Of course, I have to be honest, there is a lot of good stuff in the Bible too. A lot of what jesus said, some of the psalms. I wonder if I did a line item edit on the book, splitting it into things that make me feel angry, things that make me feel good, and things I’m totally indifferent to, what I’d learn.
Not that it would do anything to get all the awful parts of it out of my head. I need brain bleach.
So, in Genesis it’s often spoken of how we got thrown out of the garden for consuming a particular bit of fruit. Interestingly, this fruit is describe as “the knowledge of good and evil”. That sounds a awful lot like religion (at least, religious adherents certainly seem to *claim* that they know what good and evil are, perhaps in fact they know better than the rest of us)
Could it be Christianity *was* the apple? That we’re forcing the apple down our children’s throats even as the text of the bible, in the very beginning, underlines the fact that we shouldn’t actually be trying to know what good and evil are? (That in fact, knowing them might bring them to life in our minds in ways that are particularly hard on our existence not to mention our ability to enjoy ourselves?)
I mean, I will admit, I’m hostile to religions. I believe in at least one and possibly many higher powers, I believe in all sorts of “religious” things, but I hate the religions I see and would rather not have anything to do with them. It finally occured to me that I don’t in fact have to read *any* religious texts, so I stopped. Gave up searching them, because there was too much noise and too little signal and it frankly *hurts my head* that *most of the people in this country* believe this.. horrible stuff.
I won’t waste my time, or yours if I actually have any readers left that aren’t bots, enumerating. You either already agree with me or you won’t hear me or won’t understand what I’m saying, so, what’s the point. I’m moving on.
How does one uneat a apple? I feel tainted by the texts I’ve read.. I’d describe them as unclean, with a lot of toxic ideas. I think I’d describe the God of the bible as
A) Someone who regularly abused their powers. No, it’s not moral because you’re all powerful.
B) Difficult to believe. Not at all congruent with my experience of reality. My experience of reality suggests if we do have a god or gods, they’re good people or at the very least indifferent to us.
C) A really unhealthy set of things to believe in. Remembering my thesis that the connection between what you believe and what you experience is a bidirectional one – that your beliefs form resonant filters that shape your experiences – do you want to believe God would casually make a bet with a angel and torment a guy because of it? And you think you should WORSHIP this guy? Destroy the entire world via water (changing all sorts of physical constants to suit his whims) and then promise not to destroy the world again *that way*. (I’ll come up with something else next time). And these people describe this guy as being *LOVING*? Maybe in a dysfunctional the-kind-of-love-that-destroys you way. But that is not love as I know it.
Wish I could just type DELETE FROM BOOKS_STORED_IN_MEMORY_OF_SHEER WHERE Book_Title LIKE ‘%Bible%’ and be done with it. I suspect (as does Neil Stephenson I would guess) that the book is a neurolinguistic virus. It tells people “Make copies of me and tell your friends about me or they’ll go to hell” and “Don’t change me”. And people oblige. And then it disables their ability to think rationally, to change their minds, to create probability chains, and (my guess) to communicate in any way with their higher power. (It certainly contains the belief that God can’t talk to you because his voice is so powerful it’d kill ya. Yah, way to be all powerful, God!)
I think I’ve talked before about how astonishingly little faith Christians have. Abortion murders.. because God never figured out how to build a hypervisor, or how to make life hypervised so that he could casually only connect souls to bodies that are going to make it. Our religion is the only way – because this all powerful being who is also supposed to be incredibly loving couldn’t have possibly thought of the fact that people are different and need different paths to the light. I could go on for a while, pointing out the many, many ways that religion tends to put the people it’s about (Gods, angels, etc) in incredibly small and I’m fairly sure incredibly inaccurate boxes. My thesis here is that religions tend to be written by black hats, for their own reasons. (personal gain, power, that sort of thing) and that if we had any common sense, we’d realize that you can learn about all sorts of spiritual concepts *without religion*. In fact, the tendency of religions to disable a previously functioning mind really makes me think that if we want to see a lot of great things happen, maybe we should exterminate them from the earth like the damaging virii they are.
Except we can’t. The only way people are going to get better from this disease is one at a time, by thinking it through as individuals. It’s like Sting says.. Men go crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one.
I actually think this is a remarkable description of how I feel about Christianity. It’s like a disease. Now I suppose there are those who would say that it actually makes people happy, that they’re more complete believing in it. The problem is, I have no way to know. I’ve only got a sample size of one – me – and it’s really really really bad for me.
So, I wanted to write some about one percent, because I think a lot of people think it’s about something completely different than it’s actually about, and also in the hopes that perhaps I’d draw some attention to the existence of Fraud In France, who really seem to get the short end of the stick, web hits wise.
First off, a link to the track:
Fraud In France – One Percent (from practice 21CN)
And the lyrics:
One percent got the money and they have all the rights
Two percent we put in prison for trying to put up a fight
Three percent aren’t sure where their next check’s coming from
Four percent are terrified of everything under the sun
(Chorus)
Us and them, you and me
One is the lock and the other is the key
Us and them, you and me
Does our world have a future
(Will we ever be free / To be or not to be)
Tweedledum and Tweedledumber are vying at the polls
Five percent are indifferent, we all know how that goes
Six percent think the president gonna solve all their woes
Seven percent think the president is a wolf in sheep’s clothes
(Chorus)
I’m not a number, I am a free man
They tell me nothing, I find out what I can
Some people say that this is all part of the plan
That’s small comfort when the shit done hit the fan
(Chorus)
—
Okay, so, a explanation. The song is actually about the folly of breaking people into different groups and thinking you’re part of one group and not part of another – about the extreme isolation that can come from thinking you’re not “part of” or he (whoever he is, be he a billionare or the bum on the corner, a politician or a saint) isn’t “part of” – about why we shouldn’t divide ourselves into focus groups and factions when there are things that affect all of us that we should address as a whole, and about thinking you and me are not so different, even though there may be some radical differences in the choices we are making or the circles we are flying in.
About once a week, I get told I’m among the smartest persons $WHOEVER has met.
I really hope not.
I want to be right in the middle. I would like to think there are a whole lot of people smarter than me and a whole lot of people dumber than me. I think there probably was a time when I would take pride in being in the top 1%, but that’s before I discovered that there are many problems that individuals can’t solve that teams can. Now that I’m aware of the power of teamwork, I would really like to think there’s a whole lot of people smarter than me working on some of the more obvious problems in my viewpoint.
So, I think you all know I’ve had a long and complex struggle with the religion of my childhood. I’ve come to accept that for many people it is a good thing, and that there are some amazing people (Martin Luther King Jr. comes to mind) who have had it loaded and gone on to do great things for us all. I am getting closer and closer to a place of no longer being angry at it.
However, it contains a fatal flaw. Actually, a *bunch* of religions contain this flaw, and it’s from where I sit kind of a dangerous one that we really need to get rid of.
The idea is this. “I am the only true religion. All other religions are false. All the adherents to those religions will go to $DYSTOPIA while the adherents to me will continue to $UTOPIA”.
The problems with this are legion.
1) It excuses going to any lengths to attempt to “convert” adherents to other religions. Holy wars become acceptable. So does enforcing your questionable moral code on people who have other moral codes
2) It denies reality. I’ve known people of many religions and found them all to be beautiful, amazing, and worthy of love. Surely no higher power would expect someone to guess amongst the multitude of religions currently out there and punish them for guessing wrong. Beyond that, the variety of life and people and places and whatnot on Earth sure suggests that if someone is running the show, *that someone LIKES variety*.
3) It leads to some very questionable thinking. Looking at the wikipedia entry for adherents to religions, I find that while there is a majority religion, there’s no religion that has more adherents than the sum of all the other religions. So, you’re arguing that God is such a bad systems designer that he built a system where the majority of the users are going to $DYSTOPIA. Really? You can’t really blame the users on this one, much as some of you might like to try.
I guess my plea to the religious is – don’t believe yours is the only way. Think better of God than that. Think better of *yourself* than that. I feel a lot like saying your religion is the only way and $A_SUPERUSER will participate in punishing those who didn’t see the world the way you did is in some ways a lot like shoving the blacks – or the gays, or whatever $MINORITY or $DIFFERENT_PEOPLE you might happen to dislike – to the back of the bus.
Beyond that, I take great comfort from the many times when friends of mine from a wide variety of religions and walks of life have freely acknowledged that we have more in common than we have different, and that theirs probably ISN’T the only way. It’s a happy thing to hear.
Also remember that monolithic systems often fail where systems with variety in them succeed.
Happy to be here, hoping to help the ball club.
While we tend to think of ourselves as being located ‘within’ the bodies we are wearing, it’s not at all clear to me that this is the case. These bodies could be rather similar to views in a database – a particular way at looking at the dataset rushing towards us. And, also, I keep coming back to the interesting idea about the electron probability cloud. As near as we can currently tell, a electron forms a probability cloud around the nucleus of a atom. While the odds are enormously high that it will be within a few diameters of that nucleus, it would appear that the odds never do fall to zero that it will be any distance short of infinity away. So maybe we’re all everywhere. 😉
This is a thought that struck me the other day. I know that the scientists among my readers will scoff, and I don’t blame you, but it’s a interesting idea to let rattle around your head for a few minutes nonetheless.
It’s generally assumed that the vast majority of stars have no life surrounding them. When we look up at the sky, we don’t usually think about the possibility that every single light shines down on civilization. However, the current rules of the universe as we understand them make it very difficult for us to be aware of whether there is or is not life surrounding most of those other stars. Given how recently we acquired radio capacity, and also the extreme difficulty of getting a radio signal any appriciable distance, it’s possible that *every single star* has life on it.
Since I think we’re hypervised anyway (i.e. I think that our experiences happen within a ‘virtual universe’ container in order to save resources and also enable a much more flexible set of experiences for us) I’m not sure if it’s a meaningful discussion, but nonetheless, it’s a interesting thought to think about..
What if every star has life?
I would think that the religious would be especially in favor of this idea. If there is a God, clearly said being has a real *thing* for diversity (I’d gesture you to the variety of life on earth, and the variety of types of stars, and types of people, and types of religions, and so on, and so forth). Why would they think that life was only created *here*? Why not *everywhere*?
If we are hypervised, and our scientists are discovering about the rules of the hypervisor rather than the ‘bare metal rules’ of the universe so to speak, then it would seem clear that a number of aspects of this universe are designed to keep us away from other stars, at least for now. Maybe we’re working out how to go about first contact.
Of course, in my view, first contact has already happened. Dogs and cats and elephants and all the variety of mammals around us do think, and make decisions, and communicate. A dog has as much bandwidth to his nose as you have to your eyes! Surely the world must be very different to them, and they are pretty alien. And yet so wonderful 😉
The russians kept humans in space stations for over a year. They suffered no ill effects.
This speaks strongly towards the human body being a broad-purpose design. If it was truly shaped by nothing but evolution, it would not be likely to be shaped for either free fall or some of the very high accelerations that are experienced both in spaceflight and at six flags, and it would very likely stop working correctly.
Of course, when I look at our bodies, I see signs of design of the exact same type I do every day. I see DNA manifesting as running code, and I still think it likely that we are also hypervised so even the proteins are a type of running code. To me, it’s silly to have a system that *is* intelligent, and argue against intelligent design. Whatever symbols you want to attach to the idea of God, whoever you want to posit as the designer, I think the intellectually honest must acknowledge the most likely explanation for the bodies we wear is that a intelligent designer fabricated them. I think anyone will acknowledge that it’s *possible* that you could get to them by randomly throwing dice, over and over. But It does not, to me, seem *likely*. As soon as you build a brain big enough to write code, evolution seems like it would quickly take the back seat.
In short, I think the evolutionists are denying large chunks of data in order to hold onto their pet theory. That doesn’t mean I don’t think evolutionary algorithms haven’t been used in the design of our bodies. But they are far from the whole picture, in my opinion.
One thing that frustrates me is how it sometimes seems like people only concede two possibilities.. a remote/external to us/out there somewhere God, or evolution. It seems to me my hypothesis is by far the most reasonable.. that the intelligent designers are *us*. Why does no one even discuss this possibility?
We were in the studio this weekend.. we got most of 1% and some of Click recorded. I laid down a badass B3 part on 1%, I’ve been discovering a little more about the art of setting the two manuals to different collections of harmonics and then playing parts suitable for the collection of harmonics that have been set. I continue to love the B3 sound.. it seems like it compliments everything. 1% is a interesting track in that it’s recorded with a accoustic piano and a real live B3 – the first track I have laid down on tape in a very long time that didn’t involve any synthesized instruments at all.
My opinion of AWS keeps dropping. Now, perhaps I should be thinking in terms of being grateful that this resource is available to me instead of being annoyed that it isn’t working the way I’d expect, but I currently have a instance stuck in ‘stopping’ state – and I can’t open a support incident on this because the ‘Instance is not known to be impaired’. Well, no really? If you knew it was stuck, you’d have probably also already fixed it.
I’m guessing there’s somewhere I can go to request a fix.. but still, grr. Way to not be helpful, AWS..