[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by All Darc

Bible it's like play dough. It can be used (modelled) to justify anything. So religion it's a brain masturbation.

People tend to take an interpretation which justifies their behavior. The authors had a particular meaning though, so the only way to read the text in good faith is to consider the context in which they wrote, and give the best effort to determine what they were saying. If there's no effort to understand what someone is saying, there's no point in listening/reading.

I'm with you in my dislike of religion, though I see the benefit for those more concerned with fitting in, or needing concrete rules to live by to ground them. Rules get you by in absence of good philosophy, and adopting good philosophy is extraordinarily difficult compared to adopting rules.

If you earn much less than someone it creates some pity feeling. If you earn more they can get envy over you. Human nature... People want you to be fine, but not better than them.
In the case of save money, if you manage to save more, while a fool expent and don't save a peny, even if earns more by month than you, this can create some envy.

I'm not very envy prone; it's probably the least of "the 7 deadly sins" for me. A consultant was hired on at my last job at $155k/yr, and he had below average intelligence, and somewhere around 25% of my technical ability. His job was to administer the email program (Lotus Notes), but he would just call IBM and get them to do his job. That was the closest to envy I've felt in a long time, but it was more a sense of injustice that the company would not spend any money on critical items (pens and paper, $5 parts that can keep manufacturing from failing), but then hire this guy to do nothing but make phone calls. His pay was 4x mine, but the value to the company was perhaps 1/4 of my contribution.

I turned it around and said that if I wanted to make $150k, I could. Ultimately I don't care if I make lots of money, and I'm not willing to become a slimy salesman to oversell my capabilities and worth in exchange for it.

The saver vs spender personality is mostly genetic though. Some of my first memories was saving pennies in a toy trailer. I valued the opportunity the money represented more than the things I could buy with it. Behavior can change, but it's enormously difficult, and gets harder the older a person gets.

I see how much rightness are becaming target of angry nowadays... If media and fashion says to people get dirt behavior, imoral people get angry over people with moral values. If media tells people to expent all their money with foolishness, and some people save money and don't buy foolishness, they get angry over people who save money.

It does amaze me how certain immoral ideas are deemed moral, or at least neither moral or immoral. There's a fringe group of people that think "white people" should pay reparations to "black people" in the US, as if all white people now are responsible for past wrongs to black people that are long dead. It's at least as evil an idea as saying all black people should pay more taxes since some black people create a disproportionate burden on police and other social institutions.

That said, society tends toward better behavior and ideas. The terrible ideas now while bad, aren't the worst we've had, and surely won't persist into the future. Darwin rules apply to ideas too, and only the fittest persist.

Hey 50K it's a quite a money...
So you did more a sort of investment, I presume.

More like I didn't have a solid investment plan at the time, so I decided to loan the money until I did have a plan. He agreed to pay it back within 1 week of notifying him. In my laziness, I loaned the money for 6 years, and he recently paid it back.