Do long-term unemployed job seekers deserve any of the adverse economic consequences which they may receive?
For example, do they deserve bankruptcy, homelessness and so on?
Let's set aside the philosophical question of deserving. I would ask instead: is what happens to them the consequence of their actions? My answer is no.
Long-term unemployment is defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as 27 weeks (a bit more than 6 months) out of work involuntarily.
Who are these people? One big group is workers over 55, known as "older workers"; although it is illegal to discriminate against anyone over 40, the market place is not kind to older workers as a rule. They are more expensive to hire because they know the score and have some experience. They are not blank slates and cannot be molded to do whatever an employer wants. And other reasons.
Another large group is much younger people with little training or skills. You might say they should have stayed in school or gone to college, but in reality the deal you're dealt has a lot more to do with what I jokingly call the family you chose to be born in. If you were born poor in the United States, on average, only your children's children's children's children have a chance of becoming rich. That has been studied and demonstrated.
Lastly, there is a well-known labor market bias against LTUs: employers wonder why no one hired someone who has been looking for a job for six months or more. "Is there something they knew about this person that I am not seeing?" (Many stay unemployed as long as two years.)
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions in italics and their subtexts are not mine.
Friday, September 23, 2016
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Why did God create hell if he claims to love all of his creations so much?
If you are speaking within the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition, let me answer right off that the Bible does not teach that God created hell.
This question is part and parcel of the branch of theology called theodicy, which explores the philosophical or logical problem of the existence of evil, which is a paradox hard to resolve. The best biblical exponent of the problem is found in the book of Job.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is no complete answer. As Jesus says in the gospel "No one has seen the Father but the Son" (John 6:46), which teaches that even believers do not know really know all there is to be known about God. We just have been told the little bit we need to know for our own good.
As to hell, it was adopted by Christians of the 2nd or 3rd century from a few verses in which Jesus or others make reference to the Greek idea of Hades. The Hebrew Gehenna or Sheol is not Hell.
The modern theological answer is that God did not make hell, we did. No one goes to hell, strictly speaking; rather, we make ourselves unfit for heaven.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions in italics and their subtexts are not mine.
This question is part and parcel of the branch of theology called theodicy, which explores the philosophical or logical problem of the existence of evil, which is a paradox hard to resolve. The best biblical exponent of the problem is found in the book of Job.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is no complete answer. As Jesus says in the gospel "No one has seen the Father but the Son" (John 6:46), which teaches that even believers do not know really know all there is to be known about God. We just have been told the little bit we need to know for our own good.
As to hell, it was adopted by Christians of the 2nd or 3rd century from a few verses in which Jesus or others make reference to the Greek idea of Hades. The Hebrew Gehenna or Sheol is not Hell.
The modern theological answer is that God did not make hell, we did. No one goes to hell, strictly speaking; rather, we make ourselves unfit for heaven.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions in italics and their subtexts are not mine.
Monday, September 19, 2016
Why don't religious people see that they believe in their God is because they were told to as children?
Belief is not a static thing. Sociological research shows that, at least in the United States, church affiliation (taken as an external indicator of faith) ebbs and flows throughout a person's life. It has become statistically normal for people brought up in a religious household to experience a crisis of faith in adolescence and/or young adulthood and return to the family faith once married and with children in their late 20s or early 30s.
Faith typically springs from one of three sources: revelation (an angel appears to you, which is not very common); reason (your thinking leads you to conclude that the possibility of God, albeit not irrefutable proof, is reasonable -- again, not hugely common); witness (a friend, parent, teacher, etc. tells you about their faith, this is probably the most common). My experience of religious people, which included being in a sociological team surveying on this topic, suggests that most believing people first follow family custom, then face the challenges of reason and sometimes have a revelatory experience (most often quite short of an actual angel).
Thus, believers might legitimately demure when confronted with someone who would pose a question derived from yours, such as: why don't you realize you're just following what you were told as a child? That would be because, in actual fact, their faith has undergone ups and downs and they have drawn on other resources, such as reason and spirituality, to decide to adopt their faith as a matter of conviction.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions in italics and their subtexts are not mine.
Faith typically springs from one of three sources: revelation (an angel appears to you, which is not very common); reason (your thinking leads you to conclude that the possibility of God, albeit not irrefutable proof, is reasonable -- again, not hugely common); witness (a friend, parent, teacher, etc. tells you about their faith, this is probably the most common). My experience of religious people, which included being in a sociological team surveying on this topic, suggests that most believing people first follow family custom, then face the challenges of reason and sometimes have a revelatory experience (most often quite short of an actual angel).
Thus, believers might legitimately demure when confronted with someone who would pose a question derived from yours, such as: why don't you realize you're just following what you were told as a child? That would be because, in actual fact, their faith has undergone ups and downs and they have drawn on other resources, such as reason and spirituality, to decide to adopt their faith as a matter of conviction.
This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions in italics and their subtexts are not mine.
Wednesday, September 07, 2016
Why the rush to make saints?
First it was Karol Wojtyla (aka Pope John Paul II), now it’s Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (aka Mother Theresa).Why does Jorge Bergoglio (aka Pope Francis I) insist on sprinkling saints hither and asking questions later?
We all know that neither Wojtyla (pronounced woy-TEE-wah) nor Bojaxhiu (bo-YAH-joo) will withstand the test of time.
There’s a Rasputin-like murky figure who stowed away evidence of Wojtyla’s hiding pedophile priests in Krakow; that will eventually all come out. Then there’s Bojaxhiu’s little romp with Charles Keating, the 1980s savings-and-loan fraudster whose donations of ill-gotten money she took, then refused to return (perhaps thinking she was paid for the character witness testimony she delivered to a U.S. court on his behalf).
Apparently, there’s more in Bojaxhiu’s dossier, concerning her disregard for needs of poor people in Calcutta and her outrageous celebrity seeking.
There is nothing even remotely redeemable in Wojtyla’s life to warrant putting him up as a model of Christian behavior, even if we dismiss his efforts to avert a scandal he personally did not cause. But Bojaxhiu appears to be downright reprehensible.
Couldn’t the Vatican, which usually thinks in centuries, have waited a tad and investigated more thoroughly?
We all know that neither Wojtyla (pronounced woy-TEE-wah) nor Bojaxhiu (bo-YAH-joo) will withstand the test of time.
There’s a Rasputin-like murky figure who stowed away evidence of Wojtyla’s hiding pedophile priests in Krakow; that will eventually all come out. Then there’s Bojaxhiu’s little romp with Charles Keating, the 1980s savings-and-loan fraudster whose donations of ill-gotten money she took, then refused to return (perhaps thinking she was paid for the character witness testimony she delivered to a U.S. court on his behalf).
Apparently, there’s more in Bojaxhiu’s dossier, concerning her disregard for needs of poor people in Calcutta and her outrageous celebrity seeking.
There is nothing even remotely redeemable in Wojtyla’s life to warrant putting him up as a model of Christian behavior, even if we dismiss his efforts to avert a scandal he personally did not cause. But Bojaxhiu appears to be downright reprehensible.
Couldn’t the Vatican, which usually thinks in centuries, have waited a tad and investigated more thoroughly?
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