Can we agree on this? Biggest problem in the world today.

[mattttherman3]

Religion, money. Those are the two greatest problems in the world. IMO anyway.

 

[Hunde Des Krieg]

Too many children.

No, really. Think about it.
Children are filthy, loud, and obnoxious little snots.
When they grow up, they become filthy, loud, and obnoxious adults.
Or sometimes, politicians.
Or soldiers.
Or terrorists.
Or rapists.
Or regular people who just contribute to making everything worse.

Instead of blaming "people," I blame "children."
It makes me sound like a mean old man and damnit, I like that.

Did you get that from somewhere? Cuase it sounds familiar...

Not that I know of. I don't really watch many comedians, and they're the only ones I can think of who would say such a thing.
As far as I know, I made it up.
With my brain.

As long as you didn't make it up...
with your ass

...He's on to me.

You say patriotic like it's a good thing...

Also, this. Being all, "My country is pretty cool" is fine.
It's when you get into "MY COUNTRY IS BETTER THAN YOURS DIE BITCHES STAB STAB SHOOT LYNCH" that problems arise.
Sadly most patriotism falls into the latter category.

Yeah... but's that's more nationalism than patriotism...

 

[Dancingman]

The biggest problem in the world is that humans are intrinsically evil. The biggest political problem is the ability of national governments to print money and impose taxes with impunity because those 2 things are financing the corrupt welfare states and bureaucracies.

The biggest problem in the world IS the United States. We arm small nations that would be otherwise be harmless so they can fight proxy wars for us and it turns around to bite us and our allies in the ass, we rape the environment harder than anyone else does, we consume more resources ourselves than any other country in the world despite being nowhere near one of the largest countries, our people are ignorant of cultures external to ours, our leaders care more about winning elections and their own wallets than they do about the well-being of humanity or even the well-being of our own local population, our corporations and mass-media are closely in league with our government in order for each entity to make as big of a profit as they possibly can, and all the while our citizenry sits idly by and lets it happen.

If all of that does not make a country a threat to global security and stability then I don't know what does.

The United States is the main source of global stability at the moment. If it vanished over night it would leave a trade and power vacuum. Countries such as China and Japan would lose their biggest trading partner and would have to resort to imperialistic expansion to maintain their economies.

Newsflash: China's already doing plenty of imperialist stuff, they've got an oil agreement with Sudan, and veto power in the UN Security Council, that's why nothing's getting done about Darfur, and why Al-Bashir isn't in the prison he so richly deserves.

Japan isn't exactly new to the whole imperialism deal either, WWII basically was German, Japanese, and Italian imperialism trying to compete with everyone else's, except for the Soviet Union of course, they were free of imperialism, but their human rights record made Hitler look like Gandhi.

 

[Superballs]

I think mankind is the greatest problem.

Sure a few of us go out and do great things like invent the telephone or the transistor, the rest of us just try and coast off of that greatness simply because we're from the same country as that person or whatever....

Then there's our celebrity obsession, yay Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's Marriage so damned important that it actually takes time on a real news program.

Then we have to fight each other over super-important things like what kind of music we listen too or what country our car's manufacturer is originally from (in Windsor Ontario, Big 3 employees with bumper stickers saying "out of a job yet? keep buying foreign" had been reported to forcefully run Honda, Toyota drivers off the road when these hondas and toyotas were in fact assembled with canadian made parts in canadian cities by canadian...though non-unionized...workers).

We threaten each other with nuclear weapons.

We pump tons of toxins in our air. Yes us...not just factory owners but before we start pointing our fingers and blaming...it's our fault because we just keep shoveling our money over to these companies and expect that to be a deterrent to their practices.

We spend all our time concentrating on the sanctity of our own rights before helping our fellow man.

As David Suzuki said.

We're all on a bus travelling at 100 miles an hour towards a brick wall and we're all fighting over where we're going to sit.

Sorry if it seems like i'm copying anyone but i'm not reading through 5 pages before i post, I'll go read now though.

 

[Highlandheadbanger]

Mate, don't kid yourself. First of all, the Romans were really overrated as a people. Took alot of shit from the Greeks, who got it from the supra-Balkanian peoples, etc, and used their feelings of superiority to justify the conquest of everyone else's shit (the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Numidians, the Franks, the Celts, the Picts, the Gauls, the Iberians, etc).

Now its not hard for a culture to flourish on the Meditaranean, the Egyptians and Greeks did the same, the area around there is full of pretty much everything needed to grow with minimal offput dangers. The reason America really flourished is the politics of Europe. Most Americans don't know this, but the American Revolution was a war fought on the American continent and in Europe, with the Germans, French, and a bunch of other aristocrats taking the blunt of the blow, cock-sure that the British would give up and this new democratic nation would be a cock-up for them to come claim and sort out. They then followed up by taking advantage of a people who developed their culture along a fashion more suited to mutually beneficial growth (and something scholars and philosophers have spent forever before and since trying to recreate).

The example of "the next Roman Empire" fails to account for advanced cultures in Japan, China, India, Eygpt and other places not on the Christian map. If you really wanna play this game, the Byzantines succeeded the Romans, then Istanbul really (but in the Christian mindset, it was France, I could go on but its not worth it). The U.S. only really shined as a power after World War 1 when Europe had bombed itself to shit and, to phrase it lyrically: "When the Citadels have all Crumbled to Rubble, Even a Molehill looks Olympian".

One mistake the Romans made was having people who hated them stay alive while they took their shit. When the central power is weak, that leaves plenty of oppressed people to rise up and fuck some *****-ass (to put a complex socio-political piece of history as basely and grotesquely as possible). The United States easily bipassed this problem by exterminating and humiliating an ancient people in a fashion Hitler would be fucked for thanks to the free press.

Honestly, I don't give a fuck who tries to run the world next, but I doubt the next asshole who tries to play God'll fuck up any less and end up hurting things more.

 

[Highlandheadbanger]

Too many children.

No, really. Think about it.
Children are filthy, loud, and obnoxious little snots.
When they grow up, they become filthy, loud, and obnoxious adults.
Or sometimes, politicians.
Or soldiers.
Or terrorists.
Or rapists.
Or regular people who just contribute to making everything worse.

Instead of blaming "people," I blame "children."
It makes me sound like a mean old man and damnit, I like that.

Did you get that from somewhere? Cuase it sounds familiar...

Not that I know of. I don't really watch many comedians, and they're the only ones I can think of who would say such a thing.
As far as I know, I made it up.
With my brain.

As long as you didn't make it up...
with your ass

...He's on to me.

You say patriotic like it's a good thing...

Also, this. Being all, "My country is pretty cool" is fine.
It's when you get into "MY COUNTRY IS BETTER THAN YOURS DIE BITCHES STAB STAB SHOOT LYNCH" that problems arise.
Sadly most patriotism falls into the latter category.

Yeah... but's that's more nationalism than patriotism...

The word this bloke is looking for is Chauvenism or Jingoism.

Patriotism and Nationalism are treated synonymously in some cultures, but as a general rule:

Patriotism is a love for and identification with a certain language, religion, ethics, and law of an area or group.

Nationalism is a love for and identification with a nation-state.

I guess the modern use could be interchangeable, but patriotism is usually preferred over nationalism in diction, the main exception being in nuetral analysis of political and social practices, movements, and studies for academia.

 

[TenthRegeneration]

I think that we can all agree that problems are the biggest cause of problems in the world today. Am I right, or am I right?

 

[Dele]

Japan isn't exactly new to the whole imperialism deal either, WWII basically was German, Japanese, and Italian imperialism trying to compete with everyone else's, except for the Soviet Union of course, they were free of imperialism, but their human rights record made Hitler look like Gandhi.

??? Soviet union was one of the largest imperialistic nations in that era.

The example of "the next Roman Empire" fails to account for advanced cultures in Japan, China, India, Eygpt and other places not on the Christian map. If you really wanna play this game, the Byzantines succeeded the Romans, then Istanbul really (but in the Christian mindset, it was France, I could go on but its not worth it).

Sorry to jump in but to my understanding, Russia was the third rome from the Christian point of view.

 

[Booze Zombie]

Selfishness is what drives life, embrace it.

But the bane of the world is hive mindedness/fanatics (organised religion, cults, etc).

 

[bl82]

It's simple really. The people are the problem with the world. All problems stem from people and end with people and nobody's gonna be happy with the solution to this people problem.

 

[Daveman]

I would say the fact that there are too many pointless internet forums, instead of people making any real progress towards making the world better, is the worst thing in the world today. But I do love 'em.

 

[GreenDevilJF]

I am the biggest problem in the world.

 

[Iron Mal]

I personally think that many of our problems are made worse by we, the people, spending too much time pointing fingers and blaming things and not enough time finding solutions.

Once an issue or problem has been resolved then by all means feel free to start the debate of what is responsible for said problem, until then, knuckle down and sort the damn thing out.

Also, I blame our societiy's 'sheep' mentality and emos/indies for the dire straights we're in.

 

[cuddly_tomato]

I'd love to know how you come to such a conclusion, given that most people on this planet have been and continue to be religious, and nations which adopt atheism (not secularism) as their state religion tend to collapse and actually go a bit backward (Soviet Union, Cambodia, Maos China).

Maybe it's because most people are also idiots?

Possibly... As atheists are so fond of requesting from theists, where is your proof?

Let us use the scientific method.

1. Due to the fact that world has yet to see an atheist state last beyond 50 years, and given that such states have been horribly oppressive to its citizens, we can formulate a theory that governments founded on atheism have always failed up until this point.

2. Some stuff here about faith being "poison", and Issac Newton, Descartes, Freeman Dyson, and Francis Collins all be stupid.

3. Yeah, and Richard the Third and Saladin and crusades and 1157 and stuff.

4. Therefore religion is bad and is responsible for alllllll of lifes problems. And atheist societies would provably work much better.

No.

The real problem in the world today, the big challenge that causes war and people to fight each other, is intolerance, hatred and bigotry. It is the Muslim who will not make peace with the Jew, the Turk who will not talk with the Greek, the Christian who will not talk with the Pagan... but it is also the atheist who will not talk with the theist. In condemning everyone else you have a beef with and blaming the worlds problems on them, your behaviour matches exactly that which you claim you want to remove from the world.

Oh how ironic is the path of the fundamentalist atheist... =p

Have you ever noticed how America has never, ever been a Christian nation? We separate church and state here because the founding fathers understood the dangers of theocracy. This is the way any operable country should be. Forcing people to be atheists works about the same as forcing people to be religious, and our country would be just as bad of a place to live were we a Christian theocracy.

Well yes, as we all know, Christianity is dead in America.

Could you please show me where I even once referred to myself as an atheist? Please? I am secularist. Religion does not fit with military or political matters and the fact that it is often brought into such matters is verifiably a reason for much of the suffering in the world.

Certainly.

As someone who was raised Christian and has not limited himself from reading any religious texts I can say with absolute honesty that even non-violent religious people are still, you know, impeding human progress simply by believing in something so obviously untrue and ridiculous.

 

[Cowabungaa]

Well yes, as we all know, Christianity is dead in America.

That's just a matter of definition ofcourse

Could you please show me where I even once referred to myself as an atheist? Please? I am secularist. Religion does not fit with military or political matters and the fact that it is often brought into such matters is verifiably a reason for much of the suffering in the world.

Certainly.

As someone who was raised Christian and has not limited himself from reading any religious texts I can say with absolute honesty that even non-violent religious people are still, you know, impeding human progress simply by believing in something so obviously untrue and ridiculous.

That doesn't really show he's an atheist, no not really. That's something completely different.

Anyway, I think it's not fair to say that religion is the cause of all evil. Sure it's the source of a fair amount of crap in the world, but overal a lot of problems aren't rooted in (organised) religion. I still think it's greed, and maybe combined with intolerance, but especially greed. It's because of greed that we're raping this planet and thus ourselfs, it's because of greed that Third World Countries are in the state they're in now. Ofcourse not everything is solely because of greed, but I think that greed either hs a hand in everything or stands at the base of it all. Problem is, greed is something 100% natural and human, we're just slowly destroying ourselfs because we're simply ourselfs. Kinda harsh, isn't it?

 

[Infiniteloop]

Is it a modern day Roman Empire? I'd disagree with that.

We have a winner.

 

[Gotham Soul]

Stupidity. To be honest I'm not saying it's a problem, but if I may quote bash, "let's just take the safety labels off everything and let the problem solve itself".

 

[Incredible Bullshitting Man]

I am the biggest problem in the world.

Don´t be too hard on yourself. You just wanted to see the world burn. It´s OK, I understand. Here, let me give you a hug.