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Pastimes : My House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (3676)	11/18/2002 5:41:56 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

"What makes the relationship with the government arbitrary is the fact that the government can and does exceed the limitations the constitution placed on it" If that were true it would only be true in the particular not in the general. So your characterization is wrong, regardless... If government can and does exceed the legal limits then it is arbitrary. The checks and balances of the system and the fact that there is some democratic control over it reduce the extent that it is arbitrary but it does not eliminate the fact that our government does act in an arbitrary fashion exceeding its constitutional mandate. That is not what I said. I simply made the obvious point that individuals (such as yourself) do not define what is right for the social group--not unless you are a dictator with the appropriate preponderance of weapons... I define whatever I want as wrong or right. You of course can, and probably will disagree with a lot of my definitions. This would be true even if I was a powerful and ruthless dictator, although then you would probably want to hide the fact that you disagree, or you would want to flee the area I controlled. "A minimum safety net amounts to preventing those who can't work from starving" Now THAT would be against the Constitution... You really think so? Perhaps your right. But if so the actual welfare state in the US would be even more so. One clarification by "preventing those who can't work from starving", I didn't mean force feeding them. I meant rather giving them a chance not to starve by making food or money available to them. I'm not sure that you did misunderstand what I meant but I figured I would close off that opportunity for misunderstanding now that I have recognized it. She is not specifically "threatened" with Hell. But the bible makes it very clear that just as Jesus requires the rich to give everything in order to enter his kingdom...so does he require "everything" of the poor. Salvation does not count money...it considers what one values. I think the point Jesus was making was to give to Caesar on earth, and to God for what follows. The basic message was to give away everything you have--especially if someone asks for it..."if a man has two cloaks, etc...") Whatever the actual message of the story (and I don't think it is that we are required to give away everything we have or face hell) the woman was the example in the story and could not be threatened by it. If she actually existed the incident in question took place before the story. The story used her example later. In any case I don't think you believe in hell, and I don't think that someone who will not give away everything they have will face hell because of this refusal. Since neither or us think that a poor person who will not give away every last bit of their wealth and possessions will face hell because they want to keep something, it doesn't make much sense to consider someone in that situation as being compelled by the threat of hell. Tim