Because you drive on roads, it's ok to tax you for a million dollars a year right?

If society as a whole has given me the privlege of earning 4 million dollars this year, then sure, it's reasonable for society to expect me to give a million dollars back.

We have a public service, we have a tax. The thing you're missing in your argument is that the cost of your use of that service is far less than the tax I made up. That's what the rich have to put up with.

Do you have numbers to back that up?

And I haven't even considered whether the tax is going to the right government! If NYC is paying for the road, but the feds are taking the tax, then that's a bad allocation of taxes.

The question at hand is whether it is fair to expect people who have benefitted incredibly from the System to give back into the System; and my argument is, yes it is. I agree with you, that the current method of having the federal government suck all the money out and then dole it back out to the states at their whim is not effiecient, and also reduces the diversity of solutions attempted.

What you're saying seems to have only marginal relationship to what I actually wrote; I suspect that you are arguing with an imaginary opponent in your head, rather than with me.

- A lot of the very rich people don't use roads and bridges very much. [snip]

- They absolutely don't use the public school system. Their kids are likely to attend exclusive and expensive boarding schools.

- They may be in the same hospital building, but they get very different treatment from what you or I get. [snip]

Do their employees also take a helicopter to work? Do businessmen have to train their employees from scratch in basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills? Does each company have to have its own set of on-staff doctors to avoid having the entire company out sick with the Plague?

Even if the owners don't personally use the services, they benefit immensely from having them available to the general public, who ultimately become their employees and customers.

It's not the ratio - it's the fact that it's based on only 10 events. Just think - if one more non-branded package had gone through, the ratio would have halved. When would that next parcel have been lost? Would it have been on the 90th send, or the 180th? We don't know. If you were trying for statistical rigour, you'd want to repeat the experiment until you were satisfied that a few extra events on either side wouldn't have a significant event. Consider, if they'd had 90 branded lost, and 10 non-branded lost, the ratio would have made exactly the same as presented, but an extra event on either side would have had a far lower impact on the actual ratio.

No, I understand that. I certainly don't think that we can say with a high statistical certainty that the ratio of missing packages is 9:1 -- as you say, a single additional missed non-labelled package could make it 4:1. What I am saying is, whatever the actual ratio, it seems fairly unlikely to be 1:1 -- and that's a problem, even if it's only in fact 11:10.

The "3 days longer" statistic seems to be massively skewed by a single non-representative parcel that took 37 days later than its counterpart.

Ah, thank you -- I hadn't noticed that connection. I did think I would really like to see the data for myself, to find just such an anomaly.

If the "average of 3 days longer" statistic is really caused by that single outlier (i.e., if taking that out makes them about even), then it basically counts as a lie: while what they are saying is technically accurate, they know it will be interpreted as "the typical delivery took 3 days longer", which is not the same thing.

Hard to see how the 9:1 ratio of lost packages could be such an anomaly though...

However, when you look at they claim, how they act and what they do, it all seems the same, from an atheists point of view.

Well if you squint funny everything looks the same. But there are pretty important differences in practice. The thing that has people up in arms about scientology isn't the belief system. It's how they treat the outside world, their own members, and in particular how they treat former members. I grew up going to churches, including some pretty fundamentalist ones. But no one would ever disown or harrass people who left. Nor if anyone was talking about leaving would they be threatened with death (as a Muslim friend of mine was threatened by his brother, when he even tried to bring the subject of Christianity up).

The other thing is this: Have you ever been in or seen an abusive, manipulative, controlling relationship? A lot of times on the outside everything looks pretty normal. A lot of the external activities and things that manipulative / abusive people say look similar to those in a real, loving relationship. Both the abuser and the abusee frequently distort reality to maintain the fiction that they have a normal, loving relationship. But inside it's *very* different; but often in a way you can't really see clearly at first.

The same thing happens with religion. Human feelings surrounding religion, just like human feelings surrounding love, are very powerful. Most religious groups that have been around for a long time satisfy these feelings in a fairly healthy way. But just like there are people who can take feelings of love and affection and use them to manipulate people, resulting in an abusive relationship, there are religious organizations that can take the feelings that motivate people to follow a religion and use them to manipulate people as well, resulting in the cult.

This is the distinction between the modern words "cult" and a "religion". A religion is like a healthy friendship or romantic relationship: there's no element of control or manipulation. A cult is like an abusive relationship: all about control, manipulation, and abuse.

And what people are saying about Scientology is that it shows a lot of the classic signs of a cult -- and in some ways a particularly nasty one. That's certainly not to say it's the only cult out there; and it's not to say that there aren't other religious organizations that dabble in manipulation, or tend towards the controlling side. But it is particularly important given their size, and their history of attacking critics.

I stand by my suggestion, and I'm sure that most people would agree with me and not you. Beyond that, it's not worthwhile continuing the discussion. Your mind is set. And it's set because you want to disassociate WBC from your group. No amount of reasoning is going to make you change your mind.

Did you read the rest of my post? Because if we use your definition of "subjective", then even your definition of "Christian" is subjective.

For a start, Christians tend to act contrary to Christ's teachings everyday. That's why praying for forgiveness or going to confession is a regular occurrence. Even you accept that isn't only a criteria rather than a definition, which suggests even you accept it's weak.

Sorry, meant to respond to this. Yes, you're right; that's why I said "accept", not "obey". It's possible to accept that something is good or true without always doing it 100%. If a person asks for forgiveness or goes to confession, or even just feels guilty and tries to behave differently, it proves that they do accept that the teaching is valid.

But if a person consistently behaves as though X is not true, never shows any sign of attempting to behave as though X is true, never asks forgiveness for behaving as if X is not true, then isn't it reasonable to conclude that deep down, they really don't think X is true?

Because it's your opinion on what Christ's teachings are, and your opinion on how they match up to that. Doubly subjective.

I don't think you're using "subjective" or "opinion" properly. If I think chocolate tastes better than vanilla, that's my opinion. But if I think that an interview candidate will not perform very well, that is my *judgement*: either he will or he won't, and based on the evidence I have, I think he won't. Very little in this life is ever 100% clear; in the end, we have to look at the available evidence and make a judgement call. This is true of whether we believe what someone tells us, or evolution or global warming, or economics or politics or anything. Sometimes reasonable people can look at the same facts and come to opposite conclusions. But that doesn't mean that any conclusion is the same as any other one. Some conclusions are much more sound than others.

So the above definition is not subjective. What Christ's teachings were is a matter of fact. Whether someone's actions match up to it is also a matter of fact. Sometimes facts are not clear, and sometimes people can be mistaken due to poor judgement or poor information. If you think I'm mistaken about Jesus' teachings, or mistaken about whether someone's actions match up to that, you can try to persuade me to change my mind by evidence and argument.

It may be reasonable for people to come to opposite conclusions about whether Jesus would support abortion, or gay marriage, or divorce. But it is absolutely not reasonable for any person to read his teachings, or those of his disciples, and think that writing "God hates fags" on a sign is something he would approve of.

I propose that a reasonable, objective and widely-agreed definition is: A person who believes that Jesus Christ existed and was the son of God.

That's subjective too (by your definition of "subjective", which seems to be "requires a judgement call"). To "believe that Jesus Christ existed" includes at least some parameters for what this "Jesus Christ" was like -- and if "what Christ's teachings are" is in part a matter of judgement, then "what Jesus Christ was like" is also a matter of judgement. Furthermore, do they actually believe that Jesus Christ existed and was the Son of God? We can't see or measure the internal states of their minds; we can only tell what they believe by how they act. And in my judgement, they certainly don't act like they believe that a man like the Jesus Christ described in the Gospels was the Son of God.

Unless, of course, you mean "A person who has the phonemes J-E-Z-Uh-S attached to some idea, no matter what that idea is." In which case, your definition of Christian is not very reasonable nor very widely accepted.

No it's not, it's entirely subjective. You're comparing the person with your idea of how a christian behaves, rather than coming up with a reasonable, objective and widely agreed definition of what a christian is, and then testing the person against that.

Um, how is "A true Christian accepts Christ's teachings" an unreasonable, subjective criteria that is not widely agreed? (Criteria because it's not a full definition, but it's one aspect of a definition.) What would you propose as a reasonable, objective, widely-agreed definition?

As they don't, or indeed have anything at all that says they are atheist, all that's left is your misunderstanding of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Wait, are you saying that NO TRUE ATHEIST would not call themselves an atheist? That NO TRUE ATHEIST would call themselves a Baptist Church? Why is "what they call themselves" a criteria that can be excluded from the argument, when "what they teach" or "how they act" doesn't?

There's certainly a point to the "No True Scotsman" argument. However, the problem is that the way it's used sometimes doesn't leave us with any criteria for defining what *is* a True Scotsman. By taking away all definitions and boundaries, it completely removes our ability to use language to communicate ideas. The result is using language only for propaganda -- which is what people who point to the Phelps Family and say, "Christianity is a religion of hate" are doing.

I think the real conclusion is this: It's only a "No True Scotsman" fallacy if either 1) no criteria are suggested, or 2) the criteria suggested have nothing to do with the word itself. "No true Scotsman would watch the Twilight series" is a fallacy; but "No true Scotsman has never spent any time in Scotland" sounds perfectly reasonable. "No true Christian would support gay marriage" is a fallacy, but "No true Christian would teach something opposite to Christ's teachings" is perfectly reasonable.

What you won't hear: "What a fucking ass I was to have believed this nonsense and promoted fear and possibly a few deaths through my ignorance."

Well Harold Camping did say this in the aftermath:

We were even so bold as to insist that the Bible guaranteed that Christ would return on May 21 and that the true believers would be raptured. ...However, even so, that does not excuse us. We tremble before God as we humbly ask Him for forgiveness for making that sinful statement. We are so thankful that God is so loving that He will forgive even this sin.

but yeah, not sure how many other people who believed him have come out and said the same thing...

The 'Church' makes up to several million dollars a year on the settlements to all the nuisance suits, and have hundreds going at any one time, more than 1000 concurrent ones at some points in the past. Its strictly a business model.

I've heard this thrown around, but I have yet to see any actual references. I would dearly love to repeat this story with confidence -- can you provide any?

If you are going to conflate a small group engaging in clearly fringe behavior with a larger mainstream group, it is YOUR responsibility as the accuser to show the links. NOT the responsibility of the accused to show lack of links.

Maybe a better response would be to say, "Actually, WBC are ATHEISTS!!!! Look at how awful and hateful atheists are!" After all, there's no way you can prove they're *not* atheists... No True Scotsman!

The WBC has many many lawyers including members of the Phelps family. They, the WBC, make a living by suing. The picketing is simply to drum up additional lawsuits.

I'd absolutely love to believe that and spread the word about them, but not without a reference. Have you got one?