You need to get to the child before it develops critical faculties. I think that you also need to get to the child before it develops the concept of “fairy tales”. If the child is somewhat familiar with the genre, I think it takes many times times the effort to convince the child that, for no reason, this one particular story (which in shape and form is basically the same as all other stories) is supposed to be treated differently.

It is no accident that they lobby heavily to get access to the younger classes in school. Even though basic philosophy is only taught at university level, they want to start in first grade to

I visit local schools on behalf of Norwegian Humanist Association, and I don’t want younger than 10th graders. I educate, I don’t indoctrinate. I want to be challenged. I want a dialog.

In humans, in a male female relationship, sex only compliments love and not the thing itself
What is a lot more absurd is the assumption that it plays any role in animal love. Non mammals dont even have orgasm for hells sake.(same goes with most mammals esp females) Its it almost solely hormonal and can even be painful. In any case they cannot experience the pleasure in a human level, let alone make that an activity that compliments a relationship.

Man’s ancestors,the apes are divided in to chimpanzees,gibbons,gorillas and orangutans.
Male chimpanzees are polygamous and opportunistic-they tend to mate with which ever female comes in to season.

Gibbons ,how ever,establish a pair bond relationship that often lasts for life,they are familial and mutually supportive.
In a gorilla group,the silverback,the dominant male,has his pick of his females,though he may show special favour and develop a more lasting relationship with one or may be two.

Orangutans are solitary,or at most a unit consisting of a female and may be one or two children,to which group adults pay occasional visits.

I believe that,even evolved men and women are characterized in such different groups who has their own different instincts…one can not say its completely one genders fault in a non working relationship.

It is nice to wish to be free from coersion; that’s why modern governments usually involve some form of division of powers (with varying degrees of success) to make sure that no one person is too powerful. The problem is that people with an irrational exuberance for capitalism, such as Ayn Rand, obviously like to feel that power in the form of money should be excluded from any system which could limit extremes of power; and that capitalists should be free to seek the mediocre Nash equilibria of the economic games that they play with each other, without any interference by organizations that might (gasp) be more interested in public welfare than in money.

Objectivism is a great way to realize that you should be allowed to want and do things for yourself, if you’re trapped in some sort of codependent frame of mind. Beyond that, if you want real economic thinking, it would be better to read Adam Smith or even Thomas Hobbes, than a pretender such as Ayn Rand.

(To be fair, perhaps this was a reaction against the extremely ’subjectivist’ philosophies which have been popular in continental Europe, but from an analytical standpoint her ‘work’ is in many ways too coarse-grained and populist to be taken seriously.)

Ayn placed tremendous importance on humans as tool using animals, who can acquire power by reason. But she seemed not to consider very much the fact of humans as social animals. This seems to skew her entire worldview to the question of what systems will prevent you from doing what you might want to, as opposed to whether or not what you want to do will prevent others from doing what they want to. In short, “might makes right, except if by ‘might’ you mean the power of government to interfere, which is evil”.

It seems to me that our reaction (for example) might be that the fact that, like anarchy, it tends to produce significant power blocks (which bring an effective end to anarchy) in the form of monopolies, duopolies, and large corporations generally make it unreasonable to lump all economic systems which lack governmental interference into a single term. Because of the presence of the government as a legislative authority, however, and precisely because “free markets” have advocates who blatantly ignore this tendancy of accumulation of power, it is important at least to identify the class of economic systems without governmental control, in order to show how they may degenerate.

The problem is not in the concept of a “free market”, but (as with all models which get abused) in the fact that a “free market” doesn’t have the features that many enthusiasts claim/hope/wish it does. But whatever one claims about it, one cannot identify what the actual features of a free market would be without appealing to the concept of a “free market”, defined in some way.

Actually, it is not only intrinsic, it is a sine qua non component; without disparity, Capitalism ceases to be. In capitalism, the more something is abundant, the less is its value. That’s why real prosperity is anatema to capitalism; when things start to go well, when more people start to have plenty, stuff loses value, inflation eats the prosperity, disaster and collapse hits everybody, and the cycle restarts.

2) Can capital accumulation be justified by an individual’s “merit”?

Not if the accumulation is an end in itself. Accumulated wealth should be used as a tool to provoke growth and prosperity; it is sad that so often this accumulation is nothing more than just accumulation (greed). Accumulate in order to accumulate even more and the hell with people!

Still, as said on item 1, if everyone could be wealthy, no one would be wealthy, because the offer would soon become larger than the demand, money would lose its value and collapse would follow.

I think this mix of capitalism and socialism that the helvetics are trying is a better alternative, the trick is to achieve the right balance, the correct dose of both in the mix. Markets are human cultural institutions.
Somebody is always making rules and the definition of “free” is arbitrarily made up by one interest or another.

What most free marketers often tout as free markets are markets with no government regulation. But such markets end up internally controlled by interests with the most power, they breed monopolies and such.

Free marketers have this illusion that such problems will fix themselves, and maybe they can, eventually, or at least they will change over time, but the “adjustments” involved can wreak havoc with peoples lives while the adjustments are still trying to work themselves out “naturally”.

The idea touted as a free market usually includes the illusion that markets are “natural”, but then falls into the naturalistic fallacy that “natural is good”. Hurricanes are natural, earthquakes are natural, bubonic plague is natural. Pretending that a human cultural institution is good because it is “natural” fallacious thinking. Sure human culture is natural, because we are embedded in nature, so religions are also natural and wars are natural.

Current wisdom among free marketers is magical thinking. The fact that economics is heavily invested in mathematics does not make it a science when the models are based on fantasy, which most modern economic models are. And this isn’t just me, there are voices in economics saying similar things.)

The only alternative to the is to have some regulating body, and the body must come up with a definition of what the purpose of the market is and what criteria constitute “free”. It all gets messy very quickly, but messiness is the human condition.

All markets are controlled by some process or another, the magical thinking of most free market economics is really magical thinking which merely abnegates the responsibility of deciding how the market should run.

Nothing designed is original… They are merely the result of small, incremental improvements over time. In other words, an evolution parallel.

Lets take the Watch as an example as it appears to be one of the favorite used by ID proponents:

The watch wasn’t invented one day by a man who decided, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to tell time?” It was a long, slow process involving thousands of years.

First there was observing the Sun. People could tell approximately what time of day it was merely by looking up and seeing where the sun was.

Of course that wasn’t always accurate enough so the Sundial was produced. Markings around the sundial could give much more accurate information in regards to what time of day it was.

Then there was the problem of cloudy days (not to mention nighttime) which led to the invention of the mechanical clock. The markings were the same as the sundial and even the hand moved in the exact same direction (clockwise). Other hands were eventually included to make the clock more accurate.

The first clocks weren’t very portable. They required weighted pendulums and weighed several tons. For that reason there was usually only one in each town (usually in a central location such as a church or clocktower). Refinements to the design were made until eventually the clocks weighed only a couple hundred pounds apiece and could therefore be placed in individual homes.

As clocks became shrinking in size, there became a challenge amongst engineers to create a portable version. Once the weighted pendulums were replaced by a series of springs, the clock became truly portable and the “watch” was invented.

Of course these first watches weighed between 10-15 pounds, but incremental improvements over the years eventually brought the size and weight down to the point where they could be comfortably strapped to the wrist.

Other improvements included a small pendulum inserted into the winding mechanism (self-winding) through replacing the mechanics of the watch altogether with piezoelectric crystals.

As you can see, the watch wasn’t just invented “out of the blue” by some genius in Switzerland, but rather evolved through thousands of years with small, incremental changes over time.

So, we can see pretty easily that the “Watchmaker” argument does not prove ID, but rather supports evolution rather nicely. ID proponents point to the watch as proof of the necessity of a designer. Dawkins refers to this as “The Blind Watchmaker” argument because it relies on the watch being invented by an individual that had never seen a clock, a sundial, or even the Sun itself to be valid.

But…they become also dangerous; they start to think critically, they start to question authority and defy dogmas; they begin to vote better and to demand accountability from priests, teachers, politicians and every person in a position of power; and they acquire the most dangerous ability of all: they start to see through the marketing and advertising and become enlightened consumers — they become a threat to the economic foundations of the nation!

No wonder fear is shoved upon us all since early childhood…and the best way to instill a deep fear of authority — and thus total obedience — for life is to teach religion to the children.

Concepts of angels and devils, use of religion by politicians(mullahs) to control the population and doubting that the Quran was in fact the revelations to Mohd. from ‘Angel Gariel’ are some of the highlights of the book.

Angel Gabriel! Remember?!?! The same ‘Angel’ that appeared to the Mother Mary of Bible fame to announce that she has miraculously got pregnant without having sex..with the world’s first test tube baby!!…what fun.

Looks like in the period around 0 BC and up until several hundred years into AD, Angel Gabriel has been a very popular character in the imagination on the people of the Middle East where all Abrahamic religions were born. And the Angel whose only role appears to be performing a Reuter’s like service in religious fiction passes on that role to the ‘Messenger’.

The reason why I mention this book here is because this book enabled me to shed the last of my ‘fears’ and doubts about the existence of God and come out in the open convinced that God IS MAN MADE. Yes, most potential atheists prefer the term agnostic which is what I used to called myself as it is so much convenient that takes so little courage.

I am an atheist and more importantly a humanist and proud of it. I intend no harm to anybody unlike several of my religious brothers and sisters who might be incensed by my belief.

Well, since creationism requires a creator/god whose existance haven’t been proven, it is based on faith and religion only. It cannot be called creationism until somebody is able to prove the existance of the creator no matter what other evidence might suggest. Not that there is any valid evidence for creationism.

First: Karl Mark wrote against religion because religion was used (and still is) to control populations. Governments that would otherwise have failed have had their lifespans artificially extended by having the religion of the country telling their followers that acting against the government is a “sin”. Karl Marx believed that only by removing religion from the political picture can governments evolve to their natural, utopic state.

Second: The vast majority of Chinese followed what is referred to as “Traditional Chinese Beliefs”. These beliefs ranged from ancestor worship to Confucianism and the one thing that ties them all together is the fact that each and every one of them were atheistic. What you don’t seem to realise is that Marxism isn’t against theism… it’s against any belief system including atheistic systems if such systems can be used to subvert or control the population.

I recommend you watch these videos, specially the first one:
‘Why Evolution Is True’ by Jerry Coyne, AAI 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1m4mATYoig

‘The Evolution of Confusion’ by Dan Dennett, AAI 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_9w8JougLQ

‘Design vs. Chance’ by PZ Myers, AAI 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba2h9tqNYAo

There’s nothing that haven’t been already been mentioned, but they present in a concise manner what the evidence is, and how people have difficulties interpreting them. They are long videos for sure, but I think they’ll address all the questions you have been raising.