Is contemporary atheism sufficient to sustain a civilisation?

[LostLocke]

Its a big tendency nowadays to do not fix your own sad life and try to think about how to fix global problems.

Some global problems need to be fixed, or else we won't have any lives of our to also fix.

[Anomalocaris]

In a documentary chinese guy got 2 years in work or slave camp, just because he went on a public protest because some goverment official illegally kicked him out of his house to build there luxuary apartaments for himself.

Exactly, and that's what I miss in all this China this and China that hyperbole. The abject poverty of the largest part of the populations. Cold comfort that they don't starve such as during Mao's cultural revolution. They still have next to no rights and that's but one of the reasons why our corporations treat China like the promised land.

The cold comfort is when you have rights, but no heat in the winter.   What they have is actually rather warm comfort, just a smaller, and less formal, set of rights.    

Poverty emiserates far more than lack of assurance of political rights.

When actually facing a stark choice affecting oneself Between heat and western concept and implementation of rights, food and western concept and implementation of rights, leisure time and western concept and implementation rights, only a very small,albeit vocal and self important, minority, even in the west, would chose the latter and not the former.   The west promotes right over other things because lack of heat, hunger and lack of leisure is born by others while the west enjoys the tenuous but much desired asthetically pleasurable dilution that the west is ideologically great and everyone else agrees by emulating.

Also, the Chinese may not have implementation of rights structured as is familiar to us in the west.  But they now have considerable assurance of tolerance of of a wide range of activities, which is the practical generalizable bottom line, as oppose to specific detached theoretical conception, of rights.   What is more important is that, since 1980s, the range of assured tolerance, the real bottom line of practical rights,  has vastly expanded at the same time as enormous rise in standard of living.    I think most Chinese would regard china as being on broadly the right trajectory in ways that are important to them.

[purplepurpose]

Heres video Bell

[abaris]

The cold comfort is when you have rights, but no heat in the winter.   What they have is actually rather warm comfort, just a smaller, and less formal, set of rights.    

Poverty emiserates far more than lack of assurance of political rights.

Agreed, and when you're both poor and without rights, what's that then? That's what the majority of China is all about. Outside of the shiny cities and the global press getting one orgasm after the other over the golden opportunities there. Apart from the fact that even in the cities workers are expolited without having any workplace regulations to speak of. Human trash, expendable, to be replaced with fresh meat when the old one reached it's sell by date.

[Anomalocaris]

Being treated like human trash in sweatshop factories is actually such an enormous improvement over immemorial state of rural poverty that is the alternative, that the countryside of China had emptied by its own accord, and China actually had to impose internal immigration control to stem the flood of voluntary movement into sweatshop conditions. So disparaging sweatshop conditions fail to recognize it has proven to be a effective, perhaps necessary step into the progress up the wealth ladder.

The reason why a place will remain a sweat shop is low wage labor is its only exploitable competitive advantage. But while China was the default sweatshop in the 1990s and early 2000s, it is no longer so. This is because it now has superior infrastructure as well as progressively more skilled workforce. As labor rates go China is actually now quite expensive compared to places like Vietnam, India, Thailand. It now compete more in higher value added activities. But the fact that it remain a force in lower market manufacturing is not because it's workers were the most exploitable, but because it's infrastructure allows it to compete on final price even if it's labors rates were not longer its primary exploitable competitive advantage. This again indicate bargaining power for China's labor pool. One again this belies the notion that in China there are no rights.

In practical sense the workers enjoys far more assured range of activities then Chinese workers and farmers had ever enjoyed before.

[Minimalist]

Ask China.  They seem to be doing fine.

Ask the chinese workers and the majority of the population. Are they doing fine? Is that a model to strive for?

Compared to last century?  Chinese history shows a repeated pattern.  When the people are dissatisfied they rebel.  When the rebellions start let me know and I will reconsider my position.

[abaris]

Compared to last century?  Chinese history shows a repeated pattern.  When the people are dissatisfied they rebel.  When the rebellions start let me know and I will reconsider my position.

No, I don't do comparing. I'm in the business of not presenting a model that is obviously shit awful for anyone than the 1 percenters. Worse than what we have in Europe or America. So, please, don't buy the media hype and take it for what it really is. Orgasm land for every outsourcing western company.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Not in its current form of non-discriminating individualism.

 

Bosh. The world gets along fine right now with a vast majority of faux religious people. If they didn't have to go to  church on Sunday they'd be no more religious than I am.

[Anomalocaris]

Compared to last century?  Chinese history shows a repeated pattern.  When the people are dissatisfied they rebel.  When the rebellions start let me know and I will reconsider my position.

No, I don't do comparing. I'm in the business of not presenting a model that is obviously shit awful for anyone than the 1 percenters. Worse than what we have in Europe or America. So, please, don't buy the media hype and take it for what it really is. Orgasm land for every outsourcing western company.

The model has actually been spectacularly great for about 20% of China population, who reside in preexisting coastal urban population centers, perhaps greater than any other model in history had ever been for so large a number of people.  It is also good enough to be better than any plausible alternative for about 50% of the population who mainly reside in relatively well connected rural areas, no worse than what they've been use to for about 15% who resided in more remote rural areas, and only for at most 5%, who menifestly have priorities other than what would be considered understandable by the 95%, is what they have now shit aweful.   But because we think the 5% suits us and must therefore be right, the other 95%, must wrong and their assessment therefore doesn't matter.

[downbeatplumb]

Most of human history has been unfair especially in theocracies so it is doing at least as good as those.

Sorry, but that's a shit argument and often heard before. Others did it too, so it's OK then. It's not doing good for the population at large and that's the only thing I take offence with. Presenting it as an example of a working society. In fact, China represents the worst of both worlds. Unchained capitalism and an oppressive political system.

The question is "is atheism sufficient to sustain a civilisation?" No one said it had to be a good one, just a sustainable one.