I recently read this:
Now here comes Christopher Beha with a book-length lament about the felt deficiencies of atheism. Felt is precisely the right word here because, although Beha ventures some arguments against atheism, when examined they are transparently invalid and operate as nothing more than an expression of his disappointment that atheism did not provide him direction on how to live. (Source: Another Lament About Atheism by Ronald A. Lindsay)
The book length complaints about atheism are mostly about science (which is not part of atheism) and most of the science is got wrong, but allow me to focus on “direction on how to live.”
Most of these “atheists” jumping ship convert to Christianity. So, how does Christianity tell us “how to live?” According to The Google “Christianity teaches a way of life centered on loving God and loving others, modeled after Jesus Christ. Key principles include humility, forgiveness, compassion, and serving others. It focuses on spiritual transformation, following biblical commands to live holy, righteous lives while trusting in God’s grace and relying on the Holy Spirit.”
So, ignoring the fact that the “Holy Spirit” is a ghost and if you ask random Christians if they believe in ghosts, I think you would get the same response if you asked almost any other subset of our society, and the bulk of the respondents would say “no.” So much for relying on a ghost for life guidance.
So, how many Christians do you see who exhibit “humility, forgiveness, compassion, and serving others along with following Biblical commands (Stone those teenagers, stone them!)?” Let’s see … 1, 2, 3, … I am sure there are more, but most Christians are indistinguishable from non-Christians in their lifestyles. And if you would look at Christians for Trump, would you get anything close to that behavior? (Yeah, right!)
If any of you out there are looking for guidance as to how to live, I suggest reading the Humanist Manifesto. This is a document of the American Humanist Association.
If that is just TL/DR for you, how about this:
1. Don’t be an asshole.
2. Don’t be a jerk.
3. Think about others for some time before you act.
That is enough guidance for ordinary people I think, and isn’t close to being followed by the Elon Musks and Donald Trumps of the world.
Uncommon Sense 
The Folly of Chasing Profit
Tags: economic theory, greed, profit, tax the rich, The New Deal
The American economy is based upon one thing and only one thing: the acquisition of profit. If one makes profits, one is considered successful in business. If one makes huge profits, one is an icon of business.
Contrast this with the government the founders of the U.S. Constitution envisioned. They envisioned a society and especially a government in which virtue played a substantial role. They recognized, even with their limited sources of knowledge, that a republic, democratic or not, would not survive if its rulers did not display and espouse virtue, civic virtue.
So, what have the “pursuers of profit” done with the profits they have accumulated? For one they created a theory of economics that supported that pursuit with no limit upon greed. In economic terms they claim that economic growth solves all problems. This is foolishness on a grand scale. If the population of human beings on this planet numbered just a few million, this would function quite nicely … for a while. But if it succeeded, it would create its own problem. A truism of biology is that organisms expand in number to the limits of their niche, especially food supply. A classic example, even taught in economics classes (Oh, the irony!) is what happened when rabbits were imported into Australia. There were no native predators that saw rabbits as prey, so the rabbits “bred like bunnies,” and their population exploded in short order. So many rabbits and Australia being a semi-arid country, there wasn’t unlimited food for those rabbits so they stripped vast acreages of the land of what greenery grew there, then millions of rabbits starved of hunger.
There are always limits to growth … always. It is telling that the economists of the 1950s and 1960s omitted any reference to the natural world in their economic theories, basically stating that nature would never limit our economies.
The answer given by the greedy for any economic difficulty is “More Greed!” This is a recipe for disaster that school children can understand. But to people who define themselves as acquirers of profit, they can do nothing else. So, the game must be changed.
If they cannot see any goal other than profit it is necessary for us to require other goals to be included. Making a profit may be one building block of a company, but it cannot be the only building block. (So adding “shareholder value” is unacceptable as it is just another form of profit, shareholder profit.)
We have many examples of how this can be done and how the pursuers of profit will respond. As a response to the great Depression, as part of his New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt did something quite amazing (and which he is vilified by the moneyed elites today for doing). He gathered the captains of industry into the White House and explained that if the federal marginal tax rate on income weren’t near 100%, he couldn’t protect them from what the labor unions or the Socialist Party of American were going to do. They begrudgingly accept a 90+% marginal tax rate. Now this tax rate only applied to income over $100,000, if memory serves me) which was a huge amount of money in the 1940s. (That hundred K would be over two million dollars today.) But companies and corporations realized that if the remunerations of their CEOs were to exceed $100,000 of income, then (90+% of that income would go to the federal government and the CEO would get almost nothing. So, the CEO’s started acquiring remuneration that wasn’t in the form of cash: they got the use of a company car, maybe with a chauffeur, they for fancy offices, with expensive art hung on the walls, they got beautiful secretaries, often more than one, the got to live in company housing, and so on. They didn’t exactly starve.
But all of those restrictions on excessive salaries have been gutted and, well those profit-seekers are in charge, so they arranged for obscene amounts of remuneration to come to them and arranged for a lower tax rate on those mountains of money than “ordinary” citizens paid. Of course they did.