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Azrael Rand: You speak of "national self-interest". What is important is individual self-interest. You have made it clear that you think our self-interest requires restrictions on immigration and letting race be a consideration in setting public policy. But I don't see how you have proven this. You have not sufficiently considered the point that we must think of people and treat them as individuals, not as members of collectives, whether defined racially or otherwise. When I spoke of rape culture I did not mean in the whole society or a whole university. I was speaking of what might be called a subculture, a cultural attitude that seems to exist among some American male college students that encourages rape. If one-fifth of Africa's population (about a quarter of a billion people) decide to enter the United States in the next year or so, where exactly would they go? No private property owner would have to let them onto his or her property. Even owners who were willing to accept some of them would probably have a limit to how many they would accept. If they are squatting on or clogging government property, the government would have the right to require them to leave, and if there is no place here for them to go, that would mean sending them back.

Well, this is interesting... technically speaking the “loss” of investment was ongoing... its discovery is much delayed and thus can be quite shocking if many years and much effort, thought, and feeling were wasted. I’m not well versed enough in psychology to judge whether discovery of loss of investment can possibly cause the emotion of grief. I usually associate grief as the process of coming to grips with a type of loss which is something more psychologically fundamental than a loss of investment... something loved or cherished .... but I don’t know... it’s an interesting dimension to consider.

What do you mean? Calling Nietzsche a Christian in his critique of the church is one of the most controversial things you can say about him, so I'm wondering what you mean. That's regret. Grief is an emotion about the loss of value, and wishing you had it. Regret is about lost opportunity (or a failed opportunity), and in this context, wishing you never held god as a value. Coming to realize the parts that made you feel bad or miserable is a matter of overcoming and taking those experiences to become something better than you were. Sometimes, in the case of god, there were some really great values and insights more than likely, but you can take it as a path towards further understanding of reality. That's why a person shouldn't feel grief about the loss of god - rejecting god actually puts you in a better place than you were before.

I used to believe in God, and study the Bible, when I was very young. I don't look at it as "lost time" at all. In fact, those were some of the most intellectually productive years of my life. I didn't just read the Bible, I also read Dostoevsky and several other Christian authors, but it was all connected to my faith, and it was all very much productive and worthwhile. I highly recommend crazy ol' Fyodor. Every single thing he ever wrote is genius. Insane (or maybe just insanely pessimistic) on some level, but he cuts to the essence of things on every other level. So does Nietzsche (who is very much Christian, and a fundamentalist at that, in his critique of the Church, though he's nowhere near as sophisticated as Dostoevsky). So does most of the Bible, as do some other religious texts. There's a lot you can learn from religion, when you're really young. You can even learn some stuff from it when you're old. The main things wrong about the Bible are the (occasional) altruism and the supernatural God part. Most of everything else makes quite a bit of sense, and is well worth studying. When you study the Bible, you're studying thousands upon thousands of years worth of human experience. And even the supernatural God part can just be interpreted as a metaphor for reality, and you're fine (well, it's more complex than that, it involves the context of knowledge people had before science was a thing, but there's no reason to get into that here). Thing is, this is all off topic. The thread is about the loss of a literal God. There's no loss there, because there's no literal God.