"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there."

- Karl Popper in "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge" (1963)

Science is not basically against religions at all. Science and religions as forms of philosophy and human wisdom have no conflict of interests whatsoever. Science and religions do clash, however, whenever unsupported claims about the physical reality are made.
Unfortunately, in their quest to differentiate from other human ideologies, almost all modern religions have learned to use claims of supernatural origins and supernatural knowledge of physical environment as even their major selling points.

These claims of the supernatural are and will be a cause of friction between religions and science as long as religions do maintain them. However, it is quite possible for religions to live without depending on supernatural claims. For example, the West-European Lutheran state-churches have quietly been dropping their most outrageous supernatural claims for a long time.
They just have had to learn to live side by side with science. They had had to do it when the benefits brought about by the advance of science are extremely easy to anyone to see in these advanced societies, but the benefits brought about by religions are much harder to spot.

When religions do drop their supernatural claims the clash with science will go away; it is simple as that. Unfortunately, just these claims have formed the base for their excuses for a privileged position in societies where they operate. This habit of supernatural claims is extremely hard to give up.
The thing just cannot e the other way around. Science just cannot give up its demands for reliability of information and falsifiability of theories just to please people who happen to believe in unreliable information and unfalsifiable theories. There just would be no real science after that.
It is possible, however, if religions just are content to offer their ideas (and services) as sources of human solace and comfort in the hectic modern world.

I would like to add that science is open to everything that can be somehow proven to exist. If it is, for example, proven that people can move things with their 'mind-energy', scientific community will do its utmost to understand how and why this thing works. Great rewards will wait a person who can show this thing to work and even greater the ones who can explain it.
However, until a phenomena can be reliably to work in controlled conditions, people who believe in the existence must learn to live with the fact that science is solidly against their pet ideas. The real wonder of science is that the instant that this phenomena are proven to exist, science will turn around, as there just is no absolute and unmovable truths in science.

Of course, there are paradigms and inertia of tradition, as in every field of human life. There are also charlatans, who use the science just as a tool in their hoaxes. All that is claimed to be science is not science. Science does hold a privileged position in human endeavour in that its central and basic findings are not mere opinions. They can be verified by anybody with the right tools. It can be done even by those who do not agree with these findings, if they really would want to do it.
Those who want us to believe that there is something that cannot be seen, touched or measured with any conceivable means known to man do not like the idea that there really now are limits what can be passed as "knowledge". This often pisses them off even in a grand way.

Theists have had the field totally for themselves in Europe for one and a half millennium after early Christians did destroy and hide evidence for any dissenting ideas. Also in places like India the pressure from majority has been immense on people who have not believed that people should believe in something that cannot ever to be proven to exist.
Theist have had ample time to develop immensely complicated and complex systems to hide away the fact that they are just offering human opinions. They have had a good time to sell their ideas as something 'divine' and 'deeper' and 'more meaningful' as some other ideas human. They have, in fact, been busy erasing these other ideas from public knowledge for a very long time.

Theist often do find science and scientific thinking utterly frustrating. In the stark and revealing light of modern science, they do not find a way to peddle their 'divine' ideas as 'ultimate truths´ anymore. Theist just must learn to live with the idea that more and more people do not see the need believe in their ideas anymore. This just is too much for many of the theists.
A fact of life is that the mere public doubting of theistic ideas does really weaken their impact on people. This process will weaken the earthly powers that these ideas do have in society and theists do not normally like this at all.
I well understand when people who have tied their whole idea of their self to these antiquated ideas feel that they are offended by science. They very often also completely fail to see that their ideologies are just a form of human ideas and nothing more. It is often hard to remember that theism just not is a genetic property of any person, but always a learned thing.There is also an incredible amount of people who make a lot of very good money from religions, the 'New-Age' pseudo-science and plain hoaxes.

Naturally everything in this world needs not to be science or based on scientific way of thinking. Imagination and fiction like ancient myths are extremely important parts of human experience. They just need to be acknowledged to be such to be appreciated as what they really are. However, all too often people with fantastic ideas try to sell their ideas as some kinds of 'truths' or even market them as science. Cloaking ideas as science just gives an aura of respectability that mere fiction does not carry.
In an open society, people must be allowed to believe in anything that they would ever want to believe. However, problems do arise when things that are in conflict with known and established scientific facts are asserted as 'truths' that do override the known and established scientific facts.

Of course, people can well continue in believing in things that clash with scientific knowledge and science should have no problems with that. These people just must learn to live with the fact that people with knowledge of scientific inquiry will not accept these things as any kinds of 'truths', but as opinions. People well can have many kinds of different opinions and scientific world itself is full of controversies.
However, if people who believe unscientific claims make these claims publicly and most of all if they try to convince other people of the absolute truth-value of some unscientific ideas, they will inevitably face opposition from people who are familiar with scientific way of thinking.
If you do not believe in science in the first place, the opposition from the scientific world of course does not really matter to you personally. Unfortunately for these people this opposition does make propagating and selling unsupported ideas much more difficult. This is true, as very many people already rate science as the most important source of reliable information that we currently have.

Comments

In many cases, the truth-value of an answer or claim can be anything between 1 or 100 on a scale of 1 to 100. Assessing the exact truth-value is naturally very often quite impossible at the particular moment when a claim is made or an answer is given.
However, very often our knowledge of the issue at hand can grow later and the truth value of claim can either grow or diminish with time in the real world.

I have, in fact, been dreaming of a thing that I like to call Stochastic Motivational Analysis, which is in my mind could be a valuable tool in examining the history and things like history of religions.
It is an analysis of WHY people say and do certain things; what are the real reasons why they do them. Stochastic means that the results are always tentative. They will change always when new and better information is received or more argumentative theories are formed.

However, the real point is that in the SMA answers are never true or untrue, but always something in between, Their truth-value can be perhaps as low as 1 or 2 of 100 in worst cases and maybe even 60 or 70 in best cases.
I think that even the simple process of just thinking through the motivations of a historical person can give valuable insights. This is true even if the real truth-value of these ideas is unknown. In philosophy too many people live in a static universe, where things and most of all our knowledge over them does not change. This is the 'theoretical universe', where most of modern philosophers do unfortunately operate. This operation mode is the reason why their results have so little use in the real world.

On the other hand, one needs to remember that the truth-value of an answer or claim is dependent of the level of zoom or level of detail that is expected. “Why is this lamppost here in front of my house?” This question can be answered in a very simple and straightforward way. For example: “Because our community wants us to see in the dark.” It is also very easy to evaluate the truth-value of this answer.
However, the question: “Why is this tree growing in front of my house? “ is incredibly more difficult question. In fact, there is no absolutely true answer to it, if this tree has grown there without any input from humans.

There are an incredible number of factors that affect the growth of a tree and the selection of places where they choose to grow. To answer the question fully one needs to go millions of years back to the evolutionary history of the trees to discern why certain trees prefer certain kinds of areas and places.
To know why this tree is really growing in just this place, one needs to delve into the nature of just how this variant of a tree does live and what preferences it has for places that they prefer.

To understand this issue you need to delve into the nature of photosynthesis which is the engine that propels this tree in its growth. To understand photosynthesis one needs to delve into properties of matter and energy that make photosynthesis possible,
In fact, there is an incredible number of very complex questions that stem from the original questions. Under normal circumstances, we will never evoke or even notice all this enormous complexity, but just accept the tree as it is.

Of course, the same issue of hidden complexity is present every time we make a question about almost any natural phenomena or complex social process. What is the satisfactory level of an answer depends wholly on our own momentary expectations. In some instances, we want and expect just a simple yes or no – answer, but in other situations we expect a higher level of analysis.
The person who receives the answer always decides what level of complexity in the answer is deemed as satisfactory. The truth-value of the answer very much depends also on what is expected from it. There just is no simple single truth for even as simple a question as the ones presented in this piece.
Naturally we can very often tell when the answer is simply wrong according to what we already know of the issue, However, discerning "truth" is so often much more difficult task than just rejecting falsehoods.

Comments

Out of these simple beginnings this idea of a monotheistic ‘god’ has acquired a life of its own. Now we have people who really and honestly think that a concept of ‘god’ could somehow exist independent of ideas and ideologies, and in the human mind there could be innate ‘need’ to have it.
The monotheistic ideas of ‘god’ have been transmitted during the last two millennia to countless new cultures. The spread of this idea has already often changed the very different ideas on deities that have been dominant in other cultures.

People who were brought up in monotheistic cultures were also in the lookout for similarities in the new cultures that they did encounter. They have simply dug out similarities in ideas that have very little in common with their own ideas concerning the idea of ‘god’.
These two factors have aided in creating the widespread illusion that there would exist a single idea of ‘god’ that would be universal to all cultures. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. For example, the Chinese old ‘religions’ of Confucianism and Taoism do not have any kind of similar idea of ‘god’ that many western religions do have.

Also when one looks into very many animistic mythologies one needs to stretch ones imagination to the utmost to see any kind of semblance of similarity with, for example, Christian ideas of a 'god’. A very sizable part of humanity has always lived in cultures that do not have any ideas that would even resemble the ideas of the recent monotheistic religions.
A striking evidence of this is how the ideas of 'god' or 'gods' are missing from the mythologies of the Aborigines of Australia, who have lived in complete isolation from the cultures into which this quite modern idea of 'god' has spread from other cultures. There simply has never existed any kind of single universal human concept of ‘god’.

An idea like ‘god’ can survive in the long run if there are people who do benefit from its survival socially, politically and economically. The spread of the new idea of monotheistic ‘god’ did benefit even enormously all parts of the early ruling elites. Presenting their favorite ideas and social structures as having a supernatural and unchangeable origin was a staggeringly good method for safeguarding them form any kind of critical inspection. These ideas have benefited even enormously the ruling elites of all monotheistic societies for two millennia.
The ruling elites have always had political and economical motivations to create and support these new belief-systems that were based on new kinds of monotheistic claims. At very first, they did also give a much needed support the ideas of growing inequality in the first agricultural societies, when it was simply described as a god-given situation.

It is no wonder that these ideas did spread like wildfire from culture to culture, as every sane member of the ruling elite could see the immediate benefits they could reap from creating a similar god-based belief-system of their own to suit their local needs.
The various pantheistic ideas of unity of life and its relatives have quite different origins, however, but I will concentrate on the modern idea of monotheistic, personal ‘god’ here.

The most important factor for survivability of an idea like this is the creation of a paid full-time class of employees to support the survival of the idea. This requirement was soon amply fulfilled with the creation of various kinds of religious organizations with full-time employees. Of course, there need to be also string psychological need in humans that did make it easy to accept these new monotheistic ideas. We crave for explanation for the unexplainable, and these monotheistic religions have always offered these.
Religions also do offer soothing (even if false) comfort in the face of death. Most of all modern do offer the sense of community and belonging, even if it happens with the price of letting others tell you what are your limits for your own reasoning. Religions do also work as tools for maintaining social coherence in a societ. However, this role does not, in fact, need any kind of supernatural basis.

In the end, the idea of ‘god" has had so massive backing from the ruling elites throughout the last two millennium that the fact that any competing ideas still can exist is a miracle in itself. The success of modern secularism in society after society does already show that the basic structure of the human mind does not have any kind of inner need for this idea of a monotheistic ‘god’, as so many religious people are so fond to claim.
The immense success of the concept of monotheistic 'god' does really just show how an idea can spread like a wildfire from culture to culture, if it just really can benefit the ruling elites and also give comfort those who are below them.

Comments

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1977).

If you wish to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Over the Teacups (1891)

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body."

Cicero

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better."

Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh (1903)

If you start to think about your physical or moral condition, you usually find that you are sick."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Proverbs in Prose (1819)

Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady."

François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, No. 285.

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.

George Dennison Prentice, Prenticeana, 1860

It is part of the cure to wish to be cured."

Seneca, Hippolyus, CCXLIX.

I see rejection in my skin, worry in my cancers, bitterness and hate in my aching joints. I failed to take care of my mind, and so my body now goes to hospital."

Astrid Alauda

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."

Attributed to Markus Herz by Ernst von Feuchtersleben, Zur Diätetik der Seele (1841)

Health is merely the slowest way someone can die."

Author Unknown

The best six doctors anywhere
And no one can deny it
Are sunshine, water, rest, and air
Exercise and diet.
These six will gladly you attend
If only you are willing
Your mind they'll ease
Your will they'll mend
And charge you not a shilling."

Anonymous nursery rhyme set to the tune of "Yankee Doodle", quoted in "The Health Club" in School Life

Comments

Some people seem to think that non-believing in something is exactly the same thing as believing in something. However, most atheists that I know of do think that if a 'god' is somehow shown to exist, they will accept it as a fact.
Some people also have a fantastic belief in a very strange notion that need for a religion would be somehow "innate". This is true even when they very well know that a religion is always taught with very great effort to all members of all religions.

Learning even the very basics of any religion does take a lot of work. They just are in general quite haphazard collections of current ideas of the time of their creation. One big problem is that these ideas come from very different cultures. Most of all they do come from very different societies that were in a very different stage of general development.
Really learning any religion is always hard work, even if you can also surf along the traditions with even no real knowledge at all. This is verified by maybe even hundreds of millions of people who do it, mostly just to please their parents, friends and relatives.

The idea of ‘god’ is not present even in all major world-religions. Original version of Buddhism did not include an idea of a god and also the Confucians did not need this notion at all. It is quite probable that this notion of a 'god' has just been spreading like an infection to culture after culture during the last few millennium.
It is quite possible that this idea of a single totalitarian ruler of the universe has been so eagerly accepted because it was soon shown to be a great tool in controlling most of all the lower classes in all class-based, feudal societies.

On the other hand, there just does not need to exist a belief in non-existence of tooth-fairies; just a belief in their existence. However, if you were taught all your life that tooth-fairies are a very important part of your cultural heritage and the whole your way of life, you would have similar problems in understanding the fact that simply not believing in them needs not to be a belief.
Religious people have mostly just been taught to believe in the existence of a 'god' in an age when they are vulnerable, and are unable to use any kind of reasoning really to figure out this issue by themselves.

One can well have live without any kind of fixed opinion on the idea of existence of a 'god' even if the humanly created the idea of a 'god' does without any doubt exist. However, the idea of a ‘god’ is just a human idea and convention. I can well have an opinion about these widespread human beliefs and ideas without having any kind "beliefs" of my own about them.
On the other hand, the idea of a 'god' cannot really exist without some humans believing in it. However, one can well dismiss this human notion without having any kind of "belief" of one's own. A human can quite similarly dismiss human ideas of the "revolution of the proletariat" without having any kind of particular "belief" in the non-existence of "revolution of the proletariat".
The idea of 'god' does exist in very many cultures, even if there is and never has been any kind of proof over the real-life existence of it'. It is easy to forget that this idea is a quite recent innovation when it is seen within the background of the whole of human history. This idea has been spreading mainly with the spread of agriculture and the spread of class-divisions that this method of production entails.

Many people seem to also mix religiousness with the need to have higher values in a human life. A fact of life is that religions are simply a subset of human ideologies, even if religions do commonly try to behave as they would not be ideologies at all, as these claims are part of their very central ideology and marketing-strategy.
However, also most non-religious people do have a higher ideology that can be socialism, humanism, libertarianism or something like that. One can also really reach a higher level where one can look also at one's own ideas and ideologies with a critical eye, which is so commonly prohibited in human ideologies that are normally collected under the heading of 'religions'.

Things like humanism, socialism and libertarianism are belief-systems, as is every human ideology. They try to guess how the lot of humans could be improved in the future. Our ideas on how the future will turn out are very often based on our beliefs concerning the future.
These beliefs on the different methods of how the future of ones own society or humanity would be improved have always been important tools in improving our societies. However, these ideas need not to include a belief in the existence of some kind of deity. The lack of such a belief is just the lack of such a belief.

Comments

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."

- Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements" (1951)

To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance."

- Eric Hoffer in "The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms"(1955)

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength."

Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements"(1951)

The Savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets. There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience; a readiness to attempt the impossible; a bias for simple solutions — to cut the knot rather than unravel it; the viewing of compromise as surrender; the tendency to manipulate people and "experiment with blood." Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power."

- Eric Hoffer in "Reflections on the Human Condition" (1973)

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind."

- Eric Hoffer in "The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms"(1955)

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."

- Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements" (1951)

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."

- Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements"(1951)

There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless."

- Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements"(1951)

We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?"

- Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements"(1951)

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both."

- Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements"(1951)

The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe. It penetrates only into minds already open, and rather than instill opinion it articulates and justifies opinions already present in the minds of its recipients. The gifted propagandist brings to a boil ideas and passions already simmering in the minds of his hearers. he echoes their innermost feelings. Where opinion is not coerced, people can be made to believe only in what they already "know."

Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements" (1951)

The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than of deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without."

- Eric Hoffer in "The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms"(1955)

A fateful process is set in motion when the individual is released "to the freedom of his own impotence" and left to justify his existence by his own efforts. The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations.
The individual on his own is stable only so long as he is possessed of self-esteem. The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task which taxes all of the individual's powers and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day. When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from an unpromising self and plunges into the pursuit of pride — the explosive substitute for self-esteem. All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.

- Eric Hoffer in "The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms"(1955)

To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats — we know it not."

- Eric Hoffer in "The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms"(1955)

The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion — it is an evil government.

- Eric Hoffer in "The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms"(1955)

Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.

- Eric Hoffer in "The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms"(1955)

We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.

- Eric Hoffer in "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" (2005)

It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment."

- Eric Hoffer in "Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely'", The New York Times Magazine(1971)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer
"Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1902 – May 21, 1983) was an American social writer. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that his book The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. In 2001, the Eric Hoffer Award was established in his honor with permission granted by the Eric Hoffer Estate in 2005."

Comments

Now when you know where I stand, I can freely confess that the first two thirds of this book just strengthened my prejudices. At first, I still saw this book as an attempt to bring the methods of physical sciences to the world of social sciences. I also saw that the book was not successful in convincing me that this kind of thing needs to be done.
However, the last third of the book did a lot to open my mind to the ideas that are presented in this book. My original fear was that Philip Ball is out to show that the basic ‘laws’ that make society work and change in a certain way can be ‘revealed’ with the use of tools and methods offered by physical sciences.
Happily, this is not the case, but Philip Ball does show, for example, how complex systems can emerge form very simple basic rules. He does show also how applying new kinds of analysis to statistical data can give new kinds of results.

Philip Ball does not, however, suggest that there are ‘secret laws’ that do guide our societies and they could be revealed by using he methods developed for the physical sciences. The last two chapters do make it clear how he does see these methods as just ways to aid science in creating a fuller and richer view of how complex societies do work.
He also clearly thinks that ideas generated in this way can aid the decision making in a society in general, even if one cannot derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’.
The first half of the book presenting the history of how more and less successfully some of the methods and ideas of the physical sciences have been applied to the social sciences in the past.

This book is really a cross-scientific voyage to the world of scientific ideas and most of to their development and history. It has a clear value as such, even if one does not buy the idea that society can be analyzed with the tools that were originally developed to serve the physical sciences.
The book is all in all well worth the effort of reading it. It is not a light read and some parts of it are rather dull basic explanation of scientific ideas. However, also these parts are needed. Without them the book would be left hanging on thin air.

The most valuable part, at least for me, were the last three chapters. Philip Ball has created an easy to read primer to the development of philosophical ideas that concern the very basic ideas over society. I can highly recommend this book on the ground of these chapters alone. At least I got a clear view of how philosophical thinking has developed in this field in the past.
Especially interesting was the chapter that did present the secret truces that were formed in the trenches of the First World War. I have known about them, but Philip Ball does really go deep in the issue to show how humans can act rationally even in a desperate situation like the trenches of Marne.

Comments

Most of all, Christians themselves did forbid and destroy all of the Epicurean, Stoic and other philosophical schools in the Empire of Rome. If they would not have done so, these schools would have quite probably been accepted and flourished also under the new Germanic rulers of the Western Europe.
Quite probably this would have happened in a similar way as Roman Christianity was allowed to continue its operation also under Germanic rule. The victorious Germanic tribes had lived under the influence of Roman culture for centuries. Many of them wanted nothing more than to adopt the Roman customs and traditions.

However, at the time when these Germanic tribes achieved a position of power in the areas of modern Italy, France, and Spain these areas had already been utterly and forcibly Christianized. All remnants of the older Roman religious and philosophical traditions had been erased from these areas by the time of the German invasion.
One other complication was that most of the Germanic conquerors had by then already adopted Christianity. However, they had acquired it in its ‘heretical’ form of Arianism. This fact did lead them to needless confrontations with the newly Christianized Western Roman Empire. It was also one of the decisive factors that did lead to its demise.

Many these tribes had been allies of the Roman Empire for centuries. However, adaptation of the ‘heretical’ Arianism made them all too often to be seen as enemies of the newfangled Christianized Roman Empire.
The needs of the uniform Christian state church or the future Catholic Church dictated that they were often treated as enemies. This did happen in a situation where Rome would have needed all the allies that it could get.
These facts have avoided and tiptoed around by most Christian historians, as accepting and publishing these facts would not have benefited their pet ideology.

If Christianity would not have achieved its position of a totalitarian state church in the Empire of Rome, the real wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans would quite probably have been transmitted directly to new generations though the many philosophical schools that did exist before the Roman Christians suppressed them.
For example, the Epicurean, Stoic and Platonist schools were dutifully erased form all cities of the empire by the extremely intolerant Christians.

Catholic Church did originally suppress most of the legacy of the ancient Greece and Rome. Only with the advent of Renaissance, and the weakening of the position of the church, was the legacy of Greece was allowed to surface again.
Up to that time the Catholic Church allowed only those Greek or Roman ideas to be studied that did be seen to support their own new and strange ideas.
In practice, just Aristotle and Plato were among the allowed philosophers. Even their work was, in fact, quite totally suppressed for centuries. In the end, they just were the only Greek philosophers who could be misused to at some level to support the new Christian notions over gods, humans, and the universe.
Of course, I am only guessing here. However, so are those who do say that without Catholic Church there would not have been no other forms of education in Western Europe in the ‘Dark Ages’.

There is even compelling reasons to suggest that there would not have been ‘Dark Ages’ if there would not have been the rise of the intolerant and extremely narrow-minded Catholic Church. Nobody actually knows what would have happened if the new Germanic rulers would have acquired the traditional Roman religions and also the ideas of traditional Roman religious tolerance.
We do not know, what could have happened if they would have acquired also the wide mix of religions and philosophical schools and also the ideas that were present in Rome before the advent of the intolerant Christian religious totalitarianism.

The monolithic Catholic Church did occupy the monopoly of education for centuries for its own purposes in the Western Europe. However, nobody can predict what kind of education there could have been if the totalitarian Catholic Church would not have acquired its position of sole allowed ideology.
Nobody can predict what could have happened if the Christians would not have been able to destroy all competing religions and the old schools of philosophy from the Empire of Rome just before the final Germanic onslaught.
However, it is similarly hard to understand why Christians feel free to guess that without the spread of their narrow-minded ideology, the older and much more open-minded Greek and Roman ideas would not have survived. In real life, the main enemy many of these ideas was just the intolerant Christian ideology.

Comments

Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.”

– Epicurus (Principal Doctrines 2)

It is folly to die of the fear OF death.”

- Seneca (Epistles, LXIX)

“He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life.”

- Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.”

- Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)

Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.”

- Francis Bacon (Essays, 2, 'Of Death')

“The fear of death is worse than death.”

- Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy)

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.”

- Francis Bacon (Essays, Of Death)

There is no such thing as death.
In nature nothing dies.
From each sad remnant of decay
Some forms of life arise.”

- Charles Mackay (There is No Such Thing as Death)

To me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe — such a great universe, and so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible — and eternal, so that come what may to my 'Soul,' my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part — I shall still have some sort of a finger in the pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me — but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.”

- W. N. P. Barbellion (Bruce Frederick Cummings) (The Journal of a Disappointed Man)

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

- Richard Dawkins (Unweaving The Rainbow)

People are frightened of death, and the central lie of all religion is that there’s a cure for this and an exception we’ve made in your own case: an eternal life offered if you make the right propitiations and the right abjections. Well, I’m sorry. I think that it's the height of immorality to lie to people like that. That’s why [religion] survives”

- Christopher Hitchens

Every single atom of our bodies is preserved and is used again in the grand evolutionary process that is going on around us. Also our memory and most of all our ideas will live long after we are gone. These ideas and memories can linger on for a long time, if we just will create interesting enough ideas or memories when we are still alive. Some will make themselves 'immortal' in a way, when their ideas will live on and keep on changing peoples minds even after their physical demise. However, most of all we will live on in our genes. Our children and their children and grand-children and so on will always carry part of us into the future. This will happen as long as we do not destroy our ecosystem or bomb humanity with nuclear weapons out of the face of the planet Earth."

- Jaakko J. Wallenius

Comments

The main problem with existing religions is that they do not serve well the existing societies anymore, but just hold back their development in countless ways. A religion that would be based on science and philosophy needs not to include any of the old-fashioned fantasies and mythologies on which the existing religions are still based on.
A science-based religion could be a reasonable collection of ideas that concern the very basis of human existence. Of course, one needs to pick and choose the ideas that can make up such a religion from the vast collection of ideas that humanity has created thus far. Naturally, a very hard question would be who would do the picking and choosing.

However, it just might be possible to create a 'pseudo-religion’, which just would offer a wide framework for use of many kinds of existing ideas. Members could then pick and choose the specific ideas that they would like to be included in their own version of that science-based ‘religion’.
The reality on the ground among at least sophisticated folks among the religious people is that people do just this kind of picking and choosing. They very commonly already endorse only those parts of a religion that they find palatable for just themselves.

The grim reality is that religions will not go away as long is the religious organizations do employ hundreds of thousands of people. Many of them have a well-paid and fulltime job of promoting and propagating their own version of blind faith.
Religions will not go away as long as they are taught to little children with no intellectual faculties of their own as a 'greater truth', which they are never allowed to examine like all other areas of life are examined.

Religions will not go away as long as they are taught in schools like mathematics of physics to unsuspecting youngsters. Religions will not go away as long as they are part of the central power-structures in so many countries. They do even still form the central ideology for state-forming in some cases.
Religions will not go away as long as they are supported by official institutions in very many countries. Religions will not go away as long as they have special privileges to use nearly whatever means in which they ever want to propagate their ideology. One should not forget that in some countries any differentiation from the official religion is still punishable with death.
Religions will not go away as long as there is a class of people who see that they will benefit from their existence. The millions of members of existing clergy are one important part of this crowd. They will do their utmost to preserve the privileges. There privileges were given when people still thought that social stability cannot be achieved without a religion.

On the other hand, the ruling class of a society will greatly benefit from existence of population that believes that their current oppression is ordered by some kind of 'god'. There are religious organizations like the Catholic Church in Latin America, which will actively destroy all political dissidence among this religion and will support the local ruling elites through thick and thin.
All in all, religion is never just a personal experience. Often this 'personal experience' can be also fine-tuned to serve the greater interests of the religious organization and in many cases the needs of the ruling elite in society.

In modern western societies, the role of religion as a tool of state has been greatly diminished and has even evaporated quite completely, but does not mean that this role would not exist in very many other societies.
A person can have deeply personal private religious experiences. However , as soon as a prson joins a religious community he enters another level. On this level religions do work as social and political phenomena. On this level the sweet, loving personal message of a religion is so often forgotten and religion is used even as a weapon and a tool of oppression.

One should note that deists have never oppressed anyone. The deism of Baruch Spinoza or Albert Einstein or Thomas Jefferson was based on a personal religious experience only. It was not based an upholding of any kind of religious tradition.
They did not see the need to form a religious organization to force their deistic views on unsuspecting children. They did not see the need to arrange funerals and weddings according to their religious views, either.

A strictly personal religious experience is a quite different thing as a religion; as long as it is kept private. The game is changed totally if old religious books are taken at their face-value. Danger lurks, when interpreting these ancient books becomes a basis for forming the rules for an existing modern society.
Then the issue it is not the personal religious experience at all. The isssue is how a belief in a religious message offered by others can make one act as a part of society. This is a completely different thing than a personal religious experience.

These experiences will not go away in a totally secular society either, if they really are just private experiences. If they are used as justification for public policy, the situation is totally different. A science-based religion could be like deism. It could in practice be just a private framework for thoughts and ideas and a collection of higher ideals and goals for a better life and better society.
However, even this kind of religion just might be able the fill the void that could be left by the removal of the faith-based religion in many people’s mind.

The fiercely individualistic core group of current atheists would never need such a thing. This has been made clear in a recent discussion over the latest book of Alain de Botton called “Religion for atheists”.
This does not mean, however, that there would could not exist a group of people who could benefit from a new clear-cut alternative for the existing religions. All atheists really do not need to think alike.

Comments

I did admire him also as one a few of the true moralists of our day. He generally judged ideas on the basis of general good they would bring about for the whole of human kind. He did not judge them just on their usefulness in achieving certain limited goals or furthering an ideology.
I had already followed his struggle with incurable cancer for a long time, when I was diagnosed with cancer in stomach in the middle of last November. It turned out that the cancer had already spread to my liver and lungs, and it was past the stage that it would ever be cured totally. This situation made me naturally relate rather strongly with Christopher Hitchens, who had then in a quite similar situation.

This strong mental bond did survive his death. It did also survive a later happy turn of events. It turned later out that I could benefit greatly from chemotherapy, even if the different type of cancer that Chris had could not be kept helped with it.
When I was recuperating from my heavy surgery, I did also listen to Christopher Hitchens latest collection of essays and reviews called Arguably. I did listen to it as an audiobook in Audible-format. He did read most of the essays himself, with his raspy voice which strongly hinted of his illness.

There were many essays that were very American for a Finn like me or rather too literary in their subject matter. However, the strongest and most powerful essays did really bring tears in my ears. His strong writing and his strong voice really carried home his indignation on the moral depravity of many of the religious extremist and proponents of a open greed.
Happily, my ongoing chemotherapy has almost almost eradicated the cancer from my liver. This was a startling turn of event, as before the therapy could be started I was already classed as goner for a while, with just a few days to live.
Sadly, Chris could not enjoy such a turn of events. In fact, even I will never be really cured, but the rather heavy and demanding treatment can give my even many additional years; nobody really knows.

We did also share a strong love for history with Chris. From his books and appearances it is easy to see the results of his never-ending quest to deepen his knowledge on human history.
I for my part have read all the things that I could have laid my hands on history for over 40 years. My voracious appetite for books concerning history manifested itself already when I was well under ten years old. In fact, I have never recovered from it, but I can never claim such a depth of knowledge that Chris did posses on so many issues.

Christopher Hitchens has always been a very controversial figure even among the atheists, as his extremely outspoken style and argumentative reasoning are not to the liking of all. Most of all his original approval of the war with Iraq has caused much consternation among the people of the left.
They have simply never understood his motives for supporting the toppling of one of the bloodiest and ruthless dictators of the last decades.
I have written in this blog this about him earlier. However, I think the things that I wrote a few years ago do still well stand:

“The greatest problem for many is that it was a hard thing to pinpoint Christopher Hitchens on the political map in the latter part of his life. On the other hand, he was maybe the fiercest critic of the religions alive, but on the other handhe did, for example, give his public support to the war in Iraq when that war was being waged by the hated right-wing Bush administration.
The key to this dilemma just might lie in the fact that Christopher Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who did slide into a peculiar position on the political field when he did broke his old ties to the left.
I fear that this public breaking of the bonds with the old friends on the left did turn his thinking to the right in many areas. This process was undoubtedly intensified when he was hounded and pestered by his old comrades on countless occasions. Such attacks do normally only strengthen one's will to break as clean away as possible.

For me, Christopher Hitchens was a classical example of a man who did believe that telling the truth is the only thing that really matters. The problem in this often is that this belief in the sanctity of the truth at times prevented him from time to time from seeing that there not always is a single grand truth available, but many different ideas can be true in different ways, even simultaneously.

The traditional religions are of course also the traditional breeding grounds for the believers of Only Truths. However, in the political left there has always been a quite similar tendency towards a love of a single unmovable truth.
The belief that only one grand explanation is needed is in the hard core of communism and Marxism also. I have a feeling that even if Christopher Hitchens did shake off the ideological shackles of the Trotskyism, it still left him with a legacy of longing for a single grand truth.” http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2008/01/19/on_christopher_hitchens~3602798/

I would like to make this celebration of the legacy of Christopher Hitchens a yearly event. So the Facebook-event will be soon be updated to point to the next coming birthday on 13th of April of 2013.

Christopher Hitchens Closing Remarks in Dembski Debate

The birthday-page in Facebook is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/328324723893296/333876246671477/

Comments

Some of us will get cancer and quite similar people will not. Some of us will wind up under a bus and most of the others will not. Some of us will learn from our mistakes, but most of us will not, but keep on repeating them.
Some of us will find the love of their life, but others will not. Some of us will be happy with they have already got, but others will complain until they die. Some of us will be happy, and others will not be under quite similar circumstances.

One could say that a lifeless world is also a predestined world. The ‘laws of nature’ or the basic structure of the physical world will govern it. A planet or sun will go through a process of birth and decay that can well be almost totally predicted.
However, the birth of life makes things much more complicated, as every living thing has an ability to act also unpredictably. This ability grows with the complexity and most of all with growing abilities of evolving life-forms.

The most basic and simple life-forms do lead quite predictable lives, but the level of predictability is eroded with the rise in complexity of life. The introduction of life-forms that have the ability to change their environment will inevitably make systems less and less predictable. However, unpredictable life can exist also in a quite predictable environment.
Even most of the actions of life-forms in the planet Earth can be predicted to a degree. However, the existence of self-propelled life will eventually erode the predictability of a system, even if it will never go away completely. To what degree this happens varies wildly in different situations and environments.

The problem is that many people want to categorize even so vast and multi-faced phenomena as life in one single category of "predestined" or "free". However, in reality life is always a combination of both. The amount of how predestined things are or how free we are to choose varies immensely from situation to situation, day to day and place to place.
Of course, also the level of zoom is an important thing here. If you look too close on an event in human life, you will lose the big picture of causes and consequences that are behind the event.
However, if you look from too far, you will lose sight of all of the little things that can lead to a bigger event in the life.

The biggest obstacle for understanding the true nature of life as a combination of predestined and 'free to choose' elements is the false dichotomy according to which things are classed as either predestined or ‘totally free'.
In the real world most things are combinations of these two. The level of freedom of choice can vary wildly with time even on same issues with time.
I could even simplify things to the uttermost and claim that an event can be 0,01 per cent predestined and 99,99 per cent free or it can be 99,99 per cent predestined and 0,001 per cent free or anything in between (mostly in between).

However, many people claim for no apparent reason that there are just two choices – things are either totally predetermined or totally free. They forget totally that real life is not at all like that. Outcomes in the real world are always combinations of many kinds of different, simultaneous forces.
The idea of total predestination or total freedom of choice can be valid only in a vacuum of a theoretical world. Unfortunately, so many people choose to spend their time in the vacuum of a theoretical world...

The freedom of choice is in one sense a variable that can also be traded or bought and sold. This aspect just cannot be left out from when one considers if a human life is predestined or not. This is naturally somewhat different idea than predestination and fatalism that can grow out of it. However, in the real world the needs and will of other people are even the main reason why we do certain actions and make many decisions.
Of course, one can claim that these needs are predestined, but I claim that the same holds true to them as life in general. Most of these needs are generated by previous events and are in this sense predestined.

However, there inevitably remains the element of chance and freedom of choice even here. I will give away much of my freedom of choice to achieve benefits that are offered by social institutions like marriage and membership of a society in general.
Most of all I will sell much of my freedom of choice in exchange for food and shelter from elements or when I sell my ability to work to others. These people can and will then demand me to diminish my own freedom of choice to satisfy their needs.

All in all, my thesis is that life is not predestined or free. It is an ever-chancing combination of both. The exact amount of predestination or freedom of choice varies immensely from issue to issue and day to day.

Sam Harris has recently published a book called "Free will" on this subject. I generally see it as a worthwhile read on the subject of predetermination and freedom of choice. However, I think that hes has slided too much to the determinist camp because of some his very basic views of how human mind works.
Sam Harris claims that the fact that we can see how an action emerges from the human mind before we are even aware of it in a conscious level is some kind of a proof for a deterministic world.
However, in my mind subconsciousness is an integral and important part of all humans. Subconscious mind is, in fact, the place where all the big decisions are prepared before they are brought to a conscious level.
One's whole life-experience, inherited genetic properties and learned cultural traits all take part in the process of subconscious decision-making before the process ever surfaces to the conscious level. However, it is YOU who is making these decisions in the subconscious level, even if you are still not aware of it in a conscious level.

Comments

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

- George Santayana in "Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies" (1922)

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

- George Santayana in "The Life of Reason" (1905-1906) Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

- George Santayana in "The Life of Reason" (1905-1906) Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

- George Santayana in "Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza" (1910)

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

- George Santayana in "The Life of Reason" Vol. II, Reason in Society

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana in "The Life of Reason" (1905-1906)Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests."

- George Santayana in "Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies" (1922)"On My Friendly Critics"

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it.
The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

- George Santayana in "The Life of Reason" (1905-1906)Vol. V, Reason in Science

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

- George Santayana in "The Life of Reason" (1905-1906)Vol. V, Reason in Science

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

"The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy"(1911)

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

- George Santayana in "Dialogues in Limbo" (1926) War Shrines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana
"George Santayana (born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás in Madrid, December 16, 1863; died September 26, 1952, in Rome) was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American, although he always kept a validated Spanish passport. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters.
Santayana's main philosophical work consists of The Sense of Beauty (1896), his first book-length monograph and perhaps the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States; The Life of Reason five volumes, 1905–6, the high point of his Harvard career; Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923); and The Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927–40). Although Santayana was not a pragmatist in the mold of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, or John Dewey, The Life of Reason arguably is the first extended treatment of pragmatism written."

Comments

People who use metaphysics to explain things like ‎"imagination, creativity, and the very nature of consciousness" have not realized that these things have nothing to do with metaphysics. They are products of our brains and extremely complex processes that are going on there all the time.
Our knowledge of how the human brain does work has grown exponentially during the last few years. At the same time, reasons for explaining the products of normal brain processes with metaphysics have simply faded completely away.

One problem in modern philosophy is lack of understanding on the state of current science. There simply are people in the field of philosophy who are quite unaware of many of the current advances in science.
However, at the same time there are also people who see knowledge as a threat to their religious ideology. They are often people who misuse philosophy and metaphysics as defensive weapons to protect their pet religious ideology. These people tend to just ignore the new advances in science.

I personally think that metaphysics is overall largely an exercise in futility. There is nothing to 'discover' in metaphysics. New claims can be created at will. Al of them will rest on a similar layer of nothing. They are often just as wild as theories as the old ones.
I would even suggest that metaphysics will survive as long as there is money in it. Most of all professionals in the philosophy-departments in universities will find endless new angles into metaphysics. This happens as long as their paychecks are in the mail.
The incredibly strong forces of authority and tradition do keep also metaphysics alive, even if the real need for it has evaporated a long time ago.

Of course, there are also those who do metaphysics as a hobby too. They will speculate endlessly on the qualities of contradictory theories and endless stream of non-provable ideas even if there is no money on it; they do it just for the pure joy of mental exercise.

One test for validity of things is to see what insights we will be left without if we lose that data or theory. The sad fact is that nothing will change in our lives or in our universe if all traces of current metaphysics would be wiped out completely.
We can of course then create an endless stream of new metaphysics that has similar value as the old had. There could even be same ideas popping up after a fresh start. However, it is to be expected that the same old divisions between rationalists and religious people would just re-appear.

Most of all the religious people would be creating again new lot of metaphysics that would support their pet ideology. These ideas will with time get more and more complex. This happens when their presenters try to safeguard these ideas from criticism. They often do this by creating new ideas to counter the objections to their existing theories.

Other major problem with modern philosophy is that it so easily becomes a form of collecting stamps. People just collect and classify different ideas without really putting them in perspective. Most of all they just learn about them without really understanding why philosophers of the past have made their wildly differentiating claims in the first place. A person can be admired if he or she can easily categorize even brand new ideas into different schools of philosophy, even without taking any stand on their validity or truth-value.

The other version of philosophy as collecting stamps is the collecting of difficult-sounding words and concepts and parading them in discussions and texts. Some people just seem to confuse deepness of thought with the complexity of expression.
Especially among the followers of modern continental philosophy there are clearly people who hide the lack of true insight behind a smoke-screen of complex-looking phrases and words. A part of existentialism seems to be a love of hairy concepts and ideas. All too often they seem to evaporate into almost nothing at all, when all the odd concepts are translated into a real language.

Among the modern philosophers, my own favorites are Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, A.C. Grayling, Alain De Botton and Daniel Dennett. They all have one thing in common: for them philosophy is just a tool for better understanding our world and not an end in itself. They apply their ideas on the real world and see how their ideas do correspond with reality.
They all share clarity of writing and speech, as they need not to hide behind a wall of difficult words and concepts. As they are not defending any clear-cut ideology and form of thinking, they can allow themselves the luxury of an open mind when looking into ideas of others.

On the other hand, the people who populate the philosophy-departments in universities seem to me all too often consist of people who see philosophy as something that exists for its own sake. They can even use it as a smokescreen for pushing their religious ideology.
They seem to see philosophy as a thing that is to be learned by basis of authority of certain philosophers. These philosophers are then to be revered seemingly often just because they have been revered by many for a long time.

In practice under the name of metaphysics are classed those abstract ideas that are just speculation without real evidence. The question still remains: why these questions are labeled under the heading of 'metaphysics'?
The other question is the wisdom of trying to find universal answers to questions that do not and cannot have such universal answers that could ever be agreed on universally.

Metataphysics is a classical case of trying to find a black cat in the dark room without really knowing if this cat even exists and if the room is the right one. All people just have not given up the bad habit of speculating on some of the issues that have been settled by science a long time ago.
Mostly this happens to protect religious beliefs. They seem to sorely need the existence of metaphysics to give them some protection them from forces of reason.

This little essay does naturally present just one opinion on the issue and it cannot be any kind of ultimate truth. However, I see that it is necessary to raise this debate, as the discussion of this kind of extremely basic ideas is needed from time to time.

"Metaphysicians cannot avoid making their statements nonverifiable, because if they made them verifiable, the decision about the truth or falsehood of their doctrines would depend upon experience and therefore belong to the region of empirical science. This consequence they wish to avoid, because they pretend to teach knowledge which is of a higher level than that of empirical science. Thus, they are compelled to cut all connection between their statements and experience; and precisely by this procedure they deprive them of any sense."

— Rudolf Carnap

Comments

Of course, all of us will inevitably have some basic beliefs and preferences. A Pragmatist would need always to have a basic higher vision of how the world should be. In fact, I see that one cannot be a Pragmatist if one does not have any fixed higher goals to start with.
These personal higher ideals are needed to be able to measure new ideas and to find the best bits of other ideologies. You simply cannot choose the best parts of ideologies, if you do not have anything against which you can measure these ideas.

One needs to have a vision of the general direction where the society needs to go to be a Pragmatist. However, one needs to have a flexible relationship with these basic personal ideas.
A Pragmatist should be able to see how any idea that is pushed too far can cause trouble. This trouble lurks especially when an idea or ideology is too successful, and it is pushed through without any compromises.

Being aware and secure of on one’s basic ideas makes one free to choose the best bits from the big market place of ideas. This is impossible if you are insecure of the quality of your basic ideas, or you are so attached to them that you cannot even consider other ideas.
Pragmatism is not an option for everyone. A very strong attachment to any ideology will weaken one ability to evaluate other ideas. Most of all it can weaken one’s ability to compromise and a person who cannot compromise cannot be a Pragmatist.

For me personally the very basic ideas and building blocks for my own vision of the world are humanism and the great western tradition of democratic socialism. Both of these ideas have always been forwarded through an endless series of compromises.
However, I see that a Pragmatist could well could be having a very different set of basic personal ideas. This is the case as long as the mental flexibility and openness are present that Pragmatism does require from a person.

In my vision of Pragmatism, the single most important idea deeply embedded in it is the grand idea of ‘Compromise’. In Pragmatism, a society is made a better place through an endless series of compromises with those who have other ideas of how the society should be developed.
Pragmatism is in reality a viable option only in open and democratic societies, as normally one just cannot compromise with totalitarians.
A Pragmatist does not hate or despise people just because of their opinions or ideologies, but a Pragmatist can hate bad and harmful ideas and ideologies. Keeping the difference between people and ideas in mind can be difficult, and people with strong ideologies normally are quite unable to separate their person from their ideology. However, a Pragmatist should be able to do it.

I know very well that there is also a school of philosophy that is called Pragmatism. It was popular especially in the United States in the 19th century and early in the 20th century.
Big names in Pragmatism were Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George Santayana.
In the 1970’s a new version of pragmatism called sometimes neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty. He is the most influential of the late 20th-century pragmatists. Most of their ideas can be applied to my idea of Pragmatism, but I am speaking about an ideology here and not about another school of philosophy.

The version of Pragmatism that I am presenting here is not a philosophy in the meaning that Peirce, Dewey, Santayana or Rorty have presented. However, their ideas fit well in my vision and they can be used as building blocks if one wants to dig a bit deeper. I think that my personal vision of Pragmatism is not in any way in conflict with established philosophical pragmatism.

My greatest single influence has, however, been Bertrand Russell. Most of the individual ideas that I present here originate from his writings.
Bertrand Russell was a champion of mental flexibility and openness.
He stressed the importance of being able to face and accept the fact that people will always have different ideas of how societies should develop. He saw claerly how there is no single receipt for building a good society. I even think that he would have been a wonderful example of a Pragmatist.

I know well that presenting ideas like this in an obscure Finnish blog is a lesson in futility, but my dream is that the idea of Pragmatism would become a meme that would receive a life of its own.
In my wildest dreams in a few years from now, I would be reading a Bulgarian blog where the writer would be presenting his new idea of ‘Pragmatismus’ with wild enthusiasm.

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Marcus Aurelius has demonstrably himself written down his ideas. On the other hand nobody knows who has come up with the ideas that are attributed to Jesus in the "New Testament" of the Christians. This strange book was after all written many decades and even century and a half after the death of this Jewish preacher and rebel.

A simple unpleasant fact (for Christians that is) is that Jesus has not written a single word that we would know to be his own work. We have just a book that this full of alleged quotes from him, but their real and source will probably never be known for sure.
The Greek-speaking writers of the New Testament could well have made up a majority or even all of these quotes and ideas by themselves. Nobody knows their sources. Bart D. Ehrman has written some good books about the issue. I have reviewed one of them in this blog at: http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2010/12/22/for-what-purpose-was-the-bible-written-10240754/

Marcus Aurelius’ only book ‘Meditations' was translated into Latin from Greek. It was the preferred language of Roman intelligentsia of that day. Meditations was originally called in Greek "Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν" or "Ta eis heauton", literally "thoughts/writings addressed to himself".
Marcus Aurelius wrote the 12 books of the Meditations in Koine Greek that was used by the highly educated class of Romans. He wrote the book as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement.

The basic difference between Christianity and Stoicism is that in the heart of Christianity is a group of magical and superstitious beliefs in things like virgin births, sons of gods and resurrections. On the other hand, Stoicism is a rational system of thought. It is based on practical experience of how the human social relationships and societies do work in practice.

The Stoic concept of "god" is not at all compatible with the Christian idea of heavenly father watching all your moves, punishing, and rewarding you for your actions. The Stoic "god" is just an idea of a pantheistic sameness of all nature, and this "god" does not interfere in human life at all. In fact, the basic nature of Stoicism remains quite unchanged if the idea of a "god" is totally removed from it.
The removal of the idea of "god" from Stoicism is a thing that very many Stoics have done already with good results. I would even venture to say that agnostic and atheist Stoics can be even a majority among the Stoics of today, but this is just a guess, nobody has really studied this issue.

Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic, and he was personally a firm opponent of Christianity. He may have initiated some harsh and violent actions against Christians too, when he tried to defend the Roman traditional toleration of all belief-systems against the harsh and open fanaticism and intolerance of the early Christians.
The later, extremely intolerant Christian rulers of late Roman Empire did not see any kind of compatibility with the Stoic philosophy. They did destroy and eradicate every single source of Stoic teaching and thinking without mercy.

They did eradicate all the older religions and schools of philosophy with brute force during the fourth and fifth centuries. In this process also the Epicurean school of philosophy was completely destroyed. Sadly also the whole body of writings of Epicurus was lost forever.
The modern Western Lutheran Christianity is of course a completely different religion than the one that did rule unchallenged in the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The rise of humanistic values and thinking has changed this also religious organization during the last century. The change is so big that even some in their ranks are able to accept ideas from the old enemies of Christianity.
There are Christians who think that Stoicism is fully compatible with Christianity. This is naturally a quite strange idea given the very basic differences between Christian faith and Stoic philosophy.

Of course Stoicism and Christianity can well live side by side, as long as Christians do not try to change the central ideas of Stoicism to fit their pet ideology. However, to become a Stoic a Christian needs to lose much of the Christian religious dogma.
The core message of Christianity simply is not compatible with Stoic way of thinking. Most Stoic Christians seem to end up more Stoic than Christian. A hard-core Christian will never fit in the Stoic way of thinking in the first place.

PS. The fact that belief in Jesus is so widespread today has been decided in the battlefields of the past. If Muslims had won at Poitiers or at Vienna a few hundred years later, Jesus would perhaps be just a footnote in history; a forgotten figure in a forgotten religion. To put it bluntly; the followers of Jesus just have had success and luck in the battlefield and more divisions than followers of his competitors.

The fact that Christians succeeded in stamping out all other religions in the Roman Empire and in most later acquisitions tells how it pays in the long run to be extremely intolerant, if you want to create a stable religion. When you allow no competition and destroy outright all attempts to doubt your beliefs, your religion is bound to survive, and other religions are bound to disappear.

It is not a question of the quality or teachings of a religion. The main thing is how ruthless the leaders of this religion dare to be. Same tactics has made also Islam so strong. When you preach universal love in a church and burn heretics at the same time, you have a winning proposition; a religion that makes people think that burning people is an act of love.

http://facebook.com/aureliusphilosopher

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1. Solidarity of all humans and humanity.

"The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation."

in “Human Society in Ethics and Politics “(1954)

2. Opposition to war and violence in all forms.

"This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising a mass massacre of mankind."

in Speech in Birmingham, England encouraging civil disobedience in support of nuclear disarmament (1961)

3. Respect for truth.

“I cannot believe — and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable — that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favour of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth."

in "The Pursuit of Truth" in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (1993)

4. Opposition to dogma and dogmatism in all of its forms and especially religious dogmas.

“All definite knowledge — so I should contend — belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack by both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy.“

in A History of Western Philosophy (1945)

5. Respect for real science.

“Most literary men is obsessed with the idea that science has not fulfilled its promises. They do not, of course, tell us what these promises were. This is an entire delusion, fostered by those writers and clergymen who do not wish their specialties to be thought of little value.”

in Marriage and Morals (1929) Ch. 2: Byronic Unhappiness

6. Advocating sexual liberation.

“Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.”

in Marriage and Morals (1929) Ch. 8: The Taboo on Sex Knowledge

“Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.”

in Marriage and Morals (1929) Ch. 20: The Place of Sex Among Human Values

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."

in Marriage and Morals (1929) Ch. 19: Sex and Individual Well-Being

7. Strong distaste for the open, greedy capitalism.

“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”

in Sceptical Essays (1928) Ch. 13: Freedom in Society

“For my part, the thing I would wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security. But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals.”

in Conquest of Happiness (1930) Ch. 3: Competition

“The businessman's religion and glory demand that he should make much money; therefore, like the Hindu widow, he suffers the torment gladly.”

in Conquest of Happiness (1930) Ch. 3: Competition

8.Opposition to nationalism and overdrawn patriotism.

“Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.”

In Has Man a Future? (1962)

9. Strong respect for liberalism and liberal ideas.

"The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community."
in A History of Western Philosophy (1945) Introductory, p. xxi

11. Rejection of automatic authority by a position in hierarchy.

“As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. “

in Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

12. Love of life and humanity.

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair..Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people..the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967) Prologue: What I Have Lived For

Quotes from Wikiquote

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The scientific method and science could offer an alternative base for building new kinds of secular communities. One could build new kind of rational communities. I even dram of the day when they could compete and even gradually (in part at least) start to replace the existing religious ones.
One should bear in mind that if one does trust in the scientific method, one does in reality put his or her trust in the whole of the accumulated wealth of real knowledge that the whole mankind has collected during its existence.

The biggest thing is that one’s view of the world around us is automatically updated if one puts his or her trust in science, when science does make new progress. There is a stark contrast to the religious communities where people commonly do cling desperately on the age-old ideas of their founders.
However, there has been and is to be seen no willingness to build any kind of communities that would be based on science. I fear that a thing like this will always be a definite no-no for the scientific community.

This is true even if this new 'faith' could be, in fact, only about a strong trust in the scientific method, It needs not be any kind of blind 'faith' that would be invested in any single scientific fact or theory.
In all true science facts and theories do change constantly. Only the basic principles of searching for the best possible answer do remain quite stable.

A faith is generally understood being a commitment not to change your ideas even if the facts do change. It is quite understandable that the scientific community can and will never have anything whatsoever to do with any such thing.
However, I claim that a community based on trust in the scientific method could also be a modern way for having a 'faith'. How can it be that in a society which is quite totally based on science and its findings, there is not a noteworthy science-based faith or religion?

Living without a ready-made and easy-to-learn belief-system requires much from an individual. I am afraid that all people will never have what it takes to do it and. there should also be a science-based alternative on offer.
There are many people who belong to various religious communities just for the comforting presence of other people, friendship and spiritual experiences they would at the moment get from nowhere else. The very thought of an all-knowing and vengeful Biblical God is, in fact, often alien for many members of modern religious communities.

I have sometimes thought that there could well exist alternative communities that would be called, for example, 'Friends of Science'. They could gather regularly. These meetings would satisfy a very basic human need for companionship and presence of other people.
Mystical experiences are often a strong reason for membership in different faiths. Countering this would be of course a challenge for the 'Friends of Science'. However, especially Sam Harris has shown that also a scientifically oriented person can also be involved in finding the spiritual frontiers of one’s mind.
Even extremely intensive moments can be reached with the aid of, for example, meditation, incense, dim lights and intensive common experience. This could happen also when one would retain a scientific frame of mind and a realistic view of society and the universe.

One of the biggest tasks for modern religions is arranging the various rites of passage that mark the big changes in human life. Religious ceremonies are now used to announce a new baby to the world, to tell that a boy has become a man, or a man and a woman have became one or finally when death has taken its toll.
'The Friends of Science' could well create an organization where its more experienced and wise members could act as masters of ceremonies in various rites of passage, Thet could also also give their advice to other members of the secular community.

They could talk wisely about life and its wonders while drinking coffee with the elders of the family. They could also give comfort for those who are in need of comforting. Maybe there would eventually be a need for permanent locations to hold these rites of passage.
The communities of 'Friends of Science' could also offer a service where mothers of small children could load off their offspring for a moment, No this happens in various religious Sunday schools.

I am sure that many others have already dwelled in this thought-game before. It covers all the major roles the religious communities fill in the modern societies.
An unpleasant fact for religions is that not a single individual practical task that the religious communities do take care of now does, in fact, require any kind of belief in any kind of supreme being. These tasks can well be taken care of by secular organizations also.
All these are regular tasks that need to be taken care of in any society. Religions just are taking care these rites of passage at the moment. They ca do it with impunity, as there often are no real alternatives on offer.

One big question remains. Would atheists or free-thinkers really join this kind of organization that I have called the 'Friends of Science'? An honest answer would quite probably be a 'No'. Free-thinkers and atheist are generally extremely nervous about all things that even have a faintest smell of a religion.
This is one of the main reasons why there are no real science-based social groups or other formations at the moment. A religion-like formation just would require laying an even rudimentary groundwork of rules, which is anathema for most of atheists and free-thinkers.

The atheist community is often compared to herd of cats; there are no common goals or even common rules of anything. However, it is a shame also. A lot of hatred, prejudice, and oppression would disappear from the world if people would be cherishing real knowledge in their communities.
However, I fear that as long as no real secular communal alternatives are on offer people will continue to flock into the existing religious communities.

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On the other hand, USA is in the name of 'security' closing its traditional open society. I fear that it will feel the immense harm of this policy in the end.
There are vast differences in experiences in different areas too. In Scandinavia, it is hard to understand the pain and sorrow that the countries which have endured under totalitarian regimes have gone through.

If we look, for example, just on the Scandinavian history and experience, the last century has been a century of steady progress and improvement in all parts and corners of the society.
Sweden for one has been at peace for over 200 years. This lucky country has not experienced inner violence of note either during all of this time.
The last hundred years have simply seen a rise in rational thinking and most of all doing things that has no parallel in history. What century would one characterize as more reasonable than 20th century? The 19th with a immense waves of its imperialism and chauvinism the 18th with absolute monarchies ruling the lands and waves?

One must go the Greece of 200-300 BC before one finds reasonable thinking in the form to which we are used in the 20th century. However, all other parts of the earth were still under the veil of supernatural and mystical thinking. A successful version of Christianity soon engulfed also the Roman Empire.
This event did wipe out rational thinking from Europe for about 1500-1700 years, depending if you count the few first lonely voices of Enlightenment as real forces of change.

I am afraid that many people are missing the forest for the trees, when they see the last century just as the century of rise of largely irrational ideologies like Nazism and Communism or of the fully irrational fundamentalist Islam.
On the contrary, the big picture is a general rise in reasonable and rational thinking during the last century. Of course, the big flow of history has been at times been even greatly disturbed by sudden currents of irrationalism.
One of them was the quite unexpected and unforeseen rise to power of an obscure populist party in Germany in the 30's. However, this disturbance of general trend was completely wiped out by more rational and reasonable forces in less than 20 years after the rise to power of Nazi-party in Germany.

The rise of Communism was not a wholly irrational phenomena as the rise of the NSDAP can well be labeled to be. This is most of all because they had a much stronger ideological base. They could lean on their new kind of secular religion, which among other things rejected private ownership and property. Communism also had a quite different staying power than the Nazis. It did after all cling to power for over 70 years.
However, during the last couple of decades the Russian Communist theocracy just did keep up a papier-mâché facade of Communism. This facade did often hide away a personal quest for power and sources of corruption.

This empty facade did not need any violent push to fall. A main problem soon was that Communist totalitarianism had to exist in the more and more rationally working new world. This is the world of computers and most of all a world of the new and often rationally working networks that also bind intellectuals in a quite new way.

It is clear to any objective observer that the systems of government that are based on irrational beliefs find it more and more difficult to stay in power in the interconnected modern world.
They need to cling to power in a world where it is becoming more and more difficult to control the flow of information. Controlling the flow of information has after all always been extremely important for all totalitarian systems.
The democratic forms of government have slowly won more ground. This has happened decade after decade and simultaneously all over the world. Of course, there still are large patches of land under the control of belief-systems that are basically just whims of human imagination. However, the current global trend towards democracy is extremely clear.

The continued existence of totalitarian systems does not mean that the general universal sum and the outlook of our times or our zeitgeist or “spirit of time” would not be more rational than ever in the human history.
I must point out that I am not talking about the ‘Zeitgeist-movement’ at all, but about a concept that was created by philosophers like Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A change in Zeitgeist is a change in how people and society generally do see things.
Of course, a single look at the current Republican candidates for the US presidency can eat away ones hope for an even more rational future. On the other hand, it is quite certain that none of these Christian warriors will be the next US president.

I must also point out that I am not talking about any kind of inevitable moral progress. This is the case, even if the rise and spread of humanistic thinking on a global level can well be counted as a form of moral progress also.
Accepting of the humanistic way of thinking often leads alto to seeing and accepting the real diversity of our world. This idea often just makes people act more kindly towards people of other races, ideologies, and even competing religions.

However, this is not an inevitable historical process, but a thing that just has already happened around us for reasons that we can only guess. This development can also happen just because more people than in the past find the humanistic and human way of doing things appealing.
The humanistic general attitude is not spread by evangelists or missionaries but through things like novels, theaters and the silver screen.

A well-established and scientifically provable progress in general human conditions is an established fact. It has been achieved by use of technology, science, and advances in medicine.
Exceptions to this global trend are naturally countries that are ravaged by inner or outer conflicts. Excluded are also those countries, which do not want to control the growth of their population. However, generally the disturbances that are created by conflict just slow down the general progress for the duration of the conflict.

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All modern religions are mostly collections of dogmas. On the other hand, a religion is of no use if its ideas are not taken seriously enough. This is the main reason why the core ideas are given the position of dogma in a religion.
Epicureanism was a religion-like system already 2400 years ago. It had its own dogmas in the form of the 40 Principal Doctrines, as we call them. These 40 wise sayings form a neat and extremely useful package of moral and ethical guidelines.

On the other hand, nobody follows to the letter all dogmas of any religion and a re-born modern Epicureanism could be used in a similar way.
Adherents could claim to follow the whole program of high ideals, but in the real world they do implement only the parts that they are capable of, as happens with all religions all the time.

Atheism, agnosticism and free-thinking in general are just rejections of religious dogmas, but Epicureanism could be used as a positive force. It includes strong moral basic guidelines.
Epiureanism can really make people look at their way of life, their actions and behavior from a new angle.
It is also part of the great humanistic tradition, as many of the modern humanistic ideals are already embedded in Epicureanism.

However, I personally am not a pure Epicurean anymore. I started out as a full-fledged Epicurean, but when I found Marcus Aurelius I encountered a positive, strongly humanistic world full of hope, but also deep realism on how the world goes.
Oh yes, even if I am the admin of the Garden Of Epicurus in Facebook and the main Facebook-page for Epicurus himself, I am more of a Stoic Epicurean now!
I am also the admin of the main fan-page in Facebook for Marcus Aurelius also at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Marcus-Aurelius/123395559393

Mixing the extremely rational moral and ethical teachings of Epicurus with the deeply humanistic view on humanity of Marcus Aurelius does produce for me at least a complete system of thought.In fact, the combination is much fuller and rewarding than either of these men can offer individually.

The impact of deep humanism of Marcus does soften the often quite strong ethical and moral demands that are embedded Epicurean thought. On the other hand, the rational analysis of human behavior of Epicurus does compliment the at times rather romantic ideas of Marcus Aurelius.
Of the other Stoics, I find only Epictetus as noteworthy, but Marcus Aurelius is the real jewel of the Stoic tradition.
A simple competition for market-share was one of the reasons why Stoics and Epicureans were at odds in Greece and Rome of Antiquity. However, we do not need even to notice such a thing anymore. There were also some deeper ideological differences, but I must admit that they have never bothered me at all.

The idea of a ‘god’ is for Marcus Aurelius just a Deistic original quite cause, quite like the Einsteins pantheistic idea of the whole entity of nature as a ‘god’.
However, the god of Marcus Aurelius does bear no relationship to the angry father-figure of the Judaic or Christian tradition. It just happens that they call their vengeful god-figure with the same name which Marcus Aurelius uses for his utterly different idea of a pantheistic universal ‘spirit of nature’
The ‘god’ of Marcus Aurelius does not affect human lives in any way. It does not act in any kind of supernatural way either.

Marcus Aurelius thought that humans themselves do make he decisions that mold and change their lives. They can never rely on any kind of deities to help them; in all of this, he is quite in sync with Epicurus.
Epicurus had also ideas of gods as perfect role-models for humans to imitate. These Epicurean ideals did, however, not have any kind of presence in human life.
Either Aurelian or Epicurean systems of ideas do not need the idea of god at all to work.
I have noticed that also among the modern Stoics even majority are either agnostics or atheists. Yes, there are modern Stoics all over the world. See http://newstoa.com/

Like so many followers of philosophy, I have built a personal philosophy that collects wisdom from different, but selected and mutually compatible sources. My own philosophy includes the best parts of both of Stoicism and Epicureanism.
However, they are modernized with a help with a good mix of Karl Popper's views on science and Bertrand Russell's views on society and most of all global human solidarity.

In fact, I think that private, one-man philosophical systems like the one I described above are a quite common occurrence. A openly thinking person ends up picksing and choosing the best parts from religions and teachings of the best of philosophers. He or she then connects them in his of or her mind to form a coherent view of the world that often does work for them just like a religion is supposed to work; as a base of support and comfort.
They just do not call their own collections and mixtures of ideas ‘religions’ and they even can well follow the outward rituals of an existing religion.

My page for Karl Popper is in Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Karl-Popper/131272180219102
My page for Bertrand Russell is in Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bertrand-Russell/86711477873

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It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life."

- Epicurus (the 5th Epicurean Principal Doctrine)

Religions were created to fill an existing vacuum in the minds of the people. All principal world religions were created at a time when humans did know next to nothing about their environment, world or the universe.
In the then prevailing state of total ignorance things could still be explained away in an extremely coarse way. Often it was done by simply making up stories that sounded plausible in some way. Unfortunately, these stories simply do not hold up to closer examination anymore.

The need for such simplistic explanations has simply vanished with the rise of the science. We do now have quite satisfactory explanations for the structure and workings of the whole universe. We do not need those old stories which nomads told to each other on the evenings to pass the time away anymore.
During the past couple hundreds of years, the Christian European state churches have been wise enough to bow away always when new information has been discovered. However, at first also the western churches did all of their power in a try to stop the tidal rise of science and the rise of real, accurate information with it.

Eventually western churches had to give away under pressure when findings of the science changed the societies around them irreparably. Churches lifted their arms in despair and surrendered quietly at the onslaught of victorious science.

Also, the European Lutheran churches were transformed enormously in the process. They are not real users of secular power anymore, but they have been changed into quite toothless caretakers of rituals and soothers of minds.
The seekers of real scientific information do not need to fear for their life or liberty in the nations where this tamed version of Christianity hold sway, as their predecessors feared just a few hundred years ago.
Religion has no real role anymore in the Western Europe in explaining the workings of the universe anymore. People who try to do so will be treated as maniacs in most parts of Western Europe. Science has simply replaced religion in this respect.

Unfortunately, situation is not as rosy in other parts of the world; especially in the United States and the Islamic world. The fundamentalist movements in the USA and Islamic world are desperately trying to hold back the scientific explanations of the world. They cling to explanations of the universe that are quite universally found to be simply outdated and utterly false.

Of course, there still remains the hard part or the role of religions as a source of moral guidance. This task is not as easy to dismiss, as is their role as sources of information.
A sad fact is that we have largely forsaken other sources of moral guidance, especially philosophy. For example Epicurean and Stoic moral philosophies are, in fact, clearly superior to the Christian one in their clarity and exactness. They do cover the whole scale of human existence in a way that is quite unknown in Christianity.

Epicureanism and Stoicism were the last and most developed schools of philosophy to emerge before the rise of Christianity. This is important as after the rise of Christianity it took over thousand years before people in the Western Europe could shake off the corruptive influence of supernatural explanations.
Sadly, Epicureanism and Stoicism and other moral competing philosophies are quite unreservedly forgotten now. Even majority of people now honestly think that religions can be the only sources of moral guidance.

People may even think that they are just not current enough because they are so old. They do not necessarily notice that the core teachings of Christianity are over 2000 years old.
However, the basic human nature has not changed much during this time. In fact, the Greek and Roman societies where Epicureanism and Stoicism did flourish were much more like our own than the backward Palestine where Christianity was created.

Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal benefit, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another."

- Epicurus (the 31th Epicurean Principal Doctrine)

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Mostly among the converts are also those who tend to use words like 'stupid' to describe those people who just happen to believe in things that seem now stupid to them. These atheist do all too often forget that so very often people believe in these old-fashioned, ancient belief-systems just because of their upbringing and education.
There are naturally also rude and and uncivilized atheist around, as well there are rude and uncivilized Christians, Mormons or Scientoligists. It is a fact of life that one has just to live with.
One clear trend is that the humanists of the model presented by for example Bertrand Russell tend to be the most easy-going and courteous part of the irreligious crowd.

I belong to the group of atheists who have been irreligious from birth. I think that this is one of the reasons why I personally think I can have a look at the religions with a curious and open eyes.
I sincerely believe that I feel no hostility towards the religious people, even if clearly see the all the idiotic things that are so rampant in the wide world of religions.
See: http://atheistnews.blogs.fi/2012/02/04/say-bye-bye-to-atheist-news-and-quotes-and-welcome-the-odd-wolrd-of-religions-12642059/

I would never call another person 'stupid', even if he or she would believe in my eyes extremely stupid things. One should always remember that beliefs can be changed. All people also can stop believing also in irrational things.
There are people who classify people they do not like as 'stupid'. They love to say things like "Life is hard, it's harder if you're stupid" as arch-republican John Wayne has allegedly said.

This is naturally just a method for classifying people you do not like as lower than yourself.
An important thing is hidden in this short sentence: it is also the denial of the possibility of change. 'Stupid' is a failure that cannot be altered. A person who is born stupid will die stupid, in the conservative way of thinking at least.

On the other hand, just saying that somebody is 'stupid' is in the conservative way of thinking a way to transform responsibility of the failures in the way society and economy do work to the individuals. The system needs not to be altered if 'stupid' will fail anyway.
So, any sensible person will not ever speak of 'stupid' people, but of ignorant or misled people. There just is a world of difference between these things. Ignorance or misled information can be mended by learning, but stupid will just stay stupid.

And oh yes, there really are people who's brain functions differently than of others. There really are people who have deficiencies in ome fields of mental activity.
However, I don't think that 'stupid' is a term that is used among those who really study how human brains do work. Those who study how different brain-functions and different kinds of difficulties in learning do affect our lives do not use the word either.

'Stupid' is a word that in the end just declares the supremacy of the person who is using the word over those on who it is aimed. Unfortunately, there really are atheists who gain satisfaction from feelings of supremacy that is given by this kind of name-calling, as well as there are religious people who gain similar satisfaction from denouncing atheists.

This word 'stupid' is like a loaded gun; when it is aimed at people, it can cause hurt. However, when it is aimed at the things that they are carrying with them, the impact should be different.
Unfortunately people are so often offended if one just criticizes their ideas. Very many people have difficulty in understanding that religions are just one form of ideology and not any kind of genetic thing.

Religions are just learned earlier than most other ideologies, as they are so often learned at an age when people do not even notice that they are taught an ideology.
There are stupid thoughts, stupid deeds and most of all stupid ideologies around. However, calling a person 'stupid' in at the end an extremely different thing than saying that an act or idea or ideology he or she believes in is stupid.

PS. One more thought; hard-line conservative are often experts in acting and many good actors are conservatives, at least in America. Acting comes quite naturally, as all too often hard-line conservatives do rehearse acting a role all their lives. We all act in different roles all of our lives. However, I think that a real conservative just has to do much more work to just maintain his role.
Acting like a tight-ass conservative is not the natural state for a human, but one needs constant effort to hide away ones real, natural thoughts and needs in a heavily conservative environment.

You can now watch this piece also in video-format, with much added bonus-stuff!

Comments

So, Alain De Botton is out to learn from the practical side of the religions. How having a good-looking building of one's own helps to build a feeling of community? How singing together soothing songs with other people helps to calm a person?
Many atheists seem simply to be freaked out by the very idea that atheists also could build their own communities. They seem to be even more freaked out by an idea that atheists could learn from the practical side of how things are run in the religious world, even if atheists do not share any common dogmas or superstitions. Of course, only time can tell if such communities will ever be born, anyway.

I personally think that secular and humanist Epicurean or Stoic communities is a much more realistic goal. People with a common philosophy would share at least some basic values from the outset. I fear that atheism could be too weak a glue for forming real communities that would resemble the religious ones.
Many of the vocal atheists seem to be fiercely individualist people. I fear that starting a community of them would be like herding a flock of cats.
However, there can be more of the free-thinking people in the future, who long also for the closeness and security offered by a community that would feel like the religious ones. It can also be expected that with time more group-oriented persons will shun religions.

Of course those atheists who don't like the idea of an atheist community can hate and curse the community-building ones as much as they like in the future also.
All too many atheists do seem to forget one of the basic principles of free-thinking; all free-thinkers or atheists do not need to think alike!

However, at t this stage I’d like to give Alain De Botton a change to defend himself against the fierce attackers, who clearly often have not even seen the book.
I will present you with a collection of quotes from “Religion for Atheists” that I hope will clarify Alain De Botton’s way of thinking.

Locked away in our private cocoons, our chief way of imagining what other people are like has become the media, and as a consequence, we naturally expect that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles – which reinforce our impulse to trust only those individuals who have been vetted for us by pre-existing family and class networks.”

For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective way to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbors than to force them to eat supper together. Many religions are aware that the moments around the ingestion of foods propitious to moral education.”

We run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them, not bothered by what we did, but because what we did makes us feel uncomfortable with an unmanageable intensity. Our victims hence have to suffer not only the original hurt, but also the subsequent coldness we display towards them on account of our tormented consciences.”

The abhorrence of crude moralism has banished talk of morality from the public sphere. The impulse to question the behavior of others trembles before the likely answer; who are you to tell me what to do?

In a world obsessed with freedom there are few voices left that even dare to exhort us to act well.”

We have grown sick from being left to do as we please without sufficient wisdom to exploit our liberty.”

It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members tendencies towards violence and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were projected into to the sky and reflected back on earth…”

We had to pretend that morality came from the heavens in order to insulate it from our own prevarications and frailties.”

We will never discover cast-iron rules of good conduct which will answer every question that might arise about how human beings can live peacefully and well together. However, a lack of absolute agreement on the good life should not in itself be enough to disqualify us from investigating and promoting the theoretical notion of such a life.”

“We simply will not care for very long about the higher values when all we are given to convince us of their worth is an occasional reminder in a modestly selling, largely ignored book of essays by a so-called philosopher, while in the city beyond, the superlative talents of the globe’s advertising agencies perform their phantasmagorical alchemy and set our every sensory fibre alight in the name of a new kind of cleaning product or savory snack.”

“If we tend to think so often about lemon-scented floor polish or cracked black pepper crisps, but relatively little about endurance or justice, the fault is not merely or own. It is also that these cardinal virtues are not generally in a position to become clients of Young & Rubicam.”

“We are unwilling to consider secular culture religiously enough, in other words, as a source of guidance.”

No existing mainstream secular institution has a declared interest in teaching us the art of living. To draw an analogy from the history of science, the ethical field is at the stage of amateurs tinkering with chemicals in garden sheds rather than that of professionals conducting experiments in research laboratories.”

Alain de Botton in “Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion"

PS. I dearly would hope that there could be a cut and paste in Kindle for PC, as I just had to type these quotes by hand, even if I had the very same text in the same computer.

You can now watch this little review also on YouTube with some video-extras...

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The low point came when my liver stopped working completely three weeks ago. I was given just days to live at that stage. In fact, I was asked by my doctor to write my testament 'immediately'. I was at that moment classed as too weak for any more treatment.
Happily, my liver started working again with the aid of cortisone and I survived that ordeal against all expectations. I also gained enough physical strength to start chemotherapy.

However, I don't know yet if chemo works for me as it has just started and it takes some time to see any real results.
I got my first three days of treatment last week. The side-effects of this rather heavy stuff are now kicking in. At the moment I am still too weak at mornings to fetch the morning-papers from the post-box. However, luckily I can well sit on my laptop and meet the world through it.

I have had much time to think at my hands. I already see that thinking about things that are larger than my own sorry life has kept me going through this ordeal.
The more so, as I quite paradoxically feel that I have been liberated from many of the normal constrains by my situation. I really feel free now to explore new angles and new ideas.
In the current situation, I seem to have at least months left. If I can regain some physical stability, I am sure that I will soon be able to produce new stuff for this blog also.

All in all, this new situation has already liberated me from the constrains of daily toil in the newspaper, in which I have worked for over 20 years. My current sickness is incurable, and it seems that I will never return to work.
There are always two sides to every coin. I feel that this liberation will give me an all new kind of opportunity to think and write. Of course, the overall price for this freedom is rather steep.

However, I feel that I have finally a real chance for finding my true limits as a thinker and writer. I must admit that I am already secretly hoping that time that I have left could be extended to a year or two with the aid of ongoing chemotherapy, but now it still too early to say.
I simply was not pleased with my work as an economics editor anymore. I have for a long time already longed to be able to express my own ideas. I was simply tired of just repeating to readers what others think as journalists commonly do.

If I get at least some of my physical stamina back, I hope that I can write at least in half-hour -long stretches before resting. Hopefully this will be enough to create all-new content also.
All in all I feel that I have already reached the next level in intellectual development. I feel that even if my body fails my mind is sharper than ever.
This feeling could naturally be, of course, because of the heavy medication. Only time will tell. You, my dear readers, will of course be the judges for that.

I have received a strongly-worded complaint about the grammatical quality of this blog. Happily I can hereby announce that I have already taken steps to rectify the situation.
Of course, I could first defend myself by saying in my defense that I am a bloody Finnish foreigner. I have never lived for a single day in English-speaking country. In fact, I have learned English mainly by just reading a mass of books in that language in my adult age

However, I have bought same paid help. I have used the Grammarly-service at http://grammarly.com. I have marked the pieces that I have corrected and stylized with the text "This piece was completely refurbished on xx of xx at 2001X"
I started this grammar-checking in August 30th of last year. For some reason I started from postings of March 2011 towards present. All this time I have tried to go through one piece a day.
I have gone through nearly one hundred of my little essays or my 'secular sermons' during this period. As I have written nearly 400 entries to this blog during the last few years, there is still a lot to be done.

All this time I have tried to proof-read one of the old pieces in this blog a day. I just think that there already are many ideas worth preserving and presenting in a readable way, even if I say so myself.
Keeping up this proof-reading has naturally helped me to keep my spirits up during a deal during the long weeks of waiting. I first waited for nearly a month to get see a specialist who would find the culprit, then I waited two weeks my surgery. Then there was a month-long wait for the stomach to cure so much that the chemotherapy could be started and this time did not all go to waste with the proof.reading going on.

I did also use the same proof-reading service to my other main blog or A Little Book for Humanity at http://thelittlebook.blogs.fi. In this blog there are at the moment 147 great quotes by secular, humanist and free-thinking philosophers, scientist and writers.
The difference with normal quote-collections is that every published quote has really given me something new as a person. However, the biggest difference to normal quote-collections is that I have included the ideas that every particular quote has raised in my mind.

(This piece was Grammarly-checked on 23th of January, 2012)

Elsewhere in this blog about this subject:

What’s so special about death, after all?

http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2008/01/07/what_s_so_special_about_death~3543260/

Why death is nothing to us?

http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2011/06/04/why-death-is-nothing-to-us-11265808/

Comments

Of course, the birth of an idea of a single indivisible ‘mind’ is caused by the fact that there is always the conscious 'me' on the very topmost level. This conscious 'me' processes the finished end-product of all of the incredible activity that going on under the hood in a human brain all the time.
Between the conscious or the ‘me’-part of the brain and the immensely diverse and highly active subconscious part, there is a web of complex gate-keepers. They keep out from the conscious part the multitude of continous routine-processes that are always going on beneath in the subconscious part of the brain. (See http://eagleman.com/eagleman-blog/135-the-mystery-of-expertise-full)

Without all this gate-keeping that is going on without a single pause for the duration of our life, the conscious part of the brain would be overwhelmed in seconds. Millions of years of human evolution have decided which is the right level of information that we need in the conscious level, and which information can be left to the subconscious part of the brain to deal with. This naturally varies incredibly at different situations.
Some of these processes keep our body alive. They do it by detecting when our body needs things like oxygen, water or food. Some of the follow our mental state. Some of them follow what happens around us. These are things that the brains of all living creatures share, as they are necessary base to stay alive if you are a mollusk or a human.

On the other hand, comparing the human brain to a simple computer is also utter reductionism in the other direction. We have not been able to produce computers that could even challenge the immense complexity and most of all immense flexibility of the human brain.

A human brain is not a computer, but one can say that it consists of hundreds or thousands of immensely effective parallel processors. They are constantly activated and de-activated on ad-hoc -basis to solve the current problems and tasks.
All these processors have unlimited parallel access to nearly endless amounts of working memory and nearly as endless amount the storage space for their results.

According to recent figures human brain has also around 100 billion neurons. The real secret of the brain is that all of these neurons are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons and creating continually new networks.
In the end, it was the subconscious part of my brain that did come up with the idea that I should write this little essay. I did not control this original though-process on a conscious level. However, I did finally analyze the idea on the conscious level and decided to write it out here.

It is easy to understand how the early people could not understand the workings of this subconscious part of the brain at all. It is also easy to see how they could have seen as these ideas and thoughts as they would be coming from somewhere outside themselves.
In fact, many of them clearly thought that their ideas were coming from some kind of 'deity' or 'spirit'. If you look at oldest literature armed with this idea, you very soon see what I mean.

The same phenomena do explain also the amazingly common ideas among believers that they are constantly in touch with their chosen deity, and this ‘divine voice’ also guides their lives in many ways.
However, I’m afraid that instead of any divine voice, they are listening to the subconscious part of their own brain. As it does process things in its own pace and answers can surface even quite unexpectedly.

Again; the idea of a ‘mind’ was invented to simplify handling of a phenomena that was all too complex for the early people to comprehend at all.
They just could not even imagine how there could be a vast number of parallel processes going on in every living brain in every single second. All they knew of and understood was the final output that reaches the conscious part of the brain, which can be even extremely restricted at times.

We have inherited from tens of thousands of generations of our ancestors a vast number of reflexes, models of behavior and trains of thought that affect our life every single second we live. There is also a extremely complex collection of social brain-processes that fire up in the brain when we mix with our fellow humans. There is always a biological base for these things also, but these processes are also changed by evolution of the human culture.
However, we are not normally aware of their presence on a conscious level. They just inevitably change the way we see our environment and most of how we see all different social situations.

On top of all this we slowly build an individual psyche. It is always different from that of anybody else who has ever lived. This psyche is a molded by all good, bad and irrelevant things that happen to us.
Of course, this individuality rests on a very strong base of inherited traits and features. However, our individual life-experiences will always produce a different end-result for every single human. Let me repeat: explaining all this with a concept of ‘mind’ is simply reductionism at its worst.
There are also inherited traits and brain-processes that different cultures have learned to use to reach new ends. For example, the brain functions that handle speech have according to some theories been developed further by development of music, which still touches the raw emotion-systems in the brain through this channel.

Language itself was developed to use these brain-processes when one species of the great apes learned to use sounds in dramatically new functions. The fact that several people can with the use of language share the contents of their brain with other people is unique to humans.
As far as we currently know, the human species is the only one that has developed a complex enough language to convey even the most abstract contents of their brain to other members of their species.

The invention of language did also change the way how humans themselves think that they use their brain. They normally see just the end-result which is formulated as language. The very basic processing of raw information happens as it happens in other animals, also without language. We just are not aware of these underlying processes, because they now feed their results in the form of language to the conscious part of the brain.

Subconscious part of the mind does not work independent of you, as it IS you. It holds all of your experiences, hopes, dreams and ideas. Subconsciousness stores our life and uses it as a tool to inspect and analyze all of new things that we encounter. The results of this process are then processed in the conscious mind.
The conscious part of our mind, however, makes all the decisions. On the other hand, in very fast situations we must rely on the gut-reaction or the results of only pre-processed information that has not been checked in the conscious part of the mind. This is one of the reasons why fast decisions are so often faulty.

The slow conscious processing of data on a conscious level does give better results in many cases. The The subconscious part moves more on the level of emotions, feelings and using old examples for new action. Conscious part of the mind adds reasoning and rational analysis to the picture. The development of language-using machinery into our mind has given us the possibility for logic and rational reasoning.
These qualities are of course also the things that made possible all human inventions. This development of a language-based conscious mind is the very basic thing that separated humans from other animals. It also gave humans this tremendous advantage over all other animals that we now enjoy.

Human brain was already a very complex organ at the time when we parted ways with the other great apes. However, mainly the development of language has created an incredible explosion in the complexity in the ways of how human brain can work.
No other species has undergone such a transformation as the birth of language did cause in human species. However, under all this complexity there is still the third species of chimpanzee. They just try to control also their natural impulses and emotions with this newly perfected brain of theirs.
The human brain started really diverging from the brain of a dog or a cat with the birth of language. It becomes possible nearly immortalize some contents of the brain with the invention of writing.

Only the birth of language made it possible also to develop abstract ideas like the ‘mind'. The development of the human brain has been a process that has taken an incredibly long time. The development of the first nerve cell was naturally the very first step that was followed by the development of the nervous system and finally the first precursors of brain.
An extremely hard question is at which point of evolution did animals become fully conscious of themselves. Most of all it is hard define at which point of human evolution did humans develop something that can be called a 'mind’ as this idea is commonly now understood. Even amoeba knows where it ends and other amoeba starts.
There still is no definite answer to this question, as the whole thing depends on how you define ‘mind’ and many traditionalists are prone to claim that only humans can have a ‘mind’.

Lions make conscious decisions when they choose a suitable prey from a flock of antelopes. A lion looks for certain signals that may make some of the prey easier targets than other. Then it makes a conscious decision that is based on the information it has obtained, just like humans do. The difference is that this decision is made without expressing it in language in lions.
The big step that humans did take was not development of a ‘mind’, but just the new ability to express its existence through the use of language.

It has been established without doubt that all mammals do share a very similar basic brain-structure with humans. It is quite certain that they all also have a very similar vast collections of brain-processes that is called ‘mind’ in humans for reasons of simplicity and tradition. The only real difference is that other mammals just can’t express themselves in a language that we could at least yet interpret.

On a little lighter note, I personally believe in ‘minds’ that exist outside the brain. I have hundreds and hundreds of them stacked on shelves of my book-case. The invention of writing made it possible to preserve some of the contents of a human brain permanently.
Every book is a little window to the contents of the brain of its writer. Some of course tell very little of the true thought of the writer, but some great books can act as true gates to another human mind.
When I press these little buttons to produce symbols on this screen to be transported over the vast oceans to my friends in Philippines or America, I am, in fact, extending my brain to reach other people. Boggles the mind, sometimes.

The study of how the human brain works has seen a fantastic rise in knowledge. We know immensely more of every single facet and function of the brain than we did 50 or even ten years ago.
Neurobiology, neurology and all other fields of research of the brain and mind have advanced in bounds and leaps. We have seen an amazing rise in understanding how our brain works in a very few years with the coming of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other techniques.

Added 31.1.2012; Julian Baggini must have been reading this blog......

Similar rise in understanding is sadly lacking in philosophy. It femains all too often often stuck in the old trenches that were dug ages ago. So, if you want to know and understand more how human brain or ‘mind’ works, you nowadays won't find help in philosophy at all, but in science.
One of the main reasons for this apparent lack of development is the strange ancient belief in immortality of some kind of 'soul' or 'mind'. This idea has made also many philosophers supportive to ideas that would make it possible to retain this ancient belief.

This belief is, of course, an old one. According to some anthropologists it is based on the fact that the memory of a dead person persists in our mind as if he would be still alive in our minds. On the other hand, the written word has made it possible to preserve the contents of the human mind and make it 'immortal'.
On the other hand, if you believe in a thing like immortal soul, you need to first renounce evolution. If you believe that a 'soul' is a purely human property, you need to believe that humans have existed always just as they are, or you end up in trouble.

The very first mammals were rat-sized four-legged creatures. Did they have a 'soul' that was reborn in other little mammals? If you resolve that hurdle, in the end you need to go all the way and to decide if also the first one-cell creatures also had a 'soul', or was just the idea of a ‘soul’ developed with the birth of the spoken language?
The answer is inevitably the latter. The idea of a ‘soul’ is a similar attempt to simplify a complex issue as the idea of a ‘mind’ is.

One thought still; the idea of reincarnation was quite natural one in the times when there was no idea of genes and genetics. Suddenly there just was this spitting image of the demised uncle as the new nephew.
Nobody knew how different features pass differently and can jump over generations and so on. The idea of reincarnation was just an easy way out of a problem. The sorry fact is that the less you know about biology, the easier it is to retain these ancient beliefs, and the more you know, the more difficult it becomes.

However, in fields like biology and scientific research of the brain and human cognition there are things that we can be even extremely certain of. Of course, we learn more all the time. This new knowledge will inevitably always change also the existing ideas that are stored in the brain.
During the whole recent explosion in our knowledge of how the human mind works, there has never been presented new scientific ideas or findings that would in any way support the alleged separateness of the ‘mind’ and brain.

On the contrary, it has become possible to explain processes and features that were quite in-explainable a few decades ago. In fact, we start to understand now how all of the main function of the brain like emotions, thoughts, reflexes are created and handled in the brain.
There still are these old belief-systems whose followers want so dearly to believe that an invisible part of a human does not die at the death of his body. They are ready desperately to grab any idea that would allow them to retain their belief in that mind is somehow separate from the brain.
However, no reliable evidence of any such thing has ever been presented. When the brain dies permanently, your brain and your ‘mind’ do cease to function and in practice cease to exist, even if your body is kept going artificially.

PS. This little essay is based largely on work done by Steven Pinker. However, there are also dozens of lectures, articles and books by many other people working in the field of studying of the human mind that have had an influence.

(This piece was extended and totally refurbished at 22th of January, 2012)

Comments

However, religions and political ideologies are not the only ones to develop dogmatic systems of thought that can change the whole way people see the world around them. Ideas like feminism and ecology have spawned movements, whose followers have sometimes even extremely dogmatic views of the world that is based on this single idea.
I am not saying at all that humans should not have ideologies and ideas. On the contrary, it is impossible to think that any human society would survive for a longer period if we would not have higher visions of how things should be.

For me, the big question is, however, how dogmatically these visions are held. I think that trouble is always brewing when any belief or idea is held in such esteem that it is impossible to make any compromises and adjust oneself to the ideas that other humans will inevitably have different ideas. The ultimate level in dogmatism is reached when people are unable to make even compromises that would further the reaching of their own goal.
For me a vegan who is not fighting to get good and acceptable living conditions for all farm animals, because it would make meat-eating more easy to accept, is acting on a dogmatic belief. In this kind of thinking, the well-being of animals is, in fact, not a motive at all, but a dogmatic belief in the badness of eating animals is the real motive.

There is also the problem of ideologies and ideas that have already reached their major goals, but who still have a lot of steam and energy left in them. Feminism is a typical example of this.
Here in Scandinavia at least, there is not a single unresolved legal issue that would hinder the full equality of the sexes. All barriers for full equality of the sexes have been removed from the work-place also. It is simply impossible to think what could still increase equality in these fields.

Of course, there are matters like that women are underrepresented in the highest leadership positions in corporate world. However, this is also changing fast, when women become more career-oriented and they do consider advancement in the workplace as an option for themselves more often than before.
The hard fact is that here in Scandinavia at least it is difficult to imagine how the real equality of the sexes could still be increased, when according to many studies also the homework is split quite evenly between sexes in the younger generations.

However, there is still a major ideological movement that was born to drive through these necessary and important changes in society and which we can thank for all of this advancement in equality.
The problem is that some more extreme parts are still fuming on the patriarchy that they see still as sucking the air out of their lungs. These people have often learned the central dogmas of their ideology decades ago and feminism is for them like the air that they breath.

However, when the major goals have all been reached one by one, where can one direct all this steam and energy that is still bubbling in the most extreme parts of the movement? I fear that there is already a loud even if smallish faction in feminism that think that all the ideas that men can have are inferior, because they are thought by men and for whom the way men do things are automatically inferior, only because it is the way in which men do things.
This is of course not equality at all, but chauvinism at its worst. The idea that ‘women are better’ is not equality, but just a call for a different kind in sex-based inequality.

All this would not matter, as it is a very small group of people who are guilty of this feminist chauvinism. However, they are often the loudest, most visible and most eager discussionists in the society, they can have an influence that goes far beyond the real following of the chauvinist feminists.
A very real problem namely is that in the atmosphere of consensus that has been reached in Scandinavia. Any kind of rising ones voice against any aspect of ultra-feminism requires an unbelievable degree of courage.

Any kind of dissident voices will be received with vicious personal attacks and charges of male chauvinism and paternalistic attitudes. One who has once experienced this thinks twice before trying again. Life is just so much easier if one remains silent.
The ultra-feminist movement has, in fact, succeeded in what Islamists have failed. They have succeeded in largely silencing the opposition to their ideas or at least branding their opponents as opponents of equality and as male chauvinists.

All this would not matter, if there would not be also serious real-world consequences. The influence of ultra-feminist activism can be seen in that all forms of male sexuality have become suspect. The last decade has seen an incredible rush of new laws that control all forms of male sexuality.
In Victorian times, it was thought that having sex can be a worse fate than death. It is strange how this kind of thinking is creeping back into a society that is markedly different in all aspects from the Victorian one.

However, this development becomes much more understandable, when one understands that there is a very influential activist group in our society that has the goal of branding of all forms of male sexuality as something evil and destructive.
If one would be into conspiracy theories, one could even think that when the idea of male sexuality as something inherently bad is widely accepted, it would be much easier to accept the idea that ‘women are better’.

I would like to add that I think that women are just as good as men. I think that many women are, in fact, far better humans than many men. I am a fiery believer in all forms of human equality. I believe that all barriers standing between full equality must be removed as soon as they are spotted.
Most of all the Islamic world and in the developing world in general there is still incredible amount of work to be done in the field of equality of the sexes also.
However, I believe in full and complete equality of the sexes and that means that even the finest qualities of either sex cannot be seen as the only good ones.

Comments

However, it is fantastic always to see how any person could fall for this kind of trickery, but there really are people who fall for this.
It is just pure and utter idiocy to claim that in slumping economy all the people who are currently unemployed would find jobs if they just would want. There just not are such jobs anywhere. However, it seems for many too hard to get this simple fact.

Turning the issue of unemployment upside down, to something that is wholly caused by the people who do not want jobs, is just utter idiocy. Of course, there are also many lazy people. However the great majority of people who get laid off in all economic downturns cannot simply be made of lazy people, as they get employed again when things get better and there are job-openings again.

There are qualities in the human mind which do make this black magic possible. We have a tendency to think about individual issues through real-world examples. As the human mind is restricted in its capacity we also tend to see issues though just one kind of example at a time.
When a social conservative tells us about all of lazy people who do not just want to work, we can easily create a mental image of neighbors lazy nephew why just lives in a sofa watching tv and playing video-games.
When it is fed with enough vigor, this mental image can push all other possible images concerning the same issue from our minds. We are not given the opportunity to replace it, for example, with the image of hard-working welder who was laid off after 25 years in the job, because his job was transferred to China, which just could be much more typical case.

However, the most difficult part here is the secret envy. A big part of working people are employed in jobs that give them no real satisfaction, just money. Its extremely natural that they envy people who don’t have to follow time-schedules that hang on as a heavy burden on them.
On the other hand, when people are taught from day one of their lives that work is the only valuable thing in life, they often cannot admit the burden that work places on them even for themselves. This kind of ambivalence can then find an outlet in the hatred of those who do not currently have work at all and who are also free of this burden.

The most fantastic thing is how some people seem to live in a completely history-less environment, where there is no past or future; just the present. They judge people only on the basis of what they are just now.
They just don’t realize that, for example, the majority of the nine percent of the work force of the United States who are just now unemployed are not unemployed because they would not want to work, but because nobody wants to employ them.
If somebody needs to be punished, would we rather not want to punish the employers who will rather hire people in China and India than in their home country?

If unemployment rises because people do not want to work, how could one explain that it always goes down when new jobs are created in the economy? Why in earth people would be lazy only in the economic downturns.
Western societies have sailed through unscathed the last 70 years, when they have supported their more unfortunate members when they have gone through a bit tougher times. Times will so often get better and most of all so many people can and will eventually change.

It is amazing to hear time after time from social conservatives how people are what they are and we should never hope for the better. In western nations millions of people deemed to be unsocial scum have changed their lives. They have married have kids and jobs, even if they have gone through tough spots at some point of their lives.
Leaving people in trouble without the possibility to survive without retorting to crime at rough times would be just plain idiocy and extremely bad policy for society.

PS.

“Our nation needs to stop doing for people what they can and should do for themselves. Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat.”

- right-wing US presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann.

Dear reader, how does this sound to you? In fact, when read literally, it would mean that losing your job could become a death sentence, as you die if you are not given any food. Do you think that it would be just fair to kill off all lazy people? One is lead to think also what kind of panels would do the judging? It would of course be interesting to know, how long would you need to be without work before you would be left to die without food?

Comments

One just rarely meets a book that can fulfill all of your reading-needs at the same time. This book by Steven Pinker is one of them.
I love books that can give brand new insights even to the things that I already know. This book is choke full of brand new insights into very familiar things.
I love information and facts and this book is filled to the brim with new information and facts.
I love writers who have close personal relationship with the information that they do present. Steve Pinker has a very passionate relationship with his data.
I love books that contain Big History, or books that look at the big and to the naked eye often quite invisible big trends that really change our societies and this book is Big History at its best.
I also love writers who use language to convey ideas and not to show off their craftsmanship or knowledge of tall words. Steven Pinker is one of those writers who just wants his reader to understand what he is writing. I just love this rare trait when I meet it in writers.

This is book with its 800 pages is without doubt Steven Pinker’s opus magnum. (Thus far, at least...) It draws together many threads from his earlier works. It happens to an extent that a recent reading of his other works makes some parts seem even too familiar.
However, they are necessary parts of the whole, as this book forms a single argument and this argument is for many difficult to accept as it runs against all conventional wisdom. We are bombarded by the media hour after hour, day after day, year after year with images of violence and destruction. Steven Pinker really needs to march all available forces of science to counter this immense trend.

Steve Pinker argues basically for 800 pages that violence in the world has been diminishing for a long time. He uses dozens and dozens of well-documented and well-researched studies to prove his point. If fact, this book is a wonderful tour to the literature that covers all aspects of human aggression.
This book is truly cross-scientific. The boundaries of scientific disciplines are not of importance for Steven Pinker when he is in search for truth. Neurology, psychology, social psychology, sociology are all covered.

Steven Pinker does not limit himself to retelling of the findings of others, but he has the courage to interpret them against a bigger picture. All good science starts with a strong hypothesis. Steve Pinker does show without any doubt that his hypothesis of overall diminishing of violence is not just speculation, but is based on extremely wide and solid set of scientific facts.
I heartily agree with his thesis that an effective and fair rule of law is one of the central factors in diminishing violence. The medieval societies with their honor culture and highly ineffective systems of feudal government just were not at all as safe places for humans as modern democracies, even if their they meted out cruel and brutal punishments indiscriminately.

The main point of course is that the rule of law must be universally accepted in a society and it must be fair and just for it to have an effect on the level of violence. Even the harshest and cruel police-states have failed miserably in achieving similar stages of security as such societies where most members of the society agree on general outlines of government and have the ability to change governments when they fail.

I really think that his central ideas and findings are quite to point, but I beg to differ with him in certain individual findings. For example, I don’t just buy it, when he claims that the counter-culture with the overt disrespect for authority and disdain of self-control would have been even the main reason for the rise in violence in the USA from the 60’s to 80’s.
I think that here the correlations just could go the wrong way, as maybe the rise of a new kind of drug-culture brought about the changes in culture. I think that the very same drug-culture drove millions of people beyond the boundaries of law, where personal violence is all too often the only way to survive.
The turf-wars, drive-by-shootings or random killings were perhaps caused by the physical drug-culture and not the popular culture, which could just have followed the changes in reality a few steps behind.

Overall, Steven Pinker gives much credence to a Civilizing Effect that starts from good table-manners and spreads from the upper classes downwards. I must say that I don’t really think that even here the causality could at least partly go the other way round. A rise in living standards just could make people imitate the behavior of the upper classes.
However, what is important, he also very strongly appreciates also the role of humanism that has in my mind been the decisive factor in the process.

I think he forgets to mention how already the early Greek humanists influenced Christians. They in turn had a new kind of attitude towards violence and shedding blood for fun, that was a common pastime in the Roman Empire.
Of course, the Christian totalitarianism did later on lead to burning of witches and heretics. Extremely cruel and bloody criminal punishments were widely used in Christian societies. Hangings were a popular form of public entertainment even in the most pious states.

The philosophers, writers and scientists of the Age Of Enlightenment were carriers of a new kind of humanistic thinking that saw value in every human life. This kind of concepts had been quite foreign before their time.
For me, it is quite odd that Steve Pinker does not use the concept of zeitgeist or the spirit of the time in this marvelous book, even if the changes he is describing in many different phases are just changes in zeitgeist: the way the world was seen was changing.
Another failing in my eyes is his inability to accept the basic fact the thermonuclear weapons themselves in their absolute destructiveness were the reason why we did not have the third world. I think that he tries to tip-toe his way around this problem in a very round-about way.
Of course, accepting that men can develop so fearsome weapons that men cannot use them anymore can sound like accepting these monstrous weapons, but I think that a scientist should be able to face the facts, even if he does not like them.

Humanism was naturally not the only force a plays here. Also the spread of humanistic thinking was aided incredibly by the invention of the printing press and cheap books.
The ensuing rise in the general level of knowledge had its effect, but Steven Pinker believes that the simple ability to be able to look at the minds of other people through novels did much to spread the levels of empathy and sympathy up in a society.
It is of course impossible to give even a rough outline of a book with 800 pages of densely packed information. I can only suggest that you read by yourself. The time used in this book will be well spent, as the reader will have a much clearer picture of very many human developments.

Comments

The latest example of this hideous group of people is of course Moammar Qaddafi, who was given ample opportunities to retire to foreign shores to spend the rest of his life in exile. However, he declined and in the end caused the needless destruction of large areas of his home country and also of his own home town, Sirte.
I don’t know why many people have trouble in recognizing the extremely plain evilness of not giving up of an armed combat in those cases when it has been clearly already lost.

The answer is of course part of the perverse logic of the war, where most of the normal values that humans hold dear in everyday life are reversed.
In matters concerning war foolhardiness is praised, stupid, unneeded deaths in the act of bravado are hold in high esteem, and all too often even acts of stubbornly seeking the death in pointless and unneeded last stands are admired as acts of great courage.
This thinking is so deeply embedded in our society that I think that many of the people reading this have trouble understanding that there would be anything wrong with it.

However, the military or political leaders who refuse to give up a clearly lost cause do all too often immense damage to their own home countries and cause immense suffering and pain to their fellow countrymen, even if also needless blood is spilled on the other side too.
Hitler is, of course, an all too easily picked candidate to this group, but the Japanese leadership which let the American firebomb all of their major cities to ashes without blinking an eye, is of course a major war criminal in this respect. If we go further in the history of the human race, for example the horrid and utter destruction of large areas of Central Europe in 30 Years War was a direct result of either side being unable to accept defeat and accept any kind of compromise.

A much harder thing to accept for many is that the real reason why the Vietnamese people had to live through over 15 years of horrid, continious warfare that did cost the lives of between one or three million people was because the Communist leaders of North Vietnam saw any kind of loss of life as acceptable, if they just could reach their political goals.
A group of leaders who will lead several million of their fellow countrymen to their deaths just to gain more political power and reach a Utopian economic goal just cannot be seen to have done anything praiseworthy.
Admiring the stubbornness of the Vietnamese leaders is like admiring a father who lets his family starve to death over a long fight over grazing rights, just to show that he was right.

In a similar vein, it is a fact of life that Afghanistan has never been really subdued by an another state, but admiring the Afghan leaders for their unwillingness to ever to seek peace or any kind of compromise with their adversaries is extremely odd thing to do.
It has been even said that in the recent wars in Afghanistan the Afghans have been somehow 'morally superior'. However, I think that the stubbornness and inability of their leaders to seek peace on any reasonable terms does not make them morally superior in any way.
It just tells about the inability of these leaders to make compromises because of an ideology that they have adopted.

In fact, a moral view of the Afghan conflict would be to say that to inflict tens of years of continuous war on one of the poorest nation on earth is a highly immoral act to do.
Of course, this poverty is also one of the central reasons why this war has been going on for so long. If the Afghan society would have been more economically developed, the disruption that is caused by a war would have made its continuation very difficult after a certain point,

However, in a poor agrarian society all new possibilities for living on war and the money lavishly given by foreign donors and gotten from the drug trade did offset the immense hardships that were inevitably brought about by war.
The Afghan nation as a whole has not benefited and will never benefit in any way from these wars, even if the religious and tribal leaders have grown their power and stature even immensely.

At the same time, there is a whole generation now who does see that the normal way to earn a mans living is to trade in drugs and blow other people up. It is terrifying even toimagine in what kind of moral void the tens of thousands young men do live, who have never seen anything other than war in their whole lives.
They have all too often nothing else but their misogynist, repressive and morally corrupt local Jihadist version of Islam to turn to. If someone claims that this ideology is morally more advanced than, in fact, any other religion-based moral system humans have invented, he does simply not know what he is talking about.

In the end, nations do not win wars because they are somehow morally more advanced than others or most of all because they would be carriers of a truer ideology. Nations who start wars want to subdue other nations to their will in some respect or they simple want to have something that the other nation is not willing to give them voluntarily.
A feeling of moral superiority can of course help the war effort even greatly, and at modern times the party that has been attacked often has a definite edge over the attacker in this respect.

However, in the end all wars are won by the nations which are more capable or enduring in the battlefield. Short wars seem to be won by parties who can muster more powerful or technically advanced forces to the battlefield.
On the other hand, long wars seem to be won by those or who can make their followers endure longest the hardships and suffering that are inevitably brought about by the war. If we put it more bluntly, they are won by the party who does care less for the true well-being of their own countrymen.

PS. This piece was heavily influenced by Steven Pinker and his fine book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes" that I am currently reading.

Comments

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

E. M. Forster in "What I Believe". First published in The Nation, July 16, 1938

A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

E. M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, which ought to have ruled, plays the pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy — they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long.

E. M. Forster in "What I Believe". First published in The Nation, July 16, 1938

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

E. M. Forster in "What I Believe". First published in The Nation, July 16, 1938

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.

E. M. Forster in "Aspects of the Novel"(1927)

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

E. M. Forsterin "A Book That Influenced Me" in "Two Cheers for Democracy" (1951)

Most of us will be eclectics to this side or that according to our temperament. The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful."

Aspects of the Novel (1927)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Forster
"Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect". His best known works are; Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924."

Comments

The worst form of lying is the telling of just one side of a complex story. This is at its worst in fiction, when a successful novel can transform the view of a whole generation on an issue.
The writer does not need to lie consciously, he or she just needs to omit mention even the possibility that there are other very different ways to see the issue at hand. In such a case, the writer is not lying, but the result can be a complete distortion of reality.
I know that I am not saying anything very original here, as anybody can see this thing happening all around them all the time. However, it is strange how rarely this issue comes up in public discussions.

I think that there is an subconscious process going on. The danger could be that this would work both ways; also those works of art that support my own pet ideas and ideologies would be scrutinized if looking at the factual trustworthiness of works of art would be more common. I suspect that this is one of the hidden reasons why there is so little talk about this area.
Is it also so that the 'freedom of artist' creates so strong protective cover around their works that people do not dare dispute the one-sidenedness of so many works in the fear of stepping on the artistic freedom of other people?

I think that first and foremost we need to preserve the freedom for all people to write or paint or film just whatever they would ever want. However, I also think it should be balanced with the strong will to point out the factual falsehoods and one-sidenedness also in the fields like literature, cinema or theatre.
I must again and again stress that all artists must always have the freedom to create whatever they want. I don’t want to mess with that very basic right at all. I just want to remind that all works of art are always subjective windows to the world.
The more different windows one does take the pain to look out to the world, the more complete our view of the world will be. We just need to remember that we can see only a small slice of the world out of a single window.

Admittedly, great art is rarely born out of 'on the other hand and on the other hand' -thinking. It is just too bad that reality is built in that way and all great art will inevitably distort reality; the more forceful and more poignant art is, the greater also the distortion can be.
I think that this eternal problem will never be solved. In fact, it does not need to be ‘solved’, as in practice people just need to be aware that art is not life, but all to often just life with its true complexity and vagueness taken away.

Art imitates life. However, to make interesting (and most of all sellable) art you so often need make life more interesting, more straightforward and more uniform than it really is. The very simple act of following the conventions of an art-form will very often distort the view of reality that is in the end presented, even if you real aim could be just telling your story as faithfully as you can.
For me personally, however, the real problem are the artists who have a hidden agenda, that they will never admit aloud. It pains to see stories whose real purpose can be seen from page one, but the writer never admits it.
I have no trouble with art that has a real purpose and an agenda, when the purpose and agenda of a work are clearly to be seen, the problem for me are just the stealthy ones.
For me at least, best art is born out of a wish to change people or society in some way, or just to drive an important point home. This need and will just need to be visible, as the distortion of reality that is involved then also becomes more clear.

There is still one more danger. There is the danger that a great artist is seen to have powers and wisdom that he or she does not and, in fact, cannot ever have. A vague enough and multi-layered enough way of saying things can make people believe that you have found answers also to questions for which, in reality, you just cannot have any kind of real answers.
The very skillful use of language can hide away the fact that the answers are just opinions, guesses and shots in the dark. An artist can have exceptionally good opinions and he can make wonderful guesses, but it is too easy to foreget that they are still just opinions and guesses, even when they are extremely skillfully expressed.
People love certainty and the danger is that a great artist can offer certainty also in areas where none can ever exist. I know that many people find this comforting, but there is the danger of making the reality conform to these imagined answers.

The Stochastic Motivational Analysis that I have spoken before in this blog may help even in analyzing the works of art that we meet. Basically you just need to try answer these questions:

1. What kind of personal ideological connections the artist has to the issues at hand?
2. Why is an artist interested in just in the one idea he or she is presenting?
3. Why does the artist want us have just that piece of information, but not some others?
4. Do the institutions or country that the artist identifies with have some kind of special relationship with the issue? Can this relationship affect his or her ideas on it?
5. Can financial considerations be a reason why an artist is bringing just this idea up at this very moment?
6. Is the artist just following some current, popular trend?

Comments

The central ideas of humanism have already changed the zeitgeist or “the spirit of times” dramatically. Thanks to quite universal spreading of humanistic ideas of the common human value of all human beings, things like feudal rule over serfs or slavery are not publicly accepted in any form anymore, anywhere.
However, humanism is never something that is paraded victoriously on the streets to the sounds of the trumpets. It is something that is learned by reading a wise book for a moment before going to sleep.

Humanism really is not a conquering ideology, but it is just an attitude and a way of thinking that can change people for the better. It will not transform people in a flash of light, but it can change peoples attitudes towards other people a little bit by a little bit during many, many years of learning.
There will never be a world that would be ruled by humanism, but we can slowly and tediously crawl towards accepting and respecting people who are different from us.

However, humanism is not a fixed ideology like a religion. It will always live and change when our societies and their needs do change. Humanism is for me personally also about striking the right balance between the need of the society and the needs of an individual; even if this is not included in the normal definition of it.
Where this delicate right balance is to be found depends on the current state of the society and the status of individuals. No universal answer can really exist.

The important thing is that one must be able to base ones ideas on a solid foundation and for me humanism offers this foundation. However, humanism will never be a vehicle for achieving personal power and glory for its followers.
As far as I can gather, humanist parties have never won elections on a purely humanistic platform. I highly suspect that such a thing will never happen.

The greatest single thing about humanism is that it can make all other ideas and ideologies softer and more human. Every ideology can be softened and pacified by a dose of humanism.
A hundred years ago capitalism was saved from itself by western socialism that was dosed in the ideas of humanism. By making the capitalists share the dividends of capitalism even a bit more evenly, these movements created the new mass-markets that the capitalism needed to expand and also the already lurking dark social crisis was averted.

To solve the current crisis of capitalism, the new rise of humanism just could be the medicine again. Moving the zeitgeist from the current glorifying of open greed to sharing, taking care and being members of communities just could make a world of difference in the long run.
As always is the case with humanism, there will not be a revolution, but just the slow evolution of zeitgeist towards a more healthy direction if all goes well.

ps. Here is my guide for stepping away from reality in 10 easy steps

1 step away :
Actual industrial production.
2 steps away:
Retail and wholesale of actual products.
3 steps away:
Actually financing the industry and trade.
4 steps away:
Marketing of actual products.
5 steps away:
Creating international brands
6 steps away:
Selling and buying of industries to form international conglomerates.
7 steps away:
Creating financial tools to facilitate takeovers and selling and buying of industries.
8 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess corporate profits.
9 steps away:
Creating financial markets for excess capital that is not needed in actual economy or in other words tools for just betting on the performance of actual economy.
10 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess capital that has been created from winning bets by the extensive betting on the real economy. There is just is so excessive amounts of unneeded capital that soon one needs to place bets on the bets that are placed on the bets.

ps. This little essay was originally inspired by a Facebook-chat with Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, who is an Iraqi humanist currently living in Malyasia. He is also the admin of Facebook-page for Global Secular Humanist Movement at http://www.facebook.com/GSHMP

Comments

The central ideas of humanism have already changed the zeitgeist or “the spirit of times” dramatically. Thanks to quite universal spreading of humanistic ideas of the common human value of all human beings, things like feudal rule over serfs or slavery are not publicly accepted in any form anymore, anywhere.
However, humanism is never something that is paraded victoriously on the streets to the sounds of the trumpets. It is something that is learned by reading a wise book for a moment before going to sleep.

Humanism really is not a conquering ideology, but it is just an attitude and a way of thinking that can change people for the better. It will not transform people in a flash of light, but it can change peoples attitudes towards other people a little bit by a little bit during many, many years of learning.
There will never be a world that would be ruled by humanism, but we can slowly and tediously crawl towards accepting and respecting people who are different from us.

However, humanism is not a fixed ideology like a religion. It will always live and change when our societies and their needs do change. Humanism is for me personally also about striking the right balance between the need of the society and the needs of an individual; even if this is not included in the normal definition of it.
Where this delicate right balance is to be found depends on the current state of the society and the status of individuals. No universal answer can really exist.

The important thing is that one must be able to base ones ideas on a solid foundation and for me humanism offers this foundation. However, humanism will never be a vehicle for achieving personal power and glory for its followers.
As far as I can gather, humanist parties have never won elections on a purely humanistic platform. I highly suspect that such a thing will never happen.

The greatest single thing about humanism is that it can make all other ideas and ideologies softer and more human. Every ideology can be softened and pacified by a dose of humanism.
A hundred years ago capitalism was saved from itself by western socialism that was dosed in the ideas of humanism. By making the capitalists share the dividends of capitalism even a bit more evenly, these movements created the new mass-markets that the capitalism needed to expand and also the already lurking dark social crisis was averted.

To solve the current crisis of capitalism, the new rise of humanism just could be the medicine again. Moving the zeitgeist from the current glorifying of open greed to sharing, taking care and being members of communities just could make a world of difference in the long run.
As always is the case with humanism, there will not be a revolution, but just the slow evolution of zeitgeist towards a more healthy direction if all goes well.

ps. Here is my guide for stepping away from reality in 10 easy steps

1 step away :
Actual industrial production.
2 steps away:
Retail and wholesale of actual products.
3 steps away:
Actually financing the industry and trade.
4 steps away:
Marketing of actual products.
5 steps away:
Creating international brands
6 steps away:
Selling and buying of industries to form international conglomerates.
7 steps away:
Creating financial tools to facilitate takeovers and selling and buying of industries.
8 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess corporate profits.
9 steps away:
Creating financial markets for excess capital that is not needed in actual economy or in other words tools for just betting on the performance of actual economy.
10 steps away:
Creating financial tools for handling the excess capital that has been created from winning bets by the extensive betting on the real economy. There is just is so excessive amounts of unneeded capital that soon one needs to place bets on the bets that are placed on the bets.

ps. This little essay was originally inspired by a Facebook-chat with Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, who is an Iraqi humanist currently living in Malyasia. He is also the admin of Facebook-page for Global Secular Humanist Movement at http://www.facebook.com/GSHMP

Comments

"A fool tells you what he will do; a boaster what he has done. The wise man does it and says nothing."

A few ideas did immediately spring to my mind. My first thought was this:

"A fool will have a great career in politics, a boaster will do great in business and the wise man will be quite forgotten, as nobody will know what he has done."

My second thought went a bit further on the issue:

"If you want to be remembered as a truly wise man, just constantly give the smallest of hints of your infinite wisdom and you will never have to accomplish anything real."

(Paraphrasing Mark Twain here, of course.)

Then I did think more of the reality on the ground:

"The other available method to be remembered as a wise man is, of course, just to utter so complicated and mysterious things that nobody will never be the wiser of them. This is naturally the most commonly used road to stardom in the field of wisdom."

Then I realized how cynical I was being and I thought:

"Of course, you could want to be a really wise man also. About that I can say nothing, sorry."

Then I ultimately realized what I had already done:

"One way to achieve status in the field of wisdom is, of course, the road of pretended and overstretch modesty to make people believe that you just do not want to reveal your whole wisdom, even if you have none on offer, in the first place. See above."

PS. Sorry if I may always sound so serious, my dear readers but, in fact, I have my secret lighter side also after all...

Comments

Why is that? The simple answer is of course that the Christian Church which took over the Roman empire in the fourth century did like Aristotle and Plato, and it did dislike Epicurus and Anaxagoras.
Christians did strongly dislike also many other Greek philosophers, of whose works there often remains just small fragment or even just mentions in the works of those Greek philosophers that were sanctioned by the church in the worst cases.

Of course, much of this material would have been lost anyway. In those times the old books just needed regular new copying, when the old versions started to decay. One can well argue, that only the ones that would be of interest to somebody would have been preserved anyhow.
But here comes my point. If Christians would not have taken over the Roman Empire and they would not have thoroughly erased all other religions and philosophical schools from its realms, there would certainly have been a extraordinarily different situation concerning also many of the earliest documents which did contain the seeds of rational thinking.

This is of course just pure speculation, but if Epicurean communities would have been allowed to continue to exist even after the onslaught of Christian domination in the fourth century, they would undoubtedly have existed for much longer time.
In fact, nobody can honestly say if some of them would exist today. These communities would also have had an extremely strong interest in preserving the words of their master and other thinkers who supported a similar way of thinking.

The main reason why this did not happen was of course the total intolerance of the victorious Christians. In hundred years they totally eradicated the old Roman religion and dozens of other religions and philosophical schools.
They did it such with such force, that these ideas were not left lingering even in the remotest villages in the corners of the empire. All competing belief-systems were just annihilated from the Empire of Rome. This includes of course all of the earlier, rival versions of Christianity.

The victorious version of Christianity then promulgated their favorite Greek philosophers or Aristotle and Plato as ‘the great Greek philosophers’, while most of the others were hardly seen as worth a mention.
This idea was cemented during the following millennium of Christian rule in Europe. The idea of Aristotle and Plato as the special ‘great philosophers’ was funnily enough eagerly adopted even by the Muslims, who soon saw how the ideas of these philosophers could support their religious ideology, but the ideas of the most of the modern Greek philosophers did not fit in as neatly.

It was in the end the work of the Christian Church to promote Plato and Aristotle and belittle almost all other great Greek philosophers of the Greek Golden Age. As we have no access to the works of Epicurus and many others, we simply can not know how they would have outshone these favorites of the Church in the eyes of the modern man.
The other unfortunate consequence of all this is that the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies soon did become the things that all other ideas were compared with, even if they did contain same extremely flawed thinking.

In the end, they were promoted to the position of the official philosophers of the church. Of course, some of their more incompatible texts needed also to be hidden away.
Luckily for the Church they were among the extremely rare breed among the Greek philosophers. Their philosophies did namely include an idea of god in a way that was nearly compatible with the ideas of the Church, if and when one stretches things a bit. This kind of thinking was, in fact, quite rare among the first-rate Greek philosophers of the time.

All this did lead to a situation where this, in fact, quite rare way of thinking was seen as a norm also in the field of philosophy, even if the idea of an omnipotent god found favor among very few of the best minds of the Golden Age of Greece.
Of course we can just speculate how and where the history of philosophy would have turned, if the major works of some of the greatest Greek philosophers would have been preserved. However, one can safely assume that the role or Aristotle and Plato did play in the later development of philosophy would have been very, very different.

Comments

Economy is a typical area where all analysis are, in fact, stochastic. There just never is enough real and stable information to call any analysis of it as a final 'truth'. When one really thinks about it, almost all fields of life have similar open-ended properties.
Stochastic also means that the reliability of analysis does increase with every new bit of information we do receive, as we can use the new information as a basis of a new round of analysis to make the original analysis better.

In this way, the Stochastic Motivational Analysis could be a fully open-ended process. It will end only when our interest in the whole issue vanes. However, it can be rekindled again the moment when our interest is renewed. In this way, there are never final, unmoving results, but just the best possible results for every given moment of time.
The main thing is simply about looking as hard and objectively as possible at the motives of the creator or transferee of the information that we do receive.

The standard basic questions in a Stochastic Motivational Analysis could be something like this:

- The most basic and important question to be asked is always: what kind of prior personal ideological connections the speaker or the writer has to the issue at hand?
- Why is the speaker or writer interested in just of that piece of information in the first place?
- Why does he want us to read or hear just that piece of information, but not some others?
- Has the institution or country he represents some kind of special relationship with the issue and can it affect his ideas on it?
- Can financial considerations be a reason why he is bringing just this idea up at this very moment?
- Can the public debate on the issue have had an effect on the speaker or writer? Is he just following the current trend?

A very basic Stochastic Motivational Analysis can of course just be a guess; a shot in the dark. However, the very process of even attempting an analysis can create unforeseen amount of new insight, when we, for example, can make ourselves think of the possible reasons why just this piece of information is presented to us, but not some others.
Of course, it my list just a basic check-list of questions that every savvy consumer of modern media should make every single time he listens or reads anything.

This process should, of course, be quite automatic. When we, for example, hear a foreign correspondent explaining an issue, we should quite automatically be able to think if he speaking because he or the media he represents does have ideological connections in the issue, or has the country of his origin or the country of the origin of the media some kind of special relationship with the issue.
Of course, some of this kind of analysis we do quite automatically already, but I’m sure that the more conscious effort is to put the issue, the better results can get. The results of a Stochastic Motivational Analysis are never really 'true' as such, as in such a complex issue as human motivation there simply cannot ever be a single ‘truth’.

In very many cases, even the actors themselves are not fully aware of their own true motivations, the more so as nothing is easier than to hide ones motivation from oneself and invent higher, nobler motivations to hide the true motivations from the view.
So, in Stochastic Motivational Analysis the right answer is mostly not arrived at by asking the person in question about his motivation, even if even this bit of information can help, but by analyzing the objective conditions.

Most of all it is arrived by analyzing the ideological and financial connections of the actors that did lead to the creation of just that bit of information and its public use. As the 'true' answers to questions like this are not to be completely ever known, the answers can only be of the stochastic nature.
The results are always tentative, but they can get better with every new bit of information that is received. Of course, the answers can be very entertaining too!

In the field of philosophy Stochastic Motivational Analysis could well be used to ask why a certain philosopher was or is interested in just certain issues and even also for analyzing why he has arrived just to the results that he did arrive.
What effect did his personal animosities or friendships with other philosophers have on the outcome? How did belonging to a certain school of philosophy affect his results? How did the then current popularity of certain ideas or ideologies affect the philosopher? Did he have financial, political and most of all ideological considerations to think of when writing? Why did he write of this, but not of that?
I think that especially interesting results could be had by analyzing the true personal motives of the most revered ancient philosophers, when one would concentrate on the ‘why questions’ on a more personal level more than is done today.

I well know that many people see philosophy as something impersonal; for some people philosophy is just battle of pure ideas. At best, this is of course true at times, but I'm afraid that a lot work in this field also is done in defence of pet ideologies and because of the will to oppose some other ideas or ideologies with all possible means.
In fact, come to think of it, Stochastic Motivational Analysis could well be applied people like the writers of the Bible too. One could see things in a new light, when one really thinks through the personal motivations that make people do different things.

Of course, nothing of the things that I am suggesting here is new as such, as the motives of writers or philosophers or historical figures have always been of interest to many. However, I am suggesting a systematic method where the whole basis of study would be the study of motives.
Stochastic Motivational Analysis can never be the only avenue for study, but I think that sometimes really concentrating solely on the analysis of motivational forces that make the subjects of analysis tick could produce interesting and even entertaining additions to our current knowledge.

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However, the real big thing here could,in fact, be the creation and maintaining of groups that can create the need to act according to what is seen as appropriate by members of this group. In fact, it can be of quite secondary importance what exactly is the ideology of this group, as long as the need to belong to it can cause a pressure to behave in a generally approved way.
So, the main function of, for example, Christianity in this respect could, in fact, to be a tool in the creation of strongly binding groups in which people really want to belong. The need to be accepted by this group could be the real force that does keep people on the narrow road.

However, a similar drive for group cohesion can be created around any kind of ideology. This is the reason why belonging to an atheist, agnostic, deist or even Epicurean community can often have a similar effect in the behavior of people than belonging to a religious community can have.
In fact, the very act of identifying oneself with a group that is strongly disapproved by a majority can create an even stronger need to act in a righteous way.
Members of an minority can come to look at themselves as public representatives of this community. Because of this they can be at times extremely conscious of a need to act in an exemplary way. They just might not want to blemish the reputation of the community if they do feel a strong enough need to belong to it and protect the reputation of this community.

So, a person who is drifting in some kind of ideological void can benefit even enormously from identifying oneself with an atheist, agnostic, deist or epicurean community. So, even if many Christians seem to think that atheists are immoral, the simple act of strongly identifying oneself with an atheist community can, in fact, have even a strong effect. People can in such situations really become more conscious of how their actions will affect their surroundings.

On the other hand, when people take any kinds of conscious steps towards assuming a new worldview they normally do confront ideas that are not necessarily confronted headlong in everyday life. A person who is inching towards, for example, atheist or epicurean world-view normally reads and thinks about the big issues in life in a quite different way that people do in normal situations. Things like morality, responsibilities or ideas of why we love and hate can be processed in a quite new fashion.
Atheism, agnosticism, deism or epicureanism is not normally accepted in a way religion is so often accepted as part of the cultural package that is inherited from parents. A fact of life is that religion are often learned in a quite automated way, without people ever really thinking what it is all about at all.

So, the thing that really often differentiates an atheist from the big mass of religious believers is that he or she has very often devoted much personal time and thought to think about the ‘big issues’ in life. The big thing here is that the very process of thinking over these ‘big issues of life’ often does make a person more aware of their meaning and importance.
When a person is more aware of the importance of keeping up things like social cohesion, he or she is more prone to act according to these ideas in real life too.

So, choosing an atheist, agnostic, deist or epicurean world-view does not mean at all that a person would become immoral, but in fact, often it does mean that a person becomes much more sensitive to moral issues than before this transition. Of course, there are bad and immoral atheists also, just as there are bad and immoral Christians or Hindu’s.
However, I am just saying just the process of challenging of one’s worldview in any more adult stage of life can really make a person more responsible and caring or in other ways 'more moral'. In this situation, people are simply forced to think through some of the very basic questions in life, that can have remained unexplored and unanswered in the flow of everyday life before that.

Quite another thing is that accepting a rational world view often does make people take a hard look at things that are labeled moral or immoral by different religions. A rational person does not, for example, normally accept the ideas that using contraceptives or masturbation would be immoral.
Religious people can, of course, have great difficulty in understanding that many of the things that are taught in their religion to be highly immoral, are immoral only in their own religion. They can can have hard time in understanding that these things are not part of any kind of universal morality, but just culturally produced, even if often ancient ideas of how humans should behave themselves.

The prohibitions against stealing, killing people and lying are quite universal, as they really are needed to keep any society going. However, religions have often succeeded in making their followers believe that all of the sexual restrictions that these religions have marketed would be somehow be part some kind of a ‘universal morality’.
When an atheist, agnostic, deist or epicurean rejects the religions as a source of morality, they do not reject the importance of having a moral code in a society, but they just reject one source that does claim to be a source of such code.

However, it is, in fact, quite understandable that this rejection is interpreted by the religious people as a rejection of morality, as they have generally been taught all their lives that there cannot be morality without religion.
Before they can accept that people can be quite moral creatures without religions, they need first to understand that the need for having a moral code is a feature of all human societies that are quite independent of religions, even if religions are generally used to enforce this code.
Most of all they need to understand that most humans (excluding sociopaths and psychopaths) have an inbuilt moral grammar and all societies do provide the moral code that follows this grammar.

They need also to understand that in the field of sexual moral there are no such universal moral codes. The area of sexuality is, in fact, the field of human life that is most tightly tied with the culture and cultural ideas of ideal behavior.
The ideas that concern accepted forms of sexuality do differ wildly from society to society and even inside the same society from time to time. The hardest thing to understand maybe is, however, that rejecting the restrictive sexual moral ideas of a religion does not mean at all that a person could not have a strong moral code in all other fields of life.

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Achieving this would not mean banning or even harassing religions at large, but the goal would be achieved just by making them to give up stubbornly implementing just single one of their most harmful dogmas.
Of course, the other way to achieve this goal would be by persuading more and more of the followers of these belief-systems to understand that they do not have to implement just these parts of the antiquated dogmas of their religion anymore.

Even if this all is admittedly just a pipe-dream, but that latter option is not just empty talk, as we have great practical examples of how this can happen.
In the Christian Protestant world and countries like Japan and Taiwan, this kind of change has already happened during the last century. People just stopped listening to their priests in these matters. Soon the priests also had to change their own dogmas not to lose their audience altogether.
The countries where this happened are now among the wealthiest in the world. It is amazing how rarely it is acknowledged that these nations have reached their unprecedented levels of welfare partly because they had as the first nations in the world that had their growth of population in check.

A fact of life is that when people have the physical means and most of all a true psychological and social liberty to decide by themselves if they want to take care of six or two children, they very often not very surprisingly choose the latter option.
Of course, massive resources needs to be simultaneously directed towards spreading dirt cheap or preferably free means of birth control to all of the poorest people of the world. This needs to happen in every single village, and with great fanfare and a upbeat marketing drive like those of Coca-Cola.
An equally strong effort would be needed for educating people on how it is in their own direct self-interest to have less children.

Then, when people would soon see in reality how their general standard of living starts to rise, when there are less people depleting the existing resources, the real change could be initiated in their minds and this change is what matters.
All that this requires is that the some of the most backward religions like Roman Catholicism, Hinduism and Islam would be required to keep just those of their ideas to themselves which do concern human reproduction, or that their followers would not listen to them just in these issues anymore.

Of course, because of this requirement, all that I have said is just a pipe-dream.
Any of this will never happen, as the religious zealots do prefer seeing small children and even whole nations starving to giving up any of their ancient dogma, that is accepted unquestioned and without even need for any kind explanations why some things are required from the believers.
Human life is so sacred to some of these people, that they prefer to let millions to die horrible, slow deaths when population outstrips all available agrarian resources in a growing number of countries before accepting any form of contraceptives.

This is bad, this is simply really very, very bad. However, as long as religions do have a special position in the public arena, very few politicians even dare even to notice the evil policies of some of the Catholic, Islamic and Hindu leaders.
This happens in spite of the fact that is easy to that some of these people just are interested in growing numbers of their followers, as they build their power and importance on these numbers.

The hardest part to swallow is that they do not even have to face the fact that they are choosing famine and starvation, but also the ensuing social instability. They think that they are just making their gods will come true. Sadly, just in this particular matter their gods will trumps the needs and very real suffering of humans in their minds, that are sadly twisted by the needs of a religion.
They simply just refuse even to think about any of the consequences of their actions. This is made easy by the people who not dare to bring the subject up out of fear of offending religious feelings.
Seemingly these people, in fact, do sleep with excellent conscience, when the so many of the unneeded, unwanted and unloved children, who are born only because of their policies, inch their way to early graves after a life spent in agony.

The hard fact remains that the religious attitudes towards the birth control are in the heart of solving this particular problem. The remaining explosive growth simply happens mostly among the followers of the most backward religions. If we would leave out the role of the religions, we would be simply lying and putting our heads into a bush.
In the heart of this issue is that the countries where the most old-fashioned religions do rule tend to be in the worst situation. It is very simple task to take a hard look at the statistics and find this out.

The Protestant Scandinavia and areas like northern Germany or the Benelux-countries and the Anglican areas of the world were the first to put an effective end to local population explosions. They have also achieved unparalleled levels of wealth since.
They were aided more than little by the simple fact that they have not had a more conservative religion on their back. The process was helped byt the fact that modern state-church-Protestantism did adapt itself to the requirements of the new world quite early.
Even later the same pattern is to be seen everywhere. In Asia there was little religious dogma in these matters that would have been preventing the use of contraceptives. After the problem was identified and its graveness realized, the problem could be handled with resolute action and education in countries like Japan, Thailand or Taiwan.

In stark contrast, in the Muslim world and much of the sub-Saharan Africa the conservative religions have prevented progress in population control and results are extremely dim.
Latin America is a special case, as there the Catholic Church prevented all progress in these matters quite like Islam for a very long time.
In fact, the area seemed to be destined to drown in population explosion. However, during the last few decades Catholic Church has lost its true grip in many areas of Latin America and there is again hope, at least in more advanced parts of Latin America.

In fact, the situation is in many areas of Latin America more and more like the current situation in Spain, France or Italy. In these countries contraceptives are used in a similar manner than anywhere else in the western world, but lip-service is still paid to the Only True Faith on Sundays.
In the United States a statistical fact is that the followers of the religions that do prohibit the use of contraceptives are dramatically over-represented among the ranks of the poor.
The followers of old-fashioned religions tend come form big families that just so often can give much less individual support to its members than a small family.

However, the richer classes tend often to come from less restrictive religious backgrounds. They tend to have smaller families, that can give a lot more support to an individual child.
The religious differences are not the only thing here at all, of course, but its importance has clearly been downplayed on purpose for a long time, so not to hurt religious feelings.

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It is simply impossible to think that a theologian could work in an official capacity, if he would reject the Bible and claim that the real source of wisdom is in the Koran.
In real science there simply cannot be such unmovable and unchangeable basic assumptions. In real science one must be able to test and also reject all claims that are being made, if the need does arise.

Of course, there is also scientific study of religions, but it normally is not made in the theology departments, but in a separate field of religious studies that are normally not connected to any kind of religious ideologies.
In the real scientific study of religions also the Bible can be studied as a historical document which does give light to the world where its writers did live and of their hopes and expectations.
On the other hand, in stark contrast to religious studies theology basically just tries to find suitable questions for answers that are already known, which is the exact opposite to how real science does work.

Scientific study of religions uses scientific methods to study all religions. It does also study Christianity, but Christian theology is looking for new justification for holding up this religious ideology and it also trains workers for the religious organizations.
If Christianity would have withered away some time ago, it is quite certain that theology would not be studied anymore in our universities, but the scientific study of religions would go on as it is now.

On the other hand, If a Marxist world-revolution would have taken place, we would quite probably have scientific study of Marxist dogmas in our universities. This field of study just could be extremely similar to the modern theology, even if we know now that Marxism is not science, but just an ideology.
Of course, people study and learn many things in the field of theology also that are quite scientific in their outlook, but the basic reason for the very existence of theology is always an ideological one, not scientific.
We have no other discipline of science that would have been founded to study and most of all support just one form of ideology, which happens to be a religion in this case.

Theology was born to train new workers for the religious organizations that are forwarding the Christian religious ideology. This fact is not changed by the fact that theology has adopted many of the scientific methods, as its ideological nature has not been changed, as these scientific methods are not used in an objecticve way that they are used in other disciplines of science.
Admittedly, there is a lot of real scientific study that is done in the theology-departments throughout the world, the more so, as the religious organizations also want real and reliable information of the impact of their work and how the world that surrounds them does develop.
However, deep down the whole discipline of theology does exist only to serve one religious ideology and its needs. Because of this fact theology is not real science as it stands now.

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However, when you start moving the zoom forward and you start discerning more and more details. Things do also become more and more complex with every single new step of the zoom. During this process, the simple single solution that just a moment ago seemed so plausible just does become more and more implausible.
The level of complexity rises with every single step that we move the zoom closer and closer, and the individual objects start to be seen more clearly.

At every single new step of the zoom, we can see more. However, with our added knowledge we can also make better and better guesses of what goes on in the inside also in the things that have just become visible.
All visible thing do, in the end, hide away a mind-boggling complexity of a natural-born machinery that we did not know at first at all. However, often we must use our imagination to see how this machinery really is. We must often do it based on very small hints, the more so, as we often do not have methods for peering inside all new things that the rise into view when the level of zoom increases.

Best results are obtained when our imagination is fired by the singular glimpses of the delicate inner structure of matter that we do gain at times. Happily we can very often build our ideas on real observations. The best and strongest theories are made just in this way.
However, often only the imaginative powers of the human mind do allow us to peer outside also inside of the visible world. Nearly boundless human ability for reasoning with the aid of imagination does allow us to understand and create theories about the structure of these minuscule and and boundless worlds, parts of which can remain forever invisible for humans with their limited viewing capabilities.

The human mind that is using the scientific method can act like an auxiliary lens that helps us reveal more detail from each of the new levels of zoom we do reach when we improve our techniques for seeing things.
New and better lenses do help us to create new and better explanations. We can still find new ways to increase the level of the zoom that we have at our disposal. This explanation will never be final and complete, as it will develop and improve as long as humans put their minds into it.

However, the sad fact is that the highly evolved and extremely fine-tuned explanation still has to compete with the simplest possible explanation that was born in the days when we had no real knowledge of how our world is really built and how it really works.

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I think that there are people who are quite unable to differentiate ideas and people at all. In the other extreme, however, there are people, who seem to forget that all human ideas are formed by quite ordinary men and women. Some people just have relentlessly trained their ability to see deeper and wider than others.
On the other hand, when a person does release a new idea to the wild, it will quite inevitably acquire a life of its own. In fact, the originator of the idea will often have extremely little influence on the future of the idea.

Of course, one can well ask if ideas can truly be valued wholly independent of their creators. Every idea is, in the end, deeply colored by the personal experiences of a writer or thinker, even if it in not always apparent. This personal level can also be hidden from view on purpose.
On the other hand, when enough people will evolve an idea further, the personal qualities of the originator of the original idea will become less and less important in the process.
This process of non-personification of ideas is extremely clearly visible in religions, where the central ideas often acquire a non-personal feeling, when they have been developed by many different people.

On the other hand, extremely often ideas are also valued according to just who has presented them. So, even some of the silliest ideas of, for example, Aristotle or Plato are often still seen as presenting some kind of deep insight. This does happen also when thse ideas are just personal opinions that are based on nothing else on the wish that it would be nice if things would be as they wished things to be.
In fact, the main reason why Plato and Aristotle were chosen to be specially revered from among the dozens of great philosophers of Greece was because they had some ideas that were to a degree compatible with those of the ruling Christian church and the needs of the extremely unjust feudal society.

For example, the 300 works of Epicurus were lost with only small fragments remaining, just because his ideas were not compatible with those of the all-mighty church. One cannot say that Plato and Aristotle would have been better thinkers than Epicurus, but their ideas just fitted better with the needs of the ruling elite for a long time.
Of course, there is not and cannot be objective criteria of how to value the thinkers of the past. Their value is simply determined mostly by how well their ideas do serve the later generations and also the needs of later ideologies.

The real beauty of the written word is, however, that ideas which are preserved in written form can resurface after centuries or even millennium of obscurity.
They can even come in handy, when the society has changed and these ideas do fit the needs of the society better than the ones that were so revered yesterday.

For example, Epicureanism was destroyed and erased by Christianity and Epicurus did become just a footnote in the history of the philosophy for many. However, in the current stage of development of our own society Epicurus just might be the thinker that would need enormously more attention just now, as he had clear recipes for some of the ills of our own society.

His ideas of finding happiness from the small and inexpensive joys in life instead of striving for more and more are alone an extremely good reason to bring his ideas back to limelight just now.
Of course, very similar ideas have been presented by many current thinkers also, but as stated, a long ago vanished thinker has had time to collect the aura of credibility and wisdom that a current living and breathing thinker never can.
The inevitable human failings of any current thinker will still be visible for all to see, but a thinker who has been dead for 2400 years will not carry similar disability. One is often much more able to see their ideas as themselves without distraction and also see the real value of these ideas.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Epicurus/79493658728
http://www.facebook.com/groups/110827475672979/

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Similarly, the new Jewish monotheistic god was an idealized mirror image of the new kings, when the Jewish nation was subdued into the power of single man on the top. This new god was all that these new leaders wanted to be; all-powerful, all-knowing and all-merciless.
This god was vengeful and sadistic, as were often the new kings too, when the absolute power perverted their mind as it will always pervert the minds of all absolute rulers. This god was the one who did give his blessings for the destruction of the cities of the enemies and the killing and enslaving of their people.

When a new and struggling sect emerged from the Jewish religion 2000 years ago, their god was again an extremely different creature, when this emerging new religion was at the very beginning the religion of the downtrodden and emerging classes.
Their god was a mirror image of them; it was helpful, supportive and merciful, as the people who were stuck in the lowest ladders of the Roman society where people who needed mercy, help and support to survive.

However, the new and emerging Christian god was a malleable beast, as when Christianity succeeded in gaining the upper hand in Roman society, the image of god did again change.
Their god regained some of more vicious properties of the Jewish god. Now the god namely needed to be the upholder of the existing social order and a protector of the holy borders of the Roman empire, which was soon forcibly totally Christianized.

So, the official god is always the mirror image of the ideas of the leaders of a religion. It does reflect their hopes and ideas, but this process does not stop here.
The lower ranking members will also quite inevitably give their own vision of their god their own properties. They will simply pick from the official party line only those parts that will support their idea of a god, which of course is an idealized mirror image of themselves.
So, a terrorist's god will be bloodthirsty and vengeful and the god of a peaceful peasant will be a very peaceful god.

God is after all just the person himself in an idealized form; the things he would like to be and achieve in life are the qualities that they give to their own version of gad.
As Salman Rushdie said about a writer; that when you start writing, you kind of dress up to be your better self. Your writing will often reflect the ideas of the noble and good person who you would like to be. Similarly, your idea of god is a reflection the idealized vision of what you would like yourself to be.

And yes, deep inside everybody who believes in any god has his own private version of this god in deep inside of his own mind, as long as humans differ from other humans.
Of course in some societies it is better just to keep mum about your own private ideas to simply stay alive in the midst of religious fanatics, who are all too often deluded to think that their own idea can be the only possible one.

In the level of an individual this kind idealized idea of human as a goal to strive for can be a valuable psychological tool, that can be used to forward one's success as a human being.
However, religion has always also another, often much more valuable tool as a source of social cohesion.
This task is, however, quite independent of the role of a religion as a tool for self-reflection and self-betterment. This role as a source of uniformity and blind obedience can even become a significant source of trouble in a world where uniformity and blind obedience are not things that would benefit the society anymore.

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Also, if all people would behave exactly alike, there would be no need to classify any of them to 'good' or 'bad'. The utter complexity of human and social behavior is the reason why such ideas need to be created and maintained.
On the other hand, could there be such things as 'good' or 'bad' monkeys?
Of course, there are; the ones who do not disrupt the social cohesion are quite certainly seen as more 'good' than those who do by other monkeys, as are quite certainly also the more well-behaved donkeys or giraffes by other members their respective herds.

So, the idea of good and bad is not just a human idea, but an evolutionary necessity, as classing different forms of behavior 'good' of 'bad' for the good of the herd simply can greatly help the herd. In the end, this idea can help the whole species to survive and flourish.
However, the modern idea of some kind 'universal morality' is purely a human cultural invention that has been invented and used as an ideological tool mostly by religions.

A very basic sense of right of wrong or a rudimentary sense of justice is really inborn in almost all of us (not all, as one must exclude sociopaths and psychopaths, who often seem to have lost this very ability), but it is a quite different thing than morality.
Normally morality is, in fact, mostly about following the social rules. These rules can be in turn be classed as 'good' or 'bad' according to the results that do produce for individuals and the general flourishing of the society.
In fact, following of the current moral rules of the society has also always lead some people into major wrongdoing.

The instinct to follow the current rules of the herd is also an inborn instinct also in humans. We also generally want to please the ones we respect or on whom we are dependent on. At the same time, we are also guided by an inner sense of justice and fairness.
However, the exact things and actions that are seen as moral or immoral do vary immensely from society to society also inside the very same society at different times and stages of development.
I would dare to say that a man who takes part in a stoning of a woman who is suspected for committing adultery needs often to suppress his inner sense of right or wrong to be able to act according to the currently dominant form of morality in his society.

At this point, I want to stress that commonly agreed form of morality has a very important role in maintaining cohesion in all human societies. Declaring what things are seen as moral and which as immoral, makes it clear to everyone what is the desired mode of conduct in a society and knowing the exact boundaries of allowed behavior does make social life easier.
However, it is pure lunacy to claim that there would be an inborn sense of morality that would say that masturbation or looking at beautiful young women would always be immoral. These things are transmitted purely culturally and moral inhibitions associated with them are quite unknown in very many cultures.

There simply are many things that will disrupt the social peace in most societies and which are forbidden in almost all societies. The killing of other people without direct orders coming from the leaders of society is forbidden in all societies, as it simply is the most disruptive single act an individual can commit in any society.
The forceful taking away or stealing of other peoples property is another thing that is forbidden in almost all societies. It has of course less meaning in societies where resources are communally owned.
The disrupting of the existing bonds between a man and a woman is quite universally frowned upon.

However, all these things do stem from the quite universal needs of the human societies. This is real reason why they seem so universal, not that humans would have some kind of gene for a certain kind of morality.
We just really do have an inner sense of justice and fairness, as do mice and rats too, according to recent studies. These instincts are necessary for all species that do live in proximity of other members of their own species.

In all modern societies the needs of society and demands the society do make to individuals are codified in some kind of set of universal laws. These laws do not normally follow from any kind of inner inborn morality, but always from the current needs of the society or from the demands of some religions organizations.
However, their overall structure is very often influenced by our species-specific sense of justice, if it just is just allowed to play a role, which is sadly not always the case.
In modern western societies the needs of the society are more and more based on the needs and best interests of the individuals. Individuals have also a chance to start to intiate changes in them if they are seen as repressive or outdated, but again any of this does not follow from any kind idea of 'universal morality'.

PS. After saying all this I must also conclude that Immanuel Kant's famous 'Categorical Imperative' may be a valid logical construct. It may well be valid as an abstract idea, but on the other hand it has no bearing on how human morality and human social rules are constructed in practice.

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If we worry so much about the ‘rights’ of a fetus, how about the rights of the child that would have been conceived, if a woman would not have said 'no' to a man?
If we really think that a woman should not have any right to control what happens in her body after any act of sexual intercourse, because the 'sacredness' of a fetus consisting of a few cells at first, how depraved must we see a women who refuses even the possibility of this new and 'sacred' life from ever emerging?
At which point does a woman lose her right to decide by herself of her own fate anymore? Does this happen on the moment of sperm and egg cells merging or when the first division of the cells, the second division of the cells or the third, or does it even happen at the moment of male ejaculation?

On the other hand, I think that biggest responsibility for unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortions lies on the people who don’t want to give children sex-education and most of all who make the easy access to contraceptives difficult in countries like the United States.
However, the real blame falls on the people who continue stubbornly to make sex seem so dirty that many ordinary people just cannot talk about, for example, the use of contraceptives at all.

It seems that for many it is much easier to just act than speak about the things they are doing, when you have been scared stiff about even mentioning the thing for all of your life.
However, as humans just are what they are, some of them will always have sex out of wedlock. If they do not have the equipment and knowledge to prevent pregnancies, the unwanted, unneeded and decidedly extremely harmful pregnancies will inevitably happen. They will often harm the lives of all of the people involved a and most of all the life of the future, unexpected and unwanted child. On most cases the whole drama would have been quite easily avoided with the proper use of contraceptives in the first place.
However, if you have been taught all your life that sex is something disgusting and dirty, you will be at a definite disadvantage to people who can handle the thing in a rational way.

Of course, basically sex is just as natural for humans as eating and drinking. Because of this the control of the human sexuality to the degree that many modern cultures still try to do it, is one or the most difficult tasks a society can face. The sorry fact is that most of this trouble is gone into because of just because of some kind of cultural heritage and baggage.
All societies throughout the human history have controlled the sexual desires and impulses of their members to a certain degree. However, the exact nature of these limitations is decided by the nature and state of economic development in the society.
For example, a typical Polynesian society with a common source of resources simply has no similar sexual stigmas and limitations that the societies based on private ownership do have.

Most of these limitations for sexuality that we have now have to do with the rise of the agricultural society and its needs, but in a post-industrial society they are often just cultural remnants from an age when there were no modern tools for controlling the results of sexual activity.
On the other hand, very often the most staunch opponents of abortion are paradoxically the most staunch supporters of the death penalty and aggressive foreign policies and military actions. Still, one just has to ask them: how you think about killing in a war which justification you are not personally convinced at all?

The sorry fact is that very many opponents of abortion do not in reality care at all for people who would be born against the will of their parents if abortion would be made impossible. All too often they don’t want to give a single thought for the poverty and the environment already full of crime that many of these unwanted children would so often be thrown into.
No, they are blinded by dogma, which of course is mostly of a religious nature, that come from the time when contraceptives and abortion were not real options. A sorry fact is that people who are blinded by dogma cannot be argued with rationally.

However, I would still like to point out that here in Finland there are very many reasonable Christians, who see abortion or the use of contraceptives as a practical issue, as these things simply do help our society to remain a better place to live for all members of the society.
There just are less of the unwanted, uncared and unloved children who would be here without the use of contraceptives and in some cases, an early and medically safe abortion.

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First and foremost humans could now retain gathered new knowledge in a large scale, which is just not possible before the invention of language. Homo sapiens as a species of the apes was an extremely social species. Our brains had already evolved to handle the extreme volume of information that living in big herd of extremely sensitive social animals does necessitate.
On the other hand, whales may have 'language' of sorts and also a social life, but they do not have hands with which to grab things and their language will be forever a social tool only.

Humans with both the language and capable hands could invent and most of all make new things. Most importantly they were soon the only species that could easily retain the exact knowledge of these inventions which would not be lost anymore when the inventor died.

So, the language is the big thing that separates humans from animals, but even it is just an evolutionary step forward of the sounds that all mammals use to warn and express sadness and joy.
Invention of language did lead, in fact, to all other things that humans are now better than other mammals. The better tools, the ability to laugh and have joy were perfected with the aid of speech.
Even the birth of music is accredited in recent research to birth of speech, as music uses the same brain functions as speech to create emotions in humans.

Language was, however, not just a force for good, as it did bring also in the seeds for future big trouble. Evolution had at first perfected the human sexuality as a way for keeping the species up and going.
It was soon doubly important, as the sexual selection was soon one of the only force that was keeping this extremely successful species still evolving. It had soon achieved such a secure position as a species in nature, that the natural selection soon did not have any real effect on the development of the species.

Unfortunately, humans have since completely messed up that system after the invention of speech and most of all invention of different permanent cultures and most of all after the invention of religions. In my mind the real, crucial event, however, was the invention of agriculture and most importantly the invention of inheritance of private land-property along blood-lines.
Only after that moment did it become extremely important to exactly know who had fathered whom, which is in my mind the root of all evil in human sexuality.

When people did live in hunter-gatherer-groups the name of the father was not really that important. Rearing of the children was a communal affair, as it was quite recently also in many Polynesian societies which also had extremely relaxed rules concerning sexuality.
The birth of landed property did in turn gave a reason, for example, for making women prisoners of their own dwellings, so they could not have sex with other males.

This development did give rise to a wild variety of other ways for restricting female sexuality. Unfortunately they are still in use even in many modern cultures, but are still commonly quite unknown in all societies where resources are owned communally.
Sexuality was soon seen as even the greatest threat to the stability of societies that were based on the then also quite newly invented private ownership of land.

This development did lead to absurd things like the endless no-no's in Judaism, where sexuality is squashed and strangled in countless ways. However, no real reason is ever given for doing this. Sexuality is just made to be something so evil that it cannot be even talked about.
One modern theory for the all of sexual restrictions in Judaism is that the new Judaic religious creed had at the beginning so small follower-base, that the leaders of the new cult wanted to make sure that every possible child is born to expand their narrow follower-base. So things like masturbation and having sex just for fun in those times when there would be no pregnancy to be expected had to be strongly forbidden.

Christianity sadly inherited many of the odd and strange ideas concerning sexuality from Judaism, but happily the secularization of the Christian world has made them dead letter all over the world.
However, in Islam this ancient and in modern societies quite needless sex- and woman-fearing (and hating) legacy still lives on.

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Law of complexity in abstract ideas: If an abstract idea can get more complex, it will.

Second corollary: The time an abstract idea has been around correlates positively with its complexity

Third corollary: The less an abstract idea has contact points with reality, the more complex it can get.

Fourth corollary: The more public attention an purely abstract idea gets, the more complex it will eventually get.

Fifth corollary: An abstract idea that does not tickle the imagination will remain simple.

Sixth corollary: The more complex an abstract idea gets, the more easily it is accepted, as complexity aids to hide the problems in the original idea. (*see footnote)

Seventh corollary: Adding more complexity to an abstract idea will not normally increase its truth-value.

Eight corollary: The popularity of a purely abstract idea does not often depend on its truth-value, but on its utility-value.

Ninth corollary: A complex abstract idea will never get less complex with time.

Tenth corollary: The complexity of an idea protects it from criticism, as the more difficult an idea is to understand, the less people will even try to tackle it.

* Footnote to sixth corollary: Adding complexity to an abstract idea will evoke the "I should understand this, but I do not. I will pretend that I do"-effect." The complexity of an idea is often mistakenly seen as proof of its deepness and strength, even if it can be evidence of the opposite.

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Creating a triangle between three separate independent objects is a thing that it easily and even automatically done by humans in their mind. The existence of measurable physical distance between these objects is, of course, a fact, but I do think that the idea that a straight line does somehow really exist between them is just a human convention.
I do understand that there is a terrible mental hurdle at play here. For example, the distance between Earth, Mars and Sun is always a physical, measurable fact. Of course, it is never the same, but for a millionth or trillionth part of second at a time it can be said to be such and such.
On the other hand, the idea that there would exist a straight line between these three objects does easily exist in the human mind, but this line does not ever exist in nature.

I do not mean at all that these theories that do produce squares, triangles and cubes would not be true and valid as tools for measuring, and also very accurately analysing and predicting things. I just do mean that even these things do exist as absolutes only in a theoretical universe, but in the real universe they can produce just good enough, great and even magnificent results, but not absolutes anymore.
The form of any object that is made of matter found in nature depends on the accuracy of the observation. As all matter is made out of atoms that do not form perfect, if we increase the accuracy of the measurement enough, its edges do becomes more and more bumpy.

Only a theoretical object can be absolutely uniform. If one does theorize and so, in fact, imagine a straight line between two objects, this line does really not exist in nature, even if we have trained our brains to treat even these highly theoretical objects as somehow real.
Many kinds of mathematical and geometrical theorems can be shown to be even absolute right and unchanging in theory. They can be repeated in endlessly and even independent of any observer. This fact does not mean that all the theoretical objects that were created with these theories would and should exist in the real world too.

If the we always start with the same premises, as is the case in mathematics and geometry, we will always inevitably get the same results and even any other species doing the same things will inevitable find the same universal laws and patterns that govern theoretical mathematics and geometry.
I’m just saying that when these rules are applied on real-world objects the results will always lose something from their absoluteness. They will for example always become relative to the person who is doing the measurement and level of measurement that is used in each case.

In the real world, the results of every measurement do gain an inevitable fuzziness that a pure theory has, in fact, often trouble to predict. We just need to know many particulars of the current thing that is measured and often also particulars about the tools that are being used.
My main point is that even if many mathematical or geometrical theories can safely be regarded as absolutes in theory, they do lose their full absoluteness the very moment when they are applied to any real world objects with all of their inherent fuzziness. On the other hand, they will certainly regain their full absoluteness again, when they are applied onto theoretical objects.

Of course, the theory in itself can still be true, even if the real-world results achieved using do become slightly fuzzy. It just does not produce absolute results in the real world, as it does when it is used in the world of ideas. In the real world, the results will always be just approximations and will depend, for example, on the method of measurement that is used.
Let me repeat; I still think that a perfect triangle, square or cube just does not exist in the wild.
They are just extremely vital theoretical tools. They are used as aids to measure, understand and interpret the reality in we do live in, and as such they are extremely useful and necessary.

The real world just lacks absolutes, as our universe really is a fuzzy and messy collection of many kinds of forces that do drive our universe into different directions simultaneously.
This, of course, is the thing that does make life interesting, even if it makes the existence of all absolutes uncomfortable in the real world.

Accepting the fact that even absolute ideas get always relative in the real world is the beginning of all science and in the it is just the thing that does differentiate it from religions, which are commonly based on some kinds of 'absolute truths'.
With the help of mathematics and geometry we can create a theoretical universe, which can help us assess and analyze the real universe. However, the things that do reside there need not to have real doubles in the real universe, as they are just vital and necessary tools, that are created to help us analyze this real universe.
The point is that even in the field of mathematics and geometry the real 'absolute truths' do reside only in this theoretical universe, but in real world we are always constrained by real, limiting things like energy, matter and time.
Understanding this does not make the mathematics or geometry or any other field of science false or suspect in any way, on the contrary.

(This piece was completely reworked at 20th of August, 2011, with changes in all of the central ideas, in fact)

PS. The great philosopher of science, Karl Popper did think along the lines that I present here. Karl Popper's principle of falsifiability runs into difficulties when the epistemological status of mathematics is considered. It is difficult to conceive how simple statements of arithmetic, such as 2 + 2 = 4, could ever be shown to be false. If they are not open to falsification they can not be scientific. If they are not scientific, it needs to be explained how they can be informative about real world objects and events.
Popper's solution was an original contribution in the philosophy of mathematics. His idea was that a number statement such as "2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples" can be taken in two senses. In one sense it is irrefutable and logically true, in the second sense it is factually true and falsifiable. Concisely, the pure mathematics "2 + 2 = 4" is always true, but, when the formula is applied to real world apples, it is open to falsification.
So, in other words, Popper is saying that the theory of mathematics is a quite different thing, than is applying it to real world objects. (This PS was added on 23th of August)

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Could it be that we have been carefully trained not to notice the lack of fairness in matters that do concern the economy anymore? Of course, there is also the undeniable fact that all more advanced human societies have always been and will always be fundamentally based on inequality,
All people just do not just have similar capabilities and human societies do also always need leaders, who have some power over others and are more equal than others, to paraphrase the famous sentence from George Orwell.
I have always hated the idea of ‘slippery slope’, but I do think that it can well be applied here. When we are forced to accept the inevitability of inequality in human societies, we can end up accepting even ultimate and cruel forms on inequality and extreme forms of unfairness, if we are not careful.

Of course, there is also the factor that makes the British aristocracy despise and hate all those who have not inherited their money, but who have earned it by themselves. They are, in fact, just making a virtue out of a vice.
Their example, however, does amply show how this strategy of just turning things upside down can work extremely well. There really are a lot of people, who really quite honestly do think that just inheriting wealth or a position because of the simple accident of birth can make some people more worthy than others.

A simple fact of life is that we have different scales for fairness for different situations. We will not tolerate a situation when our own peers get paid more than us for the same work. However, quite naturally we have often have very little problem in accepting that our superiors do get paid a lot more, as this is seen a quite natural way of how things do work.
As this is the case, we have in the end often only little more trouble in accepting the fact that our superiors do get paid twice as much as we and ultimately even 150 or 200 times more.

In a modern society, one factor is that the extremely well paid jobs are such that it is really difficult to even understand what these people do, and what are their real responsibilities. So the fact, that people who did cook up the housing bubble and the economic disaster following it were, in fact, rewarded handsomely for their troubles.
The people who really paid the cost of the downturn of the economy were the ordinary workers, who had nothing to do with creating the problems in the first place. We can easily see the unfairness of this situation, but we have been carefully trained to accept it just as an inevitable fact of life.

On the other hand, even if complete equality is impossible, I do believe that at least aiming for greater equality will always produce more equality than striving for greater inequality.
I do believe that the role of society in capitalism should be to alleviate the inequality that is always inevitably created by capitalism. I do not believe that it would be ever possible or even wise to stamp inequality completely out of a society. However, a realistic goal just could be to keep it on reasonable limits.

The fact that billionaire Warren Buffet can demand more taxes on the rich tells how a person can have the instinct for fairness intact, even if he makes billions. The sad fact, however, normally is that the idea of fairness is a thing that people with great incomes think they need to obliterate from their minds..
Great incomes just are generally not acquired with only pleasant means, but also by using other people to one’s own advantage or by acquiring inherited property that can have been originally acquired by somewhat unpleasant and even quite unfair means.

As the economist Nouriel Roubini has so eloquently shown, there is the distinct possibility that capitalism will die of self-inflicted wounds, when the extremely well-paid upper class spends their days finding ways to cut costs and to expand their profits endlessly.
Nowadays, all too often this will mean exporting the lower level of work to countries where work is less expensive. They just do not realize that by hiring less and less people in their own society, they will eventually erase their very own customer-base, as there will be less and less buying power in their own society, as there simply is less and less work on offer.

This is, of course, a very central problem in capitalism. When every single individual is aiming at maximizing their own profits in the short term, their common actions can eat up their own markets in the long term, but no single individual will bear responsibility for it.
Of course, the far-away countries where work is shipped will benefit from this shift and new markets will be created there. As the business is more and more global the extremely well paid upper class will never see any reason to worry about this trend, as in a globalized world they will simply earn their profits and bonuses from these new and emerging markets.

There is just one thing wrong here. They do themselves still live in the society that will be in decline because of their own actions. In this society there is an ever-increasing lack of fairness, when more and more people lose the ability to earn a decent living with the work of their hands.
Meanwhile, some people will earn more and more from running the ever-more globalized companies, for which the well-being and success of the society of their origins does mean less and less.

The saddest part is that even the last remnants of idea of fairness seems to have been obliterated among all too many of the really rich. One reason for this just might be that the zeitgeist of our time is just now so much in their favor, with the ideas like the of trickle-down effect making even outrageous levels of income acceptable.
The rich just seem to be less and less willing to pay taxes and share even small part of their good fortune with the less fortunate ones. I also suspect that one reason for this is that when their production was in their own home-country, the rich were willing to pay for education and health-service of their own future workers, but with the globalization even this incentive for ‘charity’ has vanished.
Of course, the really rich just have always had the need to develop a way of thinking that can make it possible for them to live with a complete peace of mind in luxury in a society, where some people are desperate and destitute. They just need to develop a way of seeing that poor are poor just because they are losers and rich are rich because they deserve it.

However, the real danger is, that when the rich take more and more of the production of goods to cheaper countries to maximize their own profits, the amount of people that are able to pay taxes will be diminishing rapidly.
If even the people who are growing rich because of this development are at the same less and less willing to take part in the upkeep of society, this will lead to big trouble indeed.

There will be more and more urban poor in the developing world, when the manual jobs they held previously are being transferred to cheaper countries, but at the same time the society has less and less ability to help them, when the income-base of the society keeps being eroded.
The recent riots in England have many kinds of causes, but the frustration in front of an extremely bleak economic future for the poor just may be one of the reasons why things flared up just now.

I do not believe in any kind of socialization of the economy, but I do believe in increasing the level of fairness in our society and even fostering solidarity between all members of it.
I believe that I do not need even to harbor any dogmas in this respect, The only thing that really is required from me personally is just the willingness to advocate the things that I understand to be able to increase the level of fairness in a society, and oppose the things that will in my own mind increase the level of unfairness.

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"From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step."

- Denis Diderot in “Essai sur le Mérite de la Vertu” (1745)

"In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice."

-Denis Diderot in “Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws” (1774)

"The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid."

-Denis Diredot in "Refutation of Helvétius" (written 1773-76, published 1875)

"Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land."

- Denis Diderot in “The character Suzanne Simon”, in “La Religieuse” (1796)

"There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint."

-Denis Diderot as quoted in Cracking the Code of Our Physical Universe : The Key to a Whole New World of Enlightenment and Enrichment (2006)

"To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!”

- Denis Diderot, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966)

“The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.”

-Denis Diderot in “Pensées Philosophiques” (1746)

“One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it.”

-Denis Diderot in “Pensées Philosophiques” (1746)

"A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone."

-Denis Diderot as quoted in “The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963)

“Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.”

-Denis Diderot in “Article on Political Authority”, L'Encyclopédie (1751 - 1766)

“In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.”

- Denis Diderot in “On the Interpretation of Nature” (1753)

"It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it."

- Denis Diderot in “On Dramatic Poetry” (1758)

“Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.”

-Denis Diderot in “Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws” (1774)

“Distance is a great promoter of admiration!”

- Denis Diderot as quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks”,

“The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.”

-Denis Diderot in “Elements of Physiology” (1875)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_diderot
"Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent persona during the Enlightenment and is best-known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie.
Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based. His articles included many topics of the Enlightenment."

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It may sound quite paradoxical, but accepting the lack of final and unmovable answers does not, in fact, make a person more insecure, but it can make one’s life much more secure. Of course, one can not forget the sorry fact of life that humans are as species prone to seek absolute truths even in places where absolute truths cannot exist.
However, if I base my life-stance on any kind of prophesied or revealed 'absolute truths', my life will be quite inevitably badly shaken if I some day do find out that they are not in fact the absolutely truths.
On the other hand, a person who has from the beginning been expecting to find better and better answers as he or she goes along, as so typically happens in science, does not generally have to face such disappointments.

Even a very strong inner conviction about an ‘absolute truth’ needs not to have any truth-value at all, if it is based on some kind of prophecy or inner revelation and it does not get any better with time.
On the other hand just an educated guess that is formed by using the scientific method that is based on even partially known facts does just become the better, the more facts are to be known later on, even if a final and unmovable answer may probably often never be available.
So, a bit paradoxically one could even say that a life-view which is based on set of non-moving and absolute truths is on much shakier foundations than a life-view that is based on movable and changeable sets of ‘truths’ and ideas.

In the latter case, one can expect new truths to surpass even the most established old ones, if new knowledge really does require doing it. Facing the quite inevitable vast changes in the world and knowledge of it do not leave a person gasping for air, as is often the case if a thing that has been seen to be an ‘absolute truth’ is surpassed by new and better knowledge.
Of course, just learning a simple set of unmovable ‘truths’ and living trusting in them, no matter what, is always the easy way out, but the easiest and cheapest things are not necessarily the best ones here as they are not in the life in general.

However, there does exist a wide set of ‘good enough truths’ in science, which are on the surface as unmoving and stable as some of the ‘absolute truths’ that are offered by religions. For example, the theory of gravity or the theory of nature of light have not been changed for a very long time.
However, the real modern scientific method is very deep down based on the assumption that we can never know even these things for sure.

All facts and new ideas that are presented in the realm of science are always, in the end, just the best possible approximations and even educated guesses that we can make at any given moment. A real scientific guess is, however, always based on the best possible currently available evidence.
It is also always subject to change, if compelling and widely enough accepted new evidence does become available.
Of course, some of scientific theories have achieved such levels of accuracy, that there has not been any need to change them for a very long time. We can, in practice, even treat them very similar to ‘absolute truths’ in everyday life.
It is possible to base other theories on them in the full knowledge that there is currently no reason whatsoever to doubt them. That does not mean that there would not always also remain the possibility, that they need to be changed on a later date, and the theories that were derived from them need just to be adjusted as well.

This is, of course, the real big difference in science, when it is compared with religions. In them an awfully lot of things are commonly presented as unmovable truths, that need and can never to be questioned, as they just are assumed as given from the beginning.
However, if I put my trust in science, I do not, if fact, have to trust in any kind of unmoving model of ideas and universe, but in fact I put my trust in the idea that we can improve our knowledge of our universe constantly.

Of course, dogmatic beliefs can and have arisen also in the realm of science, as for example the Aristotelian ideas that held sway for centuries. However, when the basic ideas of change and improvement are accepted in the core of the system, change and improvement really do occur much more easily than in any truly dogmatic system of thought.

(the following ideas on absolutes are from my earlier posting in this blog, but I think I need to bring these ideas up here also)

In fact, come to think of it, most things in the world really do not have any definite, final answers; contrary to what many people would like to think. Of course, final-sounding answers are often very cozy and comforting.
As Bertrand Russell famously said, claiming to have certainty when there is, in fact, none available is a very common human vice, but it is still a vice.

Realizing this does not stop us from striving to have the best possible knowledge it is possible to acquire; in fact, just this realization can be the driving force that will constantly increase knowledge of humans, our societies and of the universe.
History already does amply show that the love of comfortable, unmovable truths can slow or even stop altogether human progress, if we just allow these unmoving truths to accumulate deep enough.

One of the deepest human emotions is the desire for security and certainty. Humans have after all lived for millions of years in unpredictable, often hostile environments, where danger can lurk anywhere and a sanctuary offered by any kind of certainty has always been welcome.
The feeling of knowing for certain where one really stands just is an extremely satisfying feeling for all humans. This is of course one of the main reasons why the religions have been so successful, as they do offer absolutes in areas where absolutes cannot exist.

This very desire for certainty could also be one of the reasons why it could be very hard for some to swallow the things that I want to say next. Namely the more I have thought about it, the more I have become convinced that no unequivocally unchanging or in other words ‘absolute’ truths do exist in the real world in which we do exist.
I claim that absolute truths do exist only in the shadow world of theory and ideas, which is basically a mental reflection of the real world that the human mind can and will create.

In this world of ideas and theory things can be processed in a quite different way than in a real world and often quite independent of it. This world of ideas and theory is of course mostly based on the perceptions we have of the real world.
However, as it is not constrained by the limits imposed by the real world, the things that we do create in the world of ideas and theory do not need to have any connections with the real world in the end, as so often happens in religions.

On the other hand, especially in the world of science some kind of connection to the real world is always required even from the most far-fetched ideas and theories for them to be seen as part of science.
Science can reveal patterns and connections which are hidden from the naked eye and which do exist between many kinds of real world objects and phenomena, but in real science they are always derived from the properties of real-world objects and phenomena.

This idea is of course also a complete reversal of the Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which ordinary people see just the shadows of universal ideas that can be seen only by ‘philosophers’ or people with exceptional capabilities and the real-world objects we see are just imperfect copies of some kind of perfect, ideal models of things that do exist in some kind of higher level of existence.
Of course, Plato is just plain wrong and the reverse is true; humans can (and do) create perfect ideas of things that do all exist so imperfectly (and with great variations) in the real world.

The more I think of it the more I do become convinced that the things and phenomena that do seem to be held as absolutely true on the surface are that mostly just because of how we interpret and observe things as humans with a set of certain very restricted capabilities.
I do even think now that unequivocally absolute and unchanging truths can in practice exist only in an abstract universe, which is not bound by the laws of nature.

Of course, even this claim cannot be an absolute truth; it is true even for me only as far as I do not gain knowledge of any absolute truths that exist in the real world and which cannot ever be changed by anything.
At this point ,it is good to remember that even the sun will rise on Earth for over 5 billion more times, but one day the red giant that once was our sun will swallow the planet Earth and the sun will never rise again.

So, the fact that the sun always rises on Earth is not an absolute and unchanging truth. It is just an undisputed fact that has the value of a ‘absolute truth’ only for a limited duration of time.
The following idea may seem even outrageous for some people, but I do think that also logic can be absolutely true only when it is applied to things where also the premises used are always absolutely true and will never change.
As far as I know such things do exist only in the abstract world, not in the real world in which we do live in, as all the things that we deal in a real world can change with time. Only abstract ideas and abstract thoughts can remain unchanged forever.
Of course, logic can be an extremely valuable tool, even if it is not absolutely true, but just true enough to serve our practical purposes.

In the end logic just is only as true in our practical world as are the practical premises that are being used, even if in the world of theory an idea can sound and shine like an absolute truth.

So, a chain of logic can appear to be ‘absolutely true’ on the world of ideas, but it does normally become compromised the very moment when it is applied to any kind of real-world problem, as in the real world things do not always remain stable and unchanged.
Any fact or an idea that could be an extremely true and well established fact yesterday just may be false today or after five or five billion years.

In a similar vein, the vast field of metaphysics which just loves to deal with absolutes can producevery absolute-sounding ideas only because it deals with pure abstractions which do not exist in the real world.
In fact, most metaphysics cannot be applied to the real world in any meaningful way. A lot of metaphysics is ,in fact, just built to support some of the real world-ideas that we do already have.

There simply is no right or wrong metaphysics, but there is only currently popular or less popular metaphysics. In the end, there simply is no way of ever showing which of the ideas presented in metaphysics could be the right ones. A sure sign of this is that no major metaphysical idea that has ever been presented is not without its fans today.
So, an idea, which is presented as metaphysical preposition is already beyond any real evaluation when it is presented as metaphysics. This is of course a tactic that has been used extremely successfully by many kinds of religious apologists, but also by Marx and many of his followers.
The hardest thing to swallow for many could be that in my mind even mathematics is absolute only as long as it is used theoretically. It might be hard to accept that all mathematical equations that do not concern real world objects or their properties are theoretical in nature.

The equation 2 + 2 = 4 is just a mathematical theory of how things can be added up. Counting first two fungus and adding two fungus to it can produce a result of four fungus, but as in the real world it is often quite impossible to say where one fungus starts and a second stops, the result is always just ‘about four’ and not any kind of absolute.
As soon one starts to count a real objects with the 2 + 2 = 4 equation this equation becomes an approximation and the real result depends how one defines the things that are being counted.

So, even the equation of “2 + 2 = 4” is absolutely true only as long as it is not applied to the real world, and do not of what are the things that are to be counted. The moment we apply it to real world objects there is an element of sudden change and surprise that do make the exact result less than absolute.
There are of course other things that seem to be absolutes; for example the speed of light or many of the properties of sub-atomic particles.

However, they are absolutes only in our own version of the universe, but if any of the multiverse-theories does really hold water, the constants that we see as unmoving and final just could be one version of the thing and the same values could anything in a different parallel or even serial version of the universe.
Of course, we have no real way (at the moment at least) for finding out if the multiverse-theory is true, but as there is a real chance of it being true, even the most absolute-sounding things can be less than absolute.

All this does not mean that I would claim that there could not be any absolute truths. I am just saying that I do not know of things that would be always true without any kind of change making them possibly untrue some day.
The time-frames required for these changes can be of course be beyond the real capabilities of the human mind.
Of course, in practical terms there are very many things that can be treated as being ‘absolutely true’ in real life, even if we know that also they can change on some extremely distant day.

(The beginning of this piece was completely rewritten and the headline was changed at 14th of August)

Comments

Mr Russell had the wonderful ability of being able to look through and behind the things that make us follow all kinds of customs and traditions, often without giving them a second thought.
Of course, we need customs and traditions, but we need also people who can look at them critically at times and this is what Bertrand Russell did with gusto.
Bertrand Russell did use the powerful weapon of reason to look at things which are not basically often very rational at all. His results are not always applicable to the real world as such, but I do think that they can act as great starting points for future thought.

However, I do not believe that Bertrand Russell did find the absolute truth on anything, even if I do see him one of the freest minds of the past few centuries. In fact, he would have been gravely offended if somebody would have suggested such a thing, as he did not believe in absolute truths himself at all.
However, he had the ability to look at things from new angles. The most wonderful thing is that did this seemingly often quite free from all prejudice and bigotry.

Of course, he had his very own definite set of favorite ideas, which he saw as true and most of wise for humanity as the whole.
However, the more I read him the more I am surprised on his ability to free himself from the constraints of ideology and look at things at their face value.

Bertrand Russell was of course a child of his own times, as we all are. During his incredibly long writing career he did write some things that even he gravely regretted a few decades later. The most wonderful thing about him, however, was his ability to admit his errors. He did really change his views on some central ideas, when he received new compelling evidence on that he had been wrong.
Largely because of this ability to change he is also seen as spineless and unprincipled by some. There really are people who think that it is better to stick to your guns, even if you know that you are wrong.
A man of high principles sadly very often becomes a man with outdated ideas, when new information makes changing ones views necessary. Bertrand Russell was never such a man, but he always had his basic principles intact, there is no doubt about that.

Bertrand Russell was far from a dry scientist, but he was a very passionate man, who spoke and worked relentlessly on things that he saw as beneficial for the whole of human kind. Most of all peace was a central issue for him for all of his life, but issues concerning social justice for all levels were near his heart all his life.
He did much work in the field of finding a way to further a more human kind education also, but here his work was seemingly quite in vain.

For me at least the main legacy that he left behind, however, is the idea that all things that humans do can and must be analyzed also critically. The ability to free ones mind from the constraints of the moment and current society and look at very basic needs of human beings is a thing that I hope I could perhaps some day learn from this extraordinary figure.

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This may sound a bit far-fetched at first, I freely admit, but let me explain a bit deeper before dismissing this idea. The immense diversity American in the religious field is a result of the policy of strict separation of state and religion. So the American churches have had to learn to fend for themselves and they have had to develop way s that can make people want to come there and also pay for the fun.
In the European state-churches with their rights of taxation such need has not emerged, and the net result is that the real religious fervor is a thing that is seen only in the independent Christian fringe-movements.

On the other hand in the Islamic world there is basically no separation of state and religion at all. In fact, Islam is all too often used as a very basic building block for the whole society. In many Islamic countries the whole direction of policies is on the surface at least decided solely on the basis of religion.
The important thing, however, is that in Islam (outside the mostly Iranian Shite faction) there is very little formal organization in the religion itself, even if there are great varieties even in this and is some Islamic countries state has a stronger hold on the running of religious life than in others.

However, in the end, in general every individual Iman is on just as a shaky footing as his American counterpart is. They compete for followers and money in the form of donations on a daily basis with other Imans and only the really successful ones are respected and get good crowds.
This development has brought about a situation where the “purity” of the message is one of the major tools used to bolster one’s own standing in this hard religious competition.

When any apparent lack of strong convictions can and will be used against a competitor, it is very difficult to succeed by running any kind of liberal ministry. In the hard competition, one just can not challenge any of the basic teachings of Islam, even if the preachers privately would well know how their suitability to the modern world is fast diminishing by the day.
A very similar process of unrelenting religious competition is going on in the United States also and has created a class of ultra-conservative preachers for whom the “purity” and even extremism of their message is one of their most important marketing tools.

Of course, there are immense varieties in the relationship of state and religion in the diverse Islamic world. There is a direct Islamic theocracy of Iran and the medieval feudal state of Saudi-Arabia where Islam is used to justify a cruel and feudal, even medieval system of monarchy.
On the other hand there are Islamic countries like Lebanon or Algeria, where religion is not at the forefront at all, but current governments are fighting the Islamic movements to the end. There in between are possible variations of the theme.

On the other hand, the degree of how the relationship between religion and state stands in Islamic societies could largely be a result of how big impact the short period of rule by the western colonial powers did have in them.
The Algerian or Lebanonian societies were influenced to a far greater degree than many others by the European ideas of equality of the sexes, independent, secular law-based legal system and many other humanistic European innovations.

The easily discernible differences in between Pakistan and Algeria are according to also Niall Ferguson in part because of the differences in the type of colonial rule that was used in them.
The French did have a mission of spreading their (often also quite modern and humanistic) ideas to their holdings. On the other hand the British were often quite content to rule by proxy and use the local elites to help them rule.
The British just were all too often happy to collect the taxes and sell their wares to locals. That is a reason why the effect of their colonial rule was in some indirectly ruled countries much smaller in everyday-life and most of all legislation than of the French.

However, Iran and Saudi-Arabia who did never lose their formal independence had no such direct humanistic influences, as they were never under the direct colonial rule.
On the other hand, the Shite version of Islam is often compared with Catholic Church, as it has differs vastly from the mainstream Sunni Islam even in this respect. The Shia Islam is based on a rigid and formal hierarchy that is quite unknown in most parts of Sunni Islam.
Niall Ferguson reminds in his book how Sunni world lost a long-standing central source of leadership, when the new republic of Turkey did put on and on the caliphate in 1924. The Osman caliphs had up this point been also the de facto religious leaders of the Sunni world.

The development of religion in Iran has always been quite separate from the developments in the Sunni world. This process was intensified after the Persian Shahs did for political and tactical reasons choose the Shia faith as their own state-religion.
Shia faith has really developed like the Catholic Church, when the Sunni world has developed more like the American Evangelical scene.
The end result has been strong conservatism in both cases, when the countries that were under the Protestant state churches have given birth to modern secular states.

The unchanging and day-by-day more old-fashioned nature of mainstream Islam just might be a bit paradoxically to a large degree be a result of lack of formal organization, as a tightly led centralize organization can be steered to new directions by just a few people with new ideas.
On the other hand, a disorganized system of thought that relies solely on the power of tradition and draws its whole legitimacy form ancient teachings can resist change much, much more effectively than any state-lead formal religious organization.

So, both the extreme openness and extreme closeness can lead to similar end results, when the development in Western Europe does show what can happen when a monolithic faith is splintered into national entities.
Most of what it does show can happen if these local churches are changed with time by the strong humanistic tendencies that took hold of these societies. In the meantime, the monolithic Catholic Church could fight these tendencies with far greater success, as on the other hand could the leaderless Sunni Islam too.

Comments

Also, if I provide links to the writings of the Norwegian madman, I will just make him a service in his quest for publicity, even if these idiotic ramblings will not of course never have any effect on sane people at all.
I know well that all normal people can handle also rubbish like these books and texts. However I think that spreading links to them is not wise in the long run, as the more people follow those links and read this utter bullshit, the more there is a possibility that somebody starts taking it seriously.

At this point, I must make it clear that in my mind refraining from actively spreading a text is not censorship. I do not spread a lot of other texts that I see as enjoyable and worthwhile, but nobody can say that I am censoring them by not spreading them.
I am here speaking about actively spreading things like 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' or ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, which are just blatant forgeries and propaganda from which no actual information of anything can ever be gleaned.

I do think that there are a few books that can quite universally be classed as evil: 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' and 'The Malleus Maleficarum' are surely among them. On top of all, they both are well known to be just blatant forgeries.They have just one  aim: hurting a certain group of people. Besides they do not have any kind of literary merits either.
I can well understand and support the spreading of a good summary of the idiocy contained in these kinds of books, but why should anybody read a book that is simply evil and full of evil lies that try only to hurt other people?
Reading Shakespeare, Bertrand Russell or Darwin or Galileo will increase your knowledge on some front, but reading evil bullshit will not help you develop in any way. Reading evil bullshit can even affect your mind, as the most evil and most utter bullshit is normally carefully designed to have that effect.

I do not see how any sane person would not say that any of these books is not evil. Actively spreading the message of pure evil is not a thing that I do see as a thing a decent person would engage him- or herself, ever.
I am not saying at all that people who know what they are doing should not read and analyze also these things, but I'm against linking to the works themselves in public. I simply see that innocent-sounding linking to a thing can, in fact, be promoting this evil stuff in the real world.

I must repeat myself; I am speaking about even diminishing the online availability of even these utterly idiotic treatises at all, but just about actively promoting evil by marketing it with providing links to it. I just happen also to think that just morbid curiosity is not a compelling enough reason to delve into shit for any longer period of time, if you already know it is shit.
I see this as also a problem of the allocation of resources; If I spend my days studying how the evil in the world works, I will perhaps miss the good parts, as there are always both sides available and your view of the world will in the end be molded by the things that you spend your days with.

However, my main point remains this: it just is not wise to promote bullshit actively, when you well know yourself that a thing actually is bullshit. If you think that reading 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' or ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ is a excellent way to spend your evenings, that is of course your own problem. However, the thing I am speaking of here is if the people who do actively oppose ideas that are being presented in books like this should be spreading links to them and so also inevitably promote them.
This kind of decision does not depend on any outside sources saying what to promote and what not, but I think that one can get very far simply by using ones own intelligence in every single instance to decide what is worth of our attention and what is not.

I must stress that I am not suggesting suppressing or censoring anything, but just refraining from promoting utter bullshit, if you well know that it is bullshit.

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This state of affairs is of course proof of how humans are able to alter their minds to an extraordinary degree; it is not any kind of proof of that there would exist different ‘realities’.
One can develop an endless amount of different alternative realities in one's mind or develop old, earlier made-up realities even further, but these creations do exist only in the mind of a person who believes in them.
They can feel even very real, if belief just is strong enough. However, the true reality is the one that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

Of course, the reality of a bacteria is quite different to the reality of an ant and the reality of an ant is extremely different from ours. However, they do share the same basic reality, even if they can perceive it very differently.
Similarly the reality probably looks extremely different on the level of a quark or a galaxy, but they still do exist as parts of the same reality.

If the multiverse-theory is correct it is possible that there is an endless amount of other universes, but according to what we know now we just might never find out if these ideas are true or not. In any case they are part of the same reality in which we do live, they are only in different parts of it, and they can be formed differently.
The current theory goes that the multiple universes do not overlap. Pondering about their existence or nonexistence is in the end just a purely mental exercise for us, as the other possible universes have no practical way of affecting (or even to be observed in any way) from our own bubble of a universe.
However, if I claim that there is only one reality, nothing in this statement implies that I would claim to know any kind of final truth about its true nature or structure.

If we assume that there is an alternative reality, but it cannot be observed in any way in reality in which we do live in, how could we become truly convinced of its existence in the first place?
If this alternative reality cannot cause anything observable in the reality in which we do live in, what difference would its existence or nonexistence make to anybody?
If there would be any real-world effects caused by some kind of ‘alternative reality’, we should be able to verify their existence easily, and if there is none, there is no real reason to believe in their existence.

An alternative reality could, of course, be like the other universes in the multiverse theory - then their existence or nonexistence would not make any real difference to us, as we can probably never observe them and they do not affect our own reality in any way.
Of course we can well still think about all kinds of alternative realities endlessly and even imagine their existence in minute detail in theory. After all we have the ability to make up an endless amount of alternative realities in our minds, if we just have the will and enough spare time.

On the other hand, if there is no real evidence and if we base our belief in existence of an 'alternative reality" on writings of 'sages', hearsay and old stories, there is no real difference to the more formal kinds of religions, I'm afraid.
One should not forget that if there would be any even the tiniest observable fact, any single testable hypothesis the theories of 'alternative realities' would be instantly part of the mainstream science.

Alas, sadly that is not the case and all 'alternative realities' are still in the class of religious beliefs, where people do accept all kinds of ideas without any kind of real, hard evidence.
The existence of 'alternative reality' would soon be taught in every class and every university, if there just would be any kind of evidence of their existence to be had. One must just think about the glory and fame which such a revolutionary finding would bring to any scientist.
There is no real reason why scientists all over the world would not seek to prove the existence of alternative realities, but just the lack for any means of verifying the existence of things that do not exist.

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“Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.”

- Sigmund Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927)

“If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience? A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable."

- Sigmund Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927)

“Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”

- Sigmund Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927)

“Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect. “

- Sigmund Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927)

“The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neorosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.”

Sigmund Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929)

“One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation."

Sigmund Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929)

“It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.”

Sigmund Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929)

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.”

Sigmund Freud in “A Philosophy of Life (Lecture 35)

“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”

Sigmund Freud in “A Philosophy of Life” (Lecture 35)

“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”

- Sigmund Freud in a letter to Ernest Jones (1933)

“The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.”

- Sigmund Freud in “Moses and Monotheism” (1938)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_freud
"Sigmund Freud (German pronunciation: [ˈziːkmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical method of psychoanalysis for investigating the mind and treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst.
Freud established sexual drives as the primary motivational forces of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, discovered the phenomenon of transference in the therapeutic relationship and established its central role in the analytic process; he interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture."

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I know that this is a problem that can perhaps ever be solved, but I see that at the core of the problem of these mass-shootings of mostly total strangers is the quest for fame that these acts can satisfy.
On the other hand, the shadier part of mass-media has become very much dependent on the interest they can gather for the things they publish and more ghastly things you do perpetrate, the more interesting you do become.

There is a ready-made spiral of bad going on. The media do spend tens of pages and hundreds of photos to tell everything humanly possible about the perpetrators of these hideous deeds.
It does not take much to realize that a normal person with no special skills or qualities can never achieve this level of instant, huge fame with normal means.

The model for action is there, even the price is extremely high. A person must just be really out of his or her mind to perpetrate a thing like this. For just an extremely unstable mind the instant fame could also at some point seem to be a valid option, if the other options are just things like a suicide.
I do not believe that we could really do anything about this problem, even if a general realization of the existence of this phenomena could of course help.

However, I fear that there just are too big economic interests at stake here for this to ever happen. Some media-outlets just do make incredible amounts of money from reporting about hideous crimes.
An all too sizable part of the media all over the world just does thrive on things like this. They make huge profits from telling the most sordid and grey details about the meaningless and all too often really hideously uninteresting details about the sorry lives of these people.

The media do dutifully fulfill all, even the highest wishes, of these people, who are after fame they well know they would never achieve with any other way. Their grey and meaningless lives do become suddenly extremely interesting, when they have done their horrible deed.
Maybe the problem is that normal life is just not hot enough for the media; we become crime-junkies, who just want our daily servings of ever more gory details, more desperation, more sorrow to feed our appetite for deep emotions.

At the heart of the problem just might be the same thing that makes some of us want harder and harder porn with time. Our emotions are just not stirred by the normal, real life anymore, when media combs through the lives of the seven billion people of the world and gathers the most sordid and sorry human incidents for us to marvel at every single day.

PS. I must add that I am saying all this as a journalist with over 20 years of active first line duty in media under my belt.

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This very desire for certainty could also be one of the reasons why it could be very hard for some to swallow the things that I want to say next. Namely the more I have thought about it, the more I have become convinced that no unequivocally unchanging or in other words ‘absolute’ truths do exist in the real world in which we do exist.
I claim that absolute truths do exist only in the shadow world of theory and ideas, which is basically a mental reflection of the real world that the human mind can and will create.

In this world of ideas and theory things can be processed in a quite different way than in a real world and often quite independent of it.
This world of ideas and theory is of course mostly based on the perceptions we have of the real world.
However, as it is not constrained by the limits imposed by the real world, the things that we do create in the world of ideas and theory need not to have any connections to real world in the end, as so often happens in religions.

On the other hand especially in the world of science some kind of a connection to the real world is always required even from the most far-fetched ideas and theories for them to be seen as part of science.
Science can reveal patterns and connections which are hidden from the naked eye and which do exist between many kinds of real world objects and phenomena, but in real science they are always derived from the properties of real-world objects and phenomena.

This idea is of course also a complete reversal of the Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which ordinary people see just the shadows of universal ideas that can be seen only by ‘philosophers’ or people with exceptional capabilities and the real-world objects we see are just imperfect copies of some kind of perfect, ideal models of things that do exist in some kind of higher level of existence.
Of course Plato is just plain wrong and the reverse is true; humans can (and do) create perfect ideas of things that do all exist so imperfectly with great variations in the real world.

The more I think of it the more I do become convinced that the things and phenomena that do seem to be held as absolutely true on the surface are that mostly just because of how we interpret and observe things as humans with a set of certain very restricted capabilities.
I do even think now that unequivocally absolute and unchanging truths can in practice exist only in an abstract universe, which is not bound by the laws of nature.

Of course even this claim cannot be an absolute truth; it is true even for me only as far as I do not gain knowledge of any absolute truths that exist in the real world and which cannot ever be changed by anything.

At this point it is good to remember that even the sun will rise on Earth for over 5 billion more times, but one day the red giant that once was our sun will swallow the planet Earth and the sun will never rise again.
And so the fact that sun always rises on Earth is not a absolute and unchanging truth. It is just a undisputed fact that has the value of a ‘absolute truth’ only for a limited duration of time.

The following idea may seem even outrageous for some people, but I do think that also logic can be absolutely true only when it is applied to things where also the premises used are always absolutely true and will never change.
As far as I know such things do exist only in the abstract world, not in the real world in which we do live in, as all the things that we deal in a real world can change with time. Only abstract ideas and abstract thoughts can remain unchanged forever.
Of course logic can be a extremely valuable tool, even if it is not absolutely true, but just true enough to serve our practical purposes.
In the end logic just is only as true in our practical world as are the practical premises that are being used, even if in the world of theory an idea can sound and shine like an absolute truth.

So, a chain of logic can appear to be ‘absolutely true’ on the world of ideas, but it does normally become compromised the very moment when it is applied to any kind of real-world problem, as in real world things do not always remain stable and unchanged.
Any fact or an idea that could be a extremely true and well established fact yesterday just may be false today or after five or five billion years.

In similar vein the vast field of metaphysics that just loves to deal with absolutes can produce absolute-sounding ideas only because it deals with pure abstractions which do not exist in the real world.
In fact most metaphysics cannot be applied to the real world in any meaningful way. A lot of metaphysics is in fact just built to support some of the the real world-ideas that we do already have.

There simply is no right or wrong metaphysics, but there is only currently popular or less popular metaphysics. In the end there simply is no way of ever showing which of the ideas presented in metaphysics could be the right ones.
A sure sign of this is that no major metaphysical idea that has ever been presented is not without its fans today.
So a idea which is presented as metaphysical preposition is already beyond any real evaluation when it is presented as metaphysics. This is of course a tactic that has been used extremely successfully by many kinds of religious apologists and also by Marx and many of his followers.

The hardest thing to swallow for many could be that in my mind even mathematics is absolute only as long as it is used theoretically. It might be hard to accept that all mathematical equations that do not concern real world objects or their properties are theoretical in nature.
The equation 2 + 2 = 4 is just a mathematical theory of how things can be added up. Counting first two fungus and adding two fungus to it can produce a result of four fungus, but as in real world it is often quite impossible to say where one fungus starts and a second stops, the result is always just ‘about four’ and not any kind of absolute.

As soon one starts to count real world objects with the 2 + 2 = 4 equation this equation becomes an approximation and the real result depends how one defines the things that are being counted.
So, even the equation of “2 + 2 = 4” is absolutely true only as long as it is not applied to the real world and is not aware of what is being counted. The moment we apply it to real world objects there is a element of sudden change and surprise that do make the exact result less than absolute.

There are of course other things that seem to be absolutes; for example the speed of light or many of the properties of sub-atomic particles.
However, they are absolutes only in our own version of universe, but if any of the multiverse-theories does hold water, the constants that we see as unmoving and final just could be one version of the thing and the same values could anything in a different parallel or even serial version of universe.

Of course we have no real way at the moment of finding out if this multiverse-theory is true, but as there is a real chance of it being true, even the most absolute-sounding things can be less than absolute.
All this does not mean that I would claim that there could not be any absolute truths. I am just saying that I do not know of things that would be always true without any kind of possible of change making them untrue some day. The time-frames required for these changes can be of course be beyond the real capabilities of the human mind.
Of course in practical terms there are very many things that can be treated as being ‘absolutely true’ in real life, even if we know that also they can change on some extremely distant day.

Comments

"Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded Christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years."

- Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies" (1997)

‎"Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives."

— Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (2005)

‎"Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans."

- Jared Diamond in "The Third Chimpanzee" (1991)

"Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world."

— Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (2005)

‎"History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency."

- Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

"People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!"

- Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (2005)

"Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices."

— Jared Diamond in "Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality"

"Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture."

— Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond
"Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA. He is best known for the award-winning popular science books The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse. Diamond has been called a polymath."

Jared Diamond in Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jared-Diamond/142643729175

Comments

"Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded Christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years."

- Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies" (1997)

‎"Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives."

— Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (2005)

‎"Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans."

- Jared Diamond in "The Third Chimpanzee" (1991)

"Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world."

— Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (2005)

‎"History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency."

- Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

"People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!"

- Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (2005)

"Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices."

— Jared Diamond in "Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality"

"Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture."

— Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond
"Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA. He is best known for the award-winning popular science books The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse. Diamond has been called a polymath."

Jared Diamond in Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jared-Diamond/142643729175

Comments

Many religious people like to say that if universe was not ‘created’ on purpose it need to have happened through accident. However, many people seem to be just confused in the use human ideas of "accident" and "purpose".
That Earth goes round the sun is not a accident but a result of a properties of large masses of matter, where masses draw other masses with a certain force.
Similarly the nature of our universe is not "accident", but follows form certain properties that are inherent in of the things that do make it up.

The fact that at the very moment if birth of our universe matter did take a certain form was a result of the properties of the how energy will behave in such a situation.
The very first forms of matter were extremely uniform and simple, but when things progressed, there was more and more diversity, as extremely small differences in local conditions did create the first extremely small local differences also in the matter.

When these a little different particles did interact with other particles in different ways, the complexity did steadily rise and the level of differences between different kinds of matter did also rise steadily.
Again, there needed to be any kind of planning, or hidden DNA, but the inevitable properties of particles and matter at prevailing conditions made things go to a certain direction that was quite inevitable, even if it was not planned.

The history of our universe in the story of rise in complexity and the more complex things do get, the more there are rules that define how things do progress. Again, these rules need not to planned or result of a mysterious matter-DNA, but a result of the rules that were simply derived from the rules that were present in the earlier incarnations of matter.
With the rise in in complexity, also the rules do steadily get more complex, as earlier simpler rules are combined when different layers of matter do interact with other layers.

There really needs not be any kind of planning when the relentless interactions between differentiating forms of matter do create new kinds of matter. The results are not accidents, but are always based on the different inherent properties of the parties that did take part in the interactions.
These interaction did create new and all time more complex forms of matter until level of complexity was reached where the first lifelike forms did see their birth.
Their structure and functionality are decided by the different forms of matter that did take part in the interactions that did create them and they are not any kind of random ‘accident’.

A human idea of accident includes very often also idea of intent, which is not at all present in nature. If a comet hits the planet Earth and wipes out all life, it is not a accident in a way accidents happen to people who are careless, but a result of universe being such as it is and of the fact that comets and planets do exist and from time to time they will collide. There is nothing accidental in this, but all follows from the nature of our universe.

We are of course lucky that no such incident has not razed life from earth and we do exist, but this is not because of planning, but because such incident just are very rare at this stage of maturity in our planetary system.
In the end we cannot know how many struggling life forms have been wiped out in different stages of their development all over the universe, just because they were not as lucky as we have been. Here the idea of accident has of course a role, but again not as a originator of complex processes, but a thing that does end them randomly.

The narrow and extremely restricted way of seeing all things from the perspective of human species, which is extremely prevalent among religious circles of course leads into curious way of thinking where things in nature do happen to please or cause consternation among humans.
The basic thing I am trying to say here is that the birth and the nature of our universe is no accident, if it follows from the basic properties of the matter that does build it up.

Accident is something that can happen or not happen by chance, but I do claim that our universe is as it because its building blocks have certain properties that did necessarily lead into its creation. It was no accident but an inevitability.
This just is a thing that is seemingly too hard to grasp for people who want to see human-like motivations and intentions also in nature.
Accidents do happen randomly, but inevitable things do not. How does a 'inevitable accident' sound to you?

Comments

Many religious people like to say that if universe was not ‘created’ on purpose it need to have happened through accident. However, many people seem to be just confused in the use human ideas of "accident" and "purpose".
That Earth goes round the sun is not a accident but a result of a properties of large masses of matter, where masses draw other masses with a certain force.
Similarly the nature of our universe is not "accident", but follows form certain properties that are inherent in of the things that do make it up.

The fact that at the very moment if birth of our universe matter did take a certain form was a result of the properties of the how energy will behave in such a situation.
The very first forms of matter were extremely uniform and simple, but when things progressed, there was more and more diversity, as extremely small differences in local conditions did create the first extremely small local differences also in the matter.

When these a little different particles did interact with other particles in different ways, the complexity did steadily rise and the level of differences between different kinds of matter did also rise steadily.
Again, there needed to be any kind of planning, or hidden DNA, but the inevitable properties of particles and matter at prevailing conditions made things go to a certain direction that was quite inevitable, even if it was not planned.

The history of our universe in the story of rise in complexity and the more complex things do get, the more there are rules that define how things do progress. Again, these rules need not to planned or result of a mysterious matter-DNA, but a result of the rules that were simply derived from the rules that were present in the earlier incarnations of matter.
With the rise in in complexity, also the rules do steadily get more complex, as earlier simpler rules are combined when different layers of matter do interact with other layers.

There really needs not be any kind of planning when the relentless interactions between differentiating forms of matter do create new kinds of matter. The results are not accidents, but are always based on the different inherent properties of the parties that did take part in the interactions.
These interaction did create new and all time more complex forms of matter until level of complexity was reached where the first lifelike forms did see their birth.
Their structure and functionality are decided by the different forms of matter that did take part in the interactions that did create them and they are not any kind of random ‘accident’.

A human idea of accident includes very often also idea of intent, which is not at all present in nature. If a comet hits the planet Earth and wipes out all life, it is not a accident in a way accidents happen to people who are careless, but a result of universe being such as it is and of the fact that comets and planets do exist and from time to time they will collide. There is nothing accidental in this, but all follows from the nature of our universe.

We are of course lucky that no such incident has not razed life from earth and we do exist, but this is not because of planning, but because such incident just are very rare at this stage of maturity in our planetary system.
In the end we cannot know how many struggling life forms have been wiped out in different stages of their development all over the universe, just because they were not as lucky as we have been. Here the idea of accident has of course a role, but again not as a originator of complex processes, but a thing that does end them randomly.

The narrow and extremely restricted way of seeing all things from the perspective of human species, which is extremely prevalent among religious circles of course leads into curious way of thinking where things in nature do happen to please or cause consternation among humans.
The basic thing I am trying to say here is that the birth and the nature of our universe is no accident, if it follows from the basic properties of the matter that does build it up.

Accident is something that can happen or not happen by chance, but I do claim that our universe is as it because its building blocks have certain properties that did necessarily lead into its creation. It was no accident but an inevitability.
This just is a thing that is seemingly too hard to grasp for people who want to see human-like motivations and intentions also in nature.
Accidents do happen randomly, but inevitable things do not. How does a 'inevitable accident' sound to you?

Comments

If one look very carefully the texts by Tacitus and Josephus, that are widely used as non-religious evidence of the existence of Jesus, one soon realizes that they are just repeating things that were believed and told among the followers of the new sect.
Either of these texts does not show that Tacitus or Josephus would have had any kind of personal knowledge of matters, but both of them do repeat things that they have heard from others. These texts just do show that at least some of the beliefs that were associated with the character of Jesus did already exist at the time of Tacitus and Josephus.

It is a very common mistake to see Josephus and Tacitus some kind of eye-witnesses. It is so common just because the followers of the Christian faith have been spreading this idea quite consciously. They have succeeded in making the true nature of these texts as information coming from third hand has been lost even for some scientists. This has mostly of course happened because people have very sorely wanted to have any kind of proof to support their beliefs.
In reality the only real fact that we have is that very early there was people who did believe in existence of a person called Jesus, who they did believe to have had many kinds of magical qualities.

The cold fact is there has never been real first-hand document or evidence of the existence of such a person outside the New Testament and the mentions in other sources are based on the stories which the followers of the new sect were spreading.
From the Gospels we can see that they were written by people who did not know what were the names of local Roman officials at the alleged time of the birth of Jesus, even if obtaining this information would perhaps been quite easy at the time of writing of these texts 70 to 120 years after the birth Jesus, when these texts were according to modern knowledge mostly written.

The texts in the New Testament were used as building blocks for a new religion, which was like all other religion a collection of ideas from older religions and the teachings of the then current philosophy.
These writers used the very common literary vehicle of putting their main character to utter these ideas as his own. By doing this they did create an exciting and deep-sounding character which was used for a good effect when this new faith was marketed to the masses.

On the other hand the existence or quite possible non-existence of character named Jesus has very little value when we are trying to determine if the stories in New Testament are true or not. There could well have existed on historical Jesus, but this fact would not make the stories that are recorded in the New Testament about his divine origin or his magical stunts any more true.
It is quite possible that there has been a preacher named Jesus besides the hundreds of similar preachers going around the Palestine during those centuries. He was just a regular preacher if that person was not born out of a virgin, was not a son of god and did not do many kinds of magical things and did not knowingly give his life to save yours.

The historical existence of a person called Jesus has in fact nothing to do with the truthfulness of fantastic stories that are told about such a figure in the New Testament, as they have always had a life of their own that is quite independent of the historical figure of Jesus. These stories were born from the needs of the newfangled religion.
The New Testament is full of stories where the writer outright claims to have been an eye-witnesses for the events he is describing, but we have no way of verifying these claims. In fact the modern scholars are quite in harmony in accepting the fact that there texts have been born a long time after the alleged lifespan of their main character and in fact it is a established scholarly view that these writers could not have had a personal relationship with the events they are describing in these texts.

The situation is quite similar to a situation where a person would want to find out if the book “All quiet in the Western Front” is a true story about true people after a thousand years from now.
The war and the battles that are described in the book are all quite real and there a lot of well known historical figures in the book. However, this book is still a work of fiction and all of its central characters are created by the writer Erich Maria Remarque, even if he could well have based his characters on real-life people to a certain degree.

In the end book is still a work of fiction and the events in the book could well have happened only in the imagination of the writer. He has just imagined how things could well have happened in given situations and the fact that they can sound very realistic does not make them any more true.
The writer has created a believable and realistic-sounding description of events that he has largely just imagined, but after a thousand years it is quite impossible to say which parts could be true and which are just works of imagination.

A illusory Biblical 'truth' has been around mainly because the theological 'study' of the Bible is commonly a direct opposite of science, as in real science the right answers are not known before the study does begin.
The real scientific study of religions outside theology is a quite different matter altogether, but this discipline of science does normally take any kind of stand in the truth-value of the New Testament, but it concentrates on studying the impact religions do have on societies and history of humanity. On the other hands theologians do very rarely venture into the field of true science, as applying the real scientific criteria on the Bible would just too be too dangerous.

The study of theology is in fact quite similar 'science' as was the 'study' of Marxism-Leninism in the now defunct Soviet Union, even if in many countries outside the soviet world also it was accepted as 'science'.
One can well use the vocabulary, methodology and way of speaking of the scientific world, even if in reality the 'study' is all about finding things that would support the ideology one is out to support.
Of course also a theologian can use the methods of for example sociology to study the workings of a religious hierarchy and organization, but in theological studies there is always the very basic fact that if your results do not support the ideology of the organization you can expect your career to be soon over, and there is very little alternative career options for theologians in existence.

Real science can never work in way that there would be some basic ideas that you could never challenge in any way. The whole progress of modern science has been based on the fact that in true science you just must be able to challenge any idea, notwithstanding its status among the scientific community.

Comments

‎"Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror."

- Voltaire in "Examen important de milord Bolingbroke" (1736): Conclusion

‎"Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours."

Voltaire in a letter to Élie Bertrand (1759)

"What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature."

-Voltaire in Tolerance" (1764)

"Man is free at the instant he wants to be."

- Voltaire in "Brutus", act II, scene I (1730)

‎"Love truth, but pardon error."

- Voltaire in "Deuxième discours: de la liberté," Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738)

‎"To hold a pen is to be at war."

- Voltaire in letter to Jeanne-Grâce Bosc du Bouchet, comtesse d'Argental (1748)

"To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature."

- Voltaire in "Notebooks" (c.1735-c.1750)

‎"It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions."

- Voltaire in a letter to François-Louis-Henri Leriche (1770)

‎"Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

-Voltaire in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia (1767)

‎"Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

- Voltaire in "Treatise on Toleration" (1763)

‎"Ours is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world."

- Voltaire in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia (1767)

‎"Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?"

- Voltaire in "Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great”

"Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons."

- Voltaire in "Oracles" (1770)

"Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you unjust."

-Voltaire in "Questions sur les miracles" (1765)

‎"All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence."

- Voltaire in "Equality" (1764)

‎"Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so."

Voltaire in Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (1770-1774)

‎"Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors."

Voltaire in "Dictionnaire philosophique portatif" (1764)

‎"What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

Voltaire in ”Lettres philosophiques” (1733)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Voltaire-the-best-one-liners/165736696801820

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire
"François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire (pronounced: [vɔl.tɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his witand for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade. Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form including plays, poetry, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform, despite strict censorship laws and harsh penalties for those who broke them. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day.
Voltaire was one of several Enlightenment figures (along with Montesquieu, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Émilie du Châtelet) whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions."

Comments

I fear that even most people have lost this extremely natural ability to play and doing things for the fun of it through a very rigid training that aims to do just that.
The real, hidden agenda of modern education is all too often just to get people forget about the whole ideas of fun and enjoyment, as life and most of all work just are seen as an ordeal, that we must just bear to please our jealous peers and superiors.

However, I do think that this way of thinking is fast becoming an unnecessary and even very harmful remnant of the bad old industrial world. In this old bad industrial world many people needed to be automates, who were just supporting the automated production lines.
However, this model of production is fast vanishing form the west, but the model for thinking sadly remains.
In a modern world a person who does things just for the fun of it is still all too often suspect, as your goal just needs to be better than somebody else; be it playing the piano or running.

Of course the competitive instinct is one of the most basic emotions that humans have, but I do also think that not all people have it in a similar amount, as is the case with any other human emotion and ability too.
A human being can well develop even tremendously just by comparing his or her development to his or her own previous accomplishments. One does not need to squash the dreams and expectations of others in a open competition to feel good about him- or herself.

However, this need and requirement to endlessly compete with others is so deeply embedded in our society that most people don't even notice it, as they do really and honestly think that that is a thing that all people automatically want to do all the time.
Many people really do think that it is a part of nature to get enjoyment from the unhappiness of the losers, which is the inevitably the other side of any competition, as there cannot be winners, if there are no losers.

Could it be that this endless competition from the earliest childhood has a purpose? Could it be that it can make us insensitive the the unhappiness of others, when we learn daily that the only thing that matters is that we ourselves do well in all competitions?
Could it be that soon we learn not the think about the losers at all, even if inevitably we will be in their number most of the time? Could it be that this loss of ability to co-operate benefits the current economic system, even if it will hurt us as humans?

I do not have definite answers and I do not think that somebody does plans evil conspiracies to create systems like this. I just fear that the modern economic system does create an endless spiral of ever-tightening competition and an ever decreasing co-operation, when the idea of competition is ubiquitous in everything we do and most of all the media hammers the idea in every single day we are awake.
The net result of all this just might be that other humans beings are less and less seen as fellow-travelers going to the same direction, but more and more as just competitors to be beaten.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_keil_a_manifesto_for_play_for_bulgaria_and_beyond.html

Comments

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Affluent Society (1958)

“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Age of Uncertainty” (1977)

“Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.”

John Kenneth Galbraith “The Age of Uncertainty” (1977)

“The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Affluent Society (1958)”

“Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “Economics, Peace and Laughter” (1971)

“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in The Guardian (1989)

“There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in The Guardian (1989)

“We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in The Guardian (1991)

“There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in The Guardian (1992)

“It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “A Journey Through Economic Time” (1994)

“When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble — until the day of disaster.”

John Kenneth Galbraith quoted in Ben Laurance and William Keegan, "Galbraith on crashes, Japan and Walking Sticks," The Observer (1998)

“I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, "I'm in favor of privatization," or, "I'm deeply in favor of public ownership." I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “Booknotes interview” (1994)

“Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay.”

John Kenneth Galbraith in “Made to Last”(1964)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/John-Kenneth-Galbraith/89900217423

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith
"John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006) was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century political liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s and he filled the role of public intellectual from the '50s to the 1970s on matters of economics.
Galbraith was a prolific author who produced four dozen books and over a thousand articles on various subjects. Among his most famous works was a popular trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). He taught at Harvard University for many years. Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; he served as United States Ambassador to India under Kennedy. Due to his prodigious literary output he was arguably the best known economist in the world during his lifetime and was one of a select few people to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice, in 1946 and 2000, for services to economics."

Comments

Oh, how wonderful they look, these silent monuments of age-old oppression, violence and mans unending cruelty towards other men.
I fear that I just have this condition that can be called "over-empathy", if you like. In history it makes me think of the condition and the real lives of the people who did build and pay these fantastic and beautiful historical monuments that we so admire today.
I just fear that we have a tendency to even fall into thinking that historical monuments do exist for our enjoyment only and the 'colorful' history just exists to make them more interesting in our eyes, even if they are results of very real suffering, very real pain and very real and often extremely meaningless violence.

I just must add that even the finest castles of the distant past were not generally designed to protect the poor, the weak and the defenseless, but to protect the the rich, the strong and the able from attacks of other members of the predatory elite in their endless turf wars over the right to tax the unarmed majority of population.

These castles are reminders of a deeply unjust society. We just tell ourselves these little sweet lies about the carefree existence of the people in the past, as we admire these aesthetically very pleasing structures. We perhaps could not admire them like we do now, if we would want to realize their true nature.
Of course most people see history only from the viewpoint of the absolute rulers and ruling elites, who ordered these structures to be built. I'm afraid that most people simply pass over the tedious details of who really did the extremely hard labor of hoisting and plastering those stones.

Most of all we want to forget what pleasures in life did the ordinary people give up to pay and build them, as the ordinary people did produce the taxes that was used to pay for these piles of rock that were of no real use for them.
Their main function was to protect the privileged ruling class from their competitors, who from time to time liked to try take away areas from neighboring despots.
Of course there were from time to time also the predators from the sea like Vikings, but by the time most of the medieval castles were built, they were built to be used in the endless and mindless turf-wars between the neighboring absolute rulers.

People of the past were quite similar to you and me; they did not build things just for the amusement of future generations, but because they did obey the whims of religious and earthy rulers. Castles did of course serve a different practical purpose. They were built just because other men could not kill you easily if you had one.

Their basic forms and shapes do not come from any kind of aesthetic considerations, but out of dire necessity to stay alive in a world were other neighboring members of the privileged elite tried to take away the tax-revenue you were collecting from the countryside around to keep up your lavish lifestyle.
There simple people did pay for the castles and they did build them with their hard labor for their absolute masters to live in relative safety.

We, the modern men can only thank our luck, that we have been born in a quite different day and age, when states to exist for the real benefit of the whole population and not just to collect revenue for the upkeep of the non-working, heavily armed hereditary elite.
The change in zeitgeist (or the spirit of the times) has been so immense that we maybe just can never understand at all how these medieval people fatalistically accepted this immense and utterly obvious wrong that was wrought on them, mostly just because it was ordered by their jealous and angry God.

Comments

"Outside intelligences, exploring the Solar System with true impartiality, would be quite likely to enter the Sun in their records thus: Star X, spectral class G0, 4 planets plus debris."

Isaac Asimov in "By Jove!" in View from a Height (1963); often misquoted as "Jupiter plus debris".

"There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

Isaac Asimov in "The “Threat” of Creationism" in New York Times Magazine (14 June 1981)

"Happiness is doing it rotten your own way."

Isaac Asimov in "I, Asimov" (1994)

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

Isaac Asimov in "Foundation", Astounding Science-Fiction (May 1942. It is derived from the famous phrase by Samuel Johnson: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be ... This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking."

Isaac Asimov in "My Own View" in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978) edited by Robert Holdstock.

"I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time."

Isaac Asimov in Free Inquiry (Spring 1982)

Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
"Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

Isaac Asimov in "The Roving Mind" (1983)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_asimov
"Isaac Asimov (born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and over 9,000 letters and postcards.
His works have been published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (The sole exception being the 100s: philosophy and psychology, although he did write a foreword for The Humanist Way, which is published in the 100s)."

Comments

However, it seems that in economically strong societies there is chance to offer more liberty of choice for the individuals and in economically less successful societies these liberties are easily curtailed.
On the other hand it seems that the more elbow room individuals do have in a society, the more healthy the economics of a society seem to be.

This is a classical egg and hen -dilemma. Will liberty breed economic success or will economic success give more room for individual liberty to evolve?
Of course it just might be that they do together help to create a rising spiral that will create economically more robust and most of all more innovative societies.

Innovation just might be the key here, and creating an atmosphere (or at least an illusion) of liberty will help people to innovate in all possible ways In a closed society-centered societies innovation seem to be at a much lower level than in more individual-oriented societies with more elbow room for an individual.

There really are people who dream of a world without societies, but I do think that it would a fine place just for the strong, the well connected, the intelligent, the wealthy and the beautiful, but life would be all too often be nasty, brutish and short for the weak, the stupid, the lone, the poor and the ugly.
Admittedly the idea of a modern state was basically born out of mafia outfits that did extort protection money to pay for the easy living of the upper class.
However, things do evolve and the predatory nature of the state is a memory of the past, as when states have gone over a complete makeover by ideas coming from ideas like humanism, socialism and even feminism.

On the other hand the complexity of our societies evolved first tenfold, then hundredfold and then some more, the need to have some kind of a regulatory arm to watch over all this new activity has grown ten- and hundredfold from the past.

I fear that too many people live in a world without past or future, they have only "now" and they have read difficulty in grasping the possibility of drastic change and how things do not just exist, but they have often evolved dramatically in the past and will keep evolving in the future.
A classic case in point is just the idea of society and state. Even in the time of Thomas Paine or John Stuart Mill a society was there to keep order and to keep other societies away to keep the all of collectable tax revenues for the rulers of one's own state. Society was a still thing that was basically mostly needed to keep the poor and outside predators at bay.

However, after their time things have changed dramatically. First the grand ideas embedded in humanism took over the western world with such a violent force that even the age-old and generally accepted institution of slavery was demolished and even the Christian Churches had to change their views over it 180 degrees because the zeitgeist or the spirit of the times just had evolved to demand it.
Then came the idea of socialism, that at first just challenged the existing order. Even that threat was eventually enough to make many rich people realize that to save their privileges in the long run they need to share some of their proceedings with others in the short term to curb the lure of socialism.

Then came the western version of democratic socialism that did change the whole structure of politics and most of all did change the zeitgeist in a similar way that humanism had done a century earlier.
As slaves were freed in the earlier case, now was the turn of the industrial workers to gain their fairer share.

After these two immense but extremely slow and even hard to spot revolutions in prevailing zeitgeist, the idea of state had been already completely transformed. It was not just and guardian of privilege and the bulwark of the rich against the poor anymore, but a arbitrator of interests of both, that was also used as a tool to create more even distribution of wealth.
This development of course kick-started the modern rise in living-standards as more even distribution of wealth did create the mass-market that new capitalism needed to really flourish,

Now, Thomas Paine or John Stuart Mill were not speaking of the kind of society that we have now, when they did speak about the need to curb the influence and power that a society has. One should btw. also remember that Thomas Paine was a friend of the poor and he did propose a land tax to be paid by the rich land-owners to the poor.
Of course the conflict of interest of a individual and state is just the same as three thousand years ago. It is as difficult as then to find a level where both the rights of the individual would be secured, but also the state can function effectively to protect the same individuals from the ill effects of all kinds of bad decisions that are made by other individuals in the society.

The sad fact of life is that many us will remain weak, stupid, ugly and lone whatever we will we do by ourselves, as all people just don't have the same capabilities. It is a fact of life that most libertarians just like to forget, as they want to think that everybody can make out of their life whatever they want, which is simply a dirty lie. A beautiful person who is born into a wealthy family just does have a million times better chances than a ugly person who is born into a poor family and without in fact doing anything extraordinary by him- or herself; just by the simple accident of birth.

This fact does not change from the idea that it sometimes really possible to rise from poverty. It is possible, yes, but one needs extraordinary capabilities to it, which just are not so common that some libertarian do think.
To be able to rise from poverty one just need be so much more capable as a person than those who just try to keep their inherited riches. Most people just do not have these capabilities and this is the reason why society needs to support them.
It just might be that the wealthy, the beautiful and intelligent just do not need as much attention and support from the society than the poor, the ugly and the stupid.

Comments

"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there."

- Karl Popper in "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge" (1963)

"The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game."

- Karl Popper in Ch. 2 "On the Problem of a Theory of Scientific Method", Section XI

"In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality."

— Karl Popper as quoted in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" (2002)

"Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake."

- Karl Popper in "In Search of a Better World" (1994)

"Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you."

- Karl Popper in "Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976)

"Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves."

- Karl Popper in "On Freedom" (1958)

"It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it."

- Karl Popper in "On Freedom" (1958)

"We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure."

- Karl Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945) Vol 2, Ch. 21 "An Evaluation of the Prophecy"

"It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ."

- Karl Popper in "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge" (1963)

"The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts."

- Karl Popper in "In Search of a Better World" (1994)

"There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. … It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory."

- Karl Popper in "The Importance of Critical Discussion"

"We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell. Only if we give up our authoritarian attitude in the realm of opinion, only if we establish the attitude of give and take, of readiness to learn from other people, can we hope to control acts of violence inspired by piety and duty."

- Karl Popper in "Utopia and Violence" (1947)


"What we should do, I suggest, is to give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it be beyond our reach. We may admit that our groping is often inspired, but we must be on our guard against the belief, however deeply felt, that our inspiration carries any authority, divine or otherwise. If we thus admit that there is no authority beyond the reach of criticism to be found within the whole province of our knowledge, however far it may have penetrated into the unknown, then we can retain, without danger, the idea that truth is beyond human authority. And we must retain it. For without this idea there can be no objective standards of inquiry; no criticism of our conjectures; no groping for the unknown; no quest for knowledge."

- Karl Popper on "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge" (1963)

"What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings."

- Karl Popper in "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945)

"Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell."

- Karl Popper, as quoted in "In Passing: Condolences and Complaints on Death, Dying, and Related Disappointments" (2005) by Jon Winokur, p. 144

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy.
Popper is known for his attempt to repudiate the classical observationalist / inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy" As well, he is known for his vigorous defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing "open society" possible.

Comments

The basic reason why we do need these illusions is that our world and most of all our societies have become so complex that nobody really can master their all workings.
So, we desperately need an illusion of being on the top of it all, even if we are in fact quite clueless most of the time. Without this illusion we just might sink into desperation over the futility of keeping abreast of it all.

The great part of these self-created illusions is that they can also be self-fulfilling. When you get yourself into believing in the illusion that you can master a certain thing well, you will very often also learn to master it with due time, even if in the beginning you could just be flying without wings; we are often kept afloat just by an illusion. Losing these illusions could again easily lead into desperation and despair.

Richard Feynman famously said that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." This just might be the right thing in science, but I think that most of the time we just need to fool ourselves up to some point, as if we would really know the true limits of our understanding, expertise and knowledge, we would not dare do anything demanding.

Happily all the people live in the same kind of bubbles of illusion. We do live in a world of commonly build illusions, where we think that the other people do have the necessary understanding, expertise and knowledge that we deep down always will suspect that we are lacking ourselves. Similarly other people do trust us in a similar way, mainly because nobody ever reveals their real self-doubts to others.
One could say that it a really good thing that this true state of things is never revealed to us, as maintaining the common illusion of understanding, expertise and knowledge keeps us safe from despairing on the fact with how little true understanding, expertise and knowledge the world is really run on.

If we would really know how insecure, uncertain and nervous the leading figures of our society in all walks of life really are under that thick cloud of illusion of understanding, expertise and knowledge that we do keep up, we could easily really despair on our future.
Happily, this has been the way things have always been, just as long as humans have selected other people to lead them. The amazing thing is that our societies do still survive, as just this illusion is mostly good enough to keep the systems working.

There has been many very bad patches of course, but I do think that our world has become so complex that there really are no people who would really know how to steer it, and they would balk from really trying if they would completely realize the true complexity and utter unpredictability of our societies.

At this point I hear a multitude of voices crying out angrily that I am saying here that living in a lie would be a good thing. Basically, that is just my message here.
Of course I have been thundering against living in lies in this blog for several years now, but the lies I have been talking about are well-known and well-established untruths, collections of wishful thinking and outright inventions that can be called lies also, if one takes the impolite way.

However, I am now talking of a very different class very deep psychological processes here that do mostly reside in our own subconsciousness and are created and maintained there without any conscious effort on our part.
We do not mostly consciously decide to fool ourselves into believing that we can master certain things, even if we are unsure of it, but this is a very helpful and needed aid in learning new things in the best possible way; just by throwing oneself headlong into doing them.

I suspect that most people are faintly aware of this process, which has become the more important the more complex our societies and the systems we create do become.
People are becoming good on smaller and smaller fields of expertise and they need to delve deeper and deeper into smaller and smaller details.
in this process, there just remains more and more of things that we have just a faint idea, but we need to master and use also those less familiar things. Here the protective illusions come the rescue; we just need to protect our fragile minds from the idea of ignorance and failure.

I think that this process has one major downside; when we deep down at least realize that so many things that we need to rely on are just illusions, the threshold into accepting also other more serious kinds of comforting lies can be lowered.
I do suspect that many theists do wonder why non-religious people make such noises of just religious illusions, as deep down they know that their life is based on maintaining so many kinds of illusions.

However, I still do maintain that even in the world of benevolent illusions there is the limit after which it illusions do become just a form of fooling oneself.
I do think that being aware of the phenomena can only help in distinguishing the real stuff from imitation. Namely
it just might be that religions have learned to use this mechanism of positive self-illusion's for their own benefit instead of benefiting the individual, as the basic protective illusions I am speaking of here do.

Comments

For example, I just can't watch many of the things in the ‘funny videos’ in the YouTube or television, as I know that they are real things happening to real people, In many of the ‘funniest’ people are getting even incredibly hurt by falling, tripping over or being run over by something.
I do know that this condition is normally cured just by making oneself watch enough television and most of all Hollywood-films, as by doing this you will became so conditioned into seeing meaningless and even frivolous pain and suffering that given enough time and practice it does not cause any emotions in you at all.

You will be soon become also conditioned to think that pain or suffering are not to be noticed if they happen to people that you do not care of.
You become soon conditioned only to react to violence, suffering and pain that encounters a person that you have a personal relationship or who you are taught to be one of the 'good guys'.

However, personally I did a few years ago the fatal decision of not watching any television anymore and most of all no violent movies anymore. Consequently, my condition has worsened to a point that I cannot stomach any violent action at all anymore.
This has the very serious downside that I cannot watch a very large part of television programming at all and most of all the things that the movie industry does churn out endlessly is in practice out of bounds for me.

I'm acutely aware that I am different and at a tiniest of tiny minorities here. I’m also quite aware that I should condition myself into tolerating all kinds acts of violence, suffering and pain to be able to be part of the mainstream again.
At this point I want to make it very clear that this all is not sarcasm or irony at all, but this is a real concern for me. Violence has become so central part of culture that if you have trouble dealing with it, you are out in the cold.
I’m afraid there are very few people who could even understand what you are talking about, when you speak of role of violence in modern entertainment, as violence is so central to it that it is impossible for many to even think of entertainment without violence.

When I look back, I see quite clearly how I have always had to live with this deficiency. At the age of nine we were invited to a screening of the movie ‘Ben Hur’ by our school. It was the first real movie I had ever seen on the big screen. It was in fact also the very first time I did see moving pictures in colour, as our television was still quite black and white in Finland at those bygone days at the mid-sixties.
I was simply mentally crushed by the extreme violence in that movie; all the blood and hurting deliberately of other people. I did nearly become physically ill in that dark hall, when people all around me did not see anything unusual in the barbaric acts that were committed before their very eyes in the silver screen for their viewing pleasure.

Of course ‘Ben Hur’ was in fact a very Christian story about the sufferings of the early Christians and it was extremely lame stuff by today’s standards.
In the early 80’s I was dragged to a movie theater to see a disgusting little movie called ‘Caligula’ and I must admit that I had to leave the movie theatre mid-show, because my revulsion did become so over-powering.
A decade later I was again dragged to a movie theater by another lady to see a horror-movie from the Elm Street- series that I must admit that I lasted in there for a quarter of an hour.

By these examples you can see that I have a very real problem, as humans are just expected to control their feeling of empathy better than I am able to.
I just cannot help it, but I do feel bad for every single person that is killed, maimed or dismembered and when you do it, a very large part of modern entertainment does become unbearable to you.

No, no, It is not about the lack of empathy in other people that I am speaking in here, as the problem really is with me and my lack of ability to really control my feelings of empathy.
You are just expected to show empathy to just to your own next of kin, clansmen, fellow villagers and fellow citizens and turn it off like a light bulb in the first sighting of any kind of perceived enemy.

That just is the way the world works and if you are not able to do it, you must bare with the consequences. All great myths (also religious ones) in human history are full of violence and their one important role is to condition you into accepting the use of violence by the society.
These myths condition you into accepting violence when it is permitted and sanctioned by the society and to turn off your feelings of empathy when society uses violence to further its own goals.

Of course these goals can be worthy and admirable ones, but the real catch here is that in most religious traditions you are not allowed to evaluate the true quality of these goals by yourself. You just all too easily end up in the crowd with a stone in your hand ready to be thrown at the adulterer.
On the end of this long tradition are the Hollowood-blockbusters where bad men are killed by the truckloads to our endless delight, but we are expected to weep when our ‘hero’ encounters a personal tragedy of any kind. After a few decades of this conditioning the sight of real bombed out villages is nothing to us, as our empathy has been reserved to be used elsewhere.

Comments

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."

- Statement (1959) by Richard Feynman as quoted by James Gleick in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)

"Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers - because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers'. So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all."

- Richard Feynman in "The Character of Physical Law". Cornell University Messenger Lectures (1964)

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing, that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

-Richard Feynman in "What is Science?", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, (1966)

"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out."

- Richard Feynman as quoted in "Superstrings : A Theory of Everything" (1988)

"Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question - to doubt - to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained."

- Richard Feynman in "The Value of Science," address to the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955)

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

- Richard Feynman in the lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (1964).

"The fact that you are not sure means that it is possible that there is another way someday."

- Richard Feynman in "The Meaning of It All" (1999)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_feynman
"Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 - February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world."

Comments

A great quote is very similar to a great poem. A great poem encapsulates a large web of emotions in a few terse sentences. A good poem is just the visible tip of the iceberg and the reader is forced to imagine the rest of the mass that rests under the surface.
Similarly a good quote encapsulates a idea or a thought and clarifies that idea in a particularly enlightening way. A great quote just is quite similarly just a tip of the iceberg that gives the reader the liberty to imagine the real mass that lies under the surface below.

The sad fact is that many people are too impatient to read quotes, as reading great quotes requires much more than reading good long prose from the reader. A good quote requires the reader really to pause to contemplate the real meaning of the quote.
A really great quote works just as it is; one needs not to know even who has said it and when, as a really great thought reaches a true level of universality.

Of course some quotes do require the reader to be familiar with the subject matter and sometimes also with the writer of the quote beforehand to really get the meaning.
However, the really universal ones work similarly in Greece of 300 BCE or Finland of today, as they bore into the essence of being human, as underneath all this progress there always still is the unchanged basic and bare essence that makes up a human.

However, normally people want to know who has said a thing and when, as our perception on validity of any thought depends extremely heavily on the person and personality who has presented the idea.
This is quite natural, because we must have some standard or filter with which we can analyze all different ideas that we do come across. However, the dark side of this is that people all too often quite systematically reject all ideas that come from people on the “other side” without really bothering to examine them.

For example I did quote some ideas by C.S. Chesterton in some forum and I got angry responses from people who did not like me quoting things from a known theist, even if the ideas themselves had nothing to do with theism.
On the other hand on many forums the marvelous ideas of Bertrand Russell have been rejected by people taking part in the discussion on the grounds that Bertrand Russell’s private life was not exemplary, as if all his ideas would have been contaminated by the quarks in his private life.

However, I think that a truly great idea is a great idea notwithstanding who has presented it. The arch-conservative Winston Churchill has created several legendary quotes that I do love and respect, even if I am a strongly left-leaning liberal socialist myself.
Of course Winston Churchill was a drunkard also, but I do not think that this fact makes his ideas any worse.
Of course the really difficult part in creating new ideas is not creating new ideas, as it is the easy part, but making people listen to them and respect their value. If I put a idea into the mouth of Marcus Aurelius it just acquires a quite new meaning and value, even if the idea itself remains the same.
So, in fact we do inevitably value ideas by their presented more than by their real content. It just is a fact of life that one needs to learn to live with. There is a multitude of false quotes in circulation in the Internet and one should always be on guard for them.

In any case, I think that the really great quote is such that its reader does not need to know much about the of context where it was published, as really quote contains a idea in its entirety, even if just a small of it has been written on the paper, but the reader is forced to imagine the rest, just like is thew case with best of poetry too.

Collecting and appreciating great quotes is a quite different things than the quote-mining that is done by some unscrupulous debaters. Evil quote-miners search for little snippets of text that make the other side look bad in some ways, when the collectors of great quotes search for sentences that can condense an idea to a minimum amount of words.

A really great quote is really a prose poem that takes the essence of a idea and does present it in a way that often illuminates it in a way that anybody can understand.
The greatest quotes are hidden gems that lie the texts of the greatest of writers just waiting to be found. They are strikes of genius, where the writer has found a way to illuminate and enlighten an idea in a powerful or provocative way.

I am myself a great fan and collector of quotes, as readers of this blog have already noticed from the postings presenting small collections of the best ideas of some philosophers, thinkers, scientists, writers, poets and wise men. These are published without comments; just as they appeared and they are always cross-checked for authenticity.
However, I would like to remind that I have another blog that is totally dedicated to quotes. It is called “A Little Book for Humanity” and it is at http://thelittlebook.blogs.fi
There is at the moment of writing 143 selected quotes from some of the best minds I know of. They are also always commented by me, even if the comments are mostly just thoughts that were inspired by the quote in question and they try not to be any kind of explanations for the quotes as such.

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However, I do think that science is extremely rarely forwarded by fear, but its driving forces are curiosity and the need and will to know new things. Even medicine is in my mind not motivated by fear of illness, but by the joy of that comes from conquering it.
I do not think that any of the medical research would be left undone, even if people would not so needlessly fear aging or death, as so many do now. A person who does not want to face reality as it is, is always a problem, after all.

Anyway, it just might be good to get used with the idea that the removal of aging or death already envisioned by some firebrands will not happen during our own lifetime and just postponing a thing will not make it go away.
If we just could enjoy and make the most of the years on Earth we do have now, we just could improve our life much more than just by adding more boring and uninteresting years to it.

Kurt Vonnegut has written a wonderful novel about a world without death. It was a terrible dystopia, to be quite frank, as if nobody dies, no new people can be born after Earth has been filled to a certain point.
Such a society would very soon stagnate to a terrible degree when the same soon utterly bored people would be running things century after century.

A very important point in my mind is that evolution just cannot exist without death. Evolution is of course a completely blind force and it does not aim for good or bad, but there would not have been any evolution, no change and eventually also no progress, if the great force of survival of the best adapted would not have picked up the winners at very new stage of evolution.
The earth would be inhabited by at most by extremely primitive single-cell creatures without death always taking away first the less adapted and at the same time rewarding constantly the better adapted mutations with longer lifespans or more offspring reaching maturity.

Death is of course just a doorway to oblivion, and most sane people want to postpone it as much they can. However, at the same time death is a extremely central part of the grand machinery that has evolved through millions of years of trial and error to keep Earth livable and habitable.
The whole ecosystem on planet Earth is based on death and on creatures devouring the remains of dead creatures. In fact only this process of endless renewal of resources can keep life going on perpetually on this little blue planet.

I do think that humans are after just just one (in many ways special. of course) species of animals. We are still part of the nature, even if some people want to deny it for example for religious reasons, when they claim that this planet was created just for their own enjoyment.
I see this kind of thinking as extremely and utterly dangerous. Humanity is in fact just now already on the verge of committing a suicide just because we not see how we will always be an integral part of the ecosystem of this little blue planet.

Of course we seem to be the only species of animals that can consciously think of things like death, but that does not mean that the we should be exempted from the never-ending cycle that keeps life evolving on this planet, just because we can see its existence in a way that other creatures do probably not see.
Fear of aging and death cannot ever be cured by just making them happen later; postponing these things will just make the fear last longer. This process could even make these fears worse than ever, if false hopes are raised at some point.

Most of all I still think that Epicurus got it right when he wrote:

"Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us." - Epicurus (341–270 EAA)

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" Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Assignment in Eternity" (1953)

"Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Assignment in Eternity" (1953)

"Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil. Limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate.Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Revolt in 2100" (1953)

" The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed. "

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Revolt in 2100" (1953)

"Television leaves no external scars."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Have Space Suit —Will Travel" (1958)

"You're in bad shape when your emotions force you into acts which you know are foolish. "

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Have Space Suit—Will Travel" (1958)

"Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."

- Robert A. Heinlein in "Time Enough for Love" (1973)

"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."

- Robert A. Heinlein in Time Enough for Love (1973)

"Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy"is the most amazing — with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place."

- Robert A. Heinlein in Time Enough for Love (1973)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein
"Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American science fiction writer. Often called "the dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a high standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality. He was one of the first writers to break into mainstream, general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, in the late 1940s, with unvarnished science fiction. He was among the first authors of bestselling, novel-length science fiction in the modern, mass-market era. For many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction."

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