Cass from Butler, in a post decrying the tax breaks the wealthy receive, utilizes criminals like Bernie Madoff and the executives at Enron and Tyco to make her point but criminals are not what this argument about. All taxation is confiscation of wealth that properly belongs to someone. No amount of taxation is fair, but the current system in which those who earn more are progressively taxed at higher rates is flagrantly unfair (a flat tax would be an improvement).

On another subject, Christine asks about my opposition to faith and provides some alleged counterexamples such as having "faith" that drivers will follow traffic norms, etc. Christine has a fundamental misunderstanding of what faith actually entails. Faith is the " firm belief in something for which there is no proof" (Merriam-Webster); so, by definition, there can be no rapprochement between faith and science-logic-reason. They are mutually exclusively domains. Faith posits that knowledge does not require any sensory/perceptual evidence; consequently faith reduces to utilizing emotions as tools of cognition. Also, Christine is right to state that one cannot prove the non-existence of an entity; nor should one attempt to because it is a logical fallacy (argumentum ad ignoratium). The onus of proof is on the person declaring the proposition. Assertions for which no evidence exists (e.g. a deity) should be dismissed as arbitrary cognitively meaningless sounds.