German cannibal gets only 8.5 years (!!??)

[Umfriend]

Me feels silly..... Thx Brian E.

[KvHagedorn]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis
Oxford Concise Electronic Dictionary 2000


Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary (2004)



These are the full definitions, unedited, (except for my bolding).

etc.

Go look at the original authoritative editions which I have cited and throw away this revisionist crap. I went and used the OED (original, FULL edition.. not concised and electronicised) for you, B.E., but you still go off and find some way to disagree, not with ME who you seem to so loathe, but with the original authority and logic itself. If you looked hard enough, you could probably find some twisted book that defines red as blue. I however, say that red is red, and blue is blue. This is an incontrivertable TRUTH. Now have some fun and argue that point for a few pages. BYE!

[Wulfman]

just to widem my horizon: what do some of our asian friends think about the following quote?

I used the Ten Commandments because they are the basis for modern morality,

I assume you grant them (most of them are not into christanity, iirc) "modern morality", do you?

mfg
wulfman

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
Go look at the original authoritative editions which I have cited and throw away this revisionist crap. I went and used the OED (original, FULL edition.. not concised and electronicised) for you, B.E., but you still go off and find some way to disagree, not with ME who you seem to so loathe, but with the original authority and logic itself. If you looked hard enough, you could probably find some twisted book that defines red as blue. I however, say that red is red, and blue is blue. This is an incontrivertable TRUTH. Now have some fun and argue that point for a few pages. BYE!

Hee hee!

No, I don't loathe you, as a person, but I do detest narrow-mindedness, displayed many times by your goodself. Anything you disagree with becomes revisionist or liberal or somesuch label. Your problem is that you do not have the grace to allow others to have opinions that differ from yours without jumping down their throats, as if you were that guardian of YOUR incontrovertible truth, as you put it. The ONLY absolute truth that can possibly exist is that an absolute truth does not exist. Everything evolves, therefore truth is a human figment of the imagination because the truth at the moment you read this is no longer the same truth just one picosecond later.

[DukeP]

I concur 100%.

There cant be an "absolute" truth.

Right or wrong is based on perceptions.

Perceptions differ based on reciever.

The action of percieving changes the reception, changes the perception.

To have an absolute truth, all would need to recieve the same perceptions, ie, all would need to be one.

~~DukeP~~

[GNEP]

Cannibalism to suicide to murder to religion to absolutism vs. relativism...

My my this thread has it all eh?

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by GNEP
Cannibalism to suicide to murder to religion to absolutism vs. relativism...

My my this thread has it all eh?

[KvHagedorn]

I disagree. There IS absolute truth.. but it is unknowable by man. And I am not narrow-minded (thank you for being so kind as to call me that), but believe that every one and every society must have a basis for the way they live their lives and the rules by which they conduct them. We don't all have the luxury of being the philosopher on the hill all the time.. there have to be practical rules for everyday living, and the better those rules are, the closer we come to attaining truth. Do you remember your grandparents? Are they fond memories, or were they terrible people? No? Were they wrong to live by more traditional precepts than we do now? Or would you say they were right then, but would be wrong now? That is the problem with moral relativism, and part of why it does not stand to reason. You see, though absolute truth is unknowable, one can strive for it, and the way our society functions or disfunctions is a measure of how far we are from it. To lose faith in it and give up striving for it because it "doesn't exist" is a cop-out.. a surrender to entropy and anarchy.

Possibly the worst thing that has happened over the recent past is the concept that "greed is good." Young people will see someone being a total lowlife and making big money, like a gangsta rapper. Simply by virtue of the fact that "well they're rich aren't they?," all arguments against the way they act and the values they preach go out the window, because it seems to have served them well, since they have attained what most kids see as "today's" absolute truth.. money. It has only served them well because we as a society have allowed it to.

Just remember that not all change is progress. We have changed our society in recent years because it suited our baser desires to do so, and we discard religion and its precepts because it conflicts with these baser desires. Math and science people might be led astray because the existence of God cannot be proven by empirical means, and use this as an argument, but guess who is being narrow-minded now?

[DukeP]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
...
Possibly the worst thing that has happened over the recent past is the concept that "greed is good." Young people will see someone being a total lowlife and making big money, like a gangsta rapper. Simply by virtue of the fact that "well they're rich aren't they?," ...

In this I agree.
I have had a few too many discussion with my girlfriend, about the "duties of wealth" which is nothing more than the old (and much misused) "noblesse oblige".

My girlfriend is MUCh more Liberal than I (Im Conservatist).

On the other hand, a lot of people is saying that VERY wealthy people MUST be evil "you cant make that much money legally/morally". Thats just as much bull.

~~DukeP~~

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
I disagree. There IS absolute truth.. but it is unknowable by man. And I am not narrow-minded (thank you for being so kind as to call me that), but believe that every one and every society must have a basis for the way they live their lives and the rules by which they conduct them. We don't all have the luxury of being the philosopher on the hill all the time.. there have to be practical rules for everyday living, and the better those rules are, the closer we come to attaining truth. Do you remember your grandparents? Are they fond memories, or were they terrible people? No? Were they wrong to live by more traditional precepts than we do now? Or would you say they were right then, but would be wrong now? That is the problem with moral relativism, and part of why it does not stand to reason. You see, though absolute truth is unknowable, one can strive for it, and the way our society functions or disfunctions is a measure of how far we are from it. To lose faith in it and give up striving for it because it "doesn't exist" is a cop-out.. a surrender to entropy and anarchy.

Possibly the worst thing that has happened over the recent past is the concept that "greed is good." Young people will see someone being a total lowlife and making big money, like a gangsta rapper. Simply by virtue of the fact that "well they're rich aren't they?," all arguments against the way they act and the values they preach go out the window, because it seems to have served them well, since they have attained what most kids see as "today's" absolute truth.. money. It has only served them well because we as a society have allowed it to.

Just remember that not all change is progress. We have changed our society in recent years because it suited our baser desires to do so, and we discard religion and its precepts because it conflicts with these baser desires. Math and science people might be led astray because the existence of God cannot be proven by empirical means, and use this as an argument, but guess who is being narrow-minded now?

So, I now see that you wish us to go back to the ideals of Victorian life (both my parents were born in Victoria's reign, in 1887 and 1897. In fact I remember my grandfather telling me, when I was a kid, that his grandfather had told him about the celebrations after the battle of Waterloo in 1815, four years before Victoria was born. So let's see what some of these ideals were, although Dickens painted a better picture than I ever could: London was a vice-ridden city with most of its citizens in abject poverty, drowning their sorrows in the gin-palaces, when they weren't lending themselves to male and female prostitution to buy a cabbage ans a loaf of bread to live on for a week, if they were lucky enough to have a damp hovel of a cellar to share with 15 others. At the same time, the church-going middle-classes and aristocracy, steeped in hypocrisy and exploiting the working classes shamelessly, often literally working them to death before they were 30 were lording it in luxurious residences, with very modern comfort.

I am not able to recall this, myself, of course, but I have seen kids, bare feet in winter, rummaging in dustbins, looking for a crust of bread or a discarded apple core, in the poorer quarters of Edinburgh in the 1930s. This was while my middle class family drove past them in our car and taught us to despise them as worthless (fortunately, that was one lesson that I didn't learn very well). My wife was born in Jarrow in the year of the Jarrow March where hundreds of starving peoples, led by Ellen Wilkinson, marched to London to protest that they had no means of subsistence. Her father didn't take part in the march, because he had to scrounge for food and coal to keep the baby alive. Birth control and abortion wasn't necessary in those times because most of the children never even saw their fifth birthday, because of the abject poverty.Yet the shipyard and mill owners could afford their Rolls-Royces and wintering in Monte Carlo - and remember that this was in my lifetime.

This was the epoch of colonial imperialism. Remember the Black Hole of Calcutta and the 1857 Indian Revolt as examples of how our morally righteous grandfathers lived their lives within the creed of the Mother-Church? Literally millions of Indians died at our hands, before the terms of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing were invented. And the same applied to all the other empires. Again, I have witnessed, myself, how the colonials ruled their "subjects" with more than a rod of iron and a noose of hemp.

Do you really want to go back to the moral values of a century ago or barely more than half-a-century ago? Or should I say the lack of moral values? I thank God that we have evolved in our moral codes, even if we have a ways to go before we can be reasonably complacent that we are living close to the Christian ideal.

And don't say that this was a European problem: you had analogic problems in the USA - they may have been somewhat different in the details, but the overall effect was the same.

I do agree with you that modern society has become greedy - myself included. I believe that this may be the result of the evolution, of which I spoke earlier, going far too fast and riches were placed within the reach of hands of those who had not been trained to manage them efficiently. The result was that money was spent and more was needed. You only have to look at the problems of cumulative credit card debts as an illustration. Money was spent before it was earned, leading to the start of a downward spiral, often ending up in crime. Of course, the swingeing, obscene and immoral interest rates charged by some credit card companies, have not helped, either - and their greed is symptomatic, if not causal, of the whole problem.

Maths and science may not be able to prove the existence of God, but neither has God shown us that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides (Zeus may have helped, though ) or that E=mc^2.

My philosophy is to try and strive for a better future, not to regret a bygone age of moral turpitude and hypocrisy.

[KvHagedorn]

There has been moral turpitude enough to go around through the ages, you know.. but in our sad and twisted age, it has become fashionable to blame Christianity itself for it, rather than humans failing to live up to those ideals. When priests cop a feel (due to the sad sexual frustration they must surely feel, and which situation Luther reformed rather than reject Christ because of it) it makes headlines everywhere, but I also remember reading a small story in a local paper about a young priest in a dirt-poor neighborhood who subsisted on practically nothing while trying to use his station to help the people there.. that sort of decency gets neglected because news people don't think it sells.

And if you are so much in favor of income equity, I didn't notice any support from you when I wrote several posts in favor of the same thing. Did you live by your principles when you were a CEO, or did you take all the money and let the janitor subsist on practically nothing? I had a boss recently who went on and on about how terrible the Republicans were (and are.. he still comes in and tells George Bush jokes) yet he paid us minimum wage or close to it, while he made what he admitted were an "embarassment of riches." Hypocrisy is hypocrisy.

[Wulfman]

kv, you should have a look at mills "on liberty". he was already ranting over the state of christianity (something along the lines of "not even one in thousands is living up to the ideals") in 1870. it's not the topic of the book, but an interesting by-product nervertheless.

mfg
wulfman

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
Did you live by your principles when you were a CEO, or did you take all the money and let the janitor subsist on practically nothing?

Actually, now that you come to mention it, yes, I did live by them. From 1975, when I founded the Corporation until 1999, when I voluntarily liquidated it, my salary was never higher, and very often lower, than that of all my employees. In fact, a trainee engineer would take home over twice what I and my wife together took home. OK, we had two major perks: we lived in the apartment in the company building, for which we paid a very low rent which was not included in the take-home pay and I had a company car (Toyota Camry, not a Mercedes or a Rolls), which I had to pay tax on for private usage. My actual salary was never higher than CHF 2,500/month (~USD 1,500), but I've never needed buckets of money. And the corp never, in all its existence, paid a single dividend.

If you wish to have this confirmed, I'll let you have the name of our auditors.