Capitalism is a great thing and I understand the positive win win it's exactly why we have advanced in so many breakthroughs in overall life expectancy and comfortable living... but should conservatives just ignore statistics? Should we just allow national debt to drown our future generations? When we have other options? Big Pharma can change, Insurance can change, education can change, energy can change ALL without socialism.. my point is greed in high places and it's obvious, I also believe our presence here effects the planet (our environment) many studies prove this. So they both point to Sin, I can recycle and reuse all the day long but I can't trust others to do it so my little achievements do not benefit the whole, although it saves me some money like you said, but free energy used the correct way would be more efficient regardless if it slows down climate change or not.
All sorts of things can change without as fundamental a change as shifting to a totally different system. The trouble we have now isn't so much capitalism as the kind of corporate cronyism where those at the bottom face the ravages of capitalism while those at the top are cushioned thanks to having too much government on hand to regulate competition out of the market. It's a nice place to be where you can get laws written to create a huge regulatory barrier to new market entrants, where you can privatise profits while socialising losses, where you can take big risks knowing that if you win you win and if you lose the government takes money from everybody to bail you out so you can roll the dice again. None of this can be considered free market capitalism.
I know this is mixing concepts a little here but small government doesn't involve a huge national debt. The country survived for almost 200 years before breaking the link between the dollar and hard, tangible commodities (specifically gold). It survived just fine with prices slowly declining over time, where if you didn't need something you didn't buy it yet. Next year the price will be a little cheaper, because someone figured out how to make it for less and it was still every bit as good. Now we're chasing everlasting growth and things are made to be thrown away, usually by the companies that gush about their environmental credentials, while they make things designed to last one month longer than the warranty and of course the whole thing isn't user-servicable so you pretty much have to send it to the landfill.
Many things could change, and probably would change in a truly free market. But when regulations keep new players out of the market, however noble those regulations may appear, the result is the sort of thing we see now. When an Epi-pen costs a few bucks to make and the company that makes them can hike the price from $300 to $600, what stops a new player entering the market and selling the thing that costs them $5 for maybe $100? Chances are it's regulation - the rules are worded so as to appear to protect the little people (you know, can't have some unregulated entity producing something as important as an Epi-pen, or insulin, or whatever else is priced at some silly level) but actually does more to protect vested interests (because, you know, can't have some newfangled Johnny-come-lately showing up and undercutting us).
Education is lazy, they do not teach you about the real life they tell us questionable history and tell us about greek gods and basic math... Imagine if they taught hospitality and medical fundamentals by graduation, I went to medical school and if you haven't noticed in Hospitals they treat everyone accordingly down to what generation they are and what religion they are... it's the most polite and sanest education I ever received...
I've never spent any meaningful time in a US hospital, my experience is limited to a couple of trips to the ER for matters that were dealt with there and then and I was out within an hour or so.
You're right about education, it teaches all sorts of useless things while not teaching people what matters. It increasingly fails to teach people how to think, while teaching them what to think, thereby making sure they'll be ideally suited to shout at people on social media while not having the faintest idea how to explain
why they think a certain way. Of course the people who can't explain why they think a certain way make ideal serfs because they'll never question much of anything, they just know that anyone who has a different view must be wrong and ostracise them for being wrong. If kids can come out of school and have no idea how to balance a bank account, how a credit card works, how to create and manage a basic household budget and the like, they are set up to fail. Small wonder credit card debt is out of control, and the chances are many of the people with crushing debts can barely even understand what happened to them.
we have no clue how long until Christ returns but I feel we got the attitude of "so what" when it would change the world if conservatives would unite with modernizing the environment with much cleaner air and less hostility. Jesus put hypocrites in their place but he always had a special divine understanding of how a human should behave towards other humans, I just worry so often that Christianity for the most part is losing it's senses.. I surprise atheist all the time when I tell them about what Jesus himself actually spoke and taught, I tell them how he went around answering questions in beautiful parables and he would only speak doom and gloom to those hypocrites full of pride, how he would heal the sick and comfort the poor who are far from perfect and who were sinners...
This is very true. Sadly many people prefer to point out how Jesus supports their personal political stance rather than looking at what he actually taught. It's easy to come up with "10 reasons why Jesus would vote (the way I vote)" but you probably don't have to look very hard to find "10 reasons why Jesus would vote (the other way)" if you're willing to be intellectually honest. It's easier to modify Jesus to make him more like me (and therefore make me appear more Christlist) than it is to modify me to become more like Jesus and genuinely become more Christlike.
I get the impression that, if we were to borrow the words spoken to the woman caught in adultery, "neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more", and look at how this is applied today, it seems that those on the left are quick to pull the "neither do I condemn you" and act as if everything is OK, while those on the right are more prone to pull the "go and sin no more" while condemning the person for their past sin. It's like a doctor who either looks at a sick patient and says "no, you're fine just as you are, off you go", or who tells the sick patient to get better and then come in for an appointment. Both are useless.
So my expression on climate change is that regardless we all know that something is deeply troubling globally, dead fish whales beaching, earthquakes, fires, pigs jumping off cliffs, blood rain and rivers, volcanos, ground breaking open, massive surge of hurricanes floods and tropical storms, etc.. and yes we may see it all because we are overloaded with world wide information but it's still right there in the bible that we would experience "knowing and hearing of" these things, I believe it's now that it was speaking of.
And no wonder, Christianity is luke warm, persecutions of Christians are every else but here yet we complain and throw stones at sinners..
Meh.. *sips tea calmly*
We certainly aren't doing a great job of looking after the planet. Regardless of the issue of carbon emissions and what, if any, effect they might have on the climate we know that dumping plastics everywhere is bad, we know that polluting everything is bad, and we know that the earth is struggling under the weight of the pollution. One question that always needs to be considered when looking at things like natural disasters is whether they are actually becoming more frequent, whether they have always happened but social media spreads word like wildfire, whether they always happened but human activity has created a bigger impact (coastal storms are less of an issue when the coast isn't lined with expensive oceanfront property), and to what extent nature is balanced and human activity has simply unbalanced it (e.g. nature's design often provides for drainage for increased rainfall but humans paving over runoff areas can result in water flowing downhill faster, causing flooding elsewhere).
My concern with pointing at all sorts of things as if they were proof that The End in an escatological sense is just around the corner is that it causes a loss of credibility. I remember around 1990 there was a lot of talk about the "signs of the end" that were coming and how they were all around us, and yet here we are nearly 30 years later . Even in Paul's day there were people who thought the end would be "any day now" so that's nothing new. Too much focus on The End in an eschatological sense isn't helpful, not least because it makes it more likely that people will ignore the concept of The End in a personal sense. Whether this earth lasts another week or another million years, none of us has a cast-iron guarantee that we will wake up tomorrow morning. If we fuss over every little thing as a "sign o' the times" then each passing prediction that proves wrong makes us look silly.
Of course every person like that guy who spouts such utter nonsense is like the boy who cried wolf. Why should anyone listen to us if we keep making random predictions that always prove to be wrong?
