Conversation thread

Social Democracy

Social Democracy is a political ideology that advocates for a balance between a capitalist or market economy and strong governmental intervention to promote social justice. It is rooted in the belief that social and economic inequalities should be minimized through progressive taxation, income redistribution, or even welfare state measures. The ideology also supports a robust public sector, including public education, healthcare, and child care, as well as other services aimed at minimizing poverty and homelessness.

The origins of Social Democracy can be traced back to the 19th century, during…  Read more the rise of the labor movement in Europe. It was initially a branch of the socialist movement, advocating for a peaceful and evolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism using established political processes rather than a revolutionary overthrow. The ideology was heavily influenced by the works of Karl Marx, who argued for the rights of the working class and the redistribution of wealth.

Would you be more willing to follow a career passion if you knew essential services were guaranteed, even if it paid less?

Yes – I'd be inspired to pursue a political career dedicated to destroying the policies that guranteed those services and restoring a free market

Just what is actually wrong with it? If the society consents to these kinds of taxes, if these people ar slicing happier lives and it’s truly stable, if the government is for the people, how is needs being provided for a bad thing? I’ve asked this before, but your only response is “taxation = theft”, but what other reason could there possibly be that this is bad?

Because no matter what the motivations were behind it, taking people's money without their permission is, by definition, THEFT. The majority may vote for it, but what about that minority that opposes it? Shall they be oppressed and plundered from? On the one side you have free marketers like myself, who say, "Thou shalt not steal," and socialists like yourself, who say, "Thou shalt not steal expect by majority vote."

As for the government providing for the needs of the people, I've got news for you – the government can't give you anything it didn'…  Read moret first plunder from someone else, or more often than not, yourself. That stimulus check for ten thousand dollars you'd get in the mail? That's ten thousand dollars they coercively plundered from another human being with guns, and the threats of chains and imprisonment. That Social Security check? Money stolen from innocent people by the same intimidating and barbarian means. Aside from all taxation necessarily discouraging production, it is morally reprehensible, and you still have not given me a logical reason why it would NOT be theft. Why are you asking me "what other reason could there possibly" be that taxation is bad OTHER than that it's theft? That's like asking, "what other reason could murder be wrong other than that it kills another innocent human being." That's asking me to throw away the most powerful argument for my position, while you throw away nothing. We are like two vikings on a battle field of old – and you're asking me to throw down my sword while you retain your own. I've got two words for you: H–ll. No.

Once again, taxation isn’t theft, you didn’t own that money before, the market gave it to you as a reward, more specifically, it was passed to you from your employer, who could adjust how much you’re given at anytime regardless. Pre-taxation income was decided from the beginning by your employer, the federal minimum wage (which you stand against), guarantees a basic living wage so that they have less power over your already-arbitrary income. The taxation afterwards is just another filter, yet another method of using income, something you weren’t liable to in the first…  Read more place, yet seem to want to be. When you sell something, or get funds from your employer, that money is not yours, it is passed through different hands, but at no point are you contractually assigned THIS money, as YOUR personal property. In general, you wouldn’t have it without the government, no matter what currency system is done, a market in general cannot operate entirely without a government, or it’ll just create a new government by accident later on. The difference is not that you don’t own it though, it’s that the government has the authority, as stated even in our bare basic Enumerated Powers. The companies have the authority to give money to their employees after they gain monetary increase, while the government has the ability to take back a bit from the surpluses of that income to give back, no matter how that may be. You “own” post-tax income in the most unofficial sense, but are not contractually obligated to it should the government raise taxes later on. (In certain situations). In being a citizen, you have already agreed to pay taxes, that was part of the social contract, and without it, roads are left in disrepair, cities crumble, water systems collapse, and militaries cease. We need taxes, they make us strong, we agreed to them, you never owned pre-tax income, the government was granted that authority already, and they created and backed the currency of the US, which would remain regardless of how it was changed.

Not that I honestly expected you to, but you still haven't tried to explain how taxation is NOT theft, or, if you did, it was so incoherent I didn't notice it. Instead, you're denying the very existence of private property rights by claiming no one owns his income, it is what the market gave him as a reward. This conversation is pretty much over if we can't agree that private property is a fundamental right.

Private property is a right that comes from the government itself, and as such, as you have already agreed to in the Social Contract when becoming a citizen, you are supposed to pay taxes. It’s in the contract, and as such, isn’t stealing. Those rights are enforced by the government, and can just as easily be taken away, therefore, your pre-tax income is not owned by you personally as much as changed hands. I’ve literally explained this, that very thing is WHY it’s theft, because you literally signed so that you agreed to it in the first place.

I never agreed to the social contract, which is a myth. Government has granted me zero of my rights, all came from God, otherwise they would be privileges, not rights. If you believe government is the final determiner of our rights, my condolences. I'm sorry you live in such dark and depressing delusions without faith in the God who grants us liberty, and I hope you will soon escape them.

Once again, not everyone believes in god, and as such, things need to be made universal on a human-borne scale, and if one’s entire basis for the rights of ALL HUMANITY is the belief in what a god SUPPOSEDLY said, then how is that to be proved or confirmed in any way,

Ironically the same is true for you – not everyone believes there ISN'T a god, and if one's basis for the rights of ALL HUMANITY is the belief that there is no law higher than a government's law, then how is THAT to be proved or confirmed in any way? We both have beliefs, why are you assuming yours is inherently superior to mine when that has not been established yet by logic? Your begging the question, subtly, I'll admit, but begging it nonetheless.

Well then, which god definitely doesn’t help your case. There’s thousands of gods and thousands of religions, and thousands of afterlife’s inside them. All believe resolutely that their god is right, and if you’re wrong, you’re likely screwed when you die. A secular perspective ignores these thousands of conflicting beliefs and focuses on what is empirical, tangible, and practical when deciding the basic rights of humans. The only logical assumption with thousands of conflicting religions, showing no public spectacle from those gods to prove their existence in…  Read more the first place, is to focus on what benefits humanity as a whole, and what creates the highest degree of freedom and happiness for all regardless of things such as race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or sex. The most overall fairness and accountability is done by biasing no religion as a systemic measure for what is and isn’t okay for human rights. This is true today, even in religions. Most religious sects, especially in Christianity, skirt by certain written rules of the Bible, or add new beliefs, because they believe they’ve been ordained by god to do so, thereby creating controversy on who is right, yet never once does god himself or any miracle prove definitively that their god supports them. Every moment in humanity, every day of religious conquest and conflict was all done in the name that their religious beliefs and their deity they worship is right. Yet never once did supposedly all-powerful religious deities ever show up personally to confirm. It was always humans telling humans that they’ve been spoken to, yet no one has shown proof of that either. This leaves our morals up to our interpretation, and the ideal that we should pay a certain percentage of money is a common and often positively viewed one. Though we believe taxes shouldn’t be too high or too often, most believe it and most have seen success in the implementation of that belief in comparison to the very few societies with no taxation. The rules we, as the people, have set is that when one is a citizen, one is liable to taxes. John Locke was right about a lot of good philosophies, but we mustn’t hug the philosophies of the past and copy them word-for-word because we believe that’s 100% without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt right.

This Is Why I Believe What I Believe: (Part 1)

Actually, my belief in Christianity is based on the logical Law of Non-Contradiction, LNC, which states that two truths can't be contradictory to one another. You cannot have “p” and “not-p” at the same time. The sky can’t be both red and blue at once, information can’t be both true and false at once. Rocket science, this ain’t.

If you’re willing to sacrifice a few minutes of time to research major religions, it’s self-evidently clear that they are, in fact, totally contradictory to each…  Read more other. In Matthew 12:30 (NKJV), Jesus says, “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad.” In John 14:6, He also says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Clearly, Christianity teaches that all other religions are false. And so does Mormonism. In 1 Nephi 14:10, Smith wrote, “Behold: there are save two churches only, the one is the church of the Lamb of God [speaking, unsurprisingly, of Mormonism] and the other is the church of the devil; wherefore, whoso belongeth not to the church of the Lamb of God belongeth to that great church which is the mother of abominations; and she is the ***** of all the earth.” Very loving and tolerant man, that Joseph Smith. Moving on, in the “holy” book of the Muslims, the Quran, chapter 3, verse 85, it says “Should anyone follow a religion other than Islam, it shall never be accepted from him, and he will be among the losers in the Hereafter.” In case you can’t read between the lines, that’s just a polite way of saying that if you’re not a wholehearted disciple of Islam, you’ll burn in hell for eternity. Are you noticing a pattern? All these religions are adamant that if you are not for them, you are against them. So aside from being an egregious violation of the most basic logical laws, a “neutral” position that holds that more than one religion can be true is impossible according to all these worldviews. Not only would a theoretical “middle ground” view necessarily interpret the world differently than all other worldviews – otherwise, of course, it would be identical to one of them – it would logically necessitate that all worldviews and religions other than your alleged posture of neutrality would be false, and their holy books, upon which their entire belief system is based, blatantly false. This would re-create the same alleged fallacy of “either/or” you’ve accused this channel of making (either the neutral worldview is absolutely true or it’s absolutely false) resolving absolutely nothing. In order to accept all worldviews, you have to reject all worldviews but the supposedly neutral one you’ve chosen to take. This channel, in claiming that Christianity is true and other religions are false, did not commit a logical fallacy in any way, shape, or form, but held to a position that is logically inevitable. The choice you now have to make is what worldview you hold to the be the absolute truth – the Bible or some post-modernist cult afraid to label any belief as self-evidently wrong.

This is Why I Believe What I Believe: (Part 2)

You see, every worldview must rest on at least one major assumption, or ultimate standard of truth, upon which is built every other belief espoused by that worldview. With just a few moments of consideration, this can be proven to be true. For every belief an individual has, however minor, we can always ask him how he knows his belief is true, and he will supply another argument or piece of information in support of his belief. But inevitably we must ask who he knows his second proposition is true, and in defense of the second, our hypothetical…  Read more individual must supply a third argument, which we then question, and a fourth, which we may also then question, until, as all chains of argumentation must, his line of reasoning comes to an end, terminating in a belief, or ultimate standard, upon which his entire worldview is built. When we ask him how to prove his ultimate standard, he must necessarily be reduced to circular reasoning, either vicious or virtuous, because it’s impossible for any fact or evidence or argument to precede an ultimate standard – otherwise it wouldn’t be ultimate. An ultimate standard cannot be proved by anything other than itself, or it would not be truly “ultimate.” Thus, when discussing ultimate standards, circular reasoning is inevitable, and not necessarily fallacious. In order to logically debate worldviews, we all make assumptions – the true test is whether, using information after we were forced to assume our ultimate standard, we find strong evidence to back it up. As an example of non-fallacious circular reasoning outside the worldview conversation, consider the following: (1) If there were no laws of logic, rational debate and argumentation would be impossible (2) We can rationally debate and make arguments (3) Therefore the laws of logic must exist. Clearly, this is a circular argument, assuming the existence of the laws of logic in order to argue for their existence, but it is a virtuous rather than vicious circle – as the assumptions it made were entirely necessary, as all rational argument is impossible without logical laws and principles of correct reasoning.

Part 3

The same principle holds true for the assumption that the human mind can reason correctly and think rationally. The Christian trusts that the human mind can think logically because humans are made in the image of God, according to Genesis 1:26-27, and God’s mind is absolutely rational since He is the decider of truth (John 17:17) Since he has revealed some of his thoughts to us (Isaiah 1:18) and commands us to think consistently with His logical nature, according to Isaiah 55:7-8, it is obvious to any Christian that our minds are very capable of rational thought and logical anal…  Read moreysis. Again, this is a virtuous circle – it’s impossible to analyze text, such as that of the Bible, without using our mind to think about it and transform the written symbols on the page into words that can be understood. But the circle is virtuous because we made only a necessary assumption and, operating on that assumption, discovered we had good and rational reasons to hold to it. Of course, those who believe our minds were not created by God – those who think an explosion without heat, fuel, oxygen, or even space itself created the universe, and that mankind is descended from electrified soup – have zero reason to make this assumption, though to function they must make it. There’s no reason to believe a brain that is just a clump of cells that accidently formed over billions of years is in any way reliable.

As a whole, these moral systems (of which all have contradictions) in both religion and non-religious philosophy are made, entirely in fact, by humans. I don’t expect to change your view, nor will I provide a long winded moral discussion (though I find it impressive how much you wrote and the quality of the argument), but I think that the very Bible we’ve written isn’t based in a god, it is based in a moral set and a long line of those who think that it is. Those that create and prime the social structure of a religion really do legitimately believe what they do, but their…  Read more principles do contradict, in every religion and every ideal. Good moral principles, in some areas, were built in Christianity. Good moral principles were built in almost every religion. Every moral in religion is subjective and holds a “if you aren’t with me, you are my enemy” thought process. After all, that’s how they grow in the first place in so many ways. A secular perspective may not have a “middle ground”, but that’s because it doesn’t need it. If we endorse one religion, we make everyone else mad, when in reality, the only way to stop each religion from attacking one another in the area of both governance and established rights is to use none and all at the same time, as done by creating a system made to protect the people of all religions, creeds, races, sexual orientations, and genders alike. Every religion in history has attacked at least one of these traits with it’s own “virtuous” circular approaches, causing unnecessary and disgusting levels of suffering. The shedding of those beliefs often comes from outside pressure or the assumed “revelation” of recent or past prophets or highly influential members. Every religion tries to win, nearly every belief, even in religion, can break the stated “virtuous circle” when the right questions are asked. We created those logical laws, which is why god in the Bible is built on them. He didn’t create them, we created god, and used our logical laws that we had developed in the time of Abraham down to Jesus because we found the laws to be reliable, then claimed that those laws were gods.

I'm glad you took the time to read it. But how you claim to "endorse all and none" of the religions of the world at once, when, as I demonstrated above, they are unanimous in their belief that such a position is impossible? In so doing you necessarily reject every religion but your posture of neutrality in existence as false and yours as true, as the only way to stop strife, as the only way to bring justice, thereby recreating every fallacy and issue you have falsely attributed to Christianity.

Don't be confused – I never said ALL religions have "Virtous circles…  Read more" – as I demonstrated, every religion BUT Bible-believing Christianity is a VICIOUS circle, not a VIRTUOUS one, because no other viewpoint can account for the reliability of human senses, the laws of logic, and of science, and of objective morality.

When I say “all and none”, I don’t mean that I think all are right and wrong at the same time, I am saying that we preserve their right to worship at all costs, and that some secular logic would align a bit with nearly all of them, thereby making it all of them, while also favoring the rule of none of them, and not allowing any to rule over other religious groups, nor sponsor one religion as the “truth” over all others.

There’s flaws in all of those religions, Christianity does violate those laws of logic and objective morality on the occasion, and isn&rsqu…  Read moreo;t infallible in itself, it’s just much more curated after thousands of years, passing hand through hand. Basically stated, it is one of the oldest and most complex fan fictions, but the visible proof of its belief is lacking as much as a good moral system being in place (in most areas) that could’ve easily been discovered or created any other time in history in a semi-secular or fully secular fashion (assuming the removal of some parts due to parts being religious in nature).

If we discovered the laws of logic, that still doesn't solve the problem of how they cam about in the first place in order for mankind to discover them, and the only explanation for their existence is STILL God. Christianity did not violate laws of logic and objective morality, provide me an instance in which it did please, but FIRST, tell me how the laws of logic came about, just saying we "discovered" them without explaining why they exist isn't going to cut it...

No, that leaves the chosen assumption that there is a god. Using the laws of logic as a justification of god’s existence could just as easily be used for math, which remains just about as concrete. We only find it because it’s there, just like we find a new location on earth because it was simply in existence, but that doesn’t prove god, that just points to humans using the logical laws they’ve discovered to create a god using the Bible. Neither of us can explain how the universe itself came about, you simply believe that it came from a god whose only empirical evidenc…  Read moree is a book, a “virtuous circle”, and a large quantity of believers, while science itself actually tries to find physical, tangible, and empirical evidence through things such as looking through the records of light in the night sky to find a better answer, the leading theory being the Big Bang, but science doesn’t pretend it has all the answers. In many ways, that’s a good thing, because a 100% surety of being right about the origin of the universe remains ignorant when we have barely even begun to leave our planet to look around for ourselves. We need a lot of time before either argument has full proof, but they are NOT equal in terms of validity, as one seeks to find that answer now, while the other claims it’s found it.

Using the laws of logic as a justification of God's existence could just as easily be used for math, which remains just about as concrete.

Precisely! Not only can you not explain the laws of logic, you can't explain mathematics! Thank you bringing that point up!

We only find it because it's there.

But why is it there? That's what I asked you. And here you are, dodging the question for the third time in a row, because you, as an unbeliever, can't answer it without resorting to logical fallacies.

Neither of us can explain how the universe itself came about.

Actually I can, and I did: God created it. But you're right, you Read morecan't, because you don't believe in a Creator.

Alright then, fine, why are these laws there? We don’t know, some things just exist, but we have seen 0 positive empirical evidence that god is fully here other than the book which claims it is right, and TOTALLY doesn’t have contradictions as well inside of it at any point. Lacking an answer from a secular perspective doesn’t immediately validity whatever religion claims to be right, because unless the existence of that god is physically and openly proven, then it’s extremely unlikely that THAT god in THAT religion is real, and their philosophy of what happens after…  Read more death is even more disputed. From the times of Ancient Greece to todays Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religions, we’ve used religions as an explanation of the things we don’t understand yet, from how the seasons work to geocentric theory. The Bible has consistently stated things, especially in Genesis, which have little to no real basis at all, from the creation to the fall of Adam and Eve. We don’t know, but maybe the fact that we don’t know shows that we can at some point, and the answer doesn’t lie in something written, in its oldest books, in 700 BC. At most, the Bible is a historical record of how people viewed disasters such as Noah’s Flood being a record of the large (but not earth wide) Noachian Flood, which is referenced in every religious text over the area of the Middle East to record the events of that. Many viewed it as a scourge, but it was just a massive natural disaster, nor was it over the entire earth. We don’t have any real evidence at all that there is one, and when all conflict over which god there is, we need to start asking how the idea came into place at all. An extremely likely answer is the same way you view every other ancient religion: they were used to explain what we couldn’t understand, with the only basis being hope it was real. The whole tool of science can prove how the universe came to be, but the immaterial isn’t something it can truly prove or disprove, because it’s just that; immaterial however, that doesn’t prove it’s existence because it’s impossible to disprove as of yet. Logic can’t explain that fully either, because a religion following those laws won’t make it right either.