So what?
[url=http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/aidtracker/][u][i][b]Reuters Aid Tracker[/b][/i][/u][/url] wrote: ... Aid pledges by the 20 biggest government and multilateral donors total $6.65 billion, according to Reuters research. Of this $5.17 billion has now been paid out or approved for spending. Most smaller donors have now allocated all their aid.
Total tsunami aid pledges top $7 billion. Add to that some $5 billion of private donations to aid organisations by individuals, companies, foundations and religious groups, and you have the biggest display of generosity after any natural disaster in history ...
... The United States is the biggest tsunami donor with a total $2.34 billion of government and private pledges.
(Wed Sep 14 12:22:55 2005)
More than any other entity is more than any other entity. The US alone, of about 100 contributing nations, accounts for 20% of overall aid pledged so far
Continuing in misapprehension, you wrote:When the Katrina disaster unfolded Kuwait offered us $500,000,000; Bahrain $5,000,000 and Afghanistan, as poor as it is, offered us $100,000. Cuba and Venezuela offered us help and Bush turned them down.
The reason;
In a statement on Venezuela's and Cuba's offers of assistance, a scholar at a conservative Washington-based think tank, the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Johnson, warned that offers of aid from rogue regimes in the past have served as cover for drumming up support for leftist causes. Mr. Johnson warned not to "let in political opportunists eager to sow discord or probe the coastline for weaknesses in defense."
http://www.nysun.com/article/19761
To which I offer in rebuttal and refutation the following:
[url=http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-09-07-katrina-world_x.htm][u][i][b]USA TODAY[/b][/i][/u][/url] wrote: ... The Bush administration has rejected only one offer, of 20 million barrels of oil from Iran. Thomas said the offer was made through the media and rebuffed because it was conditioned on the United States lifting economic sanctions.
The administration accepted an offer from Venezuela, whose President Hugo Chavez has irritated the Bush administration by forging close ties with Cuba. Venezuela's national oil company is shipping an additional 1 million barrels of oil to the United States to alleviate shortages caused by Katrina.
"Venezuela is privileged to be able to help the United States in this time of need," Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, Venezuela's ambassador to the United States, said in a statement e-mailed to reporters Wednesday ...
[url=http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5602546.html][u][i][b]Associated Press[/b][/i][/u][/url] wrote:
... Harry Thomas Jr., the State Department executive secretary who is helping to coordinate the foreign relief effort, denied Wednesday that the Bush administration was lukewarm toward accepting foreign aid offers. "Not in the State Department," Thomas said. "We welcomed all offers."
Still, the effort to coordinate foreign aid has faced many of the same difficulties and delays that have dogged the entire emergency response. Wednesday, three Canadian warships and one coast guard ship departed for the Gulf Coast, a week after the government rushed to pack them with emergency assistance.
Doctors offered by Cuba to help attend Katrina's victims probably won't be needed because the supply of U.S. physicians is adequate, the State Department suggested Tuesday. Officially, the U.S. is undecided about the offer by Cuban President Fidel Castro, with whom the United States lacks full diplomatic relations. Iran offered to send the United States 20 million barrels of crude oil if Washington waived trade sanctions, but a State Department official said Wednesday that offer was rejected ...
Iran offered to buy her way out of trade sanctions, Cuba's offer of doctors fills no need. No other offers have been turned away. You need better talking points.
then, venturing at last a bit closer to theophilosophic discussion, you wrote:I thought I made it rather clear. I believe when we die we all go through a life review. We are shown the good and bad things we have done. We learn by feeling the pain form our errors and the joy from our benefits. We are here to learn. We will come back.
As you say, that is what you believe. Others may and do believe differently. None have any basis beyond preference of belief for the respective belief held; empirically, logically, forensically, any of those belief sets belief set is as valid - or invalid - as its counterparts.
capping your essay's foray into error, you wrote:Life is not a test, not a one time right-wrong, go to heaven or go to hell situation as some fundamentalist Bible thumpers would want you to believe. It would be rather stupid of a God to put a soul in the infinite number of situations souls find themselves in when they are born and expect them to select the "correct" religion if they are expected to be saved. Yet that's what many Christians believe. You will be judged by your faith, not words and deeds.
Deism is one God for all. It matters not to God your faith or belief. If your God is so weak that it just can't stand not to be accepted or worshiped then it does not deserve any respect.
Should the predicate concept of proposition be unresolved, the proposition procedes from an illicit premise. Though you illustrate the absurdity of religion well, and decry it, you participate in its foundational but illicit premise; that there be a deity is a matter unresolved. No argument functionally dependent upon either the existence or nonexistence of a deity has any forensically valid foundation, no valid proof of proposition may procede from an illicit premise.
As for your statement " ...
Deism is one God for all", well, in my opinion, that assertion is uninformed poppycock. Deism is naught but a name given to a set of epistemological and metaphysical claims, an unsubtantiable assumption. Stemming from antecedants dating as early as the 6th and 5th Centuries BCE, found in the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece. The concept grew, was explored and elaborated upon by such as Critias, Plato, Aristotle, was further developed and structured by the Epicureans, Stoics, and Academics, and emerged essentially fully formed in the works of Rome's Cicero, most particularly in his
De Natura Deorum, in which he compared and contrasted philosophical and popular religions. Cicero's views foundationally influenced the thinking of the likes of Plutarch, Celsus, Julian, and even the early Christian apologists. Ciceronian influence also may be found in the writings of the earliest of Islamic scholars. Through the Medieval period, the concept persisted, but development slowed, restrained by the stranglehold of Roman Christianity throughout Europe.
As a formed (if not yet formalized), named concept, Deism appears first in the 16th Century works of one Pierre Viret, a Calvinist, who employed the term in his
Instruction Chrestienne, characterizing it as a heresy created through the naturalism of the Italian Renaissance. In lamenting the turmoil of The Reformation, Viret held that the "
déistes", though possessed of a belief in God on the order of the "Turks and the Jews" (
" ... comme les Turcs & les Juifs ... "), were inescapably heretical, fatally flawed in that it was their belief doctrine derived through the evangelists and apostles was based in mere "myths and dreams" (
" ... la doctrine des Évangélistes & des Apostres only fables & resveries ... "). Viret contended deists abused and subverted the freedom and liberty of thought pursuant to The Reformation. While Viret himself criticized and condemmed idolatry and superstition, he regarded with horror the application by those he termed deists the same reasoning to the Christian mythopaeia and tradition.
Later in the 16th Century, a discusion of on religion recounted in Jean Bodin's
Colloquium Heptaplomeres includes a participant identified as a deist, and in the early 17th Century, Robert Burton's
Anatomy
of Melancholy presents a list of contemporary "Deists". As the 17th Century progressed and yielded to the 18th, the concept was visited, and variously critiqued, criticized, endorsed or condemmed by, among others, de Montaigne, assorted Catholic and Protestant fideists, de Bergerac, Naudé, La Mothe le Vayer, Giovanni Diodati, Grotius, Hooker, René Descartes, Hobbes, de Patot, de Saint-Évremond, Peyrère, Spinoza, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury (arguably the first English Deist).
It was in latter 17th and throughout 18th Century England the concept became what it is today, elaborated, expanded, and championed by Chillingworth, Hales, the Cambridge Platonists, and other protagonists of increasingly liberalized Enlish theophilosophical thought. The writings of Lord Shaftesbury, Tindal, Woolston, Chubb, Trenchard, Middleton, Lord Bolingbroke, and Gordon formed a sythesis of contemporary theocratic and political thinking, with emphasis on rational thought, reasoned argument, individual liberty, and the inate equality of all men. It became a hot topic at coffee houses and genteel get-togethers; it was a favored pastime of the privileged, the idle educated, the members of academic and scientific societies, the elitists of the day.
Spreading back to The Continent, and abroad to The Colonies, English Deism left its mark on such latter 18th Century movers-and-shakers as Toland, Pluche, Robespierre, Gordon, America's own Paine, Franklin, and Jefferson. It may be said the 18th Century was the Golden Age of Deism, thyough the period saw too the roots of its demise as as a major theophilosophic discipline. Hume, Butler, Berkeley, Diderot, Rousseau, Lessing, Burke, and Herder mounted substantial and sustantive challenge to the precepts of Deism, turning the logic and reason which had birthed the concept back on itself to expose the logical, rational, and ethical flaws of the thought system. By the dawn of the 20th Century, what had been Deism was little more than a footnote to be found in texts concercning theophilosophic studies; it had no renkowned proponents, no wide adherence, no social currency.
The heir to Deism may be found today chiefly in the works of contemporary "freethinking", liberal. permissivist critics of the religionist proposition centered on the Christian subset of the Abrahamic mythopaeia.
As I said, thats my opinion, and certainly, that opinion is a bit biased; I'm burdened by a close familiarity and long fascination with philosophy, theology, archeology, anthropology, history, logic, and reason. I must admit of my interest in those matters it seems at times almost an obsession.
