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how do you feel about only letting the majors be allowed for grants that produce a certain amount of income upon graduation? that means the majors are marketable, good for the economy. 

the government should use price controls to keep college affordable. every other developed country uses price controls as the main way to spend half as much as we do with healthcare, with better quality care.... so i dont know why we can use price controls with college. there's no point writing open checks and throwing money at that problem. 

do you support stopping all college loans from the government? cause the debt problem we have is strangling the economy. you could stop those loans, or keep throwing money at the situation, but either way, it's still a strangle on the economy to keep things as they are . 

i encourage folks to read Dr. Long’s book “evidence of the afterlife” to get some concrete science that points to NDEs being more than just hallucinations. for example, when out of body experiences are studied under scientific conditions, the folks who have the experience are almost always accurate in describing events that happened outside their body while they were dead. folks who try to just guess what happened outside their body are almost always way off. the book mentions the work of heart surgeon (skeptic turned believer in the ‘realness’ of NDEs) Dr. Parnia, the AWARE study, where a couple experiences accurately describe events outside the body in a verified and documented situation. another factoid, is that folks meet relatives during the experience and the relatives are almost always dead: if this was just a hallucination, folks would experience living folks and less relatives a lot more often. then there’s how drugs dont replicate the NDE….. drug experiences are almost always random experiences, random imagery in hallucinations, not consistent stories with common themes of the afterlife like NDEs. also, there’s the fact that common themes like tunnels and meeting a being of light are consistent when measured and documented across cultures and with people who have never heard of NDEs, including young kids. finally there’s just a philosophical point…. the idea that people just consistently hallucinate afterlife stories when they die pushes credibility. is there some story embedded in our brain or genes or something? it’s a ridiculous notion.
there’s a load of other scientific factoids in that book. i highly recommend it. clearly there’s something deeper going on with NDEs than just hallucinations.

see post 34 above. 

also see here

if you think there is no evidence for the supernatural, you are incompetent and stupid. 

your 'facts' are just made up.

there's loads of evidence for the supernatural. 

sometimes after people pray, things that look like miracles happen to them. these things dont happen to atheists. things that are impossible. like someone's retina heals, or their optic nerve. 

the book 'evidence of the afterlife' by doctcor jeffrey long regarding near death experiences. the idea that people consistently hallucinate afterlife stories is a laughable theory by atheists. is there some afterlife gene or afterlife story embedded in our brain? this all would have to be true for the atheist position to be true, which is ridiculous. there's lots of evidence for out of body experiences. people only experience dead relatives, almost completely, when if they were hallucinating there would be many living relatives. like i said, loads of evidence. 

id say strong atheists are delusional, or stupid or ignorant

so what is the verse in question trying to accomplish? and isn't the bible discriminating against people with disabilities here? 

why would God change his mind whether food was unclean or not? 

what do you think of the issues posed in this thread? 

you're pretty good at defending the bible. what do you think of the verse in the opening post?

well stated breakdown of ethang's verses. 

so are you saying that the bible says slavery is wrong or a sin, but that God gave clear instructions on how to partake of that sin?

on a side note. ive heard people say the bible only allows servants from people who owe you money. but the above sounds like slaves for the sake of slaves. 

on another note, some people say the above verse is only God permitting or allowing slavery, not condoning it. the most straightforward way of reading it though is it sounds like it's condoning it. if you want a slave, go ahead and get one. 

but i'm more interested in this thread of knowing if i can own a slave, according to the bible. 

i'm not aware of any verses that forbids slavery. but i can find some that allows it. 

Leviticus 25

"44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly."

if you look earlier in the chapter, the above is basically words from the Lord through Moses. 

so why can i or can't i own slaves, according to the bible?

ive cited articles that have doctors verify things that look like miracles. these things happen all the time to theists. you have to choose to remain ignorant to say otherwise. i can't even talk about these things with you in an advanced way, cause you are still stuck not knowing that 1+1 = 2. 

read the damn book. he cites peer reviewed science, you just can't deal with it and choose to remain ignorant, 

if you search through my topic posts you'll see i've posted about things that look like miracles, such as someone's optic nerve being healed, verified by their doctors. and these kinds of things happen all the time and you would have to be stupid or evil to not realize it. now, with that said, these things are never shown to happen to atheists. ive been asking for years and no one can show me something that looks like a miracle happening to an atheist. 

dr long's book that i mentioned cites plenty of peer reviewed articles and studies. out of body experiences that are verified as accurate from credible people, with an extreme rate of accuracy. almost 100% of the people in NDE experiences that are met are deceased, when if this was all fake and hallucation, that number would be all over the place. blind people seeing. the book is full proof. 

that you choose to remain ignorant, stupid, and have a hardened heart.... is your problem. you might want to work on that

miracles. sometimes something like someone's retina or optic nerve heals itself after they pray. this sort of stuff doesn't happen to atheists. 

near death experiences. there's just way too much good science behind this to write it off. see dr jeffrey long's book 'evidence of the afterlife' for a good start on that topic. 

look at the bible. do you see error? of course there is. so if God is real, the bible must not be error free. 

think of all the saints and other sources that were inspired. were any of them perfect? no. so it's the way things are, that there's inspiration and not perfection. only God is perfect. his creation is not. 

church tradition says that the bible has mistakes in it. inerrancy and infallibility of the bible are modern liberal inventions. 

the way i see it is there are things that look contradictory in the bible, so if i see something that on its face looks riduculous, i'm not just going to give it the benefit of the doubt. that fundamentalist christians refuse to see the obvious, is their problem. they are heretics. 

i believe the bible is only inspired, not infallible or inerrant 

alec is going off the deep end with this 'hell in the earth' talk. he's losing his marbles. losing touch with sanity. you get the idea. 

i can see that you have some points and i have some points when it comes to price controls and shortages, but at least why do you think the usa can't use price controls if every other country does it as the main way to cost half as much as we do? why should the usa be different? 

price controls to control cost. every other country does that as the main way to cost half as much as we do, and they cover everyone with better results and less wait times to wait for a doctor. medicare spends a fifth less than insurance does, because they use price controls. medicaid spends a third less than medicare for that reason. these practices could in some form be extended to the whole industry. 

here is some general information on all that plus a whole lot more for anyone looking at providing universal affordable care to the country. 

insurance companies spend a third of their revenue on profit and adminstrative costs. medicare spends three percent on administrative costs and none on profit. due to all the actors involveas middlemen  like insurance and the government, there are more medical billing specialists than there are nurses in many hospitals. we can see that the whole insurance industry can be streamlined on how it charges and maybe even minimized or reduced. just some more ideas on how to reduce costs through the government. 

killing their general is very provocative. it's a major escalation. i would have did something less provocative. now, they will just get another general. you keep ignoring that iran can just increase its terrorism. they will attack usa interest more. we can do tit for tat like u want to do,, but that just causes more flies to swat. if bees are bothering you, do you attack the queen bee when all the other bees will launch an assault on you, making the problem worse? no, you swat the individual bees who are bothering you. we can't just nuke the hive, or nuke iran, like you stupidly suggested, to stop terrorism. 

u've shown labor can be helped through more free market, and patents can be helped with tweeks, but there's a whole healthcare industry out there of medical suppliers who are also too expensive. the bulk of the costs. and you haven't shown how to approach that. 

the problem is that you are being too abstract. in the abstract, price fixes cause shortages. but they dont always. what are some specific healthcare shortages that would result? for example of why you are too in the sky, is that we can mandate that bandaides can't cost more than a buck each. so is there a shortage of bandaids? probably not. it costs little to make them, and the producers would just make more and absorb the hit. they would just get paid less. the whole point. 

medicare already does price fixtures. should we get rid of that and pay even more? if you like it in medicare why not everywhere else? what if insurance had to follow the same price fixtures that medicare has, plus maybe a little extra? i know people say the industry and providers can't do medicare prices, but why does it work in every other country?

you still haven't argued why we can't dabble in price fixtures if that's how every other country saves so much. 

you evaded the question. i pointed out that iran can increase its terrorism against us and all we can do is try to manage a worse sitatuion. after i pointed that out, your non response was 'peace through strength'. how does that negate that they could and probably would increase their terrorism against us? 

you would also need to explain more about 'shortages'. most of the problem we'd see with price fixing is that providers would just get paid less, that's mainly all there is. most things can be produced without running out of it, supplies and such. the main problem on the supply and demand side, is the wait time problem, and that's only a problem in canada and no where else, and can be fixed in canada or here too, if we want. 

i dont think price fixing is so bad. every other country does it and that's the main way they all spend half as much as we do. we wouldn't even have to go that severely low in costs. but we can do it enough to ensure everyone is covered and costs dont get too out of control. if you offer no alternative to price fixing, i would say stick with what works in the rest of the world wouldn't you? why should the usa be different? 

so you dont like price fixing and you say you dont know how to fix our system. aside from fixing patents, do you have any ideas about how to control costs if not price fixing? hospitals and general medical providers are where the major costs are, not drugs. 

most of the costs of healthcare come from hospitals, not drug prices, and general medical providers. would you be willing to use price fixing in the general medical provider setting, in the array of medical services provided by the industry? if not, how would you control costs? 

yes i would tolerate some terrorism happening. i would use limited responses to manage those situation. see my last post above to the pie guy for how trump made things worse. 

why would you think iran wouldn't escalate the situation? all they have to do is use their proxies, their funded terrorist groups. we can't just nuke or strong arm our way out of that. we can bomb more motherfuckers, but it's just swatting flies at that point. the thing is, we'd be swatting a bunch more flies. they dont care if they die or lose people. thus, there would be more terrorism going on from iran, and nothing we can do but try to manage a situation made worse by trump

dont you think escalating the situation will just make things worse?

so how do you view the increase in terrorism that his assassination will cause? 

every other developed country covers everyone at half the cost. that alone is enough to overlook any negatives that their system may have. dont get me wrong, the usa could definitely fuck things up, but we have no examples elsewhere to think it'd happen here. i know people complain about wait times in canada, but they are the only country with worse wait times than we have. everyone else is better. plus, they can decrease their wait times just by getting more doctors, but they choose not to. it's a problem that can be overcome and isn't a problem anywhere else, and they are half as costly anyway (if we spent half as much as we do now and had canada's wait problem, is that really so bad?), so why the big fear in fixing our broken healthcare system through the government? 

did the embassy get attacked before or after he was assassinated? i dont follow the news enough to know. if this was in response to an embassy attack, i still would not have escalated the situation even more. what do you think of the increased terrorism that his assassination will cause? 

where's the harm in waiting for a small attack or something more immenient?there's too much uncerntainty here such that your obvious bias is showing given how much you defer to trump. given how this plays into iran's hands and will fuel more terrorism, we should be skeptical of trump until he can make a stronger case for why he did what he did. 

it might make sense that trump knew what he was doing but we can't be so sure, cause trump can be unhinged. how immienent of an attack was there, and what was the scale of the attack? i have a feeling the administration will use distractions instead of making a strong case. i think pompeo has already been waffling on this point. and, i might venture that allowing a smaller attack happen first may have been preferable, given how this all plays into iran's hands and will fuel more terrorism. 

i think trump should have waited for a clearer attack on americans before killing the guy. as it sits now, this will fuel more terrorism, for sure. and iran will feel justified. also as it sits now, we only have speculation and maybe some concrete plotting, but it's still unclear. it's sort of like do you wait till harm is imminent or already done before attacking, or do you wade out into the murky area of just possibilities? i can get behind attacking before you are immeniently attacked, but in this case, given how this plays out for iran and an increase of terrorism, it would have been better to wait for something clearer. 

apparently he thinks all murderers are out for the maximum death count. not true at all, but that's apparently what he thinks. 

i dont think the supreme court would go for this system, though, because theyd view it as a violation of a person's liberty interest, if they were coerced into sacrificing their body. i could be wrong though because they might also just view it as the prisoner's decision. something about it though seems uncivilized such that i think the court wouldn't allow it. 

i'm against the death penalty at first blush, but if we forced murderers to either donate blood and bodily goods like that, or be put to death, id go for the death penalty for those who want it. i'm not principled enough to be dead set against the death penalty, i'm too practical. 

i dont think criminals would drastically reduce their murders if they thought theyd end up saving more lives in the end, because most criminals dont think that way that they want to kill as many as possible, and even if they did think that way, they arent rational enough to be competently making those decisions and would go for the kill. 

1. fix the national debt

2. establish tax credits for alternative energy including nuclear as part of a free market leaning transition

5. increase common sense gun control

slashing medicare and medicaid and social security would cause us to have less to pay back to those programs, so that would help too. those are the biggest spending programs we got. not that i recommend this approach, but. 

the immigration debate has little to do with the national debt. 

a flat tax has little to do with the debt. and, a flat tax would be bad for the debt, if we kept spending high. that's because you'd have to lower taxes on the rich, and if we are going to get much of anything out of tax payers, taxes will have to go up on poorer people to get a similar stream of revenue. a flat tax is unjust and an all around terrible idea. 

this quiz gives real world examples of how we can get the debt under control, or if we really wanted, get rid of it. 

i would propose cutting spending and raising taxes. alternatively, we could just keep growth of spending down to one or two percent, and eventually the economy would outpace the debt by a large margin.