People should be free to engage in politics according to their conviction, without punishment or reward. The ballot is secret for a reason.

Political donations are publicised as a check against a few billionaires distorting the playing field. To see how much money influenced the election. It was not meant to be a tool for personal retribution.

Freedom of political activism doesn't cease to apply when it is about rights. Imagine if this happened in other controversies about rights:
Employer 1: "Oh, you are pro-choice? You want to deny unborn children the right to life. Fired!"
Employer 2: "Oh, you are pro-life? You want to deny women the right to self-determination. Fired!"
Employer 3: "Oh, you support the death penalty? You want to deny felons the right to life. Fired!"

This is wrong. People must never be demoted because of political activism they do privatly, not using the company brand, and not related to the company mission.

Supporting prop 8 (i.e. supporting legislation that would remove equal rights from a particular group of people), is perfectly consistent with the definition of a bigot. It's name calling, but it's accurate name calling.

In a political debate, you may accuse the other side to fit the definition of "bigot" or "immoral" or "rearded" or "dork" or whatever, but that doesnt change a simple fact: rational political debates are about debating ideas, not name-calling people. Name-calling only serves to make the debate irrational. Do you really believe that it is mature to insult just because you think the insult is "accurate"? Most name callers think they're accurate; that doesn't make it OK.

I support the right of free association,[...]

No one if denying the legal right to free association. We are saying that demoting someone based on his personal, private political activity is anti-ethical.

One thing is to have a legal right, another thing is to be correct. You have the legal right to deny the Holocaust, or to claim that a person should be demoted from an technological organization because of his private political views. That doen't make it ethical.

Supporting prop 8 makes you a bigot.

Ad hominem attacks don't help your case. Politics is supposed to be about which ideas make sense; its is not supposed to be about which side is better at name-calling.

I have yet to see a coeherent argument for why it is OK to fire or demote someone who disagrees with the institution of same-sex marriage, while it is not OK to fire someone for any other personal beliefs. Some people try to say "he is on the wrong side of a civil rights issue", but that is incoherent and inconsistent. If we allow whitch hunts when "it's about civil rights" then the powerful will simply define their pet causes to be civil rights issues.

Oh, so you support abortion? You want to deny the rights of the unborn. Fired!
Oh, so you support the death penalty? You want to deny the right to life of felons. Fired!
Oh, so you are against the independence of Quebec? You want to deny the right of political self-determination. Fired!

I, on the other hand, prefer that political, philosophical and religious speech should be free from punishment.

You are speaking of a mere difference of opinion. If the boss actively campaigned to strip Republicans of their rights, then yes, it would be quite similar.

So pro-choice people should be fired, because they support stripping the rights of the unborn.
People who support the death penalty should be fired, because they support stripping the right to life of criminals.

Or maybe we shoundn't fire people because of their views.

remember when the world blacklisted apartheid South Africa and its supporters? That was terrible wasn't it?

Punishing actions is radically different from punishing words. For example, it is understandable to boycott states with the death penalty. It is not OK to demand people to be fired or demoted merely because they support the death penalthy.

Ideas should be debated freely, without fear of retribution. People should express the ideas they believe in, not those ideas that will get them rewards (and refraim from expressing ideas that would be punished).

In other words, atheism and a policy of non-belief was a means to consolidate power. Weed out those that gather and foment discord and make them illegal.

Isn't that just the old "no true scotsman" fallacy?

Just like you argued that atheism can be a "means to consolidate power" without being intrinsically evil (it was just abused), Christians can argue the same for Christianity.

In many dioceses the Church also makes selling or giving away condoms a sin.

Condoms are still easy to find.
Anyway, this is analogous to (hypothetically) a vegan saying that selling meat is unethical.

It's not money and comfort, it's power that attracts many people to the priesthood. Power over parishioners in the case of the parish priest

What power does a parish priest have?

or really enormous power over the political process affecting the lives of millions when they reach the position of archbishop or cardinal.

Centuries ago, that would be credible. Today, it is inconsistent with the facts.

It is far easier and more effective to achieve power by getting elected as a politician.

The pope didn't murder health workers. Pope John Paul II is however directly responsible for many dead people in Africa, by forbidding the use of condoms.

Forbid? You speak as if condoms were outlawed. The Church only "forbids" condoms in the sense that vegan literature "forbids" eating meat. It is up to individual choice.

All this in the name of a corrupt and inmensely rich institution that claims to bring the word of god.

You speak as if priests and bishops chose such lives seeking money and comfort. In fact, it is much more comfortable to live a secular life than it is to be a celibate priest.

Also, see
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ni/2009/03/aids_expert_who_defended_the_p.html

if "overpopulation" caused poverty, we would expect to see a negative correlation between population density and income per capita.

I meant this correlation with space, not time.
Comparing low-density countries with high-density countries, there is no correlation between income per capita and population density.

The correlation with time is actually positive, as population density and income per capita are growing together.

Which begs the obvious question: Why do we need GMO to feed the world?

My post was about overpopulation, not GMO.

Which commodities would those be?

In my economics class, the professor showed a graph with the inflation-adjusted price of copper. It was stable for a century.
For electricity, a quick Google search shows the price has _fallen_ in the last 20 years.
http://inflationdata.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Inflation-Adjusted-Electricity.jpg
For food, see figure 4 in
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40545.pdf

> And how do you define "stable"?
I meant "stable" as "not oscillating too wildly and not showing a clear positive correlation with time". If it rises significantly in the long term, it is not stable.

but inflation itself is an instability in the system.

Inflation is not caused by "overpopulation", it is caused by the government printing too much money.

Fourth, there is no clear correlation between population density and income per capita.

How is income relevant?

if "overpopulation" caused poverty, we would expect to see a negative correlation between population density and income per capita.

World income per capita has grown even with the financial crisis:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html
Unfortunately, in a quick Google, I did not find a historical graph.

We already invent pointless jobs for people, mostly in the public sector, because there isn't enough real honest work for everyone to do. That's in the first world, where we can afford more cruft. What happens in India and China, though, as mechanization replaces smallhold farming? What are a half-billion extra people, in each of them, going to do?

Human wants are insatiable. As simple things like food are mechanized, people will want more services such as (just one tiny example) live music.

I see this assertion time after time -- that we must feed 8, 10, 15 billions of people -- without asking the question, "Does the planet need that many people?"

There are many problems with your reasoning.
First, fertility rates are plummeting. Much of the world (including the USA) is already below replacement rate, leading to problems such as population aging and cultural weakening. Some countries still have large fertility rates, but even there it is falling fast. As a result, world population is projected by the UN to peak at 9B or maybe 10B, then start falling.

Second, much of the world is obese, and 1/3 of the food is not even eaten - it is thrown away at any of the several stages of production. Food production per capita is growing. Starvation is not caused by lack of food, it is caused by civil wars, terrorism, or corrupt, authoritarian and incompetent governments.

Third, inflation-adjusted price of many commodities have been stable for a century.

Fourth, there is no clear correlation between population density and income per capita.

Fifth: while we compete for primary resources (but see the third point above), when the population grows we share the benefits of more scientists, engineers, musicians, writers, philosophers, etc.

See
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

You are forgetting the Council of Nicea in 52 AD

You got the date totally wrong.

If you want to be a Christian today, you have to believe that Jesus is God or you're a heretic, period the end full stop fuck off.

What? No, you can believe that Jesus is not God, or that Jesus was purple with yellow dots, to your hearts content. No one will stop you.

Of course, the only place that Jesus claims a godhead is in the works of Saul

Read the Gospel of John.

And those books were written well after the others. So in fact, Jesus wasn't even God in early Christianity.

Non-sequitur; even if the works of Saul were indeed the only written source of the doctrine of Trinity, that doesn't mean early Christians did not believe in it, unless you hold the self-contradictory doctrine of radical Sola Scriptura.

The buggy Slashdot mod system made me mod "overrated" by accident.
This post will undo it.

Might I add, it's good to have a conversation on slashdot with a total stranger with your manners. Most here simply throw bricks at others.

I'm glad you you liked the converstation. However, I occasionally fall into obsessive internet arguments like this:
http://xkcd.com/386/
Gradually, I am improving, but occasionally I have a relapse.

I think we simply have a different definition of "work". Work, in my mind, isn't a noun, it's a verb. You are correct in what you said about union laws and that. However, I don't understand: "So striking is 'having the cake and eating it too'." If job=cake, then eating=?

I used that proverb in a very general sense. Maybe too general. What I meant is that by striking, you withhold your productive power, but because of labor laws, the company is forbidden from replacing you. So you get to refuse a job condition you didn't like, but without having to find another job. The end result is that you get a raise for little effort.

I am not saying that unions are evil; I am just saying that they are not angels, and there needs to be some moderation when designing labor laws otherwise you ruin the industry.

Also, if you mod a comment here, then commenting in that thread yourself, removes the mod.

This is what I meant. I accidentally modded you flamebait, then removed that mod by commenting in the article.