There is not a thing that we are aware of that exists without a purpose…there is not a single thing we do in life that cannot be tracked to a reason…
even if we are unaware of what that purpose or reason may be.

Obviously the purpose of the existence of the Universe is to support life…

why create billions of suns and trillions of planets to support life on very few?

because it is like sperm…just as it takes millions of sperm to ensure the fertilization of one single egg…it takes billions of suns and trillions of planets to ensure the fertilization of a planet…or planets.

I’m sure Hamas understands that they could not win a war with Israel…even if they had modern weapons they couldn’t compete with the military aid Israel gets from the US and other Nations…

this is not an act of war…but an act of desperation of an occupied society against a foreign invader.

I reiterate my earlier statements that I support a Jewish homeland…I support the right of Jews to defend themselves…
but…
not at the cost of displacing and occupying another society that has every right to have had their homeland preserved.

There was very clearly a concerted effort over the last 100+ years to displace the inhabitants of the region and create a Jewish homeland.

Palestinians should not pay for the crimes perpetrated against the Jews or the fact that they were homeless.

Israel is a creation of Judeo-Christian mentality…little regard was given to the Palestinians in it’s creation. It was established for biblical reasons.

Government…should not be swayed by their religious beliefs in making decisions that allow one to depose another on the basis of prejudice.

The Zionist movement wanted to establish a homeland in Palestine…Judeo-Christian Countries sympathetic to the Jews allowed the creation of Israel in Palestine.

This ( the disposition of Israel ) took place over 100+ years

CRONOLOGIA COMPARADA CHINA-AMÉRICA

Israel was created by deceit and conversion.

They’ve had the military might for years…it is way past time to win their hearts and minds with kindness rather than bullets.

If the Israeli’s put forth an honest effort to ‘ help ‘ the Palestinians…perhaps the Hamas would never have been elected.

History has proven time and time again you don’t control the public with force you control the public by freedoms and services…the types of things that they are unwilling to give up…

when you give a people nothing but anguish and despair they will fight forever with nothing but rocks against tanks if rocks is all they have.

The fact is it is too late to change history…the Israeli’s are not leaving…however, you do not win over the hearts and minds of those you oppress by making life even more difficult…this conflict will never end because Israel does not want it to ever end.

Why else would the Palestinians be fighting with rocks against tanks if not because they refuse to be rolled over in their own homeland…it is not an act of war…they could not possibly win a war ..it is an act of defiance.

If my Country was taken away and given to someone else I would fight too…even with rocks if that was all I had.

However..if my life was BETTER as a result then I would be more inclined to appreciate the change in authority, even if I disagreed with how it was done.
If you want the Palestinians to stop resisting…it’s simple..provide better schools, better housing, better public works and services…give them decent jobs and a better life than they had…

and they will not only stop fighting they will admire you and even fight for you.

We are not debating here the moral fibre of the Muslims, or their religion…but the right of the oppressed over their oppressors to defend themselves and fight for their Country.

Well it’s the story of the apple…a very old argument about knowledge and how far it extends…

we give things names for the purpose of mutual identification and communication…but a name is just a name…you are Think Harder but you could have called yourself something completely different…
just as we could have called an apple a tree, and a tree a spaceship…and we would identify those objects with those names…

but a name does not tell us what the object is…

it only identifies the object…

so…what is an apple? Not what we call it, or call any of it’s parts…what ‘ is ‘ it?

The fact is our knowledge is limited to two primary things…

1. name
2. uses

we know what we ‘ call ‘ things, we know what we can use the objects for…we know we can manipulate our environment and cause the creation of new things and we give them names…

but if I ask you to tell me what an apple ‘ is ‘ without telling me it’s name ( which is just it’s designation ) and without telling me it’s uses ( which does not explain what it ‘ is ‘ ) …you could not answer me…

we are the manipulators of our environment…industrious ants of a higher order…

our knowledge does not extend beyond that.

Edit: and it has nothing to do with being technically agnostic about all things ..it just has to do with understanding the limits of our knowledge.

Well..I’d love to be able to take credit for the idea but…

the idea is really a composite of several Greek philosophers views, primarily based upon what Diogenes himself believed…

” My view is that ALL things are differentiations of the same thing, and ARE the same thing. And this is obvious; for, if the things which are of this world -
earth, air, fire, water, and everything else we see existing in this world -
if any of these things, I say, were different from any other, different, that is, by having a substance peculiar to itself; and if it were not the same thing that has often changed and differentiated, then,
things could not in any way mix with one another, nor could they do one another any good or harm.
Neither could a plant grow out of the earth, nor any animal nor anything else come into being unless things were so composed as to be the same.
But all these things arise from the same thing; they are differentiated and take different forms at different times, and return again to the same thing. ”

Diogenes

Basically, like a ‘ Master DNA ‘ factory of never-ending production and recycling, from which all things are derived. He never refers to this ‘ source ‘ as god…as he attaches no other quality to it.

As an example…homosexual marriage…is NOT a moral issue…it is not morally right or morally wrong…it is an acceptance issue…does our society want to accept it…or reject it…

without a god, without a moral law to which we are subject…morality is nothing more than ‘ do we ‘ or ‘ don’t we ‘

and each society frames it’s values according to their own acceptance or denial…

in Canada we decided as a group to accept it…California decided as a group to reject it…and that is all it is…

none being morally right…none being morally wrong.

A lot of people who claim to not be religious are still very much affected by the religion around them…causing them to be outraged or offended or perturbed by the notion that evil, good and bad, right and wrong ( in respect to morality ) are just notions that are based in religious thought…
eg. killing must be, in their head, wrong…well, it isn’t…
we can make it against the law or make it allowable…as we see fit.

…………….

It’s very simple…

either WE make the rules, in which case they can be anything we want them to be…

or

we DON’T make the rules, in which case we are subject to a higher power of morality that is not in our control…

you can’t have it both ways.

So…if I think we should just kill every violent criminal, and if most people in my society agreed with me then, that is what we would do…
but unfortunately…most people are influenced/affected/infected by the morality they were raised on either consciously or sub-consciously or both…
even though they will swear they are not, they still subscribe to notions deeply embedded in religious morality…still subscribe to the notion of a conscience that has a specific moral code that we must follow…
this is right and that is wrong…the Moral Atheists.

Empathy itself is very cultural driven…we in our society have an affinity for dogs…in China they eat them…we don’t believe stoning people is right…in other cultures it is an acceptable form of punishment…
sympathy/empathy is very much dependent upon the influences in a society…most of which have been religious-based.

The ‘ group ‘ is not referring to atheists or theists…the ‘ group ‘ is the formulation of a society from it’s inception.

For example one group forming in the Amazon and another group forming in Alberta will develop some of the same values and some different values according to their needs…that is why one group eats people, another it disgusts…neither are morally wrong nor morally right…they have merely established different sets of values.

In today’s world values are much more complicated because they are affected by so many more things…but the way in which values are formed is still pretty much the same.

If we bought a Country and it was decided that instead of imprisoning criminals we would just kill them…then we would be doing nothing morally wrong…

god would not condemn us, there is no god…nature would not condemn us, there is no moral law to be upheld…

simply put…we decide…what values we will accept or deny…no good, no evil…just this we accept, and that we deny.

Therefore..a man who goes on a criminal spree is actually doing nothing wrong other than violating the rules we have applied as a group.

You can’t have it both ways…you can’t say:

there is no god…there is no moral law to be upheld

and then say a person is morally wrong or evil for acts that cannot be anything but a violation of the law..

To say anything else is to confirm a belief in moral law that exists apart from our control. We decide if something is acceptable or not…as a group…and the group takes precedence over the individual.

The war on drugs is as useless as the war on terror…even if you were to capture every drug lord in the world that exists today…new ones would take their place tomorrow.

The only way to win this is to take the money out of the equation…

no money…no more illegal producers or traffickers of drugs

solution: not perfect but it’d do the job…

1. legalize, or decriminalize, all drugs, making only production and sales illegal for non-licensed companies
2. you license specific companies to produce the drugs
3. sell the drugs ‘ AT COST ‘ ( this is essential…if you sell at cost you remove the profit margin for illegal sales making it unprofitable to produce or traffic drugs illegally ) through licensed pharmacies
4. you make it easy to get a prescription ( again essential )…no one is going to pay $400 for a bag of weed if they can get it at cost without a hassle

now…you have successfully removed any reason to produce or sell drugs illegally…as you have destroyed the drugs potential to turn a profit

but…now you have other issues…now that you are in control of the drugs you need to put into place ways to remove the dependence on drugs without restricting access to them…which would cause a bootleg drug trade, the equivalent of the existing bootleg booze trade.

Ending the drug war is as simple as taking away the profit from illegal sales…the drug market like any enterprise is profit driven.

But…then what do you do…now that you are the Drug Lord with a monopoly on the drug trade…now that you are in control?