis. It went into Middle East guns blazing, and expects to come out of it unscathed.
Cutting and running does not work. We're still in Germany and Japan 70+ years later and we'll have to have that kind of roadmap if we plan to help in the middle east.
And help we must. We can't sit back and watch madmen kill millions, even if doing so would spite our idiot leaders (on all sides) who caused it in the first place.
Germany and Japan have tolerant and compatible cultures, and "world opinion" was controlled by the Allies. I don't think it's possible to shape "world opinion" anymore. The Koran doesn't permit any kind of integration and tolerance. Western "nation building" (rebuilding) is perceived as an attack on that religion. My own libertarian bent tells me that it's at least an unjust attack on their way of life, how alien that might be to Westerners.
An unjust attack on whose way of life? The girls being sold into slavery? The boys forced to fight or die? Those simply murdered?
I'm pretty sure the other 99.9% are hostages, and not half as committed to the bullshit as you think, except in stockholm-syndrome ways. Soon after they weren't being killed for not being fervent, they'd be as non-religious as we are.
You think our occupation would prevent those things? I supported the Iraq invasion initially, and had some hope for the surge, but these wars are literally controlled by the news media, because every time a bomb goes off in the wrong place or a soldier shoots a kid for whatever reason, we get more tentative, and our troops lose support for their mission, then a new president comes a long to capitalize. I was wrong. 9/11 jaded and naive about that part of the world. Just cut our losses. Our government has bigger, more understandable, fish to fry.
Sorry, but "just cut our losses" isn't acceptable to me when people are being murdered. This is the Nazi murder of Jews/etc of our time and it's everyone's obligation to handle it better.
Bush caused most of this current ISIS problem by lying about WMDs. At that point, we're the bad guys invading on a lie. It made us afraid of and hostile towards the Iraqis which caused the Abu Ghraib treatment, etc. He didn't make the terrorists but he provided them with their recruiting propaganda, made an ideal nest, and let them crawl in. It sucks, but we've got an uphill slog because we elected someone who was fine with murdering people on a lie.
No, it's not. I have no expertise in ME affairs, do you? Who is the expert? What country has successfully demonstrated they can "handle it better"?
> Bush ... lie.
Yeah, and people died. I get it. But the next guy was elected partially because he wanted to withdraw from Iraq, and we did. Power vacuum. So we go back in and then what happens when we elect someone who wants to withdraw?
If done at the right time, it would have at least had a chance of transitioning to a somewhat more democratic form of government. As opposed to what actually happened when we did nothing, which is Islamic extremists being the main supporters of the resistance, versus the Russian and Iranian backed Assad. Assad believes that the West will grudgingly back him against ISIS extremists, and not so much against secular rebels, so naturally he turned the bulk of his guns against the secular rebels. With nobody supporting them and everybody against them, of course their presence and influence dwindled to nothing.
I mostly agree with fineman, except that I think it's too late for backing secular resistance to have much of a point. Just like Iraq, we left them high and dry when they needed us, and so now the only chance of having any significant influence is a direct invasion, which nobody has much stomach for anymore.
I'd summarize as grow up already. The fingers of Islamist and totalitarian interference are already all over this conflict, and have been for decades. The West keeping out of it only guarantees that one or the other will win and any chance of secular democracy will lose.
"We" didn't do "nothing". Countries like France, Israel, US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia spent years destabilising Assad and funding those "opposition groups" that eventually started the civil war. Syria originally was a USSR satellite with ambitions of regional hegemony (they basically ruled Lebanon and deeply influenced Jordan), so they had to be beaten into submission. However, there was never a real plan to get involved on the ground, that was just a huge bluff; Assad and Putin saw right through it. "We" (and French elites above all) did way too much already, and it's high time we stopped.
> The fingers of Islamist and totalitarian interference are already all over this conflict
That's really rich. "Our" best ally in the region is an absolutist monarchy running an Islamist totalitarian regime, the US just sold them a new crapload of weapons... nobody gives a shit about that stuff. What "we" care about is that the "right" totalitarian mofo is in charge, like in Egypt. Everything else is theatre and propaganda.
The real solution is less weapons and more diplomacy. Get the interested parties in a room and throw away the key until they come up with a shared plan. The US/Russia agreement is a first step in that direction, next it's for Saudi, Turkey and Iran to work out an agreeable compromise and pull their weight in the right direction. Otherwise, until countries like Turkey and Saudi keep buying IS oil and selling them weapons, you can invade a thousand times and achieve nothing except increasing shareholder value in the defence sector.
> "Our" best ally in the region is an absolutist monarchy running an Islamist totalitarian regime
Reminds me of that Adam Curtis documentary Bitter Lake[1]. I wonder if Oil Countries are the real reason these terrorist keep appearing again and again.
I bet the moment world gets rid of oil, is the day Islamic terrorist stop appearing.
They're not 'the real reason' but it is definitely a contributing reason. The people doing the most to get us out of this mess are working on electric cars.
I do not see why there is such a strong desire to install secular democracies willy-nilly all over the world. Yes, we know that it is the best form of government, but the people living in these countries on the ground do not. I just do not think the majority of people there are ready for it.
A secular democracy requires some kind of enlightenment on the part of the people, and usually this enlightenment happens after a great sacrifice has been made (something on the level of a war of independence) or through the slow and steady movement towards universal suffrage by way of representation.
All that ends up happening when you give democracy to a population that is not ready for it are strongmen who vote themselves additional executive power through legislative hook or crook leading all the problems that a secular democracy is supposed to prevent.
Whether or not the West gets involved, one side will win or lose guaranteed. Trying to pick the least evil from the outside is an exercise in gambler's ruin.
Who are the ostensibly secular rebels? Every rebel group seems to have propaganda videos on YouTube except the 'secular' ones. Call me sceptical. The only secular group we know of for sure is the Syrian National Army but Assad is their leader and he has been labeled Official Bad Guy Who Must Go. (Just prior to the war HRC said she considers the Assads "close friends".) Hmmm.... Former US pal Sadaam (secular despot) and the secular despot Gadaffi had "to go" too and look what that did.
At any rate, the 'secular' fighters are now more often called 'moderate' rebels. Hell, Al Queda (fighting in Syria as the Al-Nusra Front) is moderate compared to Daesh. Since 2012 they and other 'moderate' Islamist groups received funding and weapons from the US, UK, France, Israel, the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia. Many of the arms ended up in Daesh's hands anyway. One doesn't hear a lot about the, at one point much lauded, Free Syrian Army except that many in their ranks have defected to Daesh.
The stuff I mentioned above is as close to factual as it gets in this chaotic war. The information comes from so-called reliable media sources with supporting documents provided. This doesn't guarantee absolute truth of course.
It's interesting how almost every person has strong opinions about the clusterfuck unfolding in Syria/Iraq and the role Daesh plays in it, but very few of those people actually have enough trustworthy information to make an informed opinion. The fog of war and the spread of disinformation, and just plain old misinformation, is as relevant here as in any other war.
It doesn't help that Senator McCain advocated supplying Daesh with weapons to shoot down Russian fighter aircraft and even had his picture taken posing with Daesh. The US and its allies and lackeys have a rich history supporting and arming extremely vile regimes and insurgent groups when it serves their interests.
The West provided the fertile soil from which Daesh sprouted and now the chickens have come to roost. Big time.
Might be a bit late to reply, but FWIW and IMHO, any moderate/secular rebel groups are essentially gone at this point.
In any type of rebellion, or any other organization for that matter, the views of the group will naturally change over time to be more in line with whatever the source of funding and resources wants them to be. Let a couple of years go by with the West providing essentially no support, and all of the support coming from the Gulf Arab states with a history of exporting extremism, and naturally any moderate groups and moderate elements in less moderate groups will wither and fade away, and the extremist elements will come to the front. The more time goes by, the harder it is to find any actual moderation to back.
Whatever moderate and secular-leaning elements there may have been at the beginning, they've long since withered and died, and there isn't much of anybody good left to back, aside from the Kurds. We have the Iranian-Russian aligned Assad regime, versus the ISIS extremists so out there that even Al-Quada is fighting them. I don't see much in the way of good options now, honestly.
It might have been different if we had backed groups heavily from the start and gotten that view-shifting effect working in our favor. Of course, it also might not have. And it's hard to fault the American people for not wanting to get deeply involved in another messy Middle-Eastern war. But if you care about spreading democracy and liberal western values, this is pretty much the worst thing to do.
I guess in a way I am, but I do feel sympathy for them losing their homes/loved ones in this whole fiasco. I'm mad this whole thing is happening tbh.
But EU is IMO losing just as much. The borders are being redrawn between states, there is palpable tension between EU members(Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia). And weren't abolition of state borders and prevention of another Hitler the motivation behind EU? If so, its failing apart (not a syntax error, figure of speech).
We're totally on the same page here. Which is one of the reasons why I'm advocating restraint and attacking root causes rather than perceived symptoms. That will only worsen things (and quickly so).
> And weren't abolition of state borders and prevention of another Hitler the motivation behind EU?
That never was openly stated afaik but it would seem to be that the architects of the EU had as one of their main driving forces the fact that they wanted to re-structure the EU in such a way to avoid another war. The problem with their approach is that they did many things without sufficient buy-in of the residents and on top of that started out by setting up all kinds of irrational schemes inside the EU to funnel money to their pet special interests. If they could have waited a few decades with tricks like that it probably would have worked a lot better.
The major issue that I see with a really unified EU is that the divergence of cultures within the EU is enormous, much more so than say the Americas, where a strong federal government was the result of a large group of people uniting behind a single good cause. And even then - in spite of that much more homogeneous culture - they had to have it out in a civil war to beat the remainder into submission (and that war was a war of ideology as much as it was a war over money and power).
> If so, its failing apart (not a syntax error, figure of speech).
Unfortunately, yes, it looks that way. The Euro is quite fragile, the intra-communion tension at record high levels since the previous world-war.
Separatists may get emboldened by all this, the refugees are so much kindling on a fire that is already smoldering. It will take some really smart people with the long view to repair this.
Yeah, it's still not the rape, enslavement, and murder of everyone who believes differently.
Threatening to close your border to incoming foreigners is nothing like like closing your border, enslaving locals trying to flee you, and murdering them systematically.
And there's a difference between a leader being elected once on a wave of fear and the leader declaring themselves god's representative on earth - let the slaughter begin.
The best quote I heard about the refugees is "they're fleeing the same problems and people you're worried about". I really hope we can protect refugees better than we have been.
The problem with religion is that it isn't one thing. It's a general philosophy and creation myth to many, and to others it's day-to-day marching orders. That latter set is purely crazy - hearing voices, believing counterfactual things, and is often programmed to kill other groups or at least believe they need to die. If someone is a flat-earther in a battle with round-earthers you can take them up in an airplane high enough to see the curve of the Earth, or to space. But there's no counterproof that can be given to a religious killer.
I think the reason people tend to see Muslims as a single group is that both camps (not Sunni vs Shia, but Sane vs Crazy) share the same sets of religious leadership and respect the same historical figures. For example, a southern baptist and a russian orthodox member would have nothing (religiously) in common. If one sect started murdering others, or picking at a weak justification in the bible for slavery, the other sect would condemn them. But Muslims (through the seemingly accepted method of death-threats from priests) control their religious world more tightly. To be a member is to at least profess to, if not actually believe, a specific set of things.
There's no broad blanket condemnation for entire classes of horrible actions. The Saudis control Mecca and yet the "peaceful" muslims continue to travel there and enrich not only a kingdom but one that routinely executes people for rejecting minor religious traditions. It'd be like me saying I didn't support the Catholic molestation coverup and then going on a three-day Vatican tour and coming back with a pope hat.
So while it may be a stereotype, it is a deserved one (Ask Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali) and Muslims should pay the price of changing it instead of insisting others simply trust them despite their memberships and alliances.
Well damn right, if all I want is a bulb replaced I don't want some jerk insisting it takes a ticket to read the spec on the bulb.
I want liability insurance for the driver, etc, but all the value-adds that Taxi companies claim to have (see posts in this thread) aren't, to me.
I want to the freedom to choose any qualified driver.