“But when implemented in an open society with an elected government responsible to the People, it tends to be far more open handed and individualistic.” If it is an open society with an elected government responsible to the People, it isn’t Socialism, because the underlying economy is Capitalist, it is just an over-taxed, crippled capitalism with some wealth redistribution going on. This will make the capitalist economy run short of optimum, but won’t kill it unless the electorate votes for Bread and Circuses that the underlying productive economy cannot support. I think you are using the word Socialist to describe measures applied by Left-Wing politicians in a democracy to achieve some of the goals of Socialism without the actual Socialist ownership and Central Planning of the economy.
My view of Marriage as being between a Man and a Woman is a religious one, but part of being Christian is accepting that non-Christians have different views, and accepting that we will never agree, we’ll agree to disagree.
The argument that a women is entitled to kill her own unborn child just so she won’t be “a slave to the fetus. Literally a walking incubator with no rights of her own” is an inhuman one. The same logic would say she should be able to kill her children after they are born so that she won’t be a slave to her child, literally a walking childcare worker with no rights of her own.” The question of when has a human being been created is an easy one in science: it is at the point where it has been fertilised and attached to the uterus. After that it is just a matter of time before a child is born. It is a much harder question legally and politically. If a man shoots a pregnant woman he is charged with two murders; the woman and her unborn child. Why is it then OK for a doctor to slice that baby to pieces in the womb? Serious moral questions remain, so I don’t expect us to agree there either.
On the All Lives Matter question, read Svetlana’s analysis of the statistics here:
On climate Change you say “ Here’s what climate change does… Fertile plains become barren deserts, rain forests wither, beaches erode, and fire turns forests to ash.” The problem with that is that exactly the opposite is happening: a warmer world is a wetter world, as evaporation forms more clouds faster, and the CO2 fertilisation effect makes plants grow faster, and be more drought tolerant. We now know for a fact that the world’s deserts have been shrinking all around the world over the last 30 years: satellite observations show that an area as large as the continental USA has gone from desert to grass, scrub or forest in that time.
http://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2013/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2
Coasts will erode and land will be inundated, but that has been happening ever since the last ice age ended, at the rate of about 3mm per year, or a foot per Century. Unless the ice age returns that will continue to occur. My issue with the mission to reduce Carbon emissions is that climate change policy is doing more harm than good, and that harm is impacting our poorest people all around the world.
Here’s one UK politician’s summary of this.
He references the peer-reviewed sources for all of his points, so his view is supported by verifiable facts. he finishes with:
“I say to my greener friends:
- Where do you get your insouciance about the clear evidence that the poorest people in the world are the ones hardest hit by climate change policy today?
- Where do you get your indomitable certainty that the end justifies these means?
- Where do you find the evidence that we must cause certain pain to today’s poor in order to forestall the small possibility of suffering among tomorrow’s rich?
- And where do you find the hubris to occupy the moral high ground?”
