Off Topic but rights related

[baldeagle]

I found this very interesting. A Harvard econ prof asks his Chinese scholar if he has learned anything unexpected. His answer is both enlightening and troubling.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=YjntXYDPw44[/youtube]

[gemini]

I like it.

[rbwhatever1]

Pretty much nailed half of it. When humans have nothing to believe in and no family to anchor traditions and goodness, they're not. Most humans anyway. Some humans are purely evil to begin with. Evil creatures will most likely raise evil offspring. We also have good humans driven to do things by the acts of others they would never normally do. These folks have great conscience and will try to always do what's right no matter what their moral beliefs tell them. Or the State. We have many Evil States on this planet. Some local as well. New Jersey is a good example of an Evil State. Humans in New Jersey exist at the pleasure of the State alone. That's evil. Off on a tangent there. Institutions only reinforce family values, morals and traditions and without these as an anchor, those institutions would never have been created in the first place. Our institutions (family structure included) are crumbling at a very fast pace. We still have good strong families and these families at some point will have to fix things. I hope it happens soon I'm getting tired of searching for bulk ammo deals...

Interesting thoughts in that video.

[The Annoyed Man]

I can't think of the guy's name, but he was assistant chief of LAPD under Darryl Gates, and he used to say the same thing. He worked with Russian police departments, retraining them in western legal values after the soviet collapse. He told us (this was at a Sunday school class retreat where he was the featured speaker) that one of the Russian officers that he had worked with had the same observation. This was back in the early to mid 1990s.

I want to say this though, as an intensely religious person myself, and that is that religion is not necessarily a precursor to legal behavior, nor an absolutely reliable indicator of another person's faithfulness to the secular law. The members of ISIS are intensely religious, and they commit murder, rape, and torture on an epic scale. ......because their version of their religion tells them to.....and it pretty much doesn't matter what country they are in. Plenty of Christians and Jews have cheated on their taxes. Many of the old-school mafioso were intensely Catholic. For the observant Jew there are the 600+ Mosaic Laws.....but not all Jews are able to be 100% faithful to the Law. Neither Jews nor Christians seem to be able to be 100% faithful to 10 simple commandments, and plenty of Christians are unable even to be 100% faithful to the two simple commandments given us by Jesus..... let alone faithfulness to the secular laws. And then there's Sharia, and other religious legal systems which may or may not conflict with secular laws.

So, do I believe that religious people are more law-abiding than the non-religious? Well, I think there is some evidence to support the notion, but I suspect that most of it is anecdotal.....and I hate that I think that, but I think it is probably true.