It might not be right to invoke comedy in such a terrible situation as this. Yet it’s worth making the point that the United States stands alone for its promulgation of guns through a society that features a significant number of mentally deranged people.
The Golden Rule is a teaching of these religions, though calling it the primary teaching is debatable. For those with monotheistic beliefs, e.g., Christians, Jews, and Muslims, I would argue that the main idea is that the universe and everything in it, including ourselves, was created by an all-powerful God, who commands us to worship him.
I just had the pleasure of meeting four people from Denmark, all about my own age, who are taking two of their six weeks paid vacation touring the U.S.
I asked them about their country’s status re: the World Happiness Rankings (consistently in the top five), and they commented that, in exchange for slightly higher taxes than we pay here, they get free healthcare, they are paid to go to college, and have very little homelessness and other forms of poverty. They’re also quite proud of their transition to renewable energy and electric transportation.
“Wouldn’t that make you happy?” one of them asked me with a grin.
Mike: Are you saying that people living outside the United States, where mass shootings are extremely rare, don’t have “human hearts?”
Here’s a good perspective on human life here on Earth.
We wouldn’t regard our civilization kindly were we to discover it on another planet.
The second in line to the U.S. presidency is a man who voted to decertify the 2020 election, so as to keep Trump in office after he got shellacked at the polls.
Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen asks a valid question here re: the role that the bible plays in his worldview.
Progressives hope to see systemic changes to our world that will make this planet a greener and more just place to live. That means many things, but especially decarbonizing our transportation and energy sectors, while dealing with our huge and ever-growing wealth inequality.
If you’re asking yourself why essentially none of this is happening, you really don’t have to go any further than the massive amounts of money that are inflecting our lawmaking.
To take just one small example, how is it possible that 89% of Americans want to see gun laws into place that are proven to reduce the carnage in our day-to-day lives? Here’s a list of U.S. senators who accept financial contributions from the gun lobby, in exchange for their blocking legislation that would make us all safer.
It’s not rocket science.
From this: Representative Mike Johnson comes from Louisiana oil country and has said he does not believe burning fossil fuels is changing the climate.
A Republican who hails from “oil country” is unlikely to hold too much concern about climate change in the first place, but this is exacerbated by the Speaker’s position as a devout Christian. In Genesis, the bible explicitly tells us that “only God can end the Earth,” so why worry ourselves with environmental matters, when God has everything under control?
Here’s a reminder from John Locke, one of the very few philosophers whose thinking informed the original design of the United States, on exactly how close the U.S. came to tyranny.
Donald Trump’s multi-pronged attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including suggesting that we “suspend the Constitution” in order to return him to power, came very close to success.
These people are raising investment capital, or at least claim to be, for this idea in homebuilding: the house is constructed over a deep hole, and, in the event of a wildfire, it can be lowered into that hole using hydraulics, then raised back up when the danger has passed.
It’s true that a minute fraction of 1% of U.S. homes are consumed each year by wildfires, but does this concept sound even remotely feasible?
