"A restorative justice program aims to get offenders to take responsibility for their actions, to understand the harm they have caused, to give them an opportunity to redeem themselves and to discourage them from causing further harm."
What about this idea doesn't appeal to you? Why do you prefer to have them suffer?
I never said I preferred anyone suffer. I just said I'm ambivalent. But to your question, I am highly skeptical of the efficacy of those methods, and I think they come at marginal cost to deterrence. I also think there are better places for society to put its money than improving the lot of rapists in prison. I'm also of the opinion that, relative to other countries, US prisons are not the hell the author makes them out to be. By way of example:
https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2016/03/26050/
Only that it is exceedingly rare. Proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" is a very demanding standard, and is not even shared by all countries in the west, much less the rest of the world. Talk to any prosecutor and you will be assured that, notwithstanding the popular narrative, many, many more guilty people go free in the US than the other way around. But in any event, to the degree there are those who are wrongfully imprisoned, I cannot imagine that supporting an argument that other prisoners should somehow be treated better.
I’m more inclined to attribute those “very negative outcomes” to the life choices of the criminals, which all too often come at the cost of innocent lives and livelihoods.
Of course it comes up in social situations. If I'm interested in a girl and she has a ring on her left ring finger, I drop it. It's literally the first thing I check; it's basic etiquette.
Exactly, there are lots of social cues at play in these situations besides a ring. It’s no different than the way someone who is unmarried but in a committed relationship lets people know not to bother.
Just because something is unexplained currently does not give any weight to the idea that it was a miracle.
Millions of people saw David Copperfield vanish the Statue of Liberty as well... But I certainly wouldn't be tempted to pretend he actually made it vanish
The miracle was also seen by sailors on a British ship off the coast of Portugal. Foley recounts an experience in England. He gave a presentation on Fatima at a college in England and was told by one of the teachers that her grandfather saw the miracle from his ship and wrote about it to his wife — “without obviously understanding what it meant or its significance.”
And finally, what most convincingly shows that the miracle was not only in the minds and perception of the witnesses is the fact that the crowd at Fatima felt the heat of the sun as it approached them, and their clothes and the ground — which had been soaked by torrential rain — were dry at the end of the miracle.
How does one claim this is just some optical mirage?
One doesn't. At least not only an optical illusion. There is no consistent set of reports. Given that the reports are all wildly inconsistent and contradictory, and many reported seeing and feeling nothing at all, it's clear the reports can not be be taken at face value.
In addition, the default shouldn't be "therefore miracle".
The default assumption should be "humans are easy to trick".
My claim here, is that if we put our brightest minds on this, they will come back with a terrifically mundane explanation for it. In the same way that weeping statues are always just water from a pipe somewhere.
I feel like the Bible constitutes some kind of evidence for the divinity of Jesus. Weak evidence for sure. But evidence none the less. As I see it, even "Jimmy down the bar told me..." constitutes evidence of some kind.
There is no evidence the guy existed, either. They are most likely just stories meant to motivate a movement — nothing wrong with that in principle. Especially given that a lot of the message is “be kind”.
If you really believe that there's no evidence Jesus the man existed, then I wonder what you would consider evidence of any ancient person existing, or even evidence of any fact in general. The evidence does exist, and it is in fact convincing evidence, at least of historicity (even the Gospels are evidence, though several extrabiblical sources mention the historical Jesus as well, including ones opposed to Christianity like Josephus). IMO, the evidence of divinity is fairly strong, too, but can only be resolved as a matter of faith and not solely empiricism.
Also, Jesus said quite a bit more, and quite a bit more often than "be kind," though admittedly that's sort of the Therapeutic Moral Deism version spewed out popularly and in a lot of churches today.
I'd agree that Jesus' ultimate vision is humanity living in harmony with one another, but that this requires living in harmony with God, too. We're pretty terrible when we try to lean on our own understanding.
> then I wonder what you would consider evidence of any ancient person existing, or even evidence of any fact in general.
Without opening up a broader epistemic discussion: the question of the existence of specific people is quite a reasonable question. Because Socrates rejected writing, there is some question as to whether he really existed or was a rhetorical invention of his student plato. On the other hand, say, Sophocles is described by various contemporaneous sources. Caesar, Augustus and Marc Antony pretty definitely existed -- there is a lot of surviving contemporaneous evidence.
On the other hand the existence of a much more recent figure, Shakespeare, as the author of a body of work is still hotly debated in some circles (there is evidence that someone by his name was alive at the same time, but was that the person in question?)
There are no contemporaneous accounts of the life or death of Jesus; even Josephus whom you mention was born after the events described in the gospels.
> I'd agree that Jesus' ultimate vision is humanity living in harmony with one another, but that this requires living in harmony with God, too. We're pretty terrible when we try to lean on our own understanding.
That's a particular stance that requires judging terrible people who claim to have religious backing to have not been in alignment with a god. Both sides in a war claim divine support, after all. It's quite possible to live in harmony without any gods.
> IMO, the evidence of divinity is fairly strong, too, but can only be resolved as a matter of faith and not solely empiricism
If the evidence of Jesus's divinity isn't empirical evidence, then what sort of evidence is it? I've always thought of faith as meaning "belief despite the lack of evidence".
> I'd agree that Jesus' ultimate vision is humanity living in harmony with one another, but that this requires living in harmony with God, too. We're pretty terrible when we try to lean on our own understanding.
In general people seem to be pretty terrible if they lean on religious understanding too. I don't see much evidence that religious people are more moral than others. Personally I'm a big fan of Jesus's vision of living in harmony with one another, but I don't see why this needs to have anything to do with a god.
That's a lie that religions keep perpetuating. Many social groups exist that are just as fulfilling.
My gym for example is full of people who actively work in the community, help each other and gather multiple times per week to better themselves and encourage their community.
Religion has nothing to offer that secular society cannot offer.
Religion has nothing to offer that secular society cannot offer.
While this might be true in theory, I have not found it true in practice. I am no longer religious and I have not attended church for 20+ years, but despite trying many of these secular 'alternatives' to church I have yet to find anything as open, welcoming and socially supportive as I found church.
edit: Yes, I know this isn't everybody's experience, and yes some churches can be extremely bigoted, exclusionary and downright evil to people they perceive as 'others'.
What you say about churches being welcoming agrees with my experiences too, from what I've seen of others, given that I don't attend. But I think faith is only part of the reason for attending.
Essential in the choice to join a church is the desire to seek out a kind of 'marriage', where for better and worse, you promise to look out for others in an extended family and to help them when they need you. That sense of belonging is one of the big things that brings everyone in a church together -- the wish to be part of a community that regularly joins together and where you can share your life with others.
As someone who has been involved in both Churches, Church-associated social clubs, and no -Church social clubs, yes, it absolutely can; in fact, what you describe is explicitly part of the concept of many non-Church social clubs, some of which evolved from (or in the tradition of) organizations which started as sub-church organizations within churches by which this function was more tightly expressed for members than in the broader church.
But even where it isn't explicitly part of the deal, it's very common to evolve as an implicit part of a social club.
Do you imagine that one of the social groups you belong to would willingly play the role in your life that church members often do? Would someone from one of your groups:
- drive you to a doctor appointment?
- repair your house when you can't (perhaps due to injury)?
- take you in for a few days after a crisis at home?
- prepare a week of meals for you, if needed?
These are fairly commonplace roles that I've seen filled routinely by members of a church that I've seldom seen arise from other social networks. And never from a health club.
I don't attend church but I've regularly seen this kind of extended community in others who do. The role churches play of an extended family is incomparable to any other social network I know. This degree of compassion and service to non-family members seems to require a greater common bond than just sweating together.
> Religion has nothing to offer that secular society cannot offer.
Similar to ethnic nationalism, it can and
throughout history has provided the glue that holds groups together when they are in conflicts with other groups.
Unlike a secular club, religion cements this power inter-generationally by insinuating itself into the key human institutions of marriage, reproduction, child rearing, and membership in the religion. If you look at any ethno-religious state in the world (i.e. many middle eastern countries), they function this way.
The experiment of a secular national identity (based on shared beliefs about people's rights and dignity) is the only institution that can effectively fulfill this aspect of religion, but as we are now seeing, it can also stumble if it doesn't tend to the needs of its constituents well enough.
I think the election fraud nonsense suggests it might not be that simple. Bad actors in positions of power are abusing these services to the point where we have real conflict occurring.
If it's not illegal, don't censor or moderate it in any way. More speech is better than less speech; Uncensored speech is in fact the antidote to the supposed problems that Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. disengenuously claim to be solving.
Sounds like we agree on this. I want to push you here though.
Did twitter contribute to the events on the 6th? Do they have any role to play?
Do you have to use the words "go and kill them" in order for it to be violence?
I'm trying to be genuine here, because I don't know. I will say it certainly feels like we saw the violence being induced for months ahead of time on twitter without explicit calls for violence.
Should we just allow this?
It's happening still. We have members of congress calling the election stolen. This is how more violence happens. It's a slow burn, but it's a burn.
If the speech is legal it should not be censored or moderated in any way. Any deviation from that results in the technocrats interfering with the flow of legal information and manipulation of social, economic, and political processes - which is in large part how we ended up with the events of recent months in my opinion.
Twitter/HN is not an apples/apples comparison... but sure, Twitter is completely within their _current_ lawful rights to moderate and censor whatever content they want. But I would posit that they are actually causing more harm than good through these efforts, and they've now firmly placed themselves in a total quagmire in doing so.
Not if it's non-specific. What if someone says "Death to all [group of people]", should they be banned? It's calling for violence but is not illegal in the US.
Bill more, work less and you don't have to do internal politics.
Bail at 3 and go for a walk.