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Micro Economics, the Importance of the Individual in the Big Picture

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My academic field, economics, is thought to date back to publication of The Wealth of Nations written by Adam Smith in 1776. It was a break-through from religion, though Adam Smith was a religious, because clergy in the Western world for a thousand years or so had preached all of one's life was a gift from God. Smith said, no, wealth of nations came from individuals producing more than they consume. If humans divide up the work that is there to be done and each individual becomes specialized and more productive then trades his output with another specialist both will have more. Add them together the nation has more.  Smith basic idea of the individual was expanded to the individual firm by Alfred Marshal in 1890. The same principle applied, that a nation because better off when individuals and firms seek to gain for themselves. This dominated economics until the Great Depression and John Maynord Keynes. Keynes' idea was prosperity and the standard of living of the public could ...
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Prominent Catholic Clergy: UFO's are Demons

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Just when one thinks we cannot go further into the land of crazy, we hear from a Catholic "authority" on exorcism. He exorcises demons from people and says he thinks UFO's are demonic. A few years ago the late Pope Francis said the devil is real.  So, we have here an important person in the Catholic denomination who believes people with some kind of mental problem are possessed with demons. On top of that, objects are flying about which are also demons. If one looks up the term auditory hallucinations, hearing voices, one learns it is an illness. There are protocols for treating it.  In the case of invisible demons, or gods, there is not a matching diagnosis. It seems to me that seeing invisible things in the mind are not all that different than hearing voices that do not exist. Perhaps they are not exactly the same. Yet, to me, they don't seem completely different.  Seeing invisible demons, or hearing imaginary voices, is not harmful until those who affected start re...
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Can Christian GLBT Parents Have Pride During Pride Month

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June is Pride Month across the U.S., maybe around the world. Parents who consider themselves very Christian but have a gay child think they have an impossible dilemma. It is, of course, that their faith paints gay/trans as the sin at the top of the Sin Leader Board but the child tells them, "It's who I am. There is nothing you or I can do to change me" while their faith condemns and scolds. It was interesting to read a Christian post telling other Christian parents accept their GLBT children. Parents, she writes, can accept their gay/trans child and hold on to their faith. During the years I held a position in the national organization, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, I heard so many stories told by parents who thought their world had ended when then learned of a gay child. Later they realized a lot of their angst was about themselves, not their child. It was, "What will others think of me when they learn about him(her)?" Often there was a preacher pus...
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Some Mormons are Understanding the Decline

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A devout Mormon, now known as LDS, has done surveys about why people leave that denomination. He found the explanations people gave for leaving are very different than the reasons assigned to them by those still in the faith. What he found sounds just like what I have seen among people across Christianity. When Christian pundits talk about atheists, they most often attribute atheism to a desire to "sin." This, of course, requires the atheist to believe there is such a thing as "sin." In my experience atheists who were in the faith, not all of them were in it, simply stopped believing in the concepts of invisible gods, an invisible author of the Bible or that spokespersons for the faith, priests and preachers, have more insight into such matters than the average person.  The author of the link, a practicing and office holding LDS, swamped the internet asking both practicing Mormons and ex Mormons what they thought about the other. This was not a study up to the stand...
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Growth of Christianity in China Hit a Great Wall

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There is a rule in the affairs of nations (well not a rule actually, I just made it up) that when religion and politics conflict with each other, no one can predict the outcome. That conflict is going on, not only in the U.S., in many places around the world. One is China. A story about a Christian preacher, a Chinese citizen, who is in jail for preaching Christianity is a case in point.  Catholics wanted bishops in China appointed the same way they are appointed everywhere else in the world. That is by the Pope and Vatican. The Chinese government decided the majority of Bishops in the Chinese Catholic Church would be appointed by the ruling government. Bishops need to be loyal supporters of the People's Party. It's obvious that if Christian numbers do rise in China it will be a version of the faith different from that in other areas of the world. Add to that a world-wide loss of interest by people under 25 years of age and we have the Great Wall stopping large growth of Christ...
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Today's God is a Life Coach

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I was surprised at a preacher's post on a conservative Christian post. He lamented about the modern view of God that he feels many church members have. His post surprised me at how accurate he depicted the people minds who were sitting in his pews. These people, he lamented , do not see God as condemning sin nor passing judgement on the sin of church members. Then, the preacher went on to quote scripture after scripture about that wrath of God when he sees sin.  He went on to say God is not your life coach or your Bro. God is not going wink wink at your sin or that you will try to better next time. God is about hell, fire and damnation, he pointed out and Christians should not try to take that casually. What the link misses is that most of the public, including most Christians today, just cannot buy the old time religion. To today's Bible reader, the Bibe sounds like all the other sources of propaganda trying to get our money or get our vote. The laptop and the phone added to t...
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What Has Happened Since the book "Bowling Alone"

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Probably few readers know of Bowling Alone  by Robert Putnam. It was discussed everywhere when it was published in 2000. I seldom see it referred to today although Wikipedia says it is frequently required reading in college social science classes.  Putnam, a retired Political Science Professor at Harvard, is credited with the term "social capital." This refers to social organizations that have existed traditionally in communities large and small across the U.S. There are fewer churches, service clubs and other groups as the years have passed. Putnam had written about what he perceived to be a general decline in happiness that he attributed to the fewer opportunities to socialize or experience community. He came up with a research project to document the decline in social capital, recording the decline in the number of organizations he had assigned to it. After considerable research to document these declining numbers, which represented a rather uninteresting book of numbers, ...
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