Christianity and communism

What do Christian scripture and Communism have in common? At Daylight Atheism, Adam Lee explains:

The Bible goes so far as to say that the first community of Christians weren't just socialists, but communists:

"And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need."

—Acts 2:44-45

By some accounts, this verse is what inspired Karl Marx's dictum, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Irony of ironies: Communism began in the pages of the Bible!
The above is an excerpt from a post titled "Why We Should Tax the Churches," and Lee develops this theme in detail, dovetailing with the modern-day struggle between the 1% and the 99%. He isn't shy about bluntly stating why:
Even when it begins among the poor and disenfranchised, religion almost always ends up being co-opted by the wealthy and powerful and used as a convenient excuse to justify inequality.

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The breadth of the corporate state

Chris Hedges explains that the corporate state has not merely confiscated our political system. It stretches much further into our lives. See the following video starting at minute 5:30, where Hedges explains that affected systems include communication, education and culture. In fact, there is an assault upon liberal institutions that once made meaningful political reform possible, such as labor unions and our great universities, the latter of which are oftentimes run as corporate entities uninterested in teaching the humanities and extolling an artificially narrow analytic view of what it means to be "intelligent." What modern education excels at is training up systems managers who strive to be hyper-deferential to authority. Modern education no longer strives to teach students how to think, but rather what to think. Hedges has a "dark" view of what's going on, essentially that the corporate state is "harvesting" what is left to be had of America "on the way out the door." (min. 28:00). At this critical time, there is no mechanism for changing the system by way of voting--Hedges argues that there is no way, in light of the corporate loyalties of Barack Obama, to vote against Goldman Sachs in the upcoming presidential election, which is using tax money to re-inflate the bubble before the next crash. Lawrence Lessig prefers to use all of our resources for reforming the system, "even if there is zero chance of success." Both men are big supporters of the Occupy movement.

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What is randomness?

Radiolab's show on "Stochasticity" offers entertaining examples to explain the concept of randomness.   The story starts with the example of a 10 year old girl named "Laura Buxton" who released a balloon with a message: "Return this balloon to Laura Buxton."    The girl who received the balloon when it came down many miles away was another 10 year old girl named "Laura Buxton."  There were many other coincidences between the two Laura Buxtons. Contrary to the assumptions of most people, randomness involves results that look like patterns.  What about getting seven heads in a row? If you were only flipping the coin seven times, this can happen only one time out of 100, but if you get seven heads in a row somewhere in the process of flipping a coin 100 times, you can expect this to happen one time out of six, not improbable. Another example is the case of Evelyn Adams, who one the lottery twice in two consecutive years. If you look only at whether this will happen twice with the purchase of two tickets, it would only happen once in 17 trillion times. If you consider the entire universe of people who buy lottery tickets, the question becomes "what are the odds that somebody somewhere will win the lottery twice?" The answer to that question is that it would be surprising if that didn't happen repeatedly, and it has happened repeatedly (listen to minute 17 of the show). The lesson? (at minute 19) "If you don't see past yourself [to look at the big picture], you become prey to superstition." In the case of the Laura Buxtons, the story becomes much more interesting when we focus only on the similarities of the two girls and downplay the many many things they don't have in common.   But of course, listing their dissimilarities would not have been a good story, yet we prefer to believe in "magic"  (see min 20). See also, this post on patternicity.

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