Everyone has an agenda. Anyone telling you they don't have an agenda is lying to you. Or lying to themselves.
But there's no reason not to trust that something WikiLeaks releases is genuine. No one even credibly refutes WikiLeak's releases. They just attack the source.
The instant WikiLeaks releases something that's shown to be false I'll stop trusting them. In the meantime I find myself shaking my head in disbelief at Slashdotters trusting the CIA more than WikiLeaks. Jesus Christ what a difference and election makes, eh?
The question is whether religion is a net positive. The answer has to be that it has uses, but that it is inferior to education.
Except religious communities continue to reproduce while areligious societies like western europe are undergoing demographic collapse.
Frankly, if people who can only be convinced by religious bullshit were to die out and leave everyone else behind, it seems like things would go a lot better.
Except that will literally not happen. The areligious will die out the religious will continue on. Ergo, religion is clearly superior to education.
And if by "education" you mean "science," then Hume already settled this. Science describes what is, religion describes how you ought to act, and Hume proved you can't derive an ought from an is. The educated will putz around "knowing" what is while the religious act how they ought and out-compete every time.
If you value obedience most, then you might stand on one side of this argument.
It has nothing to do with what I value. I'm just saying societies in which people don't control themselves (which is really the tyranny of ostracization from the culture) don't propagate into the future. I'm giving you an "is" and you're giving me an "ought," and those two domains do not overlap.
What if I told you that if you're not an asshole, women will just naturally want to be around?
What if I told you that's complete bullshit? Women love assholes. Rather, they love assholes who are nice to them.
In reality mating behavior follows a pareto rule, where the top 20% of men by sexual market value get 80% of the women. Being nice or being an asshole is pretty much irrelevant.
It doesn't validate forcing women to do what I want.
Who said anything about force? How about women who want to be wives, mothers, caregivers? A society that encourages women to want to do those sorts of things will be much more successful than a society that encourages them to do stupid things like work in the economy.
A body would be enough. There's nothing to even suggest they've used these tools against domestic targets. You might as well point to a tank and tell me to be shocked and outraged because the US Army is crushing little American babies under its treads.
Who proved this and how? It seems to me that history tells just the opposite story: areligious societies die or fall apart in just a few generations. Case in point, catastrophically low areligious western european birthrates.
Imagine we both founded colonies in America 400 years ago, and mine is a town of 200 Catholics and yours a town of 200 atheists. Fast forward 150 years after that. How's your town progressed, and how's mine progressed?
Well if you want me to be shocked and outraged then you need to show me them using them against Americans. I didn't see anything like that in Vault 7 (so far). The most terrible thing in Vault 7 was their pathetic meme folder. And harboring of bronies.
Now what did bother me about Vault 7 is the CIA hoarding exploits instead of informing software and device makers so they could fix them. The (alleged) purpose of the US military and intelligence apparatus is to defend the people of the United States. They're taking my tax dollars, and I'm not as pissed off about it as I could be because it's supposed to be going towards efforts to defend me from attack. Instead they're using it to attack others. No no no. Defend me first. That's what I'm paying you fuckers for.
But that's not really a concept most of the public thinks or cares about. They cared about the NSA because they were hoovering up their dick pics. Once CIA is revealed to be hoarding dick pics then people will care.
Oh and as far as "do great in a Muslim society" goes, no, their polygamist system only works while they have enemies to send their aimless young men to be slaughtered by in search of that afterlife poon. I'd call it meta-stable. Once Islam conquers the world they'll all kill each other.
Religion beat areligion because religionists are violent and enforced their delusional views on everyone, with the penalty for nonconformance frequently being execution. The Catholic Church was a big instigator of this: they frequently burned people alive who didn't agree with their theology. Remember the Spanish Inquisition?
Remember Stalin? The religious at least have some internal nagging that makes them reluctant to employ violence in pursuit of their delusion views. The areligious have no such restraint.
It's not religion or areligion that makes humans violent. Humans are just violent, and trying to blame that on religion is a cop-out.
As for China, we'll see how long their current system lasts. Christianity is growing like wildfire there.
Eh, I much prefer the Christian model, where men and women are societal partners. The men agree to labor for and protect the women, and the women agree to make the men sandwiches, raise their children and fondle their balls. Seems to work out well for everyone. I'd call that "good."
By that logic addictive substances wouldn't have endured for thousands of years and we wouldn't have so many. People have been using and abusing opium for a long time, but you have to do some pretty serious libertarian-grade mental gymnastics to say that opium dens are a net gain.
And you'll notice non-opium use is the vast majority, and opium use is the degenerate tiny minority. This supports my claim. The productive, generative culture (religion/non-opium abusing) vastly out competes the unproductive, degenerate culture (areligion/opium abusing).
So the Mormons [deseretnews.com] and Muslims [pewresearch.org] are going to inherit the world? I understand the concept of outbreeding the competition... but that doesn't seem like the best solution in today's modern world with the whole lack of resources thing and limited fossil fuel situation.
Indeed, having fewer kids seems to be the consensus among developed nations. [wikimedia.org] Religion or no. I'd even go so far as to say that's the rational viewpoint. Especially when your retirement plans aren't "hope one of the children feed you".
That's exactly my point. The areligious, secularized, developed nations are not reproducing, and their retirement plan ("hope the government feeds you") is so poor they're importing religious, breeding people (like Muslims into Europe) hoping they'll fund the government and feed them when they're old. They probably won't though...Muslims give subzero fucks about infidels, so if you're German, don't have kids, and are expecting that in 50 years Achmed is going to be taking care of you in the nursing home...oh boy. I do not see that working out well. Having your own kids take care of you is a much better survival system than hoping the government takes care of you.
Rationality is irrelevant. Humans are not rational, human behavior is not rational, evolution does not select for the rational (usually). What wins is what wins, and what's always won is unifying, productive, generative belief, and what's always lost is aimless isolation.
It's not a gene
It's a meme, which is the same basic idea. The genes which have survived 3+ billion years of evolution are the winning "net positive" genes. The memes which have survived for thousands of years are the winning "net positive" memes. Religion is still around, strong, and growing. Areligion never lasts long because as soon as a society adopts it they die or collapse in a few generations. See western europe.
And I'm saying that since that didn't happen in any major culture on the planet, it's unlikely to be true. If you consider each nation as an internal system religion beat areligion in every case, and the Catholic Church is still here after 2,000 years. Jews seem to be doing fine, the Muslims are still expanding like mad. On the other hand western Europe seems to have given up on Christianity and become areligious and they now have catastrophically low birth rates after only 50-80 years of secularization. Their people and culture will be replaced in the next hundred years by Muslims from the middle east and Africa. Whether Islam is true or not is irrelevant. It'll keep going for thousands of years while areligious communities can't survive a few generations. Something beats nothing every time.
Eh, I think religion is an evolved codification of naturally selected (i.e., productive) behavior. This is how you wind up with religious laws about not eating pork (parasites from less-clean animals) or having sex with women on their periods (infection). The behavior comes first, then the rules describing the generally most productive behavior.
At that point if you want to get into whether or not God actually exists and the religion is "true," then you'd go God creates system of life --> system determines productive behavior -> humans codify God's system of productive behavior into rules -> rules become religion inspired by God.
At the end of the day, if you're following a system of behavioral rules that result in generative, expansive behavior for your culture and people you win and the system propagates into the future. If you don't you die, and the world today is populated only with creatures whose ancestors successfully reproduced in an unbroken chain for over 3 billion years. Must have been doing something right.
Religion (NOTE - not the belief in God) is all about control of women.
So, yeah there's solid evidence that religion has been a net loss for man in general.
How do you figure control of women is a net loss for man? You're begging the question here that control of women (or men) is bad for mankind. Can you support that?
Seems to me that left to their own devices men without women are dangerous. They don't care about the tribe because they have no genetic future without children, and they may even be hostile to the tribe because if they can overthrow the existing order they may have access to women. Left to their own devices, women don't care about any of this and will mate with the highest status men (pareto rule).
So I would say uncontrolled women leads to uncontrollable men which leads to violence, mistrust, and civilization collapse. Controlled women leads to controlled men whose otherwise destructive energies can be harnessed towards productive activity in support of the women, the tribe, and the children (their future).
Why do you think control of women is bad, and a net loss for man?
And none of that would have happened if State/CIA and western NGOs hadn't backed a violent coup to overthrow the democratically elected pro-Russian Ukrainian government. Perhaps Putin's trying to discourage that sort of behavior?
I don't think that's a supportable opinion. If religions were not useful for propagating a people and culture into the future we wouldn't have so many religions that have endured for thousands of years. And areligious people tend to not have children, so their culture dies out. Religion must have been a net positive (even if locally negative for those who don't conform to the predominant religion) because otherwise, the areligious would have had an evolutionary advantage over the religious and would have dominated and killed them off millennia ago. Instead just the opposite happened.
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It seems to me you can't answer the simple question. Are you sure it's not you regurgitating anti-religious propaganda? I think it is.
I guess it's been awhile since I saw it. I remembered that stuff being in there. Maybe I watched the unedited version?
In what way?
Everyone has an agenda. Anyone telling you they don't have an agenda is lying to you. Or lying to themselves.
But there's no reason not to trust that something WikiLeaks releases is genuine. No one even credibly refutes WikiLeak's releases. They just attack the source.
The instant WikiLeaks releases something that's shown to be false I'll stop trusting them. In the meantime I find myself shaking my head in disbelief at Slashdotters trusting the CIA more than WikiLeaks. Jesus Christ what a difference and election makes, eh?
The question is whether religion is a net positive. The answer has to be that it has uses, but that it is inferior to education.
Except religious communities continue to reproduce while areligious societies like western europe are undergoing demographic collapse.
Frankly, if people who can only be convinced by religious bullshit were to die out and leave everyone else behind, it seems like things would go a lot better.
Except that will literally not happen. The areligious will die out the religious will continue on. Ergo, religion is clearly superior to education.
And if by "education" you mean "science," then Hume already settled this. Science describes what is, religion describes how you ought to act, and Hume proved you can't derive an ought from an is. The educated will putz around "knowing" what is while the religious act how they ought and out-compete every time.
If you value obedience most, then you might stand on one side of this argument.
It has nothing to do with what I value. I'm just saying societies in which people don't control themselves (which is really the tyranny of ostracization from the culture) don't propagate into the future. I'm giving you an "is" and you're giving me an "ought," and those two domains do not overlap.
What if I told you that if you're not an asshole, women will just naturally want to be around?
What if I told you that's complete bullshit? Women love assholes. Rather, they love assholes who are nice to them.
In reality mating behavior follows a pareto rule, where the top 20% of men by sexual market value get 80% of the women. Being nice or being an asshole is pretty much irrelevant.
It doesn't validate forcing women to do what I want.
Who said anything about force? How about women who want to be wives, mothers, caregivers? A society that encourages women to want to do those sorts of things will be much more successful than a society that encourages them to do stupid things like work in the economy.
keep our Nation safe
Doesn't really say anything about protecting people
Wat.
Or they could not spend the half a million dollars. But you don't get to take my money to "defend" me...and then not defend me.
Are you going to need a smoking gun
A body would be enough. There's nothing to even suggest they've used these tools against domestic targets. You might as well point to a tank and tell me to be shocked and outraged because the US Army is crushing little American babies under its treads.
Otherwise it is pretty much a proven fact.
Who proved this and how? It seems to me that history tells just the opposite story: areligious societies die or fall apart in just a few generations. Case in point, catastrophically low areligious western european birthrates.
Imagine we both founded colonies in America 400 years ago, and mine is a town of 200 Catholics and yours a town of 200 atheists. Fast forward 150 years after that. How's your town progressed, and how's mine progressed?
Which came first, governments or religions?
I think most people don't trust wikileaks.
Only hyper-partisan leftists. Nothing WikiLeaks has ever released has been shown to be false.
Well if you want me to be shocked and outraged then you need to show me them using them against Americans. I didn't see anything like that in Vault 7 (so far). The most terrible thing in Vault 7 was their pathetic meme folder. And harboring of bronies.
Now what did bother me about Vault 7 is the CIA hoarding exploits instead of informing software and device makers so they could fix them. The (alleged) purpose of the US military and intelligence apparatus is to defend the people of the United States. They're taking my tax dollars, and I'm not as pissed off about it as I could be because it's supposed to be going towards efforts to defend me from attack. Instead they're using it to attack others. No no no. Defend me first. That's what I'm paying you fuckers for.
But that's not really a concept most of the public thinks or cares about. They cared about the NSA because they were hoovering up their dick pics. Once CIA is revealed to be hoarding dick pics then people will care.
Oh and as far as "do great in a Muslim society" goes, no, their polygamist system only works while they have enemies to send their aimless young men to be slaughtered by in search of that afterlife poon. I'd call it meta-stable. Once Islam conquers the world they'll all kill each other.
Religion beat areligion because religionists are violent and enforced their delusional views on everyone, with the penalty for nonconformance frequently being execution. The Catholic Church was a big instigator of this: they frequently burned people alive who didn't agree with their theology. Remember the Spanish Inquisition?
Remember Stalin? The religious at least have some internal nagging that makes them reluctant to employ violence in pursuit of their delusion views. The areligious have no such restraint.
It's not religion or areligion that makes humans violent. Humans are just violent, and trying to blame that on religion is a cop-out.
As for China, we'll see how long their current system lasts. Christianity is growing like wildfire there.
Eh, I much prefer the Christian model, where men and women are societal partners. The men agree to labor for and protect the women, and the women agree to make the men sandwiches, raise their children and fondle their balls. Seems to work out well for everyone. I'd call that "good."
What's your definition of "good?"
By that logic addictive substances wouldn't have endured for thousands of years and we wouldn't have so many. People have been using and abusing opium for a long time, but you have to do some pretty serious libertarian-grade mental gymnastics to say that opium dens are a net gain.
And you'll notice non-opium use is the vast majority, and opium use is the degenerate tiny minority. This supports my claim. The productive, generative culture (religion/non-opium abusing) vastly out competes the unproductive, degenerate culture (areligion/opium abusing).
So the Mormons [deseretnews.com] and Muslims [pewresearch.org] are going to inherit the world? I understand the concept of outbreeding the competition... but that doesn't seem like the best solution in today's modern world with the whole lack of resources thing and limited fossil fuel situation.
Indeed, having fewer kids seems to be the consensus among developed nations. [wikimedia.org] Religion or no. I'd even go so far as to say that's the rational viewpoint. Especially when your retirement plans aren't "hope one of the children feed you".
That's exactly my point. The areligious, secularized, developed nations are not reproducing, and their retirement plan ("hope the government feeds you") is so poor they're importing religious, breeding people (like Muslims into Europe) hoping they'll fund the government and feed them when they're old. They probably won't though...Muslims give subzero fucks about infidels, so if you're German, don't have kids, and are expecting that in 50 years Achmed is going to be taking care of you in the nursing home...oh boy. I do not see that working out well. Having your own kids take care of you is a much better survival system than hoping the government takes care of you.
Rationality is irrelevant. Humans are not rational, human behavior is not rational, evolution does not select for the rational (usually). What wins is what wins, and what's always won is unifying, productive, generative belief, and what's always lost is aimless isolation.
It's not a gene
It's a meme, which is the same basic idea. The genes which have survived 3+ billion years of evolution are the winning "net positive" genes. The memes which have survived for thousands of years are the winning "net positive" memes. Religion is still around, strong, and growing. Areligion never lasts long because as soon as a society adopts it they die or collapse in a few generations. See western europe.
And I'm saying that since that didn't happen in any major culture on the planet, it's unlikely to be true. If you consider each nation as an internal system religion beat areligion in every case, and the Catholic Church is still here after 2,000 years. Jews seem to be doing fine, the Muslims are still expanding like mad. On the other hand western Europe seems to have given up on Christianity and become areligious and they now have catastrophically low birth rates after only 50-80 years of secularization. Their people and culture will be replaced in the next hundred years by Muslims from the middle east and Africa. Whether Islam is true or not is irrelevant. It'll keep going for thousands of years while areligious communities can't survive a few generations. Something beats nothing every time.
Eh, I think religion is an evolved codification of naturally selected (i.e., productive) behavior. This is how you wind up with religious laws about not eating pork (parasites from less-clean animals) or having sex with women on their periods (infection). The behavior comes first, then the rules describing the generally most productive behavior.
At that point if you want to get into whether or not God actually exists and the religion is "true," then you'd go God creates system of life --> system determines productive behavior -> humans codify God's system of productive behavior into rules -> rules become religion inspired by God.
At the end of the day, if you're following a system of behavioral rules that result in generative, expansive behavior for your culture and people you win and the system propagates into the future. If you don't you die, and the world today is populated only with creatures whose ancestors successfully reproduced in an unbroken chain for over 3 billion years. Must have been doing something right.
Religion (NOTE - not the belief in God) is all about control of women.
So, yeah there's solid evidence that religion has been a net loss for man in general.
How do you figure control of women is a net loss for man? You're begging the question here that control of women (or men) is bad for mankind. Can you support that?
Seems to me that left to their own devices men without women are dangerous. They don't care about the tribe because they have no genetic future without children, and they may even be hostile to the tribe because if they can overthrow the existing order they may have access to women. Left to their own devices, women don't care about any of this and will mate with the highest status men (pareto rule).
So I would say uncontrolled women leads to uncontrollable men which leads to violence, mistrust, and civilization collapse. Controlled women leads to controlled men whose otherwise destructive energies can be harnessed towards productive activity in support of the women, the tribe, and the children (their future).
Why do you think control of women is bad, and a net loss for man?
And none of that would have happened if State/CIA and western NGOs hadn't backed a violent coup to overthrow the democratically elected pro-Russian Ukrainian government. Perhaps Putin's trying to discourage that sort of behavior?
TBH, a game based on a literal interpretation of Revelation would be cool as hell with the rivers of blood and screams of the damned and everything.
Religion is a huge net negative for our species.
I don't think that's a supportable opinion. If religions were not useful for propagating a people and culture into the future we wouldn't have so many religions that have endured for thousands of years. And areligious people tend to not have children, so their culture dies out. Religion must have been a net positive (even if locally negative for those who don't conform to the predominant religion) because otherwise, the areligious would have had an evolutionary advantage over the religious and would have dominated and killed them off millennia ago. Instead just the opposite happened.
He's a CEO - little people problems are beneath his status in life.
Why should some kid's employment problem be his? He at least offered useful advice to people still in college.
Whenever I hire someone, I'm trying to find people smarter than I am.
Because you're smart. Most people aren't that smart.
A level people hire A level people. B level people hire C level people. No one has figure out yet who's hiring the B level people...