The Christian God is a supernatural and incorporeal being. His adherents believe he has the power to create the world, to part seas, inseminate virgins, raise the dead and rapture the faithful.  

Such powers can only be described as magical. 

RO

Finance.  

Can the U.S. government borrow enough money to support the various financial institutions that are in danger of insolvency? Let’s not discuss the moral dynamic in this situation. Everyone knows that individuals and financial institutions that lent inappropriate amounts of money to them have behaved irresponsibly. If it were practical to punish them in isolation, I would cast the first stone. However, economic entities in a complex jurisdiction like the United States are interdependent. If the government lets one fail, that collapse may has systemic consequences, as other players (even the prudent ones) are brought down by the failure of others to meet obligations. 

The U.S. government cannot afford to let the first domino fall! 

Its capacity to support the financial system is a limited by how much it can borrow. That capacity is being tested. Watch this space. 

Psychology 

Market sentiment is driven by confidence. If people and corporations are positive about the future, they buy, they borrow, they invest, and the economy grows. If people and corporations are uncertain about the future, they sell, they repay, they retrench and the economy shrinks. If this process gathers momentum, it can become irrational and self destructive. 

I am not convinced that the stimulus packages will turn sentiment around. The Bear Stern bail out did that for a while, but since the latest sell off, the market are not likely to take as much heart from such government interventions. What will turn the sentiment around? Time. 

Time will give the U.S. a new president and a replacement cycle. A new president may not be able to do much, but the very fact of a new face at the White House may give people hope and a little optimism.  

Eventually all economic cycles run their course. Not everyone looses their job, and eventually people start taking advantage of cheap prices and spend. Inventories run down, the excess capacity is taken up, employment is created and the economy moves on. 

But it will take a few years. 

The great economist, John Kenneth Galbraith once said that ‘The collective memory of the financial markets is about ten years.’ In ten years from now, this will forgotten by all but economic historians and those shrewd individual traders who will set themselves to take advantage of the next crash in asset values. 

Richard Oakes

Melbourne

Almost inevitably, something has to give. Thence cometh the fireworks.

Richard

Seneca lived in the time of Nero, when not being compliant meant getting it in the neck. (Come to think of it, Seneca was compliant and still copped it.)  

We live in an era where dissent is permissible. Unless someone gets annoyed enough to get out there and do something, can we ever change the world and make it a better place?  

RO

Why do people become angry?

The Roman philosopher Seneca, argued that anger results the surprise experienced when our expectations are disappointed or contradicted. We become angry when another drive cuts in on us on the freeway. We get angry when shop assistant serves someone who enters the shop after us. We get angry with politicians who vote against matters we think are important.

Seneca argued that the remedy for anger is pessimism. We should lower and realign our expectations of the world to a point where we are not caught by surprise. We should be realistic. There will always be bad divers on the road. Shop assistants will always loose track of the order customers should be served in. Politicians will always do what they have to, to be reelected, rather than what is best for the state or for the country.

We would all be less angry if we stopped expecting the world to be perfect.

Richard Oakes

(After thought: A Berkshire Hatherway investor once asked Warren Buffet what he thought was the secret of a happy marriage. Buffet’s response: ‘Marry a woman with low expectations.’)

The meaning of the word Agnosticism, comes from the Greek: ‘without knowledge’. Given that science has provided enormous amounts of knowledge that contradicts the empirical claims of religion, is it reasonable to maintain a position that ‘the jury is still out’?

(I suspect that our theist friends pokoj, luke and jesse can sit back on this one, rather like the Iranians during the first Gulf War, not caring who wins, but hoping for plenty of casualties.)

However, the question is a historical one. HAS Christianity messed up Western Culture IN THE PAST? From this perspective, the question isn’t so straight forward.

Christianity has been a major influence forming Western culture during the last millennium. Christianity has fostered education, art, literature, law and science. It is reasonable to argue that the West would not a have achieved its ascendancy without this support. The universities that emerged during the late Middle Ages were originally religious institutions. Their primary purpose was to train clergy, but while doing so they became centers for the development of literacy and intellectual enquiry. Eventually they would produce the great minds, like Luther and Galileo, who would challenge the authority of the Church, and sow the seeds of the secular intellectual tradition that we enjoy today.

These great learning institutions would not have been possible without the financial resources of the Church to support them.

In the development of Western culture, the Church didn’t always plant the seed, but it did plow the paddock.

Richard Oakes

Would our faltering marriages have a better chance of survival if we all took a cold hearted, pragmatic approach to everyday accommodations and compromises that are essential if two people are to put up with one another for an extended period of time?

Love is an evolutionary adaptation. People who don’t love don’t reproduce, or if they do, their offspring have a vastly reducted probability of survival. Millions of years of evolution have favoured species who copulate, protect the gestating females and protect offspring until they are old enough to look after themselves. Evolving man didn’t figure this out for himself. It was trial and error until a species evolved that registered pleasure when it did what was necessary to perpetual and protect the species. We call that pleasure, love.  

It is an easy step for love of group, protection of other group members and their offspring to become an evolutionary advantage in group selection. 

There is always an element of self interest in love.

If the universe or the latest incarnation of the universe we inhabit started with a Big Bang, I can understand why matter is hurling away from the point of singularity and the universe is said to be expanding.  

If that motion result from the Big Bang, intuitively, I would expect that the energy of that explosion would dissipate over time and that the rate that the universe expands would decline. 

If I am wrong, and the absence of impediments and friction in the vacuum of space negate the dissipation of energy, then I would expect the universe to expand at a constant rate. 

Observations from the Hubble Telescope tell us that the rate at which the universe is expanding is accelerating.

How can this be? For this to happen, a new release of energy is required. Where does it come from? 

I am a parent of a 17 and a 14 year old, and I am trying to figure out what went right.

• They do their homework without being asked and are successful at school.

• They are capable of conducting conversations in words constructed of more than one syllable.

• They never seem to have the mobile phones turned on.

• They like the grunge and punk music.

• My son doesn’t gag when I ask him to play golf with me.

• They have both read Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and pronounced themselves atheist, without any parental encouragement. (My son appears to have started an eighth grade Atheists Club.)

• They are into science.

• They worry about the planet.

The only conscious effort I have made to direct their thinking has been make sure they had lots to read, to tell them what I think, and to entertain them with stories of the stupid things I did when I was their age.

Maybe I have just been lucky. I hear too many horror stories from my peers to think this is normal. Can readers contribute their philosophies, thoughts and ‘war stories’ on this subject. I am particularly keen to hear the other side – what the kids think.

Richard Oakes

Western nations have been fighting a war again illicit drug use for more that half a century. Governments have made decisions, usually on public health grounds, that using certain drugs is a bad thing. The strategy to stop illicit drug use has been to criminalize its production, distribution and use.

This is clearly not working.

If anything, the criminalization of the illicit drug trade has fostered a new and more danger evil in the form of organized crime. It was the same during the prohibition in the 1920s.

It is time to try something different. It is time to start treating the use of certain drugs as a public health issue.

Governments should intervene to either the supply drugs or license suppliers. Drug should be available on prescription at prices that cut the dealers out of the market. Converting users from criminals into patients would go some way to make drugs uncool and provide greater opportunities for treatment and remediation at an individual level.  

The success of such a reform might be estimated by reference to the impact of the removal of Prohibition in 1933 and the experience in countries like Denmark and the Netherlands. In both cases substance abuse continued to some extent. But a lot of the nasty side affects went away.

We have to ask ourselves, would decriminalization of the illicit drug industry make things worse than they are now?

Richard Oakes