Marat

People who profess to be religious believers, however, must realize that when they choose sin they are also choosing death by the very act of sinning, since their sin will alienate them from God's love, which will mean that they will live only ca. 80 years instead of ca. 80 years on Earth followed by infinite time in Heaven. So we are back to the originall point, which is that the ease with which religious believers sin demonstrates that they do not really believe in their religion, since if they did, they would avoid sin with the same meticulous care as they avoid touching the third rail of a subway line.

The point that the concept of scientific proof is relative to the historical era is apt, and especially so in the case of the opposition between Einstein and Newton, since the advance of relativity theory over classical mechanics really derives from the evolution of the concept of proof from the Baconian-Cartesian paradigm, which was still operative in Newton's day, to the positivistic theory which predominated in Einstein's time. Newton's error was to assume that he could encase all of physics within an absolute space-time metric, which amounted to treating Descartes' coordinate system as though it were a real thing. But the inconsistency in Newton's thinking was that he treated his space-time framework as something which had measurable effects on things inside it, but which could not be affected, in turn, by whatever was operating within it. He was thus positing a real, physical framework which could not itself be subjected to measurable physical effects, and that violates the fundamental rule of positivism, which is that nothing can be posited in scientific explanation as real unless a physical operation can be specified for measuring it. It was Einstein's development of this positivist insight, developed by philosophers working before him, such as Ernst Mach, which allowed him to realize that physical reality was conditioned by how it could be measured, specifically, by how fast light signals could register effects, and this was an idea that would never have occurred to Newton in the intellectual historical world of his time, when an absolute physical framework could simply be posited without worrying about what positive operations could independently measure it.

I think the OP is asking whether there is some evolutionary benefit in the development of the capacity to become depressed in response to negative stimuli. The answer could be simply that depression powerfully and lastingly conditions the person experiencing it to avoid the stimulus that caused it. True, it has the downside that it may discourage normal, creative, adaptive responses to other environments as long as it persists, and it may even cause suicide, which reduces fitness, but perhaps most of the time the persistence of the conditioning to avoid whatever first evoked the depressive feelings turns out to be a net benefit to survival.

To unpack the legal notion of 'sham marriage' we have to look at the reasons why states first started allowing spouses to immigrate to their partners' home country. This was intended as an exemption to restrictive immigration laws in order to make a merciful concession to the genuine human need of a couple with differing citizenships to live together. But obviously if the marriage was concluded only for the sake of circumventing the immigration restrictions and not out of any real human need, the reason for the state to make a merciful concession was missing, so the statute had to establish various tests to distinguish cases where the state's mercy was needed from where it wasn't. The problem is that the great variety of cultural understandings of the appropriate reasons for getting married means that many of these tests may appear arbitrary to those from non-Western societies. Even in the West, people used to get married centuries ago just to cement dynastic and familial alliances, to settle feuds, or to allow for the combination of adjoining fields divided between two families into a more profitable unit. Marrying for the practical advantage of immigration to a country with a better welfare system or higher wages seems no different than marriage motivated by these purely pragmatic historical reasons.

Most legal systems that punish 'hate speech,' that is, discriminatory speech against certain groups, have to make an exception for religious speech, since preaching often condemns Pharisees, Atheists, Heretics, etc. But once you have to make a special exception for religion, that amounts to a violation of the separation of church and state, since you privilege religious speech over secular speech, while the liberal state should be neutral between them. Also, shouldn't there be hate speech against certain groups? What about statements condemning the thugee cult, an ethnically defined group of people in South Pakistan who used to go around murdering travellers to steal their money? How could the law neutrally distinguish between reasonable criticism of various groups and unreasonable, racist hatred? You might try to say that the speaker's intent is the basis of the distinction, but the law can't be a mind reader, and so statutes usually punish acts rather than attitudes.

God the Almighty, Omniscient, and Perfect might deliberately put some design flaws into his creation, but only where good reasons dictated this choice. When it came to communicating his message in a divinely inspired book, he must have realized that if the book's style, composition, logic, and power to convince were not reflective of its divine authorship, it would fail to communicate, since many would quite reasonably doubt the godly authority of the stories and theories it imparted. Instead, its character looks like just what it is: the composition of many different human authors from varying Hebrew and Greek traditions who were mutually inconsistent, not always very logical, and more than occasionally poor writers. That there is nothing in the Bible which stands out as inconsistent with all the cultural, religious, and philosophical forces surrounding its composition also raises suspicions about its divine origin. If the forces of intellectual history of the era were already inclining towards generating that message on their own, then why would God have had to step in and inspire people to write it? On the other hand, if God inspired its composition, shouldn't at least something in it look startlingly inconsistent with the ordinary ideas already floating around at that time and place? It would be a stunning coincidence if the Infinite Mind of the Cosmos (as it appears in the New Testament) just happened to think like someone influenced by Egyptian relgion, Greek philosophy, and Hebrew traditions current in the Eastern corner of the Mediterranean during the first few centuries A.D.! And yet that is exactly how it looks, since somehow his writing seems uneducated by any of the developments in human thought from the Enlightenment, Existentialism, Relativism, Historical Materialism, Epistemological Idealism, Hermeutics, Phenomenology, or any other advance since the time period when he communicated his message. This would make perfect sense if humans rather than God wrote down that message, but would seem quite peculiar if an Infinite, Eternal Mind, which would obviously already have anticipated all future human thought, wrote it. Also, if the Christian message has indeed 'evolved' since its first transmission as part of the natural selection process of better over worse ideas throughout the ensuing history of Western culture, then what is the right message we should now believe in? The 17th century Puritans executed cats for killing mice on Sunday because they manifested their evil nature by 'working on the Sabbath'; other Christians took seriously the Biblical injunction that 'thou shalt not suffer a witch to live'; and still others think that the Christian teaching forbids saluting the flag, having blood transfusions, or respecting monogamy. The first Christian communities were even communist in their social organization. With all these stages and branches of evolution from the initial message, who knows what to believe? Even more disturbing, the Omniscient Mind of Jehovah must have known in advance that a message communicated by whispering an 'inspiration' into the minds of people acting under certain narrow cultural influences in one time and place was bound to become corrupted and unclear over time by various historical forces, so why was he so profoundly silly as to entrust his message to that medium of transmission? Why did he make the spread of his message subject to the contingent forces of history by delivering it in the Roman Province of Judea ca. 30 A.D., which guaranteed that the people in places like Tibet and Madagascar would only first hear of it centuries later and thus suffer the undeserved prejudice that many more of them would be denied a chance of salvation? All these problems arise from the same issue: It is simply inconsistent with the nature of an infinite god that he would manifest himself in some special way at a special time and in a special place, in one particular language with all its conceptual limitations, and through the medium of inspired authors mired in one rather backward way of thinking.

There also used to be a pneumatic tube system for mail delivery all around Paris which worked quite well until the increased availability of the telephone made it obsolete. The tube system is still there under Paris today, but no longer in operation.

Most cases in which people act against their ultimate best interest arise because they are tempted to enjoy some immediate pleasure rather than discipline themselves to pursue the long-term goal. But in mundane contexts, we all know that this sometimes turns out to be a reasonable bet. The person who spends his money today on immediate enjoyment and fails to save for retirement may also die young and never need his retirement nest egg, or he may win the lottery prior to retirement and not need his savings. There is always at least some possibility that polluting, stealing, sleeping late, being lazy, cheating, eating too much, or committing any one of the whole variety of 'sins' against our ultimate practical interests will not matter, and so the immediate pleasure will turn out to be just a pure gain. But the Almighty is by definition able to regulate things so that everyone ultimately gets his just deserts, so it is always foolish, if you believe in God, ever to jeopardize the infinitely long fate of your soul after death by sinning now for the sake of some immediate pleasure. Yet 'believing' Christians sin all the time out of some incomprehensibly irrational 'weakness' of exactly the sort that almost every sane person manages scrupulously to avoid in mundane goal-directed behavior.

Imagine that God and several human computer engineers were asked to construct personal computers and submit them to a contest to determine which one was the best. The judges have to evaluate the entries not knowing who made which and then award the prize. Could there be any doubt about which personal computer had been made by the Infinite, Omniscient Mind of the Almighty Creater of the Universe? Of course not, since his glorious personal computer submission to the contest would be not just two or three times better than the other versions made by mere humans, but a trillion times better, and it would thus convince anyone on a cursory glance that it was the only God-made design. And yet here we can seriously have a real debate whether the human-authored 'Lord of the Rings' might state the true cosmology of the world rather than the divinely-inspired message of the Holy Bible. The very fact that reasonable people can reasonably debate whether the Koran, the Bible, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Epic of Gilgamesh might be the ulitmate message of God shows that none of them qualifies for that honor, since if any one of them did, it would be stunningly obvious, not debatable. Similarly, it is simply inconceivable, if you think about it seriously, that Pontius Pilate, King Herod, or the members of the Senhedron could have been chatting at length with the human embodiment of the Great Jehovah Himself and somehow not have noticed that he was God rather than just some local religious fanatic like John the Baptist or Paul of Tarsus.

Only a few countries actually have a 'private property right' which is constitutionally anchored so that it can't be overturned and property can't be seized by the government whenever it wants as long as there is an ordinary majority vote of the legislators approving this. In England, for example, there is a rule that courts will interpret as narrowly as the statutory language allows any law allowing the government to take away private property. But still, under this system, a clearly-worded statute which says that 'Paranoia's property as of today immediately goes to support funding the national park system or his next door neighbor' would be enforced to do just that, and that would be legal in the so-called 'cradle of liberties,' England. Similarly, Canada also has no private property right, so the Canadian Parliament could at any time pass a law to take all private property away and dispose of it as it saw fit. America with its fifth and fourteenth amendments protecting private property is an exception among the democratic states of the world in this regard. Legal scholars usually divide up law into two basic categories, public, describing what the government may do, and private, describing how citizens can interact with each other. These two branches of law operate under distinct conceptual regimes and one is not usually thought of as having any implications for what is just or fair in the other. So if public law is socialistic and private law is not, then that is not theoretically impossible or even unusual, since countries like the Nordic states operate under such a composite system. But even if you want to set up the private system, where all transfers of money are voluntary, as the paradigm of what should be allowed throughout the legal system, then there is the still the problem that even the private system has large public and socialistic elements. So for example, if you don't work but you are extremely wealthy and own a gigantic estate with lots of buildings which have to be protected against vandals and thieves, then you might use up far more than your fair share of police and fire protection, which is paid for out of general taxation, so we could argue that your private property is only being preserved intact because it survives protected within the matrix of a socialistic system -- that is, one which supplies police and fire protection services without limit according to need, but which collects taxes only according to income without regard to the extent of one's demands on the free police services. In this sense all private property is socialistic in nature, since unless the majority of society agreed to fund the institutions and consented to obey the rules which keep the system of private transactions going, private property would quickly evaporate in a universal anarchy of theft and lawlessness without this unpaid social cooperation. As the collapse of regimes like Iran in 1979 or the Communist countries starting in 1989 demonstrated, no matter how much police power there is, no social system can continue functioning unless there is tacit consent from the people to keep it going, so the wealth of Bill Gates is ultimately not just 'his,' but is reproduced and reconfirmed anew every day by the silent agreement of everyone else in society to abide by the rules which sustain it.

A Dr. Humes has been working on making such a bioartificial kidney for decades now. I am suspicious of this new version, however, since it advertises itself only as replacing 'most' of the functions of a normal kidney, so some form of hemo- or peritoneal dialysis might still be required, which would not seem to be much of an advance. The problem is that the normal kidney does so much more than just filter out toxins and maintain the normal electrolyte balance. It also produces hormones which regulate the blood pressure via the renin-angiotensin system, and which make red blood cells with erythropoietin. People who have a kidney which functions at a reduced glomerular filtration rate also suffer from a reduced output of renal hormones, so I wonder how well this contraption will work if it has just a few real nephrons in it functioning at less than full capacity because they are operating behind a differentially permeable membrane to protect them from rejection by the immune system. There are already clinical tests on human subjects of an artificial pancreas which uses pig pancreatic beta cells encased within a differentially permeable membrane to let out insulin but also keep out immunologically active cells, but so far this has functioned very poorly, since the pig cells die off quickly due to an inadequate oxygen supply and poor removal of toxic by-products generated within the protective capsule. My guess is that the same thing would also happen with these encased nephrons. Also, we have to ask where the nephrons in this contraption come from? If they have to be human nephrons, then we bump up against the same problems of lack of supply as currently limit the renal transplant solution. Finally, medical science always advances at a glacially slow pace which would be incomprehensible in any other area of science, in part because of the FDA's approval process, which costs about $300 million and takes 12 to 15 years to navigate before a new treatment can be introduced into clinical practice. Also, for reasons not entirely clear, if you were to give most medical researchers a schematic diagram and a working model of a door knob, it would take them ten thousand years to figure out a way to open a door without having to use an axe. So when they say that this bio-artificial kidney may 'someday' be able to replace dialysis, I would guess that the kidney market idea will be relevant for a long time to come.

While there used to be just two subtypes of diabetes, juvenile and adult, now there is a proliferation of categories, including pre-diabetes, type 1, type 1.5, LADA, MODY, and type 2. Recently there has been a reaction against the proliferation of categories, as a result of some studies showing that autoimmune and genetic aspects play a key role in causing all forms of the disease. Since the patient in question here is an adult who does not have to inject insulin yet is still running blood glucose levels around 200 at times, it is a pretty good guess that he is an established type 2 patient. An important drug for all types of diabetics has come out of Europe in recent years but it is still being ignored by the conservative medical establishment in North America, and that is Benfotiamine. It operates by blocking the downstream metabolism of excess sugar in the body to advanced glycation endproducts, and by doing this, it blocks the development of the characteristic damage which excess glucose normally does to nerves and the vascular system. This means, in theory, that diabetics could simply take a few Benfotiamine pills a day and get the same or better results that they now have to strive for by the obsessive compulsive management of constantly fluctuating glucose levels. Unfortunately, since Benfotiamine is classed as a pro-vitamin and so cannot be patent-protected, there is no money in marketing it, so the large-scale studies to demonstrate that it works better than intensive conventional blood sugar management will never be done. In addition, there is such a huge and profitable industry now in selling devices to measure and manage blood sugar, which would not be necessary if Benfotiamine were proved in large-scale studies to be more effective than blood sugar control, there is a strong resistance in the pharmaceutical industry to Benfotiamine ever gaining a foothold in the world of diabetes management.

Paranoia: When you say that 'the more government is influences to confiscate property outside the private property rule structure,' the problem is that the government always acts within the rule structure that it legislates, which is an easy thing to do as long as you are making your own rules. Once you allow progressive taxation in principle, which is nothing other than permitting government to decide what percentage of whose income it wants to take by law unto itself, where can you draw a logical limit as to how progressive that can be? Norway at one time had such a steeply progressive tax curve that certain extremely rich people would have to pay a tax equal to the total value of the money they were setting in motion every time their money moved and thus became visible to the tax man. So if all these seizures of wealth can be made legal, given the models of taxation already accepted and legally established, how do we define 'coercive' taking of contributions from the public to the state or seizures outside the 'rule structure'? Saryctus: These incidental costs and benefits that any financial action will inevitably have on all other financial interests in the social environment are very difficult to regulate or address in legal or moral terms. I can legally set up a store selling at a discount the same things that you sell in your store across the street, and I can legally run you into bankruptcy this way. However, I can't set up a store across from yours selling at fire sale prices just to drive you out of business. But in some jurisdictions I can't legally bribe away someone already contracted to work for you because I can offer him a higher wage, as long as I know of the existence of that contract. Many of these rules are set only by legal convention, not by any principle of morals or logic.

I am always surprised at the way Americans seem to find even the minimal inflections and grammatical agreements required by the English language -- in contrast to the endless number of different tenses in French, each with their own forms, or the 4 cases and 3 genders of German, or the 7 cases of Russian -- way too difficult to learn or use correctly. Even where they have a 50-50 chance of getting it right, Americans always seem to guess wrong, such as when they say 'lay' when they mean 'lie' (as in 'he was laying on the ground'), or say 'hung' when they mean 'hang' ('he was hung for murder'), or use intensifying adverbs for absolute adjectives ('that was very excellent work'). In Canada I even hear people say 'had went to the store,' which I never heard anywhere in the United States. It must be that it is the very lack of grammatical demands made by English which encourages a total laziness about getting anything right. In contrast, native speakers of a heavily inflected language who learn English always find it easy to get everything right. You can almost spot the foreigners in an English-speaking crowd by their perfect grammar.

When you start talking about what mental attitude a believer has to have to deserve divine forgiveness, you get into all sorts of Calvinist problems about how do you know for certain what your mental attitudes really are, and thus whether you are genuinely repentant or not, or whether you are really good or not, or just extremely clever at lying to yourself about what you really feel, think, and believe. But since you can't even access or know, and much less control, your subconscious motives and desires, you don't really 'own' your ultimate, bedrock mental states any more than you can consciously direct the clouds in the sky. In this sense many things 'in' you and playing a role in the formation of your thoughts and attitudes, which the Divinity holds you responsible for, are not even really yours! Problems like this really make it look as though all this talk about God, sin, punishment, repentance, and regret as though these were simple counters we could position and value on a board in front of us, rather than subtle and inaccessible phenomena artificially simplified into purported entities by language and culture, is really just the product of the naivety of earlier eras of thought.

Also, I think Pioneer's interesting and useful analogy between wealth and grades ultimately goes too far, since while both wealth and grades are at least in part socially determined products (your wealth depends on how your actions intersect with society's rules; your intelligence and knowledge are in part produced by the teachers and accumulated learning around you), grades are in significantly larger proportion the true possession, the real property, independent of social factors, of the people earning them. Similar social influences are usually all present in the same environment for all people competing with each other for grades, so the difference in the grades earned largely reflects the individual's ability and efforts, rather than the multiplying or discounting effect of surrounding social influences. With wealth, in contrast, the expert and hard-working buggy-whip maker can go bankrupt almost overnight because the society where he lives suddenly and unexpectedly decides to allow cars to be imported, so the bottom falls out of the market for carriage parts. However, with knowledge, intelligence, aptitude, and willingness to study, these properties are less open to sudden and dramatic changes from factors totally external to the individuals possessing them than wealth.

Proving twin A's foreknowledge of the intent of twin B might prove difficult. "I thought he was just going off on another one of his wood carving expeditions," says twin A, smiling at the pretty young pair of female Siamese twins in the jury.

I agree with your diagnosis of the general American attitude towards any policies which label themselves as socialistic. However, even though it is seldom explicitly claimed that any policies have a redistributive intent, the fact that you agree that they do often have such an effect supports my general point that in reality all private wealth is immersed in a vast, social, causal network which infects it heavily with a public character. Once you have a tax system which taxes people according to their wealth, and a social service system which either provides services without user fees to everyone needing them (e.g., most roads, bridges, the benefit of military and police protection), or provides more services to those who need them more (e,g., welfare programs, funding of county hospitals, tuition at public universities subsidized by grants to poor students and funded by taxes and higher tuition fees for richer students), then the apparatus of the state is essentially redistributive, even though it doesn't advertise itself as such. Even reduced bus fare for senior citizens and students, who generally have less income than the middle-aged workers who pay full fare, is a mild device for redistributing wealth.

The problem is that there are countless theories of what constitutes valid scientific method and how theories are properly refuted or confirmed, so depending on which one you pick, you can more or less assign falsifiability or induction completely different roles or status. In stating what you think is proper scientific method, you have to make clear whether you are a follower of Carnap, Hempel, Reichenbach, Quine, Sellars, Caws, Popper, Suppe, Searle, etc.

Pangloss: Some other posters have already answered your question about whether the U.S. has redistributive policies, since any system of progressive taxation, such as the U.S. has, will operate with the effect of redistributing wealth from the richer (who pay more taxes to the government's coffers) to the poorer (who need more services from government programs). I grew up in the U.S. and have since lived in England, Austria, Germany, and Canada, so I have some personal experience of the way different wealth distribution systems operate. When I note that some 'parts' of the social pool of wealth are private property, this is only because various legal regimes arbitrarily define them as private, not because they are actually generated independently of the surrounding social matrix and thus belong to the owner as of right. When there was no minimum wage law, much more of the income generated by factories could be defined as a result of this community legislative choice as the 'private property' of the factory owners than today, even though the factory, the work, the workers, and the owners might all stay the same. No one would ever have any money or private property for more than a few minutes if there were not a justice system to authorize police action to enforce contracts and to defend accumulations of wealth against theft. This justice system has to be publicly funded to guarantee its objectivity and neutrality among the various parties opposing each other, so private property is shown to be possible only through public support, and from this origin it cannot be treated as necessarily private and insulated from seizure for the common good. Paranoia: Contract law often has redistributive effects built into it, such as when contracts for employment are forced by statute to pay at least minimum wage, to provide workers with free accidental injury protection, or to cover the tort liability of employees on the job. Rules regarding good faith dealings, fiduciary duties, necessarily implied warranties, and minimum disclosure of information about something being sold all limit the kind of trades that courts will enforce by imposing on them purely social obligations, many of which make the deal less profitable for one party or the other. If you had a huge sugar plantation in the tropics you might be irritated to hear that the government had outlawed contracts for slavery. While it is true that all socially operative wealth could be said to benefit the whole of society and so to be to the benefit of all, and so not to be 'in favor' of anyone in particular, obviously if I win a million dollars in the lottery and help improve the profit margin of the local businesses when I buy more products, the money is more 'in my favor' than in that of the entire community, although we all benefit to some degree. I don't think your interesting distinction between forceable redistribution and voluntary redistribution ultimately solves the issue, since we all begin in a society which already exists and which is prepared to use force to enforce its taxation and redistribution policies. We might imagine some original contract in the state of nature when we all got together and decided to pool our resources to protect ourselves from surrounding tribes and internal lawlessness, and here there would be a voluntary agreement on how much we would pay in contributions for which services, just as though society were the product of an ordinary contract between equally free parties. This is what Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and more recently Rawls have imagined. But this is really only an intellectual model, not something that ever really happened, or if it did, we cannot know now whether these early people came together by agreement or by force. So from this we can't be sure that the taxes we pay are ultimately the product of our agreement. Even the theory that we have all agreed to these taxes because the form of government is a fiction, since not all of us have agreed by voting in favor of all tax programs in operation, and elections are seldom truly democratic, but are instead subject to all sorts of corrupting factors like campaign contributions which in effect give money a vote alongside real people.

I don't understand Needimprovement's reasoning when he defends God's vengeance on the unbelievers in Deuteronomy by saying that this degree of harshness was consistent with the standards of the time and place. If he is truly the universal, everlasting God who created the entire world, why does he feel himself bound to adhere to the conventions of his time? (such as he would if he had been made up by the people of that time) I would have expected instead that he would have imposed some rule on the unbelieves which would seem humane and wise to all eras and all cultures, otherwise he looks pitifully parochial rather than universal. You could counter this by saying that he had to appeal to the attitudes of the time and place where the message was first being delivered in order to gain plausibility for the whole doctrine, but this is supposed to be an eternal message valid for all times and places, not one temporarily bound. If parts of it are temporarily bound because of their need to appeal to the contemporaries and locals, then which parts of the message are eternal and which are not? Where is the key for distinguishing them provided? God (or his surrogate, Christ) has no trouble surprising contemporaries of his message with doctrines they don't expect or don't want to hear, such as when he says to those about to stone the adultress, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." So why in Deuteronomy is he so concerned with being conventional?

There is something quite odd, and completely unique, with the whole epistemological attitude of believers towards their religion. Just as their everyday emotions and attitudes, such as the ease with which they are tempted into sinning against their professed best interests to do everything possible to get into Heaven, would make no sense if they seriously thought about what their belief means, so too their willingness to believe the most extremely feeble 'proofs' of their religion makes no sense compared to their ordinary level of skepticism. People who would rangle with you for a week and a half, posing every conceivable and even a few inconceivable doubts about some very good real estate deal you were offering them, suddenly become profoundly gullible when they say that they know for certain that God exists and Jesus loves them because the Bible tells them so, as though the whole system could pull itself up by its own bootstraps.

People often complain about high taxes or public welfare programs which seek to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor by claiming that these policies "steal my hard-earned money." One way to undermine such reasoning is to probe the definition of 'my money' in this context. Obviously no one could become very wealthy if he lived isolated on a desert island and accumulated goods just by his own labor in fishing, lashing together bamboo sticks to make huts, or burning the underbrush for heat. Significant amounts of wealth can only be generated in cooperation with other people in a stable society, so no one can claim that the money produced is clearly 'his' rather than belonging to those who helped him, at least not as a matter of fact. But here the law intervenes to define some parts of communal production as belonging to some people and other parts to others. This defines a conventional notion of 'private property,' but this is itself only determined by the agreement of the majority of citizens to legislate the laws which mark off some of the social product as 'belonging to' X rather than to Y. The important thing to realize is that this demarcation is purely conventional, and that changes in tax codes; innovations in civil law rules regarding the requirements of valid contracts; alterations in public zoning laws restricting the use of land; changes in building codes; variations in minimum wage laws; innovative obligatory pension contribution laws; changes in negligence liability and resulting changes in insurance rates, etc., all combine to determine what the public decides to define, quite arbitrarily, as what is yours and what is not. Also, surrounding forces in the social environment further add to or subtract from the wealth you have by decisions of the community as a whole. Thus your factory makes more money if public schooling is better since your workers will be more competent; the reliability of the publicly-provided justice system determines how much money you can make by enforcing contractual obligations in your favor; the honesty, skill, and number of policemen determines whether people can steal your wealth or whether you have to pay for your own private security service, etc. Thus since what you have is determined by decisions which the surrounding community makes, it is perfectly consistent with the social nature of your possessions that the community can also take some of it back in taxes and wealth redistribution policies.

Unfortunately I can't follow your argument when you try to make your connection between the Jesuits, the Jews, the Holocaust, Einstein, and Hitler. Perhaps you could reformulate it. The problem of correctly translating the Bible so as to receive the message God really intended is an intractible one. First, the 'language' of the Bible was actually an overlay of many languages processing a message until little if anything was left of its original form. The ideas behind it started out as Aramaic in the New Testament, and then were transcribed by authors who thought in terms of Greek and Hebrew (e.g., St. Paul), so what language do we select as embodying the 'genuine' message in the palimpset? But the 'radical indeterminacy of translation,' discussed by Quine, poses an even more difficult problem. Consider this example: In Aristotle's mind his firm belief in a humanitarian approach to the world was perfectly consistent with his equally firm belief that slavery was acceptable. But no one today, in any language, would find slavery and humanitarianism consistent beliefs. So how do we understand Aristotle's way of thinking, Aristotle's mind, or anything Aristotle is trying to tell us? The same problem undermines all efforts to understand what the authors of the Bible were saying. No matter how good the linguistic translation of their message might be, we can never understand their peculiar mindset, so we cannot comprehend the message they are supposedly so desperate to communicate accurately to us. For this reason, it seems absurd to believe that God could have used such a feeble means of communicating his divine message as the Bible. Wouldn't his omniscience allow him to have anticipated Quine's radical indeterminacy of translation problem?

Everything that Needimprovement says makes the same error, which is to assume that he can take concepts as absolutes and then treat these absolutized concepts as implying empirical truths about the concrete, material world which exists outside of concepts. I can grant (in proof 8 above) that 'being,' taken absolutely as excluding all becoming, is conceptually one, without being bound by that concession that that being actually exists, or that that one actually corresponds to something in the real world. Since that correspondence does not follow from those conceptual manipulations, the proofs say more about what follows from using language in a certain way than what follows in the real world. Is Needimprovement, with all his citing of Aristotle and Aquinas, a Jesuit?