Why is Comparative Religion in Science?

[quadraphonics]

And unlike the Warsaw Pact leaders, who got rich from bribes and other forms of corruption, the Chinese elders get rich by running profitable corporations

Where to even start with this one... maybe do a little reading on levels of corruption in China? Or question the basic premise that "running a profitable corporation" is somehow exclusive of/distinct from "bribes and other corruption" in the context of a state-capitalist system run by an entrenched single-party authoritarian dictatorship.

We truly "bombed them back into the Stone Age," yet once we finally left, in one generation they became the fastest-growing economy in the region.

Not seeing where that "yet" is coming from: having your economy systematically degraded and shrunken by outside powers is a sure-fire way to create high growth - the process of simply rebuilding what you used to have from the diminished baseline, would show up as "high growth." Similar to how bringing up China up from abject poverty to some basic level of industrialization shows up as a huge growth rate. And so not seeing any relevance to any particular politico-economic philosophy - those statistics require nothing deeper than an empoverished starting point, and a political willingness to import foreign technology and capital.

 

[birch]

Besides, only a Christian culture could have come up with that philosophy. Can you imagine any self-respecting Jew, Hindu or Confucian suggesting, with a straight face, that an economy could survive if what a man takes from it does not have to correlate with what he gives back?

what i can't believe is you probably said that with a straight face. if anything, that would apply to capitalism just the same or more.

this doesn't even make sense. of course sometimes people take or require more than they give back. and who's to say how that is measured and if that is correct, equal or fair? how is one justified to be a multimillionaire or billionaire? someone decided it was 'fair'. who decided that someone doing backbreaking work another doesn't want to do for 'pittance' was fair? is it really fair? is it really equal? no, it's bullshit. it is about power, not even perfect equanimity in contribution.

does one need to be a surgeon in order to qualify for surgery? that would be the only technical equanimity.

is a person with terminal cancer laying up in the hospital rather than 'contributing' to society taking more from it perhaps? what right do they have to deserve such medicine if they are not the ones who put the massive amount of research into it? maybe they are just a drywall specialist on a construction site. they don't deserve it because they don't do exactly what another does? how about children with terminal cancer? they may never get a chance to yet they may have spent their entire lives being taken care of by people.

if society doesn't take responsibility for others, then there is no reason why others should take responsibility for them when something happens where they may need it.