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>How do the Amish keep costs so low? R&D (plus a few other sources) identify some key strategies. >...the Amish are honorable customers. This separates them fr

by daenz 7y ago

>How do the Amish keep costs so low? R&D (plus a few other sources) identify some key strategies. >...the Amish are honorable customers. This separates them from insurance companies, who are constantly trying to scam providers however they can. Much of the increase in health care costs is “administrative expenses”, and much of these administrative expenses is hiring an army of lawyers, clerks, and billing professionals to thwart insurance companies’ attempts to cheat their way out of paying. If you are an honorable Amish person and the hospital knows you will pay your bill on time with zero fuss, they can waive all this. Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. But instead, we have to bulletproof everything (largely without success) from people who scheme and scam their way through life. We sink enormous costs into this, and it slows the progress and complicates life for everyone else. I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Religions, for all their faults, and for all of their misguided morality, at least had morality frameworks that were more or less unified and teachable. What do we have now in their place?

beached_whale 7y ago
Theory and practice. In practice, this is people, religious or not. However, what is in their place is the arguments you made. We all win, if we are all honest.
lqet 7y ago
> [Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg] once said, "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.” To which Freeman Dyson remarked, “Weinberg’s statement is true as far as it goes, but it is not the whole truth. To make it the whole truth, we must add an additional clause: ‘And for bad people to do good things – that takes religion.’"
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  > And for bad people to do good things – that takes religion. Clever retort. But even if proven true somehow is it the religion that made the bad do good or agreed upon ethics with consequences for those who broke them? Must it include belief in some unprovable future consequence?
- jessaustin 7y ago
  How do we know whether a person is good or bad, other than by seeing what the person does? In truth, the idea of a good or bad person is a trope of fiction intended for children. In real life everyone does good and bad things.
paulryanrogers 7y ago
Freedom from ancient bigotry, magical thinking, and cults is worth an increase in amoral behavior IMO. Truth is the Amish self select as the young ones can leave if they find the rules too constricting.
GuiA 7y ago
> Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. Granted, everyone in the world is suddenly moral and of utmost integrity and everyone gets used to this new reality. The economic upside in lying/cheating is now so high that a few minutes later the world is back to exactly what it was, except for the first few persons to decide that lying wasn't such a bad idea, who are now a few billion dollars richer. > Religions, for all their faults, and for all of their misguided morality, at least had morality frameworks that were more or less unified and teachable This is your daily reminder that the Catholic Church is the organization with the most identified pedophiles in the world. (I'd have written "convicted", but they work really hard - and are really good - at preventing that outcome).
- LeoTinnitus 7y ago
  I think Islam may like a word with you on that one. There it's not just the priests. It's very common for minors to be married off, young boys to be sold as sex slaves (common in the turkic -stans areas although not sure about today), and the "it's only gay if you take it" reasoning I believe in one of the hadith's which condones pedophilia.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Religion was created in order that priests, mullahs, etc. could perpetrate otherwise forbidden sexual acts on defenseless people. Some later offshoots have forgotten this, but Catholicism and Islam remember. What was the ISIS caliphate, if not organized sex crime? It seems the Protestants favor abuse of girls instead of boys, which in their minds is more moral...
    - LeoTinnitus 7y ago
      However life back then was incredibly different. We can look at it in hindsight and judge it with the morality of today but that's somewhat unfair of how life was. I mean slavery was commonplace, death sentences for most crimes, and not really any "true" justice system. Although as of today? Yes I totally agree.
testing312 7y ago
> I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. But there is no universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Even the seemingly most basic rule: don't hurt anyone, has so many exceptions. There is no 'small' set of rules you can use to describe morality. Reality is messy, human interactions even more so. We need to teach people to be empathic, and to be willing to try and understand the others position and view
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  This is such nonsense. It's the 21st century and you never heard about utilitarism and game theory?
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Indeed, religions also disagree amongst themselves what is right and wrong. This has been a primary source of conflict throughout human history. Many times, both sides believe God (or whatever their equivalent is) is on their side.
- senectus1 7y ago
  yes there fucking is, and it has ZERO to do with Religion or Secularism. Treat others how you would like to be treated. If you wanted to get more complicated its, "consider the well-being". I'm so outraged by the causal acceptance that religion has ANYTHING to do with a proven successful moral guidance in society. You people need to stop buying the bullshit marketing of religion (and politics).
  - testing312 7y ago
    > Treat others how you would like to be treated. > If you wanted to get more complicated its, "consider the well-being". Those two are not a set of moral rules, they just seem like the 'heuristic' that I already stated. But it does not help you with the trolley problem, for example. I also never said that religion is/should/can be the answer to the messyness of moral questions.
oconnor663 7y ago
I think the biggest effects here are 1) whether the society is very large, and 2) whether it's made up of different groups of people who don't know each other very well. Both of those things make it difficult to have trust- or reputation-based systems. Religion and morality themselves must play some role, but I'd want to control for those first two things before I tried to draw and conclusions.
lordnacho 7y ago
Isn't the key actually that they have the same moral compass, rather than them being more morally correct (objectivity is a long story on this subject)? That leads to fewer disagreements, as everyone comes up with the same answers for what's right and wrong. As soon as you have a heterogenous group arguments will break out about what's right and wrong, how people should live, who gets what stuff...
starpilot 7y ago
Japan > USA > Russia, in lawful citizenry. The order is the opposite in religiosity. Japan just has a coherent society.
kamfc 7y ago
is there a list of recommended writings i can study on morals?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- svieira 7y ago
  Start with _The Gorgias_ by Plato - does Justice exist? Then move on to _Orthodoxy_ by G. K. Chesterton (why does Justice require free will and the soul). Finish up with the Gospel of John. For a more detailed breakdown, take a look at _The Four Cardinal Virtues_ by Josef Pieper
v8engine 7y ago
> Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. Reminds me of playing https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/
akiselev 7y ago
> Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. But instead, we have to bulletproof everything (largely without success) from people who scheme and scam their way through life. We sink enormous costs into this, and it slows the progress and complicates life for everyone else. What bulletproofing? Humanity has operated on an extremely high trust basis since the beginning of civilization - it's the only reason we've been able to grow so fast and reshape the planet. It's why McDonald's employee don't check someone's ID at the pick up window and why social engineering works so well. It's the reason why we even have power grids, indoor plumbing, and modern medicine - all of those systems require extreme levels of trust. That's not hyperbole: A decent sized power plant joining the grid out of phase can crash the entire system, destroying - aka exploding - other power plants and distribution infrastructure. Our water supply systems and reservoirs are almost completely unprotected and vulnerable to malicious actors. A significant fraction of our health and safety regulations operate on scout's honor and personal liability: the FDA approved the diagnostic tests at the clinical labs I've worked at because they trust some certified lab managers (that we hired) to review our procedures and quality control - for life or death clinical testing - without a regulator ever stepping foot in the lab. Our species has even scraped our noses against nuclear war several times, ending in some low level officer deciding "nah... not today." As a species we are weak: we can't run fast or climb very well, our stomachs and immune systems aren't worth squat in the wild, and it takes us longer to raise our young than most animals' life expectancies. It is only through intelligence and trust have we been able to overcome those limitations to build the world we have today. The problem isn't individual morality, it's the systemic incentives built up over millennia of societal debt, tribalism, and a dash of corruption. Trying to moralize at an individual level is a big reason why so many people are anti-religious to begin with.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  Flint Michigan is an example of how too much trust and not enough verify can go wrong.
- Amezarak 7y ago
  The modern problem is in large part, scale. Trust works better in smaller communities and at smaller scales - people are more likely to be willing to fleece someone they don't know and will never see than their family, neighbors, or the person standing behind them in line. When there are immediate and permanent social consequences for violating trust, it's much less likely. The community (or tribe, if you prefer) scale is the scale that comes naturally to us. A lot of 'social technology' exists, in part, to help increase our ability to scale trust up. This includes things such as nations and religions. As people become more irreligious and nationalism declines (including into an us vs them mentality within the nation - simple cheerleading of your country is not what I mean by nationalism), trust declines, and people are more likely to scam, grift, and fleece others. And once it is gone, it is very hard to get back.
jay_kyburz 7y ago
No, what we should do is build our systems so that human nature is taken into consideration. There will always be good and bad people. Medical pricing should be simple, upfront and direct. It should not require lots of clerks and "billing professionals" It shouldn't required armies of expensive lawyers to settle disputes. Whether the bill was not paid by the customer, or the doctor failed to deliver what the customer paid for.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Agreed... but you don’t think there is an ugly backend administrator to <insert your favorite public healthcare system>? Of course there is. You don’t think the NHS has lawyers and billing professionals, they’re there, just behind the scenes.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    Perhaps. Though I'd hope the centralized system is more lean, transparent, and capable than say an opaque market ruled by big players leveraging regulatory capture to fleece patients and providers alike.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    They have lawyers, but everyone has lawyers over a certain size and the NHS is huge. As for billing, who would they bill - I've never had a bill from the NHS or even heard of someone getting a bill from the NHS? In some parts of the UK you have to pay a small amount for prescription medicines but that doesn't go to the NHS etc. It literally is "free at the point of delivery". Edit: The NHS directly employs about 1.4 million people https://fullfact.org/health/how-many-nhs-employees-are-there/ https://fullfact.org/health/how-many-nhs-employees-are-there... - and that's not including people who work in GP practices or dentists or opticians who do NHS work but aren't employed by the NHS.
- specialist 7y ago
  Yup. I first learned this from Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things. Try to apply that heuristic to all my efforts.
carapace 7y ago
> Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. But instead, we have to bulletproof everything (largely without success) from people who scheme and scam their way through life. We sink enormous costs into this, and it slows the progress and complicates life for everyone else. That the central problem of human life. "Hell is other people." Arguably, cities are a bad idea. There's no a priori reason to expect our so-called civilization to work. In evolutionary time-frame it has only just appeared and it shows every evidence of being an ephemeral flash-in-the-pan. I mean, not only are we about to roast ourselves in our own waste heat, but a single virus has deranged our whole global economic structure. It may well turn out that coming down out of the trees and inventing digital watches was wrong, and the Orangutans and Dolphins have got it right all along. Government (kings and whatnot) is a kind of machine to manage human wickedness. > ...a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. ... What do we have now in their place? The simple answer is e.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...
notyourday 7y ago
> ...the Amish are honorable customers. This separates them from insurance companies, who are constantly trying to scam providers however they can. Much of the increase in health care costs is “administrative expenses”, and much of these administrative expenses is hiring an army of lawyers, clerks, and billing professionals to thwart insurance companies’ attempts to cheat their way out of paying. If you are an honorable Amish person and the hospital knows you will pay your bill on time with zero fuss, they can waive all this. My wife came from a splinter of that group. I skimmed the article. It is missing the most important cultural part -- Amish even when sick will continue to work and eventually simply die. Culturally they do not try to extend life at any cost.
- FearNotDaniel 7y ago
  > If they’re healthier, why is their life expectancy lower? Possibly they are less interested in prolonging life than we are. R&D write: > Amish people are more willing to stop interventions earlier and resist invasive therapies than the general population because, while they long for healing, they also have a profound respect for God’s will. This means taking modest steps toward healing sick bodies, giving preference to natural remedies, setting common-sense limits, and believing that in the end their bodies are in God’s hands. >The Amish health care system has an easier job than ours does. It has to take care of people who are generally healthy and less interested in extreme end-of-life care.
  - notyourday 7y ago
    "little", "slightly" and "less" is significantly under-emphasizing how gigantic is the gap between what an average ( even average poor ) person living in Lancaster expects in terms of healthcare and an Amish family living around Lancaster expects in term of healthcare.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
> I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality This is my problem with Evangelical Atheism. The people who go hard against religion (well, two of the large three for political reasons) refuse to accept that there are good things that come with the structure and that some people really take to that.
specialist 7y ago
Who are the scammer's in this thesis?
zajio1am 7y ago
> I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Because no such framework exists? If we remove totalitarian pressure to enforce one coherent moral framework (either religious or secular) to all, we end up with pluralistic society in which various persons have fundamentally different moral intuitions, and therefore it needs extensive formal system for cooperation and conflict solving.
- svieira 7y ago
  Fundamentally different moral intuitions cannot be resolved except by conversion or war. There is no middle ground between "burn the witch" and "save the woman". Taking your own last sentence, participating in an "extensive formal system" assumes a shared morality that prefers "cooperation and conflict solving" to strength and conquest.
knolax 7y ago
> I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Given the numerous genocides committed in the name of religion, I would reckon that religion has failed to do so as well.

by daenz 7y ago

beached_whale 7y ago

Theory and practice. In practice, this is people, religious or not. However, what is in their place is the arguments you made. We all win, if we are all honest.

lqet 7y ago

> [Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg] once said, "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.” To which Freeman Dyson remarked, “Weinberg’s statement is true as far as it goes, but it is not the whole truth. To make it the whole truth, we must add an additional clause: ‘And for bad people to do good things – that takes religion.’"

paulryanrogers 7y ago
> And for bad people to do good things – that takes religion. Clever retort. But even if proven true somehow is it the religion that made the bad do good or agreed upon ethics with consequences for those who broke them? Must it include belief in some unprovable future consequence?
jessaustin 7y ago
How do we know whether a person is good or bad, other than by seeing what the person does? In truth, the idea of a good or bad person is a trope of fiction intended for children. In real life everyone does good and bad things.

paulryanrogers 7y ago

Freedom from ancient bigotry, magical thinking, and cults is worth an increase in amoral behavior IMO. Truth is the Amish self select as the young ones can leave if they find the rules too constricting.

GuiA 7y ago

> Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. Granted, everyone in the world is suddenly moral and of utmost integrity and everyone gets used to this new reality. The economic upside in lying/cheating is now so high that a few minutes later the world is back to exactly what it was, except for the first few persons to decide that lying wasn't such a bad idea, who are now a few billion dollars richer. > Religions, for all their faults, and for all of their misguided morality, at least had morality frameworks that were more or less unified and teachable This is your daily reminder that the Catholic Church is the organization with the most identified pedophiles in the world. (I'd have written "convicted", but they work really hard - and are really good - at preventing that outcome).

LeoTinnitus 7y ago
I think Islam may like a word with you on that one. There it's not just the priests. It's very common for minors to be married off, young boys to be sold as sex slaves (common in the turkic -stans areas although not sure about today), and the "it's only gay if you take it" reasoning I believe in one of the hadith's which condones pedophilia.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Religion was created in order that priests, mullahs, etc. could perpetrate otherwise forbidden sexual acts on defenseless people. Some later offshoots have forgotten this, but Catholicism and Islam remember. What was the ISIS caliphate, if not organized sex crime? It seems the Protestants favor abuse of girls instead of boys, which in their minds is more moral...
  - LeoTinnitus 7y ago
    However life back then was incredibly different. We can look at it in hindsight and judge it with the morality of today but that's somewhat unfair of how life was. I mean slavery was commonplace, death sentences for most crimes, and not really any "true" justice system. Although as of today? Yes I totally agree.

testing312 7y ago

> I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. But there is no universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Even the seemingly most basic rule: don't hurt anyone, has so many exceptions. There is no 'small' set of rules you can use to describe morality. Reality is messy, human interactions even more so. We need to teach people to be empathic, and to be willing to try and understand the others position and view

The_rationalist 7y ago
This is such nonsense. It's the 21st century and you never heard about utilitarism and game theory?
pmiller2 7y ago
Indeed, religions also disagree amongst themselves what is right and wrong. This has been a primary source of conflict throughout human history. Many times, both sides believe God (or whatever their equivalent is) is on their side.
senectus1 7y ago
yes there fucking is, and it has ZERO to do with Religion or Secularism. Treat others how you would like to be treated. If you wanted to get more complicated its, "consider the well-being". I'm so outraged by the causal acceptance that religion has ANYTHING to do with a proven successful moral guidance in society. You people need to stop buying the bullshit marketing of religion (and politics).
- testing312 7y ago
  > Treat others how you would like to be treated. > If you wanted to get more complicated its, "consider the well-being". Those two are not a set of moral rules, they just seem like the 'heuristic' that I already stated. But it does not help you with the trolley problem, for example. I also never said that religion is/should/can be the answer to the messyness of moral questions.

oconnor663 7y ago

I think the biggest effects here are 1) whether the society is very large, and 2) whether it's made up of different groups of people who don't know each other very well. Both of those things make it difficult to have trust- or reputation-based systems. Religion and morality themselves must play some role, but I'd want to control for those first two things before I tried to draw and conclusions.

lordnacho 7y ago

Isn't the key actually that they have the same moral compass, rather than them being more morally correct (objectivity is a long story on this subject)? That leads to fewer disagreements, as everyone comes up with the same answers for what's right and wrong. As soon as you have a heterogenous group arguments will break out about what's right and wrong, how people should live, who gets what stuff...

starpilot 7y ago

Japan > USA > Russia, in lawful citizenry. The order is the opposite in religiosity. Japan just has a coherent society.

kamfc 7y ago

is there a list of recommended writings i can study on morals?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
svieira 7y ago
Start with _The Gorgias_ by Plato - does Justice exist? Then move on to _Orthodoxy_ by G. K. Chesterton (why does Justice require free will and the soul). Finish up with the Gospel of John. For a more detailed breakdown, take a look at _The Four Cardinal Virtues_ by Josef Pieper

v8engine 7y ago

> Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. Reminds me of playing https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/

akiselev 7y ago

> Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. But instead, we have to bulletproof everything (largely without success) from people who scheme and scam their way through life. We sink enormous costs into this, and it slows the progress and complicates life for everyone else. What bulletproofing? Humanity has operated on an extremely high trust basis since the beginning of civilization - it's the only reason we've been able to grow so fast and reshape the planet. It's why McDonald's employee don't check someone's ID at the pick up window and why social engineering works so well. It's the reason why we even have power grids, indoor plumbing, and modern medicine - all of those systems require extreme levels of trust. That's not hyperbole: A decent sized power plant joining the grid out of phase can crash the entire system, destroying - aka exploding - other power plants and distribution infrastructure. Our water supply systems and reservoirs are almost completely unprotected and vulnerable to malicious actors. A significant fraction of our health and safety regulations operate on scout's honor and personal liability: the FDA approved the diagnostic tests at the clinical labs I've worked at because they trust some certified lab managers (that we hired) to review our procedures and quality control - for life or death clinical testing - without a regulator ever stepping foot in the lab. Our species has even scraped our noses against nuclear war several times, ending in some low level officer deciding "nah... not today." As a species we are weak: we can't run fast or climb very well, our stomachs and immune systems aren't worth squat in the wild, and it takes us longer to raise our young than most animals' life expectancies. It is only through intelligence and trust have we been able to overcome those limitations to build the world we have today. The problem isn't individual morality, it's the systemic incentives built up over millennia of societal debt, tribalism, and a dash of corruption. Trying to moralize at an individual level is a big reason why so many people are anti-religious to begin with.

paulryanrogers 7y ago
Flint Michigan is an example of how too much trust and not enough verify can go wrong.
Amezarak 7y ago
The modern problem is in large part, scale. Trust works better in smaller communities and at smaller scales - people are more likely to be willing to fleece someone they don't know and will never see than their family, neighbors, or the person standing behind them in line. When there are immediate and permanent social consequences for violating trust, it's much less likely. The community (or tribe, if you prefer) scale is the scale that comes naturally to us. A lot of 'social technology' exists, in part, to help increase our ability to scale trust up. This includes things such as nations and religions. As people become more irreligious and nationalism declines (including into an us vs them mentality within the nation - simple cheerleading of your country is not what I mean by nationalism), trust declines, and people are more likely to scam, grift, and fleece others. And once it is gone, it is very hard to get back.

jay_kyburz 7y ago

No, what we should do is build our systems so that human nature is taken into consideration. There will always be good and bad people. Medical pricing should be simple, upfront and direct. It should not require lots of clerks and "billing professionals" It shouldn't required armies of expensive lawyers to settle disputes. Whether the bill was not paid by the customer, or the doctor failed to deliver what the customer paid for.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
Agreed... but you don’t think there is an ugly backend administrator to <insert your favorite public healthcare system>? Of course there is. You don’t think the NHS has lawyers and billing professionals, they’re there, just behind the scenes.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  Perhaps. Though I'd hope the centralized system is more lean, transparent, and capable than say an opaque market ruled by big players leveraging regulatory capture to fleece patients and providers alike.
- arethuza 7y ago
  They have lawyers, but everyone has lawyers over a certain size and the NHS is huge. As for billing, who would they bill - I've never had a bill from the NHS or even heard of someone getting a bill from the NHS? In some parts of the UK you have to pay a small amount for prescription medicines but that doesn't go to the NHS etc. It literally is "free at the point of delivery". Edit: The NHS directly employs about 1.4 million people https://fullfact.org/health/how-many-nhs-employees-are-there/ https://fullfact.org/health/how-many-nhs-employees-are-there... - and that's not including people who work in GP practices or dentists or opticians who do NHS work but aren't employed by the NHS.
specialist 7y ago
Yup. I first learned this from Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things. Try to apply that heuristic to all my efforts.

carapace 7y ago

notyourday 7y ago

> ...the Amish are honorable customers. This separates them from insurance companies, who are constantly trying to scam providers however they can. Much of the increase in health care costs is “administrative expenses”, and much of these administrative expenses is hiring an army of lawyers, clerks, and billing professionals to thwart insurance companies’ attempts to cheat their way out of paying. If you are an honorable Amish person and the hospital knows you will pay your bill on time with zero fuss, they can waive all this. My wife came from a splinter of that group. I skimmed the article. It is missing the most important cultural part -- Amish even when sick will continue to work and eventually simply die. Culturally they do not try to extend life at any cost.

FearNotDaniel 7y ago
> If they’re healthier, why is their life expectancy lower? Possibly they are less interested in prolonging life than we are. R&D write: > Amish people are more willing to stop interventions earlier and resist invasive therapies than the general population because, while they long for healing, they also have a profound respect for God’s will. This means taking modest steps toward healing sick bodies, giving preference to natural remedies, setting common-sense limits, and believing that in the end their bodies are in God’s hands. >The Amish health care system has an easier job than ours does. It has to take care of people who are generally healthy and less interested in extreme end-of-life care.
- notyourday 7y ago
  "little", "slightly" and "less" is significantly under-emphasizing how gigantic is the gap between what an average ( even average poor ) person living in Lancaster expects in terms of healthcare and an Amish family living around Lancaster expects in term of healthcare.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

> I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality This is my problem with Evangelical Atheism. The people who go hard against religion (well, two of the large three for political reasons) refuse to accept that there are good things that come with the structure and that some people really take to that.

specialist 7y ago

Who are the scammer's in this thesis?

zajio1am 7y ago

> I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Because no such framework exists? If we remove totalitarian pressure to enforce one coherent moral framework (either religious or secular) to all, we end up with pluralistic society in which various persons have fundamentally different moral intuitions, and therefore it needs extensive formal system for cooperation and conflict solving.

svieira 7y ago
Fundamentally different moral intuitions cannot be resolved except by conversion or war. There is no middle ground between "burn the witch" and "save the woman". Taking your own last sentence, participating in an "extensive formal system" assumes a shared morality that prefers "cooperation and conflict solving" to strength and conquest.

knolax 7y ago

> I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Given the numerous genocides committed in the name of religion, I would reckon that religion has failed to do so as well.