Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Hebe,
Yes, affable was right. I remember him doing a book review on After School (I was a kid, OK?). His favorite book, amusingly, was Robinson Crusoe . Didn't anyone ever tell him no man is an island?
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Scott Chris,
So what's the diff?
What Matthew said. If you consider that denial of liberty for years on end is the punishment then there's no further need for the basic denial of a lot of human comforts that could make a difference to the ability of prisoners to rehabilitate. Being denied access to a whole lot of things that we ordinarily do, like conversation with people, consumption of news and entertainments, and self-education, will make people start going really strange. It's possible to lose altogether the ability to understand society when one is placed in some hellhole, indeed to start seeing society entirely in those terms. So if beatings are part of life in prison, and one's personal safety comes to depend upon the extent to which one appears dangerous and lacking in empathy, to scare off the bullies, then this behavior is very likely to perpetuate upon release. A similar thing is a big problem for returned servicemen who have done tours of duty in hellish war zones too, and a good argument for very frequent vacations and short shifts for soldiers so that paranoia and violence don't become their permanent mindset.
It's bad enough that the people that prisoners spend the most time with are other prisoners, and typically for similar (and often considerably worse) crimes, in terms of rehabilitation. We become like the people we spend the most time with, that is just a normal human response to the world. If rehabilitation really was a high priority, prisons would mostly be populated by people helping to give prisoners life skills for their reintegration, teachers, mentors, etc.
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Anyone who outright stole millions of dollars from a bank would be doing hard time, and rightly so, but destroy the life savings of thousands and you’re on gardening duty for a few months.
To be fair, stealing from a bank the non-white collar way does typically involve highly credible threats of severe violence to multiple people, and frequently leads to it. Death of the robbers and innocent staff or bystanders is not a common outcome of fraudulent theft. So there's a reason bank robbery carries heavy penalties - it is really a crime of violence as well as theft.
But I'd agree that some of the punishments for fairly extreme fraud are so tiny it's ridiculous. I guess it's seen that one of the other punishments of being busted for fraud is total loss of reputation - the convicted will never hold a job again that involves being trusted. This is not insignificant. In the long run it could end up being more severe than bankruptcy.
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Jesus' hate for zombies is strangely endearing too.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Otherwise I'd say that Christian is more than just a convenient term for media.
It's not a particularly strict term, but that doesn't make it completely meaningless. If someone says they are a Christian, it's a pretty safe bet that they think the words attributed to Jesus are very important. There may well be people calling themselves Christians who don't agree with, believe, or care about the things Jesus is reported to have said, perhaps even going so far as to deny that he ever existed, or said any of those things if he did, but they're surely a tiny minority. Why would they bother to take the name?
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I'm really glad the conclusion to this story was that no fighting ensued (which shows why you broke the first and second rule of fight club by even mentioning the episode). It's got a way of getting really out of hand, really fast. I can understand how the situation evolved, but it's important to remember that there were multiple chances to disengage all the way along.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to NBH,
"Why Religious People Are Wrong" would have been a less sleazily antagonistic title.
Or the even more careful phrasing by Bertrand Russell "Why I am not a Christian".
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Materialist?
That is the name often used for non-dualists, which is rather close to atheism, but not identical. Materialists do not believe in souls.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Bart Janssen,
To make more of me.
That particular goal would appear to have been solved by single celled organisms billions of years ago. Still the biggest biomass, even today.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Roger,
I did my school years in a series of religious education facilities that turned out to be very effective at turning me off religion and for many year I choose to just not think about this part of my life.
I wonder how much of my own tolerance of religious belief comes from the negligible part it has played in my life.
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