Japan is the poster child for traditional religious practices surviving even when people stop describing themselves as religious. There are temples all over the damn place.
I wonder if Satan's current plan is to convert world to atheism, and then move from atheism to Satanism.
It's more like people naturally choose atheism to justify not reproducing.
more and more atheists arise among Christians.
That may be true in the short term, but Christians have an annoyingly persistent tendency to outbreed people with fewer reasons to procreate.
All cultures that survive and dominate are done so through force, be it violence or force through the ballot box.
INSHALLAH
It was shown historically that when Christianity is not forced on people, it starts disappearing.
Roman lions were not enough, how do you top that? Pitbulls?
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
-Adams
“I want a culturally Christian nation whose government guarantees equal legal rights and religious liberty to everyone.”
-actual American Christian position, not the strawmans of the OP.
American democracy does not require cultural neutrality, nor does the Constitution demand it. Democracy gives citizens the equal right to preserve, promote, change, or reject the culture they inherited peacefully without violence while also refusing government the power to make dissenters second-class citizens.
Democratic cultural advocacy is a legitimate function of American democracy.
Im a flawed asshole
I used to spend all night drinking and playing SC2 Mafia. So there.
There are no Trump towers in Gaza or Canada. That is why evil exists.
Yes, Canada is Gaza now, thanks to Trump.
62% of the people living in Canada's capital city can't speak French either. Ottawa is already set for a rename to Trumppawa.
Canadian AI made Trump do it.
He has access to Canadian AI.
Trump is using you.
Except if trump doesn't want to disclose his taxes, he doesnt have to try to become president. We have good reasons for wanting him to submit, but all you have are some vague ideas of privacy and free speech. To be clear, your rationale is only an analogy for why he shouldn't have to submit them, cause neither privacy or free speech laws would prevent us from making submission of taxes a requirement
You are confusing what voters may demand with what government may compel. You should be perfectly free to refuse to vote for a candidate who won't release his taxes. That doesn't establish government authority to condition access to the presidency on surrendering private records. ‘He doesn't have to run’ is not a limiting principle. It could justify compelled disclosure of other stuff like medical records, school records, family finances or virtually anything else legislators claim voters would find useful. Next you will say government has no incentive to weaponize that information in bad faith. Good luck with that. Your american laws and Constitution are based on innocent until proven guilty for this very reason.
It's a system that only works with a moral society. The fact that you and others are pushing for a wholly immoral society where guilt is presumed before innocence shows the direction your country is headed.
The problem isn't Trump, MAGA, or TDS signalling. It's establishing a legal presumption that seeking public office requires you to prove your innocence by surrendering private records to the government. Once you normalize that principle, every lawful detail uncovered can be selectively investigated, leaked, or politically weaponized through legitimate channels. Government should need a particularized justification to invade someone's privacy; citizens shouldn't have to surrender privacy to prove there's nothing there. And a country should NEVER legitimize the weaponization of government against detractors.
You tend to do that... when backed into a corner with logic, you masterfully evade the situation...
The fact that you don't even discuss the one tax return that was voluntarily submitted heavily implies you are also wearing the skin of fiscal responsibility for an ulterior goal. That's not logic, it's deception. Socialists want to radically transform USA into a "guilty until proven innocent" type nation in order to promote class warfare, where everyone is required to justify every choice they make from cradle to the grave to an uncaring authoritarian. It's against your constitution and also moral decency, where your country moved away from scarlet-letter branding.
Your Congress released six years of tax returns in December 2022, but you were asleep along with Biden, apparently. And zero legal cases were filed after the 2022 release. The skin of legitimacy can't hide the stench of TDS.
It's the same reason pied-à-terre tax millionaires left New York after Mamdani published and disseminated a list of the PEOPLE who were paying the tax.
It's promoting class warfare and violence. There is no upside, no matter how you break it down. Many socialists in America wear the skin of fiscal responsibility to provide a casus belli against classes and justifying the violence.
Thank you for taking the rage bait AI.
How about this?
Or bankruptcies.
The implication isn’t “unfair”, it’s a demonstration of how in a capitalistic society those who accumulate wealth become better positioned to attain even more wealth.
Gross conceptualization error. In fact, Walmart has to take many more risks and work much harder than mom-and-pop to keep its market share. Large companies like that are a Dylan Mulvaney ad away from losing years of investments. The only thing you could rightly say is unfair is that some people were taught to avoid risks, and others were taught to take them. Risk takers may beget risk takers, but there is no guarantee it translates to wealth.
Here's some examples:
You can have ragebait from both sides.
Once brainless masses get used to idea of rich people paying for all expenses brainless masses made, then that just motivates brainless masses to spend even more.
this type of democracy is indeed a path to communism.
When the unproductive wolves outnumber the productive sheep, you get an unproductive form of government such as communism.
A common fundamental mistake is defining capitalism as a system of power. It isn't. Capitalism is mainly a system of freedom: the freedom to own, build, save, invest, trade, take risks, succeed, fail, and try again. Its central question isn't “Who has the power?” It's “Are you free to build?”...or does some other entity control your future?
The trite phrase: “wealth begets wealth” isn't really axiomatic. Otherwise, everyone would be billionaires. Wealth, actually in real life, begets consumption, not wealth, remarkably easily. For wealth to become productive capital, someone generally has to make a personal choice devoid of external compulsion to delay gratification: to consume less than they could today, to save the difference, to invest it, to accept risk, to wait for a return, and frequently develop a habit to reinvest that return rather than consume it in a fit of class signaling. Only by living this way repeatedly for years can "wealth beget wealth." But the compounding isn't some magical privilege bestowed upon someone merely because they possess money. Kids flush inheritances down the toilet as the norm. The willingness to sacrifice consumption today for greater productive capacity tomorrow is precisely one of the behaviors capitalism rewards with prosperity. It's an incentive structure for those willing to sacrifice, and the reward is much more than monetary wealth, it's a sense of worldly purpose, of participating in divine growth. If the ultimate purpose of life is to evolve, grow, and pass on to the next generation, no other economic system allows a person to embrace this natural urge. Wealth doesn't beget wealth. Wealth weeds out the immoral.
The Walmart example doesn't contradict this; Walmart exists because generations of capital were accumulated and reinvested into stores, warehouses, trucks, inventory, logistics, technology, and distribution rather than simply consumed. That scale now gives Walmart bargaining advantages today, certainly. But DoubleR is describing the result of accumulated investment as though the accumulation required no sacrifice, risk, competition, or restraint to create. More importantly, Walmart is NOT authoritarian. It makes offers. Suppliers make choices. Consumers make choices. Competitors remain free to build something better. Capitalism protects that freedom, not Walmart's wealth. In fact, wealth untended will always decay due to simple entropy. It was never, and can never be, a zero-sum concept in a world of natural entropy. This concept of wealth not being zero-sum goes far beyond the trite teach a man to fish, give a man a fish framework. It's more like giving a man a live fish and telling him that the fish has a set zero-sum value, and not to raise the fish for roe and offspring because his urge to gratify himself is the highest virtue.
His house example actually demonstrates the same principle. The cash buyer who offers $270,000 acquired the ability to make that offer because somebody already possesses $270,000 that they have chosen not to consume. The homeowner, meanwhile, owns the house and remains free to reject the offer. If he accepts less money in exchange for immediate payment and certainty, both parties have exercised their freedom over property they own. That's a free exchange, not subjugation OR exploitation. What actually IS exploitation is the government making this kind of transaction near impossible.
Shifting the words wealth and power to say that “power is largely zero-sum” reveals the deeper error. Political power is zero-sum. If I acquire legal authority to control you, I've gained something at the expense of your freedom. Prosperity isn't. A farmer who saves for a tractor can produce more food. A carpenter who buys better equipment can produce more furniture. An entrepreneur who reinvests profits can build another factory. Their increased wealth doesn't require an equivalent subtraction from somebody else's wealth. They created productive capacity that didn't previously exist, and they TOOK IT FROM NOBODY. That is NOT zero-sum.
If zero-sum theory was a universal reality, we would all still be living in caves with zero growth.
That's why I will NEVER see inequality as evidence that capitalism has failed. Inequality is the measure of freedom. People can choose to decay and embrace entropy. People can thrive and grow and rage, rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas penned in his famous poem. If two people are equally free and one consistently consumes today while another consistently sacrifices today, saves, invests, risks and reinvests, eventually their wealth WILL become radically unequal. Preventing that inequality would mean preventing one of them from fully enjoying the consequences of his choices. At some point, supposedly correcting “power” becomes restricting freedom. In the end, to pursue equality would entail fierce authoritarianism to take humans and turn them into robots with no agency.
Fine, I will concede that government has a legitimate role in protecting that system: enforce contracts, punish fraud and theft, protect property, and prevent people from replacing voluntary exchange with coercion. But government possesses the awful taint of actual coercive power and monopoly on justified force. Giving it ever-increasing authority to determine how much prosperity someone is permitted to retain really just concentrates a different and much more literal kind of it. And it naturally creates a class where the only justified wealth holders are the ones managing wealth levels in the government when the system is "might makes right"
So when I hear “wealth begets wealth,” I don't hear an indictment of capitalism. I hear a resounding description of one of its most important incentives:
Delay gratification. Save instead of consuming everything. Build instead of merely possessing. Risk what you've saved. Reinvest what succeeds. Do it long enough, and prosperity compounds. That is freedom rewarding the moral behavior that creates more tomorrow than it consumes today. Matthew 25:29
A free society requires no takers to sustain it. A free society punishes, reforms, or exiles takers as existential threats. But a free society is wholly unsuitable to an immoral populace, and that is true, long before and since John Adams said it.
When it is given, it's always received with gratitude and more than deserved; when it is taken, it's always received with resentment and longing. That's basic human psychology.
My ultimate point is that society functions better with more trust if welfare is given through charity instead of being taken through sin taxation.
I know I dont like the idea of an income tax on below average income...
It's this thinking that has created so many wolves voting for unlimited spending.
These incentives guarantee deficit spending.
My main concern is that if you refuse to tax the poor and blindly aspire to the religion of jealousy, you are essentially constructing the perverted "2 wolves and a Sheep" style of Democracy, where you create a majority of wolves by removing accountability from the poor. And that is why they vote up unlimited spending bills. They suffer nothing for doing so. The incentives guarantee deficit spending.
If your country hadn't experimented with the idea of having the most progressive tax scale on the planet for 40 years, I would take you more seriously, but many people in your country continue to chant "tax the rich" as a sacred mantra as if the past 40 years never existed. It gets tiresome beyond fatigue. You say you are prosperous, but the past 40 years of the most progressive taxes on the planet don't show it. The very existence of Trump refutes your prosperity claim.
If the poor aren't footing their fair share of the spending bills, they will initiate force through voting to enact more spending laws to drive the nation into bankruptcy.
Even Europe isn't stupid enough to not tax the poor and middle class for this very reason. Yall had an experiment for 40 years with the most progressive tax scale in the world, and the debt has spoken.
The difference between the left and right when it comes to Trump is that the left judges Trump by the same standards as we judge any president.
I've watched enough videos of people testing the residents of deep-blue Marxist cities in America. They cite a quote from Obama, tell them Trump said it, and they instantly denounce it. Every. Time. It's a cult.
Obama was worse than a bad president.
He was irrelevant.
Obama was dressed up as the beginning of a new political age, but perhaps he was actually the end of the previous one. Biden was but a nail in the existing coffin.
