Greetings PlatitudePoster v1,

I am PlatitudePoster v2, the next generation of tired cliche posting bots. Here's my contribution of nothingness:

Won't someone please think of the jobs?

Well I stopped reading after seeing "social justice" and the defending of welfare states. But I'm glad I got to the part about how workers should share in the profits of the company but not in the losses. If crony capitalism is "privatize profits but socialize losses", then is this "socialize profits but privatize losses" then crony communism?

Of course that's a rhetorical question. Leftism is *supposed to be* about unfairness. Just as I don't see income inequity as a bad thing, Leftists wouldn't see what the cardinal said there as a bad thing. I guess a take-away here is that it's realized by thinkers on both sides that there will always be unfairness, but that the Left seeks to replace "bad" unfairness with "good" unfairness.

That's assuming that from the collapse to rubble, power will be dispersed.

While something may exist outside OUR universe's time/space construct, that implies a PLACE.

Not really. Image a 2-dimensional reality with 2-dimensional beings. Having a "place" to them would be defined as existing somewhere along the x-y plane at, unbeknownst/incomprehensible to them, z = 0.

We also have to deal with what we call the "fundamental" laws of the universe may have changed over time.

That certainly throws an interesting monkey wrench into all of this. But I could just as well accuse you of special pleading in this because now you're saying the universe is special. That might be the atheist's equivalent of the famous Christian cop-out: "The universe works in mysterious ways."

From TFA:

This non-contigent, un-caused thing, or being,

Whoa, pardner, there's no rationality for believing that just because our space and time had to be created by something, that that automatically means that that creator wasn't also begat by something itself. I.e. there's no way to rule out that whatever realm the universe's creator exists/existed in, couldn't also have the same "no something from nothing" constraint as our realm. I.e. to not have all of our constraints does not indicate that it must therefore have none of our constraints.

BD's Logical Fallacy Axiom of the Internet: Most the time logical fallacies are misapplied.

I took the link from there to the page on "special pleading". It simply doesn't fit. To risk becoming an example of my own axiom, you may be guilty of the logical fallacy of "if you happen to have a good answer for something and I don't, then yours must be wrong".

To the best of our knowledge:
1) In the physical realm, something can't come from nothing, and
2) The physical universe was created suddenly.

From these then, the only rational assumption is that something outside the physical realm created the physical universe. Believing to know anything more about it, is irrational, granted. But no less irrational than the dismissal of that core part.

p.s. Looking back on this, to assail this you'd have to believe in the possibility that the physical universe doesn't exist in the physical realm.

You should know.

(Just kidding this time.)

I'm the more cynical BD now, who realizes all is lost with my country. Otherwise, right back atcha, and hope everything is going well with you and yours.

...100 years of sin proves that humanity can't handle governing itself. Then obviously human authoritarianism can't fix that.

I.e. your implied argument is of the utmost absurdity. You're saying people can't be trusted, so people must stop them. But people can't be trusted!

The EOW may come in our lifetimes. The only workable authoritarianism is divine authoritarianism. (And your popes are not Christ.)

You Conservatives. It's so passe to analyze things objectively in terms of principles and strive for such antiquated values as consistency and coherency in positions. Your Constitutional republic is dead, boys, it's now a democracy, where a thing is right if it can be made popular. (Or if you can get a court to foist/force it.) You guys have such laughably American ways of looking at things. America is almost dead, but Americanism died a long time ago.

TL;DR: Why would you even try to think about larger ramnifications and meanings of things? Just play with your smartphone and otherwise do what the authorities and experts tell you.

...like theism.

I dub his persona a "freedom troll".

Not to me. I was never a bleeding-heart Liberal, but I'll admit I had a deficit of compassion in my 20's. My sis on the other hand was. And now she's experiencing the truth behind the rest of that saying.

There's deceptively a lot of wisdom in that saying. How for example youth and inexperience is naivety, and what one might have thought compassionate early on used to grow (when Americans used to grow up when they became adults) to be recognized as actually overall harmful.

"It's run by con men."

You should know.

There is some linear acquisition of wisdom with age, or at least there used to be, upon which the saying that starts "If you're not a Liberal by the time you're 20..." was based.

I had a similar conception growing up, but not exactly the same. To me it wasn't about heeding/power/obedience, because I didn't have a Lefty influence on me growing up and those are Lefty ways of thinking about things, but I did assume that people in prominent positions were among the best and brightest for those positions. It was a difficult thing in my late 20's (late bloomer) to come to grips with how that it not how it is at all, and that many times, while I'm no genuis, these people are much stupider and less qualified than even me.

I.e. I was never the type when I was a yute that thought I knew it all and old people were dumb. I grew up naturally assuming that the adults were better than me and I had a lot to learn from them. And was eager to learn. Until I got well into my adulthood, and realized that, well selective things I could learn from selective people, but the world is definitely not run by experts.