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- Monday, February 6, 6:22 PM Greece agrees to lay off 15,000 public-sector workers by the end of 2012, a government minister says, which would signal a concession after meetings between PM Papademos and Greece's political leaders over a reform program demanded by the country's creditors had been delayed for another day.
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It's okay to watch a train wreck, as long as you are not near the tracks. It is even more important to not be on that train.
Oh, yeah, that's right, I forgot. These people can't even muster the will to make babies. Broke? No more than that - broken, beaten, abject, fading away into history.
Otherwise, they will be labeled as "overproductive", and forced out of Spain.
Should be cast off ASAFP.
Of course, 15,000 Greek civil servants should be sacked, the elderly should have their pensions slashed, the minimum wage reduced by 20%, and a further 1.5 to 3% cut from the 2012 budget. And there are a host of other requirements that are being made, conditional on Greece getting the €130 Bn loan that they want.
Any reasonable person can see that this is justified.
Sure some people will suffer. There will be beggers in the streets like in America. Some people will die because they don't get the medical treatment they need, but they would have died anyway. It just would just have taken longer.
And the Greeks don't deserve our compassion. They are the authors of their own misfortune. They made the decision to join the EC and the Eurozone. No-one forced them to.
Greece should make these changes because they are morally right. It shouldn't matter whether or not they will make the economy stronger, because it almost certainly won't. Next year they will be back.
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Morality has NOTHING to do with social cycles of behavior. The strong claim they are strong because they are moral. The strong get to make the rules because they are strong, not because they are moral. Is America moral? Is America more moral or less moral than China? Is America more moral or less moral than Nepal?
When we worship the material god we become strong in the world. But the Bible (both Old and New Testament) telsl us that power and wealth in the world belongs to Satan. So, does material strength denote morality, or lack of understanding?
So who has more power the lender or the borrower who is in over their head?
You give a distorted view of what the Bible teaches. Certainly earth is Satan's domain but his power is not unchecked. God is still overall and can bless those He chooses. And He also puts in power who He wants. And He also says "The cattle on a thousand hills are mine." Creation and all that is in it still belongs to God.
The Bible does give a lesson about the ant and the grasshopper which is applicable here. Along with "you reap what you sow." Your statement "morality has nothing to do with social cycles of behavior" is in direct conflict with the aforementioned verse.
Clearly the lender has more power especially when he has the lender (and all other taxpayers) on the hook also paying him bailout money when his bad judment and bad loan fails.
I have a distorted view of what the Bible teaches? How can you tell whose view is distorted and whose is clear? Plus, we must understand that the Bible is written by men attempting to understand God and His/Her Creation.
Satan is not the force of and director of materialism on earth? The cattle on a thousand hills are definitely God's, but what about the men living in the golden towers who think THEY own all the cattle? Do they belong to God or Satan?
In the sense that God created Satan also, then all of God's creation is his own. And man's passing into the Evil Zone (the Valley of the Shadow of Death AND the Mountain of the Substance of Death) is also a part of this plan apparently. But when someone starts telling me who and what are evil, I remember that what I thought was evil at 26 I thought was virtue at 52; and then I remember that this wheel is ever turning; and perhaps, I begin to think, the only truth that includes both truth and falsehood and sees each as a kind of relative truth that is built up from a time perspective.
Evil is the sense of duality that makes us think we have to kill someone for truth and destroy something for truth, so that we will always be on the right side.
Yeah every lender has federal bailout in their business plan along with them losing jobs and shutting down the bank. Get serious.
Your Biblical view is distorted because it is so far outside of mainstream Christianity it is by definition distorted. You cannot define by your own interpretation who God is and what he claims or does not claim. If you don't believe the Bible then don't hijack it for your own purposes. That is illogical and/or devious and manipulative.
If your view of evil and virtue is changing dramatically then you never had a good foundation to decide in the first place. And your sense of evil leading to kill someone is way over the top.
Seriously you seem to be floundering around.
Interesting idea.
Jesus didn't believe that. Jesus believed the mainstream was lost and needed to be reformed. In fact, the Jews always had a grudging mandated respect for the prophets even though they knew the role of the prophet was to come back and condemn the mainstream for being lost.
I admit that I am traveling in a stream that does not have many congregations...but does that mean I am not seeing correctly? Einstein saw a lot but very few saw what he saw. Do you think the mainstream saw what Shakespeare or Dante saw? I should think not.
You seem to be defending the average, Tomas, figuring that all, as you call them, distortions come back to the average eventually.
There is a higher spiritual truth beyond good and evil, Tomas. Moralism is simply choosing one side of the duality. Both sides are moral in their given context, or at least appear to be so -- they are reading their environment accurately. They just forget that there are different environments, seasons, with different perceptions of truth. The higher spiritual truth marries the two sides of dualities into a unity. That's what Jesus meant by love your brother, love your enemy; do not resist evil.
My sense of evil being the polarization into a duality that leads one to kill another for poltical or moral superiority is way over the top? Are you forgetting history? History has too many examples of this to catalog: Nazis, Khmer Rouge, KKK, the Spanish Army of Christ in America...all defenders of the truth and destroyers of evil.
At 26 I thought right wing patriotic America was evil; at 52 I thought right wing patriotic America was virtuous. See how the wheel turns.
Generally speaking everyone should see right wing patriotism as evil when they are young because one should be naively idealistic when young and right wing politics seems hard and not sensitive enough. And then when one grows up they see the manipulation of the system by people who are extracting or stealing from others and realizes it is not all about empathy in isolation. There is a Jewish saying that goes something like "Empathy for the wicked is being wicked to the just." We certainly live that experience today.
Being wicked is not just reserved for the most flagrant examples. If you want to be Biblical it is wickedness at every level and involves rebellion against God and his commandments. The mixture of politics and religion creates the flagrant examples because politics is power and power wants justification so the use religion as a cloak. Witness the politicians going to church for a photo op when they are running for office. Tasteless to say the least.
Jesus came not to reform but to restore back to God as did the prophets before Him. These are fundamental tenets of the Bible and are expressed in His own words. If you believe His words are average then just leave the Bible alone and write your own book.
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Jesus did not come to reform the corrupt mainstream? But he came to restore back to God...the corrupt mainstream view? Is there a difference in meaning here, or are you playing at semantics?
The mainstream is average, always. Defending the mainstream is identifying with the world that is dying out. When we are young we are idealists because the young are not defending their possessions, because the own nothing, have established no personal empire -- and they are demanding that the world lives according to ideals. The young are closer to God than are the Middle Aged adults, who have turned away from God and embraced the logic of Satan: pragmatism -- of course, they do not understand it this way. You have to be pragmatic. You have to be realistic. But God lives close to children, to the dreamers, to the prophets, not to the kings of the Earth, not to the pragmatists, the defenders of the established beliefs, the mainstream. The mainstream is ALWAYS wrong.
God does not value realism. God values idealism.
I forgot to finish my thought in the last post:
"At 26 I thought right wing patriotic America was evil; at 52 I thought right wing patriotic America was virtuous. See how the wheel turns...." Now, again, at 61, I again am beginning to suspect that right wing patriotic America is evil. Selfish. Worshipping Satan, Saturn, the God of Money and materialism. Putting Money ahead of every other value. I read on this web site the angry cursing of poor people by 'conservatives' who are afraid some of their money is going to be taken away from them and given away to all the 'losers on the bottom who aren't willing to work for a living".
Jesus told the rich who were in pain to sell their belongings and give the money to the poor. Jesus was a socialist. He was an idealist. He did not come to earth to defend the policies of Rome, which was stealing resources from the world, hand over fist, to condemn all the losers at the bottom of the world who didn't know how to create an empire. That was Paul. Paul did that, at least in the beginning. And that was always a big part of Paul's creed. Because Paul was a fascist at heart. A religious fascist.
Jesus came to humans offering a way out of duality: right vs. left; capitalist vs. socialist; white vs. black. The way out is love; the marriage of the two opposites. Synthesis of opposing principles.
You have to choose Ego or Love; you can't have both. Ego defends itself against the world, hoards, justifies almost any kind of behavior to 'survive', to be a winner -- to have his body survive. Ego is about personal empire being threatened by almost everyone. Love is different. Ego is how Satan takes over the world.
Jesus actually is the gatekeeper. When he appears in the world, this means that we are at the end of an age. He will open the gate into the lower world for those who have been living in the upper world; and he will open the gate into the higher world for those who have been living in the lower world. It's a new era, when Jesus appears. Those on top get to go down; and those at the bottom get to move up.
Let's end this thread. I don't have enough time to walk you through chapter and verse and really elaborate on anything.
Maybe but both fish are in over their heads :-)
By the end of 2012,that's 11 months away.
No hurry.
Austerity in slow motion.
No quick fixes.
So why are the taxpayers now trying to save the bankers from their mistakes. Poor taxpyers; they made bad decisions electing bank lackeys as their governors.
We should have let the broken banks go down, and let the unbroken banks rise up to take their places. Which is what Europe should also be doing.
Public servants DO pay taxes, unless they wages don't qualify they to pay taxes. Some of you people want a society that has no government. If you have a government, you have a bureaucracy that makes the government work; you have an army to protect the country; you have judges that try to keep aggrieved people from killing each other. Nothing is more naive than the idea that in the current world we live in, we don't need public servants. A government keeps getting bigger and bigger until it breaks -- and then the society gets the Dark Ages.
We have major problems with corruption, this is true -- but the idea that we don't need a government, or that we can shrink a government back to nothing is ludicrous. We can do this if we are ready for the Dark Ages.
At the root of it all is government waste and overspending.
Because they were greedy. They were counting on making money. Just like when they gamble in Vegas but the bet did not work. So spread the blame and cover the bases.
By the way many banks did not make bad loans and many people did not take out loans based on greed.
It's like the goverment paying back gamblers in Las Vegas who losed money (paying them back with money from those who didn't play or who won) so they can keep the game going.
Indeed, not the role of government.
It's the same problem in all developed nations. It has quite simply been the transfer of wealth from the private sector citizens to the public sector workers. And voters who voted for it, blindly. And unions who bribed politicians with money and political support.
OK the US has their military spending that is larger than most nations total budget.
Beware ideologies: they are always, at best, only half true.
once again, government waste and overspending is as the root of the problem.
Don't worry, worker pay is coming down in the US soon, with increasing work, lesser benefits, no retirement in sight future.
Benefits and retirement for American workers are NOT the enemy or the cause of our failure. The cause of our failure is too much fat and too much unregulated risk at the top, not at the bottom.