"Thou shalt not steal" is literally part of the Ten Commandments, lol. Too bad Moses hadn't read Marx and couldn't embed them in the necessary discource about class conflict and dialectical materialism.


I get it, some consider "casual shoplifting" to be a petty crime or even morally justified, because racism imperialism slavery colonialism sexism capitalism hurr durr. But even if we accepted the premise of this perspective, it could still not explain why poor people in rural places or other big cities, which are at least as poor and needy as the ones in San Francisco or Sacramento, are not engaging in casual shoplifting nearly as much. If this really was an act of rebellion or civil disobedience against an unfair system which has lost its legitimacy, we would expect this phenomenon (shoplifting spiraling out of control) to occur in all places, not just some select cities which, by puuuuure coincidence, have particularly lenient enforcement.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 4 2021 05:48pm

In biblical times if you were starving and took something from a field, that wasn't theft. That was expected. In biblical times if you went to your neighbor and said "My family doesn't have food because our crops failed" and they turned you away, they would be ostracized from the village for being greedy pricks. In modern America if you don't give to charity, that's just good business sense.

You know what Jesus would say to somebody who complains about poor people stealing? He would say you should give them your posessions without them having to steal it, because he who is first on Earth will be last in heaven.

The bible is pretty clear on God's stance with regards to material posessions. Your number one obligation is to use your material posessions to take care of everybody else.

When you die and go to heaven if the biblical god is real and you say "I lobbied to cut the social safety net because poor people are lazy", God is going to laugh in your face and send you to hell. And when you say "but I believed in God" he's going to say "Actions speak louder than words, and actions reveal what is written on your heart".



Best part is Christians will pretend things are there that aren't, and things that Jesus was insanely clear about were just suggestions.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Jul 4 2021 06:05pm

Agree, the jesus of the bible was the exact opposite of a modern Christian conservative.
They analyse the 4 lines in the bible about homosexuality all day and avoid the entire chapters about looking out for your fellow man.

Today I learned, pretty theft did not exist before capitalism.

Did property?

Dude, I was not referring to Christian belief in particular. I'm an atheist heathen and don't give a fuck about religion. I brought this up to show that considering theft to be a sin/violation of social norms is not a modern concept arising from the class conflict in industrial societies. It's occurrence in the Ten Commandments shows that ostracizing theft has been a staple of the moral code of pretty much all advanced civilizations dating back over 2400 years.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 4 2021 07:02pm

Yes, but our conception of what constitutes theft has massively shifted, such that in biblical times theft was about stability whereas in modern times it's at least partially an expression of class divide.

It's easy enough to see. In 2008 the fraudsters crashed the world economy, and like two people went to jail even though they had defrauded billions of dollars from millions of people. Yet we're far more worried about petty theft. It's because the writing and enforcement of the criminal code is a way that class warfare is carried out.

By thousands of years at the absolute minimum.

Like I said in my previous post: even if this were true, it would still not explain away the fact that shoplifting is spiraling out of control in the exact places which have extra lenient enforcement, but not anywhere else. If shoplifting was indeed a symptom of "capitalism and inequality reaching the breaking point", as ink insinuated, this would be a lot more widespread and not just a California or deep-blue-city thing...

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 4 2021 07:20pm

You'd be hard pressed to find a greater example of inequality th an California though. Deep blue doesn't mean shit, they're all servants of the corporate elite.