Capitalism vs. Socialism For Dummies

Townhall shares 7 reasons socialism will make you poorer than capitalism:

1) Socialism benefits the few at the expense of the many: Socialism is superior to capitalism in one primary way: It offers more security. It’s almost like an extremely expensive insurance policy that dramatically cuts into your quality of life, but insures that if worse comes to worse, you won’t drop below a very minimal lifestyle. For the vast majority of people, this would be a terrible deal. On the other hand, if you’re lazy, completely incompetent or alternately, just have a streak of very bad luck, the meager benefits provided by socialism may be very appealing. So a socialist society forces the many to suffer in order to make it easier for the few. It’s just as Winston Churchill once noted, “The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

2) Capitalism encourages entrepreneurship while socialism discourages it: A government in a capitalist economy can quite easily give everyone equality of opportunity with a few basic laws and regulations, but socialism strives to create equality of results. This should frighten people who value their freedom because ultimately, as F.A. Hayek has noted, “A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.” You can see this happening in America as our efforts to reduce “inequality” have led to an ever expanding government and a vast regulatory tangle that is almost unexplainable despite the fact that it is certainly enforceable. Capitalism encourages people to start a business and build a better life for themselves while socialism lays in wait with IRS agents, nooses made of red tape and meddling bureaucrats looking for businesses to control and loot.

3) Capitalism leads to innovation: Coming up with new products is often time consuming, expensive and hit or miss. Nine ideas may fail before that tenth one takes off. The less the creative people behind these ideas are allowed to benefit, the less time, money and effort they’ll put into developing new concepts and inventions. Put another way, the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward has to be to convince people to take it. Capitalism offers big rewards for productive people while socialism offers makers only a parade of bureaucratic leeches who want to take advantage of their “good fortune.”

4) Capitalism produces more economic growth: Capitalism produces considerably more economic growth than socialism and as John Kennedy said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” A fast growing economy produces more jobs, more wealth and helps everyone. Many people assume that capitalism isn’t working if there are still poor people, but that misses the point. In many parts of the world, poverty means living in a hut with a dirt floor while in America, most poor Americans have TVs, refrigerators and cell phones. The rich may take home a larger share of the pie in capitalism, but the poor also benefit tremendously from living in a growing, thriving economy.

5) Socialism is too slow to adapt: Capitalism is extremely good at allocating capital to where it’s most valued. It has to be. Either you give people what they are willing to pay for or someone else will. On the other hand, socialism is slow and stupid for a variety of reasons. Because the government is spending someone else’s money, it doesn’t get particularly concerned about losing money. Political concerns about appearances often trump the effectiveness of a program. Moreover, even if politicians and bureaucrats are intelligent and competent, which are big “ifs,” they’re simply not going to have the specific knowledge needed to make decisions that may impact thousands of different industries. This is why capitalism may have its share of troubles, but when there are really colossal economic screw-ups, you’ll always find the government neck deep in the whole mess.

6) Socialism is inherently wasteful: Milton Friedman once said, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own.” This is very true and it means that the more capital that is taken out of the economy and distributed, the more of it that will be wasted. The market does a considerably better job of allocating resources than the government because there are harsh penalties for failure. A company that makes products no one wants will go out of business. A poorly performing government program that wastes a hundred times more money will probably receive a bigger budget the next year.

7) Capitalism works in concert with human nature while socialism works against it: Ayn Rand said it well, “America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to ‘the common good,’ but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way,” but Adam Smith said it better, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” A man will work much harder to take care of himself, his family and his friends than he will to make money for the state, which will then waste most of it before redistributing it to people who aren’t working as hard as the man who earned it in the first place.


Capitalism vs. Socialism Brilliantly Explained For Dummies | The Federalist Papers

Only in America

#  10 Only  in  America ... Could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a  $35,000.00 per plate Obama  ​campaign fund-raising  event.

#  09 Only  in  America ... Could people claim that the government still discriminates  against black Americans when they have a black President, a black  Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black  while only 14% of the population is black, 40+% of all federal entitlements  goes to black Americans - 3X the rate that go to whites, 5X the rate  that go to Hispanics!

#  08 Only  in  America ... Could they have had the two people most responsible for our  tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and  Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and Means Committee),  BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher  taxes.  

#  07 Only  in  America ... Can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and  have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed  by the backlash.

#  06 Only  in  America ... Would they make people who want to legally become American  citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of  thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they discuss letting  anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just 'magically' become  American citizens. (probably should be number one)

#  05 Only  in  America ... Could the people who believe in balancing the budget and  sticking by the country's Constitution be called EXTREMISTS.

#  04 Only  in  America ... Could you need to present a driver's license to cash a check  or buy alcohol, but not to vote. 

#  03 Only  in  America ... Could people  demand  the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public  because the price of gas went up when the return on equity invested in a  major U.S. Oil company (Marathon  Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes  (Nike). 

#  02 Only  in  America ... Could you collect more tax dollars from the people than any  nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it  has per year - for total spending of $7 Million PER  MINUTE, and  complain that it doesn't have nearly enough money.

#  01 Only  in  America .... Could the rich people - who pay 86% of all income taxes - be  accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who don't pay any  income taxes at all.

Melania Trump On Her Life, Marriage And 2016

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Racist?

Hump Day Hunnies

Capitalism Promotes Equality | Foundation for Economic Education

Highway traffic began to slow outside of Boston as we made our way to the airport. My wife was
driving, so I took out my $100 Android phone and opened Google Maps. Google Traffic instantly showed me, in real time, the best route to avoid delays and estimated the number of minutes we’d save by altering our route. Thanks to Google, there was no threat of missing our flight.

It was not too long ago that we relied on traffic reporters in helicopters, and their advice was often useless by the time we heard their updates.

Have you wondered how Google Traffic does it? The answer is crowdsourcing. If you are among the two-thirds of American adults who own a smartphone, and if the GPS locator on your phone is enabled, you are generating real-time traffic information. Google Traffic measures how fast cars are moving compared to normal speeds and generates location-specific reports.

Rich or poor, most of the drivers on the highway that day had access to the same miraculous traffic report and the same opportunity to make better driving decisions. This is just one example of how the marketplace generates equality in consumption.

The cars we drive are another indicator of consumption equality. We were driving an inexpensive Subaru Outback. There are more expensive, comfortable, and bigger cars on the market, but the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that there are none safer than the Outback.

Would a rich individual, on this same drive to the airport, have any noticeable advantages over me? He or she could hire a driver and use the drive time for something more productive, but even that advantage will dwindle as driverless cars become the norm.

Read more:
Capitalism Promotes Equality | Foundation for Economic Education

A Progressive's Guide to Political Correctness

Jesus Who? The Historical Record Gives No Clue

Do 1st and 2nd century historians give us accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ?

In an earlier article, Did Jesus Exist or Is It All a Myth, I wrote about how it is very odd that we have no eyewitness accounts of Jesus, his life, and his teachings. No one wrote a thing about him during his supposed lifetime. We don’t even have any accounts of Jesus from someone who knew someone who knew Jesus.

Christian apologists often cite the Epistles of Paul or the historians of the 1^st and 2^nd century CE Jospehus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Suetonius as proof that the man we have come to know as Jesus Christ actually existed. Here is why their proof is no proof at all.

How are ancient historical documents authenticated?

Scholars often refer to the known dates of historical events to determine when a document was written. If the author mentioned who was ruler at the time of his writing, or if he mentions an historical event for which the date is known, the reference can be used to discern the date of the document.

Linguistics also comes into play. The use of certain language and words can help pin down when a document was written.

Authorship can be determined by comparing the writing style of a particular document from a known writer with the writing style of newly found document ascribed to the same author. If they don’t match, the new document is probably a forgery.

Documents are also dated by archeologists based upon where they were found and what was found near them. Carbon dating is also used.

Read more:
Jesus Who? The Historical Record Gives No Clue

Before the Fireworks: A Refresher on Supreme Court Nominations

By Dennis Lund

Few Senate actions are as dramatic or divisive as the ‘advise and consent’ process for Supreme Court nominations. The replacement of Antonin Scalia is shaping up to be a barn burner, since November’s outcome is not a solid bet. We can expect the Democrats to be going full out for rapid approval of any Obama nominee. The Republicans, if history holds true, will likely put up the same level of resistance as France did during Germany’s ‘Fall Gelb’ operations of May 1940.    

Democrats fear Republicans will not follow tradition and might actually offer resistance, thus they could use circumspect methods, such as a recess appointment, to slip in a leftist extremist, such as Holder, Lynch, or Kamala Harris.

However, if the Democrats stick to principles they would honor their own Senate Resolution 334 which urges no SCOTUS recess appointments. The likelihood of that occurrence is about on par with Bill Clinton honoring his marriage vows.

With decades of practice, the Democrats have mastered the art using the judiciary for agenda advancement and they play to win, no holds barred. Republicans still believe their Senatorial opponents are gentlemen who play by Robert’s Rules of Order. They do so without supporting evidence.

Past hearings have been fraught with difficulties, false charges, racist allegations, hypocrisy and despicable politics. As the battle looms it is worth recalling the advice of Sun Tzu: “If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.”  

In order to move forward successfully, a refresher on the past is in order:

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Articles: Before the Fireworks: A Refresher on Supreme Court Nominations

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All Aboard Starship Bernie!

By Don Feder, originally published at American Thinker. 

The chattering class is amazed at the rise of avowed socialist Bernard Sanders, running against hyper-welfarist Hillary Clinton. But Sanders’s campaign is just the latest chapter in the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch -- from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama.

When MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to explain the differences between a Democrat and a socialist, she changed the subject. Hillary Clinton snapped “I’m not going to get into it. You’d have to ask him [Sanders]” -- or you can check her e-mails. In a 2010 Gallup Poll, 53% of Democrats said they had a positive impression of socialism.

In the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Sanders was supported by 84% of 17-to-29 year-olds -- those least connected to reality. Even the nonstudents among them have little life experience. If they have jobs, they’ve only been working a few years. Many still live at home with their parents. Most are unmarried and don’t have children to raise or mortgages to pay. That’s why they can so easily fall for a codger peddling recycled nostrums.

Sanders has the perfect resume to lead them. Before he won elective office, he was an agitator -- or “community organizer” in Obama-speak. He’s spent the past 35 years in government, 26 of them in Washington. He never ran a business, met a payroll, or created a job for anyone.

The Vermonter has a typical elitist contempt for capitalism. He told an interviewer last year, “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants and 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” (Socialists hate consumer choice.) How many kinds of deodorant do we need -- four, three, two? And who decides whether it’s Ban or Arrid Extra Dry, Commissar Bernie?

Human credulity knows no bounds. Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven’s Gate cult was another prophet of the absurd. In 1997, Applewhite convinced 38 of his followers to join him in committing suicide (with massive doses of Phenobarbital and plastic bags wrapped around their heads) so their spirits could ascend to the alien spaceship hidden in the tail of the Hale-Bopp Comet.

Sanders is urging his young followers to kill their futures along with the U.S. economy. Bernieism is concocted of equal parts of class envy, economic illiteracy, and a touching faith in government to lead us to Marx’s golden age where no one works and we all frolic in the sun.

Bernie wants to give the kids free college educations. (Hurrah!) So who pays the salaries of professors and teaching assistants? Who pays for language labs and gymnasiums? Why, taxpayers, of course, including many low-income workers. That’s socialist fairness.

But the Eugene V. Debs clone has something for the working poor too -- doubling the minimum wage to $15 an hour. In socialism’s alternate universe, government can set any wage it wants, which businesses will happily pay. If that’s the way it works, why stop at doubling the minimum wage -- why not triple or quadruple it?

Every time we raise the minimum wage, youth unemployment increases. The 16 to 19 demographic had an unemployment rate of 45% in 2011, compared to 26% in the year 2000. That staggering number represents lost tax revenue, increased social spending and, most importantly, lost opportunity. One of two things happen when the minimum wage goes up: a business passes the cost on to consumers, or it sheds the least productive employees -- like the baggers in supermarkets or kitchen help, and busboys in restaurants.

Can the Vermont senator cite an example of successful socialism? The USSR collapsed under the dead weight of decades of five-year plans. North Korea doesn’t have an economy. Cuba is a basket case. China started on the road to prosperity by abandoning Maoism.

Sandersistas cry foul. Those are failed communist experiments, they counter. (What is communism but socialism with a gun?)

But what about Venezuela, with the world’s largest oil reserves and an inflation rate of 720%? A January 29 headline in the Washington Post warned: “Venezuela is on the brink of a complete economic collapse.”

Sweden has an income tax that takes 55% of GNP and a value-added tax as high as 22.5%. Altogether, the Swedish government controls roughly two-thirds of the nation’s economy. Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad told Forbes that Swedish bureaucrats often accuse him of exploiting workers and “only wanting profits.” The nerve!

A quote often attributed to Winston Churchill goes: “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.”
So, what’s Bernie’s excuse? 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/02/all_aboard_starship_bernie.html#ixzz40WMQniTM
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Milton Friedman - The Free Lunch Myth

While Americans Talk of Slavery

There are more slaves today than at any time in human history, reported Benjamin Skinner, a fellow

An estimated 27 million people in the world are forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence, in forced marriages, in sex-trafficking and prostitution.

Though mostly illegal and called by different names, slavery nevertheless exists today in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Southeast Asia, Romania, Sudan, Haiti, Brazil, Latin America, and even in the United States.

It was reported in TIME Magazine, Jan. 18, 2010:

"Despite more than a dozen international conventions banning slavery in the past 150 years, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history."
at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Read the rest of this story:
American Minute

The Greatest Story Never Told

Do you know how many people the Bible says were raised from the dead on Easter weekend?

When Christian friends engage me in debate about the reliability of the Bible, I like to ask them that to see how well they know the book they so revere. One of the hallmarks of fundamentalism is the belief that the Bible can’t be wrong, and that has produced a plethora of problems for American society. But believing in a perfect Bible doesn’t always lead to actually knowing what the book says.  So when I ask them this question, the answer I usually get is: “It says only one person was raised from the dead:  Jesus.”  But that’s not correct, and what happens next fascinates me.

I have to point out to Christians, many of whom maintain that the Bible cannot be wrong, that in one place (and only one place) the Bible says that a whole bunch of people came out of their graves right after Jesus died on the afternoon of Good Friday and then walked around Jerusalem…a couple of days later.  Here’s what it says in the gospel attributed to Matthew about the moment that Jesus died:

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

In all my years in church I don’t recall ever once hearing a preacher acknowledge from the pulpit that a bunch of people were raised from the dead and appeared to many on Easter weekend.  Have you ever heard one talk about this?  Surely somebody has addressed it at some point.  But most of them don’t, and never will.  I find that fascinating!  This book, which many of them claim would never make a mistake (especially about something as important as the events of Easter weekend), tells a story that I’m not sure they really believe.  I say that because they virtually never talk about it.  This gets talked about so infrequently that even when I ask people the above question they seem unaware the book even says what it says.

Read more:
The Greatest Story Never Told

White Privilege for Dummies | ZoNation

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Bernie Sanders, The Bum Who Wants Your Money

An editorial from Investor's Business Daily (January 16, 2016) 

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Monday his parents would never have thought their son would end up in the Senate and running for president. No kidding. He was a ne’er-do-well into his late 30s.

“It’s certainly something that I don’t think they ever believed would’ve happened,” the unabashed socialist remarked during CNN’s Democratic town hall forum, as polls show him taking the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire.

He explained his family couldn’t imagine his “success,” because “my brother and I and Mom and Dad grew up in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, and we never had a whole lot of money.”

It wasn’t as bad as he says. His family managed to send him to the University of Chicago. Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check.

“I never had any money my entire life,” Sanders told Vermont public TV in 1985, after settling into his first real job as mayor of Burlington.

Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”

One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”

So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner.

He finally wormed his way into the Senate in 2006, where he still ranks as one of the poorest members of Congress. Save for a municipal pension, Sanders lists no assets in his name. All the assets provided in his financial disclosure form are his second wife’s. He does, however, have as much as $65,000 in credit-card debt.

Sure, Sanders may not be a hypocrite, but this is nothing to brag about. His worthless background contrasts sharply with the successful careers of other “outsiders” in the race for the White House, including a billionaire developer, a world-renowned neurosurgeon and a Fortune 500 CEO.

The choice in this election is shaping up to be a very clear one. It will likely boil down to a battle between those who create and produce wealth, and those who take it and redistribute it.

Source:
Bernie Sanders, The Bum Who Wants Your Money | Stock News & Stock Market Analysis - IBD

Hump Day Hunnies

Homeopathy: The Air Guitar of Medicine

Homeopathy is an alternative medicine, which means a few things. It means it’s not medicine, it’s alternative; it means it’s seen by many as somehow better and healthier than modern medicines; and it means that people are incredibly emotional in their support for it.
an

I’ve received death threats pretty much every time I’ve ever written about homeopathy, which is incredible if you think about it. How can a remedy cause so much hatred? And what could I possibly say that would make people upset? Well, it doesn’t work. Homeopathy is a £40 million industry in the UK and it doesn’t even work. I once deliberately overdosed on homeopathic sleeping pills. I ate the whole tube, about a month’s worth. I did fall asleep but it was 10 hours later and at bedtime.

Like cures like

Many alternative medicines are a bit silly. Crystal healing anyone? However, none are as frustratingly absurd as homeopathy. There are not one but two unbelievable aspects of homeopathy that people are often unaware of, the first being like cures like. Homeopathy was invented in 1796 by a German named Samuel Hahnemann. He believed that you could treat and cure illnesses by using substances that cause the symptoms of the illness in healthy people.

If you had insomnia, a suitable substance would be caffeine. Caffeine will keep healthy people awake but if you’re unable to get to sleep then according to homeopathy, it will help you. You can buy homeopathic remedies on the high street that supposedly contain caffeine to help you sleep. And worse, Reddit user papafree claims to have used dangerous and hilarious ingredients while working in a homeopathic manufacturing plant according to this entertaining and disturbing thread.

Read more:
Homeopathy: the air guitar of medicine | Gadgette

Is America Ruled By Law or Ruled by Power?

Hillary Clinton is a felon many times over. Assuming the facts are as being reported – or that they are
even a tenth of the severity of what has been reported – Hillary Clinton is guilty of multiple serious felonies stemming from her conscious choice to unlawfully hide her correspondence as Secretary of State on a “private” server that was kept in some dude’s bathroom somewhere. I use the term “private” only in the sense that it was non-governmental; every foreign intelligence agency, friend or foe, was reading it. Only we American citizens can’t see what was on it, and that’s because much of it was highly classified material. So she is a felon many times over.

Understand that this is not open to debate. There is no “her side of the story.” There is no excuse nor harmless explanation. To those of us who have worked with classified material in the military or other governmental agencies, the daily revelations of new OPSEC atrocities literally make us nauseous. And I understand what “literally” means. We pros read that someone consciously took classified material off a secure system, walked it out of a secure facility, and somehow (by scanning it then cutting and pasting from the PDF, or even by typing it in manually) put it in an unclassified system and emailed it off in the clear to Hillary and her toilet server, where it was stored in a machine that was hooked up to the world wide web. And we feel our stomachs turn even as we run out of fingers and toes counting the horde of individual security violations that process entails.

There is no dispute. It can’t be disputed. These are felonies. Anyone telling you any different is either utterly ignorant about how classified material is handled, or is irredeemably stupid, or is a liar who puts the political viability of Hillary Clinton above the safety of the United States and the people who defend it. And, as much as the trial lawyer in me professionally appreciates when an advocate misdirects people away from the weak points in his argument, the claim that this material is somehow “overclassified” insults the intelligence of anyone it is directed toward. If the advocate has actually seen the material, he’s broken the law too (as has Clinton for letting yet another uncleared person see it). And even if the classification could have been lower than TOP SECRET/SCI, it wasn’t lower. It was TOP SECRET/SCI or whatever, and some minion of Hillary’s in Foggy Bottom doesn’t get to make that call. Hillary doesn’t get to make that call.

The question is not whether Hillary Clinton is manifestly and indisputably guilty of multiple felonies. She is.

Read the rest:
Is America Ruled By Law or Ruled by Power? - Kurt Schlichter - Page 2

30 Pairs Of Bible Verses That Contradict One Another | Thought Catalog

A long, long time ago, I used to be a Christian. Then again, I also used to believe in Santa Claus. Thedivinely inspired, AKA the infallible words of a perfect God that was dictated to human transcribers.
thing that primarily killed my faith is that I read enough of The Bible to realize that it teemed with contradictions and thus couldn’t possibly have been

Here’s a pair of verses that are completely incompatible:

And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven. —Luke 12:10

For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. —Romans 10:13

I used to agonize over those two, because if you commit a sin that can never be forgiven, you burn in the Lake of Fire forever—no turning back, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. So what would happen if, in the same sentence, I said, “Dear Lord, between you and me, the Holy Ghost is kind of a jerkoff, but I’m calling on your name, anyway—so save me, dude”? These two verses can’t be simultaneously true. They cancel out one another.

Another thing that ultimately made no sense was the whole Old Testament/New Testament conundrum. God actually changes his mind? In Leviticus, God lays down a bunch of laws and calls them “everlasting.” Then in the New Testament, we suddenly hear this:

For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second. —Hebrews 8:7

So God made a deal with the Hebrews that had faults in it? God is imperfect? It doesn’t compute.
Long after I stopped being a Christian, I started realizing there were other things about The Bible that made no sense, whether logically or emotionally. For example, here’s what is probably the most-quoted Bible verse of all:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. —John 3:16

I now have a son. The idea that I would send him in my stead to be crucified for someone else’s fuckups doesn’t sound like love to me; it sounds like the ultimate punk move.

Also: If Adam and Eve were the original humans, how did the world populate itself without incest?
For your edification and enlightenment, here are 30 more pairs of Bible verses that contradict one another:

Read them all here:
30 Pairs Of Bible Verses That Contradict One Another | Thought Catalog

How John Adams Predicted Bernie Sanders and His Acolytes

By William Sullivan

 

There is something incredibly curious about the Bernie Sanders’s faithful.  On the one hand, we’re told that they’re incredibly well-educated.  Indeed, academia and its young charges support him more than other candidates, some say.

One might be inclined to think that this implies some sort of intellectual ballast to Sanders’ fiscal approach.  Surely, such learned scholars wouldn’t just flock to the guy without having done extensive research, and after having earned a broad foundation of knowledge about economics through hours, days, or perhaps years of diligent study.

Then, you see the Sanders campaign tweet something like this:

@SenSanders: You have families out there paying 6, 8, 10 percent on student debt but you can refinance your homes at 3 percent.  What sense is that?

This tweet has not been removed, despite its having been thrashed as perhaps “the most economically illiterate tweet ever.”  But naturally, this is the kind of stuff that makes the rest of America that isn’t “feeling the Bern” scratch their heads.  Your everyday taxpayer, who may not have gone to college because of the 6, 8, or 10 percent interest rates on the debt he would have incurred by doing so, wonders how Sanders supporters, supposedly so intelligent, can be so incredibly ignorant to the concept of collateralized debt.   One Twitter user, @Smittie61984, clarifies the concept in less than 140 characters, complete with the requisite snark that silly tweets like Sanders’ deserve:

@SenSanders A bank can repossess a house.  They can’t repossess your brain if you quit paying your student loans.  Though, you make me wonder.

Read the rest:
Articles: How John Adams Predicted Bernie Sanders and His Acolytes

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