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Jim H,

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"'...the God of the Christians provides...a common purpose around which they can unify and a set of values they can use to do it with.' --- The 'set of values', morals & ethics predate Christianity & are clearly man made/secular, all one has to do is examine Confucianism to understand this. Given the 30,000+ & growing number of Christian denominations, seems to me this concept of a Christian God divides just as much as He unifies, and that's just within Christianity. Add all the other world religions & non believers, & things get quite divisive. So, unless you can convert everyone to believe in a God that you yourself question the existence of, and then get them to settle on one version of this God, & one set of teachings, I'm afraid I'm not seeing the unifying aspect that you seem to see. All I honestly see is the Wizard of Oz before the curtain is pulled back."

Jim, this has continued to nag me but I think that is because I think as an engineer.  "The 'set of values', morals & ethics" INDEED "predate Christianity & are clearly man made/secular."  I've always maintained that (for my most recent articulation of this see my comment to Sue Harris above).  My point is entirely different.  As an engineer I think of structures or processes that connect parts.  For an engineer the connecting tissue and mechanisms are of paramount importance. You in turn are looking at the person and how he can be freer and more self-reliant; you are thinking more as a scientist trying to understand the parts and how they work alone and perhaps affect one another.  I say fine but how do you then connect them into a functioning society.

I've been thinking hard about your "not seeing the unifying aspect that [I] seem to see" in Christianity.  Acemoglu and Robinson's "Why Nations Fail" and I overlap almost entirely, theirs of course with far more documentation and evidence and better developed. Yet there is something missing, at least to me.  Their emphasis is on the political and economic institutions that work better, the right and better parts.  They do connect them through a lose but still central government that lays down the laws (the right parts) and enforces them. So they too have a connector and a structure but as I said, while their emphasis is on the parts, mine is on the connector, which to me has to include a process that maintains it.

You and Zach don't want that central government or connector and maintainer of the social structure and fabric to get too large because as it does it limits your degrees of freedom. You instead rely on empathy and education,  something we each carry internally.  What I can't see, maybe because we still don't have enough of the stuff to feel and touch and understand, is how it functions as connector of not just a few who can get to know each other but many millions.  

I don't know about you but at least Zach continuously cedes the need for some central government, much as Acemoglu and Robinson do. Fine, but as an engineer my antennas immediately go up and I ask, "okay, but with change we inevitably need more rules, there's more conflict over them, and more need and opportunity for that central enforcer and mediator to grow, but as it grows all kinds of unintended, undesirable and harmful things happen owing to man's flaws, so how do we keep all of that from happening?" How do we deal with the paradox of free men insidiously giving up their freedom while chained men look for freedom?  How do we find and maintain a good balance without the large swings we observe in history?  And I do grant that education is a crucial ingredient but the more we learn the faster we are able to change, make more rules, and require even more learning.

Continued...

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Now let me come back to your 30,000+ denominations and growing.  Isn't the same true in a Confucian society centered primarily on the family and education only there are not just thousands of them but millions?  Isn't that why in China the cycles seem to swing wider?  In the East you end up relying on a very powerful emperor that eventually fails but while still in power raises armies of as much as one million men?  A few very large conflicts and swings instead of a whole bunch of smaller and perhaps less harmful swings as in the West, swings that hopefully allow more net progress?  More two steps forward and one back instead of four steps forward and five back?  Or just eliminate the darn cycles?  I know Christianity has not gotten us there but, when not being used by mere mortals for their own purposes, at least its leader doesn't grow and mess up.

So let me turn then to "...this concept of a Christian God divides just as much as He unifies..."  To me that's good!  If you have been following my posts you know that I want to keep any institution, including of government, from growing too large.  That is for the very simple reason that to learn we eventually have to put everything to the test and failures are inevitable until we finally get it "right" or right enough.  Big institutions make bigger mistakes like I described above for China.  Just as bad, while they still survive they tend to be much more rigid than their smaller counterparts, thus inhibiting further change.  Slowing down change alone might be good to allow everyone to catch up, but as I said, everything eventually fails and big institutions fail bigger including sometimes bringing down the whole house of cards. 

So I am quite happy that Christianity divides and that there are 30,000+ plus denominations. I wrote a week or two ago that the churn (Joseph Schumpeter last century described the importance of creative destruction to change and progress) among those many denominations has been instrumental in allowing Christianity to change internally and adapt to the changes happening in the larger society while influencing them as well.  I see that kind of symbiotic and synergistic change as good and constructive.  After all there is much of value in "The 'set of values', morals & ethics [that] predate [and were then absorbed by] Christianity & are clearly man made/secular."  We don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Instead we want to see him evolve and grow into a stronger and more useful person, don't we :).

RE: Do we need religion to have ethics?

What KIND of "ethics?" The "ethics" of relativism are transient and therefore useless. REAL ethics grow out of unchanged and unchanging beliefs so that generation after generation can rely on each other's word.

RE: Is it possible that a world without religion can be, on the whole, a better place to live?

Whose "religion?"

It's interesting that some would dare to call what Bain Capital does "constructive" . Let's look at this thing from the inside which I can do. You see I was a "Business Analyst" for a large retailer located here in Dallas. This was a nationwide retailer that was controlled by two families even though it was publicly owed. It was run very conservatively maybe too conservatively. The company was always profitable although in recent years it had to pay back taxes due to some tax shenanigans.

One day we were notified that a Canadian Company had taken a 5% share in our company and that they sought representation on the board, Though this was unusual, it was not greeted with any panic. But that changed and changed fast when we found out that their investment banker was Drexel Burnham and Lambert. Drexel had made a name in hostile takeover/greenmail game.

Many long nights running financial models demonstrating that our company was worth considerably more than what this smaller company was offering resulted in a higher offer and acceptance. So what happened after that. Well Drexel organized a bond offering that allowed them and the Canadian company to pay themselves a "special dividend" which effectively "cashed" them out. There were layoffs and an ensuing recession sent the now highly leveraged company into bankruptcy. It was reorganized and still alive and kicking today. But I dare anyone to say that there was a net benefit to anyone except for the orginal owners and the takeover artists.

If the strategy sounds familiar , well it is,. It is the same model that Bain employed time and time again. It bought a stake in a company that wasn't necessarily doing badly,. It then borrowed money to cash itself out of its original investment. This was the case in the GST Industries the company featured in the Obama commercial. In the meanwhile the company lays people off to cover the costs of the new interest load. If it can, then it survives. If it doesn't,it goes into bankruptcy., In the case of GST, the bankruptcy was a Chapter 7 liquidation. And the assets of the company were so picked through that the guaranteed pensions were foisted on the Pension Guaranty Board which means you and i pay for them.

I challenge anyone to tell me what service this piece of Vulture Capital performed. A smallish company was doing alright. It may not have been an industry leader., But it was providing employment to hundreds of people. Even if it was dying, why did we need Bain to come along and euthanzie it. There is no creatvie destruction here. This is the untold truth that Romney supporters want to look over. They want us to think that somehow this is capitalism at work.

Markets are imperfect things. I used to teach my students that if a company doesn't use it resources properly, the market will come along and remove those stockholders and replace them with somebody that will. But for that to be true, the markets have to value companies properly. There are companies out there that make an adequate return but whose valuation doesn't reflect it. Companies like Bain can swoop in, leverage these companies up , fire people, and in effect mismanage the company and still make a load of money.Now somebody tell me that that is ethical. Tell me that somebody like that can be trusted to do the right thing rather than the convenient thing. Tell me about the morality of this kind of capitalism.