Religion and terror

Remember the time God said to one of His prophets: They are ‘sinners’, go kill them? No? No, neither do I. I have never read anything of the sort in any holy script. I’ve read about prophets being told to leave because a great calamity will hit the place where the ‘sinners’ dwell. One even made an arc and took off with animals as if animals were worth more than people of that era and location.

We are now in 21^st century. No prophet ever carried out mass murder (though many did fight, but those were always ‘fair’ fights; armies clashing, defending yourself and your rights, and their behaviour after victory speaks volumes of their morals – freedom of religion was their true way), yet in this day and age, we have all kinds of individuals claiming God wants us to kill innocent people. The bunch that claim to do it in the name of Islam are perhaps most widely spread, larger in numbers than those who claim to do it for Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity etc. We’ve heard from true followers of each of these religions that that is not the way. In fact, we have stories from all over the place about Prophets forgiving infidels, being patient with them, giving them time, praying for them etc.

The amazing thing is that atheists now have this fantastic argument that humanity is better off without religion, even though, in the past, each and every prophet that ever came left their society much better than they found it. So, my thinking is that religion is important, in fact, it seems to be so important to so many, that it is the greatest tool ever. It is currently being used to spread evil, but we could and should use it to spread good. Imagine if this force was applied to do good! That would be a world I’d be proud to leave to our future generations.

What is the real purpose of the ‘use religion to spread terror’? Power, money and more power. That’s the simple answer. Those who lead people to murder and death are not doing it for God (if God wanted us dead, He has His own ways), they do it for god, and their god is their own ego, arrogance and greed. The God, capital G, is far from it. In fact, He is the very opposite of it. It seems too simple to be true, but it seems we need more religion, more faith in God rather than god to set things right. 

Economics – a world of its own, on its own

I’d like to start by asking capitalists to take a chill-pill and stop pretending like everything’s just fine. Everything’s clearly not fine and this is no time to be a spoiled little brat, turning a blind eye with our heads in the sand. We need to face the facts so that we can start working on solving issues. Economics is not supposed to be a world of its own. I get that it is based on assumptions, but some of the key assumptions have gone into ‘fairy tale’ category. This is causing considerable chaos, especially since many of those assumptions are seen as absolute and complete truth by decision makers.

I do not claim to have answers, I only intend to get people of will, courage, imagination and knowledge to start thinking outside the box. I only graduated Economics, so I am no professional in the field. But, as a professional in the field of citizen activism, I have observed numerous curious indicators.

1. Price is not determined by supply and demand. Products get priced randomly and this is particularly important at the age in which markets are flooded with products. We’ve never had so much choice. This choice has its good and bad side.

2. People are rational, generally speaking, but they draw their conclusions mainly by observing the world around them; i.e. Everything’s relative! Person’s happiness does not depend on how much they have, but how much they have relative to what they could have and what others have. Plus, when a person goes shopping, it’s not just about how much they get that matters, it is also about how many things they have to say ‘no’ to because they don’t have enough money. If they say ‘no’ more times than ‘yes’, this will make them feel sad.

3. ‘Over worked and under paid’ – OWUP – is not a myth, and it is not to be taken lightly or resolved by bringing in extra labour force who will be willing to work for ‘that’ wage without complaining. OWUP has a very negative effect on our family life and labour force. Possible causes: 1. One worker getting irrationally more money than another (reminder: everything’s relative), 2. Wage dose NOT equal to marginal productivity of labour, if it did, a firm would do better to employ managers to clean and cleaners to manage, 3. Market forces are almost evil to determine wages.

4. Dividing time between labour and leisure – most people do not face this, most people face bills and decisions how best to make money to cover the costs. This is one area where we have huge difference between different classes of people, so different that we need different theories for each class.  Bear in mind that we live in the age where parents are buying gifts for their children out of guilt for not being with them.

5. People are selfish COMMUNITY CREATURES. So ‘selfish’ and ‘giving’ have to coexist or we have chaos.

Well, I think that’s enough for now. I’m sure any decent economist will see how mistakes in these fields cause an effect on other parts, until we have the whole thing ‘kinda falling apart’.

There are many other issues. I wrote a part of an introduction in my book Just Another Life– I’m thinking I could get people a little more interested if I use fiction and write it as a dialogue; we’ll see. Plus, I didn’t even mention ‘social cost vs social benefit’ – that’s a BIG topic that we have to look into.