Beliefs don't hurt people. Actions hurt people. Criminalize bad action. == Beliefs don't automatically lead to action. Acton occurs outside of the body. Beliefs are internal. === Reason. Emotion. Whatever cognitive processes lead to decision-making. "Belief"? Too nebulous a concept. === Oh you're talking about religious documents. Well, talk about religious documents if you're talking about religious documents. Are you talking about religious practices? Then talk about religious practices. Are you talking about the internal state of an individuals cognitive processes in relation to the choices they make? Then talk about that. Are you talking about political leaders? Inspirational words? Mob mentality? Talk about those things. But to just say "belief" to cover all of that? That's a lot. == I don't think reason and belief are indistinguishable. Nor do I believe emotions and belief are indistinguishable. == Describe to me the maps you use. == I will tell you my bias: I'm slow to "belief" in general. I am skeptical. I'm even skeptical of my skepticism sometimes. Because I pattern my reality - my map of humans - via my own introspections of self, I utilize cognitive dissonance (my confusion about "why people think differently than me") as a tool for understanding others and myself better. Compare. Contrast. Process. Retrain myself. I've never been impressed by laws. When I see people on TV listening to a televangelist, I figure they were all paid and faking it for my entertainment. I'm not stupid but I often appear stupid. I give others the same leeway. == My mother was married to an Egyptian for a few years in the early 1980s. . She still has his last name. He never wanted to kill anybody, just have a normal life. Most Muslims want a normal life. He prayed 5x a day 'cause that was his tradition. He accidentally ate pork once but it was ok because it was accidental. I've been friends with Muslims through the years. None of them had a murderous streak. Are there some nutjobs blowing themselves up? Sure. They're idiots. Ask a Muslim. They'll tell you. == It's an experience-to-experience process that I've been on as long as I can remember. I get remedial guidance thousands and thousands of times a day. I never waste an opportunity to learn and instruct when I communicate, even now. == Yes, and on the lawbooks in parts of the USA, it's illegal to play Dominoes on Sunday. It's rarely actually enacted. Something's in the Quran? Great. It's in the Quran. But among the peoples that are Muslim? Do they treat it like a lawbook where every word must be put into play? No. The current crop of idiots are revisionist, like the Sola Scriptura movement within Christandom a few centuries ago which believed "Bible only" was enough. == Nope. Their belief is part of whatever living tradition they are a part of. The living traditions within Islam have followed a number of paths, much like the Church --> East/West split --> West split into Protestantism --> further splintering. The difference is, in Islam they generally consider all Muslim brethren, but shake their heads at the idiots who are doing it wrong. == Whenever a religion decides to throw out its living tradition and go "BACK TO BASICS" - I agree. They get stupid. Example: Mehmet II. Ok, it started 200 yrs before him but when he led the charge to the fall of Constantiple, he TOTALLY changed everything. Ottoman Empire? His baby. Before that, there was at LEAST an status quo between the different religious groups. [granted, the 200 yrs prior to the fall of constantniple, things were shit everywhere.... Crusaders over here, Power grabs over there, East and West churches totally not happy with each other, forced conversions.... yeah, it was a shit period of time. And the poor West was stuck with Aristotle when they were forming their Universities and Scholasticism! No Plato! Thank you Byzantium. It's as if they knew it was their last gasp of breath and during the failed council of Florence, all that knowledge that was alive and well in Byzantium and Islamic empires was FINALLY transferred over to eager students in the West, who quickly translated and spread the knowledge of Plato and other ancients they didn't know about... starting the humanist revolution that has led to today. == While I'm not Eastern Orthodox now - I was for a few years in my 20s... and I don't STRICTLY hold to this timeline-as-truth, nevertheless, it's pretty close to the 'map' I have for the history of Christianity. Not precisely mind you - but I'd say tradition-wise, they did a good job of trying to stick to it better than anyone else. Still, I think they should reconcile with the Copts already: I mean, 1700 years over an iota of difference... but neither side wants to budge over their I, so... == Well Gnosticism didn't have a continuing tradition like the others did. Some of them went over into Persia and continued there but basically had left the Christian realm altogether by that point afaik. == You could hold a gun to my head and I'd never remember "Balfour Declaration of 1917" but yup smile emoticon I was never good at dates/places with precision, but my brain's filled with large movements of peoples, their interrelationships [moods] and stuff through history. Someday I'll tackle China and their trading relationships (both material and spiritual trading as it were - ideas and stuff).It's on my bucket list. == I think you can cal the violent commandments stupid and that anybody who takes them seriously is stupid. *IF* all followers of a religion followed the violent commandments ... religiously.. as it were... I could agree with you. But most don't. That means something to me. What it means is: judge those who follow the shitty commandments. Write letters to their leaders suggesting they take those stupid verses out. But I don't think it taints an entire group of people if they're not following those thing either. It's "don't play dominoes on Sunday" for most of them == Loved Douglas Adams. Saw his BBC series as a kid on PBS in the USA. Talked to him on alt . ascii-art a bunch of times in the early 1990s Usenet. Awesome guy. But I don't know about the wave cycles. They're a bit too broad view for me. == Thing is to me, secularism-as-religion has become the dominant religious force over the older ones though. == lol naw, I judge, but I usually do it on an individual basis or subcultures. You should hear me go off on new atheism. Wait - no, that'd be bad. But beyond a certain bulk of people, I can't do it. I dunno why. == cultish, mannerisms of fundamentalist christian bible thumpers, resurrecting dead 19th century historical accounts and old debates that SEEMED to be dead by the 80s... and they suddenly reappear in the late 90s + beyond with a Dawkins rage... Polarizing, divisive, ruined atheism for some atheist friends I had that were more the "douglas adams" style atheist which was more about mockery and absurdity and less about "religion is child abuse" stuff... I'm agnostic for like 15 yrs although I always kinda was, even when I was trying on religions to learn stuff, and the old style atheism was more or less compatible. But new atheism is just this... thing. I dunno. It took Science (one of my loves) and it gets used as a rallying cry: "SCIENCE SCIENCE YAY" and plenty of people talking ABOUT the scientific method who don't really understand it 'cause if they did, they wouldn't always be saying, "SCIENCE IS FACT" so much 'cause that misses the whole point of it. ...ok, I could go on... I mean, it ruined the Science channel for me. About three years ago I stopped watching it when I heard new atheism style descriptions of history from science educators... my buddy Hawking putting together this "why God need not exist" (utilizing a VERY LIMITED God construct - a "straw god" to knock down)... ...and yeah. It's disappointing. It's a new religion for new times and it has an evangelical push like I haven't seen before. == I'm ok with Inflation but I still have a soft spot in my heart for Steady State theory and Hoyle. He got the shit end of the stick by 70s/80s physics communities and didn't get his Nobel prize... In school (in the 80s) he was mocked in my textbooks, yet when I learned later the real SIGNIFICANCE of his discoveries for nucleosynthesis are just extraordinarily HUGE but because they didn't like him (and he was a big of an obtuse prick anyway), he got shafted. Oh well. === Quantum Foam though, does (did?) lead to a possible resurrection of a _form_ of Steady State... and I expect we'll see more Steady-State-like theories come out as comes goes on and people forget. Hawking's recent "God need not exist" origin of Time thing was Big Bang-less if I remember, although i was so annoyed by him I was hardly listening. == I think we may have to rethink "what life is" and "what intelligence is" at some point. What if (it's a big what if), giant molecular gas clouds are conscious? What-if at the centers of stars, the complicated magnetic fields and slow moving photons pushing their way through inch by inch for thousands of years, there's a consciousness there? We don't know. We can't know, not yet. I think we're only at the beginning of discovery. I can't wait to see what the future brings. I'd love to get in my TARDIS for 500 yrs from now and spend a few years there just to see. == If I'm 13.7 billion years away? I'd probably see whatever we see 13.7 billion years away from here. It'd look the same I should think, but there's no way to prove it just yet, if ever. == Thing is, we can't know what's 13.7 billion years away right now. == Well that's the thing of it. We don't know the conditions of the Universe right now anywhere but here. Light is slow. Universe is big. Time stretches back. I keep waiting for the stars we use as "Standard Candle" for measuring to turn out to be totally wrong fucking up our calculations altogether. == Hey, I made a religion a few years ago based on the Primal Star, the giant molecular gas cloud it crashed into and gravity, as the Trinity that created all of the actual elements that make up us, your computer, everything the internet's running on, the Sun, and most of the matter we'll ever likely come in contact with around here. That's worth worshiping. But anything before that in time? Eh, somebody else's God to worship. == [1]http://icopiedyou.com/the-church-of-the-primal-supernova-2/ There we go. April 5, 2011. "The Church of the Primal Supernova". I figured a scientific religion would be an interesting thing to see in the world. All the hymnals could be kept up to date with latest scientific discoveries... we could have science experiments every week... and the songs would teach people about scientific stuff, like Oxygen, cognitive dissonance, photons... == Thing is, I love science. I also love history. I love imagination. Lots of things. But I don't like when people abuse a field for a political purpose... unless it's politics in which case, that's what its for I guess. == true dat, although at the time of the formation of the religion in 2011, they hadn't yet made a successful model of the black holes in the center of galaxies. That wouldn't come out until 2012, a year later: here: O. Straub, F.H. Vincent, M.A. Abramowicz, E. Gourgoulhon, T. Paumard, ``Modelling the black hole silhouette in Sgr A* with ion tori, Astron. Astroph. 543} (2012) A83. So, the religion _may_ need some modification - actually it's designed for modification... ..but really my main thought was (and I'm glad you like it!) - "What formed the actual elements in us now?" Like what was the forge? That's our creator quite literally. == I like think about it 'cause even my fingers touching the keyboard here: The skin on my finger tips and the plastic of the keyboard were once hydrogen, then helium, all the way down to iron... then BOOOOM.... SMASH.... ELEMENTS! Then static electricity bringing stuff together, then gravity took over, and the rest is those animations you saw in school. Oh and life and stuff too. == Well, here's how I see it: The fact that we're even HERE discussing it, the only known creatures CAPABLE of such things in an otherwise VAST, perhaps DEVOID of life Cosmos... makes us _very_ significant indeed. Despite hopes of alien we _could_ be "it". That's pretty amazing to me and worth appreciating. As far as voting? yes I'm gonna vote. No, I don't know who yet. == My two main choices will be decided for me by July or so. But I never completely decide 'til I pull back the curtain behind me 'cause our constitution is strong and whoever is in power will get their empty campaign promises' wings clipped as all of them too. and yeah our tiny size always fascinates me as well. I suspect we'll _probably_ find other life at some point... I mean look how primitive we are: We have VERY few telescopes ACTUALLY in space, away from the atmosphere and it's what.. 2016? And we've been back to the moon how many times? Let's see.. well, China has but the usa? == is it likely? no ,but not impossible. I'd be disowned by everybody I know if I did anyway tongue emoticon But a lot depends. I wait. I always wait. When the GOP and DNC decide the Prez and Vice Prez, THEN I'll have a _little_ something to work with. Plus I want to see what people they plan to stick into important positions. What's their cabinet gonna look like? That's really important. Stuff like that. == I'm independent. Always have been. Hate the two party system. Trump paired with a strong VP and a strong cabinet _COULD_ outweigh whatever misgivings I might have. It's always possible. Likelihood at present: 0.0002% but I always leave a margin open. I vote independent when I can. I haven't hit every election cycle. I even voted republican once. Bush in 2004. Why? It was an experiment on myself. Could I do it? Well, I could. I liked his cabinet. So, a month later he fires his cabinet. FUCK! I learned. == My main issue with Trump isn't the shit he says or the hate he rallies in people. It's that he doesn't listen. that's a problem for a prez. == Mostly though, I don't believe him. I don't believe any of 'em, but him especially. He's playing a poker game with the system to see if he can win - and he can. What happens when he puts his feet on the desk? likely nothing that he's been promising. He doesn't have to. He knows that. == I want to know his plans for china. Can't go full protectionist. Neither can Sanders. Not practical. Our globalism has to be cut down I think - yet if we lose trade negotiations, byebye walmart, dollar stores, cheap affordable goods. and honestly? I'm cheap. Of course every one of 'em will end up making things cost more somewhere along the line. *sigh* - whatev. I'm just living here. == I also don't worry too much either because in the USA, the electorate decides who wins, not the popular vote. It's brilliant really 'cause time and time again it's been shown people like to be misled. Other votes count, just not the prez vote. == References Visible links 1. http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Ficopiedyou.com%2Fthe-church-of-the-primal-supernova-2%2F&h=HAQGVRXZA