People need to understand basic math, and around 30% of the population doesn't, at all. I went to public school and I know what kind of people neglected real education, and chose to fuck around instead. Its not the fault of these two guys, banks, or anybody else.
I think you need to understand what empathy is. Nothing in your post actually addresses the post you replied to. Seems like what you're implying, is that it's okay to take advantage of people. And you're basing this implication on some anecdotal experience you had growing up. I just fail to see what that has to do with anything. Do you feel like taking advantage of desperate people is okay? Because that's what I'm getting out of your post.
Well hold on a second. How did the two playboys take advantage of the small businesses? The businesses needed money, he lent it to them. Did he physically force them to sign on the dotted line? Did they even bother reading the terms and understanding what it meant? If the business is croaking, taking a high interest loan isn't gonna help. Liquidate now, so at least you got some cash to pull through while you look for a normal job.
I mean, what do you have to say? Surely you're more empathetic than I am, so I'm very interested in how people like you think.
At Second Source, the best customers were the most desperate. Often they were immigrants with poor English. Brokers bragged about their biggest rip-offs. For motivation, Hurwitz would tape $100 bills to the wall. Salesmen who weren’t cutting it would have their chairs taken away. “Why are you sitting on my chair,” Hurwitz would yell, “if you’re not making me any money?”
I'm sure those businesses were not physically forced to sign but I'd wager those phone calls were not entirely forthcoming on details as well.
A large segment of the population is bad at math (and it's way more than 30%). You're labeling those people as some kind of moral failure since you didn't like the kids at school who were poor students and are sure all people who are bad at math are just like those classmates.
There is a small group of people who recognize that many people are bad at math and deliberately exploit this fact to suck their victim's wealth dry until they're bankrupted or put out of business. You are absolving these people of any moral culpability.
Good for them, I guess. I don't think there should be a legal limit on interest rates, but I also don't think I'd like to be in their business. At the end of the day, I'm of course envious of their money and lifestyle. I'd just like to get there a different way.
The lenders of yore would drag you into a legal status of debt peonage, a form of slavery, if you couldn't make payments. The old loan sharks would break thumbs and legs.
As long as it's very easy to declare bankruptcy and walk away from debt I don't get too worked up about it. Look at the irish pub owner discussed in the story. The business was going to go bankrupt anyway, he took a gamble with a loan that might have floated him through, but it turned out not to. The loan wasn't really the problem.
The student loan originators are way more immoral than these guys, because student loans can not be discharged in bankruptcy.
Judging them on how they are quoted and this article makes them appear doesn't surprise me at all. I'm sure they want others to see how they've made it.
The mark-up in bars comes from the cost of rents, human resources, some advertising and a mark-up for smashed/lost/stolen glassware.
Source: worked in a bar long enough
Edit: Also, licensing and inspection fees tend to be ridiculous. And as soon as you serve food in your bar and not just alcohol, you're thrown into yet another pool of regulations, more licenses and more inspections.
Oh yes. This happens far too often. It seems to be a common hobby among many college students to snatch anything and everything they find interesting. That very big beer mug? Gone. The decorations you hung for Valentine's day? If they're made of anything stronger than paper, they'll disappear. Hell, I've seen students stealing metal infomation boards from trams as souvenirs.
And bartenders are a walking target for criminals. I got robbed three times, a colleague got his cellphone stolen behind the bar while clearing a fight - and next day, he was working again, cops arrested someone and another guy stole his backup cellphone right under the cops' nose and vanished.
The amount of times people tried and sometimes succeeded paying me with fake money or blowjobs (okay, I accepted the blowjobs though) cannot be counted even if I had eight hands and twenty fingers.
And soccer club banners are a prime target for fans of rival clubs. Hell, I could write a book about my endeavours.
beer is just an analogy. I interpreted it as him saying there is greed in all markets.
Is there something inherently wrong with marking up cash advances for those who are otherwise seen as too risky to take on? Any market that has little to no competition has the opportunity to run the same course.
The recent drug price increase of 5000% comes to mind.
As others noted, it probably would've been more ethical just to buy the company outright, not simply doing "intellectual capital front running" they've frequently been accused of doing with actual capital.
This wasn't too bad, actually. Starting off with them looking fairly "boss-like", ending up with them looking mediocre with lame post-party fare, and ending with both familial and distant anecdotes of the people they made suffer with shark loans, for plastic pearls. I would hope the average reader sees it as a cautionary tale about how not to become pathetic like this.
Then again, my time browsing WallStreetOasis.com showed me that people unironically admired Gordon Gekko, so I'm sure some money hungry dweeb out there just wishes he was in their shoes right now.
I found three things very sad about that article; these guys were raised to a strict religious code but had no idea about right and wrong, they had no problem rationalizing their behavior to themselves and others, and they ended up with a fat exit because the guardians of sleeze on Wall Street bought them out.
Really? Sort of encapsulated the attitudes of some of the worst sorts of people who exploit "perfectly legal" loopholes to prey on people.
Depending on what there books looked like they might have gotten similar returns winding down the company, it's not like there going to spend 20 million this year.
That's basically the difference between being raised as a biblical rules lawyer and being raised with a moral compass. I've noticed empathy seems to be the opposite of rules.
Its not unique to Christianity or even religion, but you would think people who claim to study the New Testament would see their relation to some of the people mentioned as having conflicts with Jesus. I mean, its not like it doesn't hit you over the head with "don't be like that". They also slip into the "any means to an end" side of the spectrum which I find the true one phrase definition of evil.
I have more experience with Christians doing the biblical rules lawyering than Jews, but its not an unknown way to learn codes in any religion. I'm pretty sure empathy is a shared trait from the common books from the Old Testament for both Christians and Jews[1].
1) On a side note, Catholics and Protestants have different Old Testaments.
[edit: folks JesperRavn has a legitimate question - be nice]
'Different' Old Testaments is a somewhat misleading thing to say. The vast majority of the Old Testament is the same - Catholics include the Deuterocanonical books that most (but not all) Protestant churches do not[1].
There's a lot of interesting history behind this, but my understanding is that Catholics don't necessarily put these books on the same level as the broadly accepted Old Testament, but include them in printings nonetheless. I've heard that they were dropped from Protestant Bibles to save money on printing, but I have no idea if this story is true.
It's not incorrect, but it is misleading. It's not so much that Catholics have a different Old Testament; it's more like they have extra Old Testament. Similarly, if you have a copy of the first edition of a book and I buy a second edition of a book with an added epilogue, it would be misleading to say that we have different books. The book are completely the same, but one has some extra content.
Again, it's not technically wrong, just misleading to someone unfamiliar with the topic at hand. In terms of relevance to the conversation, the reason it's misleading is that the moral codes and content present in the Protestant OT is all present in the Catholic OT as well; the Catholic OT has a little more, but by and large, they are pulling from the same moral background. Saying that they have different OTs in this context seems to suggest that this is not the case, and that Catholics and Protestants have a different set of sources for, e.g., moral guidance and teaching.
Indeed, you would expect more from Christians than from Jews, given that big parts of New Testament are about replacing the rule-based thinking of Old Testament with empathy and conscience-based principles.
I personally don't think I would expect any difference, but that is one of the major differences between all the branches of Christianity: "how much of the Old Testament has been rewritten by the New".
If the only reason something is bad is because a big guy will send you to hades, then once you stop believing in that then nothing is evil and everything is permitted. It's not really a moral code at all, since there is no understanding of morality. It's just "don't do X or God will whack you."
Two of the least moral people I've ever meet were raised fundamentalist. A part of their atheist conversion was to realize there is no morality and that humans are "just animals" (in the words of one). It's a perfectly rational conclusion if force wielded by God is the only basis for moral action.
One could argue that some the worst things happen precisely when you think you have god on your side. In the paraphrased words of Christopher Hitchens, "The suicide bombing communities and the child genital mutilation communities are almost entirely faith-based."
Yes, but circumcision doesn't seem to have any long-term effects on genital function. Yes, there are arguments back and forth in the medical community, but it's not an obvious mutilation.
You are wrong sorry. Plenty of Christian mutilation of female genitalia is permanently disfiguring and removes their ability to have pleasure during sex.
Any mutilation is horrible just because it isn't so bad does not excuse it at all.
>Practice of FGM has no relationship with religion. Muslims and Christians practice it, but it is more widely spread in Christian predominated parts of Nigeria.[2]
I have found in life that when people say obvious, they really mean unexamined. If you have the courage to honestly know the damage done, you will see mutilation.
Any sort of theistically-based morality can degenerate into that, of course, but it's hardly the mainstream way that adherents of any of the major monotheistic faiths think or talk about God and His commands. On the contrary, the typical (and orthodox) way that God is understood to be connected to morality is to say that just as God is the ground and source of Being, so God is the ground and source of the Good. God requires righteousness from His creation because He (as the Good) is the goal or τελος of that creation, and you simply can't be what you were intended to be without that goodness. Of course, failing to be what you were intended to be comes with problems, but the failures are organically connected with the problems, just as the rewards are intrinsically a part of the success.
That's one theological approach to some of the more difficult problems in religion (especially modern Christianity). Is it really widely held though?
It's a natural interpretation for anyone familiar with the Euthyphro, but most people have not read Plato.
I haven't generally seen strong evidence that adherents have actually adopted the beliefs professed by apologists. Surveys routinely find adherents generally fall closer to literalists.
Gallup found that 70% of Americans believed in the Devil, similar numbers for hell.[0]
It might be tempting to wash this and say, "no, all those people just meant a metaphorical devil." But if you step back, it strains credulity a bit to argue that people, when asked if something existed, would respond "yes" to mean "not really, only in an allegorical sense."
Mostly though, of all the rationalizations offered for odd religious views, I just haven't yet seen any good evidence that most adherents have actually adopted these more nuanced views.
As a fairly traditional religious type, I'm not too worried that, say, the folks in my Bible study can't explain the theological basis for natural law, any more than I'm worried than the folks who use my software can't explain how a compiler works. You can gain value from something without being able to explain the details - though it's also true you can do yourself quite a few favors by trying to understand at least a couple of levels down, whether as a Christian or a computer user. (And by the way, reasonably nuanced philosophical perspectives are by no means incompatible with belief in supernatural evil: just ask Thomas Aquinas, or, for that matter, I suppose, me. :-)
I completely agree that people don't need to know all the nuances of something to get some value out of it, in the general case. I read your response to api as suggesting people held a more nuanced view than I think they actually do. My mistake.
More importantly:
> reasonably nuanced philosophical perspectives are by no means incompatible with belief in supernatural evil...
There are a lot of ways to take this, so just to be clear, are you saying that you believe an all-loving and omnipotent god created a willful being of pure evil?
My clarification to your last question is to fall back on the traditional understanding of evil, going back to at least Plotinus: evil is real, but it's a derivative reality, parasitic on good. So you can't have a being of pure evil: it's sort of ruled out (in this understanding) by definition. What you can have is a being that, through the good of free will, chooses lesser goods - in this case, itself - and in the process corrupts itself and effectively revolts against its Creator. Evil, yes, but not pure evil, and not originally created as such.
It's not as if this line of defense doesn't have its holes, but it's plausible enough that I don't think it can be dismissed out of hand. And it also explains enough that, given my other philosophical and theological predispositions, I tend to think it (or something like it) quite probable.
Well there are different ways to raise children, and while the theological arguments are fine, I was really wondering about the parents. I suspect, but can't prove, that every child at some time or another lies, cheats, steals, and generally tries to circumvent what is perceived to be "ridiculous" constraints on their behavior. And while a church might provide "rules" for behavior, I firmly believe it is up to the family to provide "why" for behavior. I spent many hours explaining the why of rules to my kids. And yes, some of that why came from teachings like "love thy neighbor as thyself" but most of it was common sense about making everyone's lives as enjoyable as possible rather than one person's life that enjoyable.
The God reference is perhaps a canard here. (If you think ${religion} provides a useful moral framework, you haven't read enough about ${religion}.)
IIRC each of the three major monotheistic religions is fairly clear about the wrongs of lending money and charging interest -- except Judaism, which says it's okay so long as the borrower is not Jewish.
Perversely, from a regulatory perspective they'd have been in trouble if they'd vetted their customers based on their faith.
Depending on who does the interpretation of Matthew 25:27, Christians might get a pass.
I've read quite enough about my religion and it does provide a moral framework. I also believe in the principles in the US Constitution, but I see the section on slavery and realize it concept best banished to the dustbin of history[1]. The Bible was not only a religious text, but a historical and instructional. It had sections on how to treat slaves, which I ignore. I also have no need to go outside the city and bury my poop[2]. Inspired words are sadly not perfect words.
1) although given some stats, it might be more prevalent now in number (not %) than when that document was written
Acknowledging this is a potentially very touchy subject, and definitely veering way off topic ... I'd still like to ask:
If you're selecting which bits of a text to adopt, and interpreting other bits, why do you need the text (which contains things you obviously disagree with) as a 'basis of a moral framework'?
Is there anything in your particular preferred version of the text that unambiguously allows the reader flexibility to pick and choose which bits they will agree with (my understanding is that this isn't the case - but my knowledge is not deep in this area).
Yeah, a bit out of topic and I'm not a Biblical scholar or a learned man. Just another sinner trying to be a good person. Church elders have long sermons on how a religion changes with new discoveries, I just go with the flow and keep the theme. That said, I'll try.
Its not so much selecting, as knowing that the context has changed in thousands of years. Burying your poop and what hand to use eating were important things back then, but only really practical on a survival show now. I have plumbing and good soap. How to treat slaves is not something the modern world should care about. Its not about disagreeing with the text, its understanding that whole free will and gaining dominion over it all sometimes discards the old conditions by freeing people. Its was a survival manual after all too.
"Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" are not something that loses their context. They speak to how to treat others and don't lose any meaning with era. Our changes to the world have not changed such fundamental truths. We are still humans and some things are eternal. The parables are still good lessons.
At the risk of sounding churlish, however, I think you dodged my question : )
I know that I should not murder, and that I should not buy / keep slaves. Yet I don't need to refer to a text that agrees with my position on the former, but is (at best) ambiguous on the latter. (The precise mechanism by which I've come to know both things are bad is not something I can conveniently answer, before you ask. Quoting K-Pax may be necessary.)
My question was if you have the necessary innate / internal / nascent / instinctive understanding to know slavery is bad (as one example) then what's the point of using a text that advocates slavery as the basis of a moral framework?
Well, I tried, as I said I'm not a scholar but a student.
> I've come to know both things are bad is not something I can conveniently answer, before you ask
Yet, you ask me the reason I use a text that is the basis of my church's beliefs that were taught to me to show those are bad.
I don't think its instinctive to know its bad or else it would have not been such an institution in the first place.
To be fair to the Bible, it doesn't advocate slavery, but it does have commands on how to treat slaves including freeing them. I guess there is a pragmatism in lessening the horror when its not ingrained to end it outright.
This is a very good question. As a Lutheran, we don't receive the Bible and make of it what we will as interpretation of the Bible is done by the church and involves a lot of tradition - we have vast libraries filled with the writings of the early church and other doctors of the church.
My own woefully incomplete study materials occupies 12 cubits of shelf space - That's 5.4 meters for you modern types. :)
The body of knowledge is so vast for example that at one point economics was considered a small subset of theology.
He also states his belief in the principles of the US Constitution, a document that has been heavily edited using amendments. We do not follow the original copy anymore as we have progressed and found different ways to run the country. Additionally, like any text, we can interpret the document differently depending on the bias of who is reading it. The second of three commas in the 2nd amendment makes the amendment have different meanings on who you ask. Pro-gun says the comma seperates the right of the militia and the right to bear arms. Anti-gun says the comma doesn't mean anything and only the militia have a right to bear arms.
The whole idea of the New Testament which is what Christians follow, is supposed to be an amendment to the Old Testament. The only issue is that there is no copy of the Old Testament with the repealed parts striked out. One could argue that the Old Testament is the book of law but the New Testament is the guidebook on how to follow the law, whats ok to break and whats not.
Very rarely do we have situations in life where we have absolute laws and absolute consequences. Marijuana is federally illegal but legal in certain states. Speeding can get you anywhere from a warning to a hefty ticket depending on how the cop feels about you. You can hem and haw about how Christians don't follow the Bible to the letter but it really doesn't matter. Everything progresses (and regresses) over time, changing from the original intended meaning to the new interpreted meaning and maybe back again.
Having worked on getting a Sharia-compliant investment fund set up a few years back, what I recall is that interest ("riba") is specifically forbidden. However, there are structures that can provide the same cash flows as interest but aren't technically interest: example, instead of paying interest on a 30-year mortgage, you just buy the property from the lender in installments over 30 years, etc.
Unfortunately, some of these so called Shariah-compliant transactions are not really. There is heavy debate around them, and as they say, the devil is in the detail.
For instance, my biggest issue with the scheme you mentioned is that, why would a third party come and buy the property and resell it back to you if they did not have an incentive (i.e. they have a buyer already lined up)? And can the contract be conditional that you have to agree that they sell it to you after they buy it? How is the profit rate set? Etc.
There are other schemes which seem permissible (e.g. a group of people agree to buy a house, then they find a renter and split up the rent between them. This way, the risk is spread across everyone, not just the one who owes the loan. The renter can then decide to buy shares of the house along the way). Of course, there need to be scholars who review this since there are small things that can render the agreement non-Shariah compliant.
* The Prophet, Peace be upon him, said: "There will certainly come a time for mankind when everyone will take riba and if he does not do so, its dust will reach him."
* The Prophet, Peace be upon him, cursed the receiver and the payer of interest, the one who records it and the two witnesses to the transaction and said: "They are all alike [in guilt]."
I think that asserting that it's a 'matter of interpretation' is a cop-out.
Although perhaps comparably cop-outedly I get most of my information on such topics from the writings of John Ralston Saul (who coincidentally popped up a few weeks ago on HN's front page).
Quoting from the his book The Doubter's Companion:
"Bankers -- Pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
"All three Western religions have always forbidden the collection of interest on loans. When Samuel Johnson defined the banker in the eighteenth century his status was clear: "One that trafficks in money." Their venal sin of usury continues to sit high on lists of scriptural wrongdoing, which raises the question of why bankers -- the money-market sort excluded -- tend to be frequent church-goers.
" ...
"The clearest situation for bankers would be if God didn't exist. They would then be morally home-free and could go to church in a more relaxed frame of mind."
Anyway, I return to my earlier point that dwelling upon these chaps' alleged, or at least erstwhile, belief in a deity is at best an annoying irrelevancy.
Prohibition on charging interest makes perfect sense in a zero growth economy. Economic growth was effectively zero per capita for almost all of human history before the industrial revolution. Wealth amassed from charging interest in a zero growth economy represents transfer of wealth, not capital formation.
Likewise, sabbath keeping rules make perfect sense in such an economy. No, you can't work a lot of extra hours more than we're all willing to work and amass extra wealth for yourself. The net result of that is you taking a bigger piece of the economic pie. The longer work really doesn't grow the pie, which was essentially limited by the agricultural productivity of the land.
It also makes sense today. Look at how the rich are becoming richer, and the poor are becoming poorer. Practices such as interest are making the issue worse and worse. This is not sustainable.
A big point of banning interest is that one can just sit on his money, while making more money; without really incurring any risk. One can get wealth from other means, which contribute to the society, while incurring risk on the money owners part. This is key.
Funny, I never interpreted rules about not working on the Sabbath that way. I always saw them as rooted in the wisdom that you need recovery time, you need to rest regularly.
IIRC, during The French Revolution, they tried a 10 day work week just to try to distance themselves from the old ways. It did not work. People need a day off about once every 7 days when they are working physically hard and for long hours at their jobs. They suffer burn out and collapse when they don't take time off to recover.
I'm an atheist, but I think plenty of religions provide useful moral frameworks. As Huston Smith said, "Religion gives spirituality historical traction." Coming up with a complete moral code from scratch is very hard work. I've learned a lot from reading about moral codes that have been worked out by many thoughtful people over the centuries, work that has been preserved because it happened in a religious context.
That said, one way I measure various religions is the extent to which their followers perform the inductive reasoning that takes them from the individual bits of the moral code to a well-developed moral sense.
There have always been loan sharks and a subset of the economy that they feed off of.
What is troubling is that the business segment described in the article is so profitable that it has attracted institutional investors at a much bigger scale, which makes me think the number of small businesses in trouble these days must also be higher.
In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor—
let them be caught in the schemes they have devised.
3 For the wicked boast of the desires of their heart,
those greedy for gain curse and renounce the Lord.
4 In the pride of their countenance the wicked say, “God will not seek it out”;
all their thoughts are, “There is no God.”
5 Their ways prosper at all times;
your judgments are on high, out of their sight;
as for their foes, they scoff at them.
6 They think in their heart, “We shall not be moved;
throughout all generations we shall not meet adversity.”
75 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadI mean, what do you have to say? Surely you're more empathetic than I am, so I'm very interested in how people like you think.
At Second Source, the best customers were the most desperate. Often they were immigrants with poor English. Brokers bragged about their biggest rip-offs. For motivation, Hurwitz would tape $100 bills to the wall. Salesmen who weren’t cutting it would have their chairs taken away. “Why are you sitting on my chair,” Hurwitz would yell, “if you’re not making me any money?”
I'm sure those businesses were not physically forced to sign but I'd wager those phone calls were not entirely forthcoming on details as well.
There is a small group of people who recognize that many people are bad at math and deliberately exploit this fact to suck their victim's wealth dry until they're bankrupted or put out of business. You are absolving these people of any moral culpability.
Very strange.
As long as it's very easy to declare bankruptcy and walk away from debt I don't get too worked up about it. Look at the irish pub owner discussed in the story. The business was going to go bankrupt anyway, he took a gamble with a loan that might have floated him through, but it turned out not to. The loan wasn't really the problem.
The student loan originators are way more immoral than these guys, because student loans can not be discharged in bankruptcy.
“But a business owner can buy this beer for a dollar, mark it up eight times, and sell it to idiots like us, and no one cares.”
Source: worked in a bar long enough
Edit: Also, licensing and inspection fees tend to be ridiculous. And as soon as you serve food in your bar and not just alcohol, you're thrown into yet another pool of regulations, more licenses and more inspections.
Oh yes. This happens far too often. It seems to be a common hobby among many college students to snatch anything and everything they find interesting. That very big beer mug? Gone. The decorations you hung for Valentine's day? If they're made of anything stronger than paper, they'll disappear. Hell, I've seen students stealing metal infomation boards from trams as souvenirs.
The amount of times people tried and sometimes succeeded paying me with fake money or blowjobs (okay, I accepted the blowjobs though) cannot be counted even if I had eight hands and twenty fingers.
And soccer club banners are a prime target for fans of rival clubs. Hell, I could write a book about my endeavours.
Is there something inherently wrong with marking up cash advances for those who are otherwise seen as too risky to take on? Any market that has little to no competition has the opportunity to run the same course.
The recent drug price increase of 5000% comes to mind.
"Doing God's work" indeed, Mr. Blankfein.
Doing what GS always does: take someone else's crap, wrap it in gold foil and serve it on a silver platter in the guise of 'legitimacy'
Then again, my time browsing WallStreetOasis.com showed me that people unironically admired Gordon Gekko, so I'm sure some money hungry dweeb out there just wishes he was in their shoes right now.
Really? Sort of encapsulated the attitudes of some of the worst sorts of people who exploit "perfectly legal" loopholes to prey on people.
Its not unique to Christianity or even religion, but you would think people who claim to study the New Testament would see their relation to some of the people mentioned as having conflicts with Jesus. I mean, its not like it doesn't hit you over the head with "don't be like that". They also slip into the "any means to an end" side of the spectrum which I find the true one phrase definition of evil.
1) On a side note, Catholics and Protestants have different Old Testaments.
[edit: folks JesperRavn has a legitimate question - be nice]
There's a lot of interesting history behind this, but my understanding is that Catholics don't necessarily put these books on the same level as the broadly accepted Old Testament, but include them in printings nonetheless. I've heard that they were dropped from Protestant Bibles to save money on printing, but I have no idea if this story is true.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterocanonical_books
The Catholic Old Testament has 46 books and the Protestant Bible has 39 books.
46 and 39 are different numbers and it is not misleading to say that they are different. A red car is different from the same model in blue.
Again, it's not technically wrong, just misleading to someone unfamiliar with the topic at hand. In terms of relevance to the conversation, the reason it's misleading is that the moral codes and content present in the Protestant OT is all present in the Catholic OT as well; the Catholic OT has a little more, but by and large, they are pulling from the same moral background. Saying that they have different OTs in this context seems to suggest that this is not the case, and that Catholics and Protestants have a different set of sources for, e.g., moral guidance and teaching.
Two of the least moral people I've ever meet were raised fundamentalist. A part of their atheist conversion was to realize there is no morality and that humans are "just animals" (in the words of one). It's a perfectly rational conclusion if force wielded by God is the only basis for moral action.
(Not that Christians and Jews as a group are sinless, of course.)
>Practice of FGM has no relationship with religion. Muslims and Christians practice it, but it is more widely spread in Christian predominated parts of Nigeria.[2]
It's a natural interpretation for anyone familiar with the Euthyphro, but most people have not read Plato.
I haven't generally seen strong evidence that adherents have actually adopted the beliefs professed by apologists. Surveys routinely find adherents generally fall closer to literalists.
Gallup found that 70% of Americans believed in the Devil, similar numbers for hell.[0]
It might be tempting to wash this and say, "no, all those people just meant a metaphorical devil." But if you step back, it strains credulity a bit to argue that people, when asked if something existed, would respond "yes" to mean "not really, only in an allegorical sense."
Mostly though, of all the rationalizations offered for odd religious views, I just haven't yet seen any good evidence that most adherents have actually adopted these more nuanced views.
[0] http://www.gallup.com/poll/27877/Americans-More-Likely-Belie...
More importantly:
> reasonably nuanced philosophical perspectives are by no means incompatible with belief in supernatural evil...
There are a lot of ways to take this, so just to be clear, are you saying that you believe an all-loving and omnipotent god created a willful being of pure evil?
My clarification to your last question is to fall back on the traditional understanding of evil, going back to at least Plotinus: evil is real, but it's a derivative reality, parasitic on good. So you can't have a being of pure evil: it's sort of ruled out (in this understanding) by definition. What you can have is a being that, through the good of free will, chooses lesser goods - in this case, itself - and in the process corrupts itself and effectively revolts against its Creator. Evil, yes, but not pure evil, and not originally created as such.
It's not as if this line of defense doesn't have its holes, but it's plausible enough that I don't think it can be dismissed out of hand. And it also explains enough that, given my other philosophical and theological predispositions, I tend to think it (or something like it) quite probable.
I'm sad these guys didn't learn that.
IIRC each of the three major monotheistic religions is fairly clear about the wrongs of lending money and charging interest -- except Judaism, which says it's okay so long as the borrower is not Jewish.
Perversely, from a regulatory perspective they'd have been in trouble if they'd vetted their customers based on their faith.
I've read quite enough about my religion and it does provide a moral framework. I also believe in the principles in the US Constitution, but I see the section on slavery and realize it concept best banished to the dustbin of history[1]. The Bible was not only a religious text, but a historical and instructional. It had sections on how to treat slaves, which I ignore. I also have no need to go outside the city and bury my poop[2]. Inspired words are sadly not perfect words.
1) although given some stats, it might be more prevalent now in number (not %) than when that document was written
2) Deuteronomy 23:13
If you're selecting which bits of a text to adopt, and interpreting other bits, why do you need the text (which contains things you obviously disagree with) as a 'basis of a moral framework'?
Is there anything in your particular preferred version of the text that unambiguously allows the reader flexibility to pick and choose which bits they will agree with (my understanding is that this isn't the case - but my knowledge is not deep in this area).
Its not so much selecting, as knowing that the context has changed in thousands of years. Burying your poop and what hand to use eating were important things back then, but only really practical on a survival show now. I have plumbing and good soap. How to treat slaves is not something the modern world should care about. Its not about disagreeing with the text, its understanding that whole free will and gaining dominion over it all sometimes discards the old conditions by freeing people. Its was a survival manual after all too.
"Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" are not something that loses their context. They speak to how to treat others and don't lose any meaning with era. Our changes to the world have not changed such fundamental truths. We are still humans and some things are eternal. The parables are still good lessons.
At the risk of sounding churlish, however, I think you dodged my question : )
I know that I should not murder, and that I should not buy / keep slaves. Yet I don't need to refer to a text that agrees with my position on the former, but is (at best) ambiguous on the latter. (The precise mechanism by which I've come to know both things are bad is not something I can conveniently answer, before you ask. Quoting K-Pax may be necessary.)
My question was if you have the necessary innate / internal / nascent / instinctive understanding to know slavery is bad (as one example) then what's the point of using a text that advocates slavery as the basis of a moral framework?
> I've come to know both things are bad is not something I can conveniently answer, before you ask
Yet, you ask me the reason I use a text that is the basis of my church's beliefs that were taught to me to show those are bad.
I don't think its instinctive to know its bad or else it would have not been such an institution in the first place.
To be fair to the Bible, it doesn't advocate slavery, but it does have commands on how to treat slaves including freeing them. I guess there is a pragmatism in lessening the horror when its not ingrained to end it outright.
My own woefully incomplete study materials occupies 12 cubits of shelf space - That's 5.4 meters for you modern types. :)
The body of knowledge is so vast for example that at one point economics was considered a small subset of theology.
The whole idea of the New Testament which is what Christians follow, is supposed to be an amendment to the Old Testament. The only issue is that there is no copy of the Old Testament with the repealed parts striked out. One could argue that the Old Testament is the book of law but the New Testament is the guidebook on how to follow the law, whats ok to break and whats not.
Very rarely do we have situations in life where we have absolute laws and absolute consequences. Marijuana is federally illegal but legal in certain states. Speeding can get you anywhere from a warning to a hefty ticket depending on how the cop feels about you. You can hem and haw about how Christians don't follow the Bible to the letter but it really doesn't matter. Everything progresses (and regresses) over time, changing from the original intended meaning to the new interpreted meaning and maybe back again.
For instance, my biggest issue with the scheme you mentioned is that, why would a third party come and buy the property and resell it back to you if they did not have an incentive (i.e. they have a buyer already lined up)? And can the contract be conditional that you have to agree that they sell it to you after they buy it? How is the profit rate set? Etc.
There are other schemes which seem permissible (e.g. a group of people agree to buy a house, then they find a renter and split up the rent between them. This way, the risk is spread across everyone, not just the one who owes the loan. The renter can then decide to buy shares of the house along the way). Of course, there need to be scholars who review this since there are small things that can render the agreement non-Shariah compliant.
From the Quran:
* http://quran.com/2/275
* http://quran.com/4/161
From the Hadith:
* The Prophet, Peace be upon him, said: "There will certainly come a time for mankind when everyone will take riba and if he does not do so, its dust will reach him."
* The Prophet, Peace be upon him, cursed the receiver and the payer of interest, the one who records it and the two witnesses to the transaction and said: "They are all alike [in guilt]."
Although perhaps comparably cop-outedly I get most of my information on such topics from the writings of John Ralston Saul (who coincidentally popped up a few weeks ago on HN's front page).
Quoting from the his book The Doubter's Companion:
"Bankers -- Pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.
"All three Western religions have always forbidden the collection of interest on loans. When Samuel Johnson defined the banker in the eighteenth century his status was clear: "One that trafficks in money." Their venal sin of usury continues to sit high on lists of scriptural wrongdoing, which raises the question of why bankers -- the money-market sort excluded -- tend to be frequent church-goers.
" ...
"The clearest situation for bankers would be if God didn't exist. They would then be morally home-free and could go to church in a more relaxed frame of mind."
Anyway, I return to my earlier point that dwelling upon these chaps' alleged, or at least erstwhile, belief in a deity is at best an annoying irrelevancy.
Likewise, sabbath keeping rules make perfect sense in such an economy. No, you can't work a lot of extra hours more than we're all willing to work and amass extra wealth for yourself. The net result of that is you taking a bigger piece of the economic pie. The longer work really doesn't grow the pie, which was essentially limited by the agricultural productivity of the land.
A big point of banning interest is that one can just sit on his money, while making more money; without really incurring any risk. One can get wealth from other means, which contribute to the society, while incurring risk on the money owners part. This is key.
IIRC, during The French Revolution, they tried a 10 day work week just to try to distance themselves from the old ways. It did not work. People need a day off about once every 7 days when they are working physically hard and for long hours at their jobs. They suffer burn out and collapse when they don't take time off to recover.
That said, one way I measure various religions is the extent to which their followers perform the inductive reasoning that takes them from the individual bits of the moral code to a well-developed moral sense.
What is troubling is that the business segment described in the article is so profitable that it has attracted institutional investors at a much bigger scale, which makes me think the number of small businesses in trouble these days must also be higher.
In part:
In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor— let them be caught in the schemes they have devised. 3 For the wicked boast of the desires of their heart, those greedy for gain curse and renounce the Lord. 4 In the pride of their countenance the wicked say, “God will not seek it out”; all their thoughts are, “There is no God.” 5 Their ways prosper at all times; your judgments are on high, out of their sight; as for their foes, they scoff at them. 6 They think in their heart, “We shall not be moved; throughout all generations we shall not meet adversity.”