If the universe isn't infinite, but just gigantic, and there are multiple dimensions, rather than just one, and time branches into multiple dimensions in response to possibilities, one dead cat and one live cat instead of one cat floating in an indeterminate state, then that would imply that the universe is a finite set, time is a path through permutations of that set, and time travel would consist of mapping these permutations to a degree that one is able to follow non-obvious and improbable paths through the set.
That's another way of looking at it. Another way is that they were given a shitload of money from people in the large media industries, and a red carpet right into the service-provider model that they so desperately want, only people are attempting to rebel against this, so they need to find another way to deliver the locks and keys onto peoples desktops.
No, privacy protects people in power from abuse by you. The people in power already have access to the things you're trying to keep private, and the things your neighbour is trying to keep private. They are holding all the cards already, and trying to keep you from getting your hands on them.
No, you won't. You have no idea how many hops the data is making, who is in the middle, where copies are being stored.
If you live your life in a way that demands privacy to assure your personal security, you will be disappointed.
The privacy debates going these days are a bunch of bullshit. Privacy is a myth, and it serves the interests of those who already have access to all the data and don't want to lose that edge by sharing it with everyone else.
We should be striving towards dismantling the myth, banishing hypocrisy and helping people deal with their deep dark secrets that they hide because of the real and present danger of being singled out and made to take responsibility for human failings they share with those who are judging them.
If your kid likes Squeak, you might want to take a look at the Scratch project. It's somewhat similar, released by MIT, and there are a ton of projects you can tear apart and modify released Creative Commons - Sharealike Attribution on the site.
Only Windows/Mac unfortunately, but there is a Linux version planned apparently.
Doesn't sound very labour intensive to me. They made a robot arm that dips a piece of glass into a dispersion of nanosheets, then dips it into the glue, over and over again. That sounds trivially easy, like something you could do in your backyard.
I imagine you could produce some pretty interesting seamless objects with this... just smash it on the ground when you're done and shake the broken glass out.
Nanosheets don't look that terribly hard to grow, and this polymer they're talking about is apparently similar to white glue.
I know I'll be buying four of them for Xmas, two for poor kids, one for my daughter, one for my niece. She's only just turned seven, and is already designing video games in Squeak, which comes with the OLPC, so I imagine this will work well for her.
No, although I'd like to know those things about the people I deal with, and I don't really see any justification for why compromises in health care and infotech and my own capacity to decide who I wish to have dealings with, just to keep someones deep, dark secrets. I wouldn't say there should be any entitlement to damages either.
Every example you gave was a choice, not a disease.
Why should we be helping the alcoholic keep his job? Why should we be helping the transsexual, who we've already established to have a mental disorder? Why should it be impossible to decide to help young mothers-to-be instead of baby killing little sluts?
Seriously, what justification for any of this beyond live and let live? Is society meant to enshrine peoples right to trick people into thinking they're something they're not?
Aside from all that, does anyone find the idea that hospitals could be shut down with no more difficulty than erasing an illegally copied politically newscast off a TCP compliant DVR intimidating?
What happens when a small county hospital can't afford to pay, so they lose access to the data they depend on to treat people? Spend a few years in court establishing that this is a problem?
Hell, there seems to be a lot of concern about foreign nations using cyber-warfare to attack another nations critical infrastructure. So, that being the case, why in the sweet hell would you want to take something as critical to human life as medical records and centralize them?
Wouldn't we be safer making do with a little less privacy and having them replicated automatically from hospital to hospital?
Honestly... I don't care if you guys know that I broke 5 ribs 15 years ago, have bad eyesight and am allergic to Ceclor. Snoop away, no skin off my ass. But you better fucking believe I want every hospital worker and their mom to know all about it.
Heh, you want something that's a real bitch to tune, get a harmonica.
It's a delicate process involving emery paper, jewelers files, modeling knives, tiny screwdrivers, beeswax and tape. You slip up, you need a new harmonica.
They use piezoelectric pickups. The thing I thought was kind of weird is that they use the strings as the conductor for the signals to the servo-motors. If the building got hit by lightning, would you look like Yahoo Serious?
The alternative is Sun and Novell forming their private militia and sending hitmen to hit their competitors. In a country with a developed legal system, we rather slap each other with licenses.
Nothing's perfect.
Why am I reminded of the time someone told me their city was safer than other cities because "around here, we fight with knives instead of guns".
When you respect people who haven't earned it, like drug addicts and mental patients, you end up with things like "Major Linux Hardware Donor Is a CNN Hero". Take a fucking note.
Right now it appears cohesive because it has a common cause to fight against. Leave it on it's own and it's just a big mob of separate nations.
Isn't that how a democracy with freedom is supposed to work? When there is no need to be ruled, there is no central rule, and when there is a common threat, there is cohesion. Despite cowards dropping bombs from the sky and laying their cities to waste, they still are not ruled in their hearts and continue to fight.
Seriously, show some fucking respect. The respect due a valiant enemy, if nothing else.
Judaism: It is an evil thing to loan money on interest and place people in bondage to you. You should only do it to foreigners. [And no conversions. We are the people of God.]
Christianity: There is nothing wrong with charging interest on people and placing them in bondage to you. You may do it to each other if you wish. [Oh, and go convert more people. Bring your sword.]
Islam: It is an evil thing to loan money on interest and place people in bondage to you. You should not do it. If you have excess to loan, give it charitably. [Oh, and go convert more people. Bring your sword.]
Lets not pretend there are people around here with clean hands, eh?
Jews and Judaism have never crusaded against anyone or instituted any forced conversions ever. We actually have a law against prosyletization, saying that I can't so much as hand you flyers on the street to make you become Jewish.
That's because followers of Judaism are conspiratorial racists. Followers of Christianity and Islam are taught to treat humans who are not faithful as dangerous threats, regardless of tribe, who should be either converted into a resource or eradicated.
Followers of Judaism are taught to treat members of their own tribe with dignity due to the people of God, but to treat members of other tribes as chattel to be exploited. Basically, according to your doctrine, we're not good enough to be Jewish, and we're not enough of a threat for it to be wise to eradicate us, but rather, we should be economically ruled.
I'd suggest you to stop acting superior, but you're not going to listen to me anyways.
Using outcomes from inequal start conditions as a measure of objective superiority only works on infinitely long timescales. In the real world, it's a poor metric.
Measures of what civilizations ought to think, what it's wise to think, are always measured on long time scales. In the real world, that is to say, what we can see and touch, we are incapable of experimentation, because our own lives are smaller than the scope of the experiment. Therefore, anything you have to say on the subject that isn't based on successful multi-generational practices of the past is conjecture. That is why science can't deal with the problems religions are meant to cope with. You'd need a time machine to test things. This is what we get, deal with it or don't.
In the absence of modern contraception, homosexuality is a powerful disease vector. Cultural acceptance of it leads to declining birth rates in a civilization. Therefore, civilizations that accept it in the absence of modern contraception and in the presence of civilizations that would compete for resources die off.
The idealists who deny the existence and relevance of these factors in their pursuit of freedom for the individual above all else are no better than the fundamentalists who refuse to apply critical thinking to their own beliefs, and therefore cannot properly justify their social systems to critical thinkers. Neither group is fit to dictate policy.
Jewish peoples dietary constrictions are the same sort of thing. In the absence of modern pasteurization, sterilization, packaging and cooking techniques, their system of beliefs kept them alive when other peoples poisoned themselves. And again, they do not apply critical thinking to their own beliefs in the modern age.
The problem with a religion is that in order to achieve the goal of convincing those who cannot critically think to act in their own best interest, it denies critical justifications from existing within itself, and therefore its followers are unable to tell when the advice has gotten stale.
It really doesn't have a damn thing to do with the existence or lack of existence of God. I'm an atheist, but to speak using the metaphors, God is everything.
When you conduct an experiment to prove your hypothesis, if your experiment is wrong, that means you didn't understand God properly, because you didn't understand the universe properly.
When people say "I don't believe in God", they're either saying "I don't believe in your hypothesis of what God wants" or "I don't understand that the concept of God as a person you're putting forward is really a hypothesis about what will happen to us if we do these actions, and I think you're just babbling nonsense". Usually, they are babbling nonsense, because they don't understand what they're talking about as they parrot these things.
None of this changes the fact that modern religions are each and every one successful experiments on human groups through multiple generations, something that science simply cannot achieve because if you were to set out to try, you'd be dead before the relevant data started coming back. Just like Joseph Smith.
Anyone whose mind is worthlessly closed will be unable to grasp simple truths that challenge them.
Your mind is "worthlessly closed" to the simple truth that this is a very characteristically human thing, that it's not unique in our history, that it led those who believed in it to survival where those who believed differently are no longer with us, and that it is a human survival mechanism that should be appreciated in that light and learned from.
If it wasn't any of these things, the horrible truths you have already noticed about it would have led to its destruction long ago.
There's a lot I want to say to that, but I wrote a blog entry six months ago that makes the point I'm trying to get across better and more eloquently than I have the time to do right now, so I'm just going to copy-paste it in here as my retort and get some work done.
There is no truth, and there is no knowledge.
All the things we know are things which we have decided, and we have decided them from a position of gross ignorance.
There was a time when we knew of the great and terrible fire god in the sky.
It was wise that we knew of him thus. To know of him thus was to understand that our lives sprung from him, that without his presence we would die. It was to understand his terrible power and be wary of it, lest he burn you to death. It was to understand that there was a pattern to his actions, and that we could build patterns among ourselves that were supported by the resolute and predictable nature of his actions. We could create time and history where once there was only timeless story and myth and the endless now.
This was not the truth. It was an arbitrary decision that we believe this, and that decision withstood the test of time because it was useful to view things in this fashion. It was a viewpoint that let you do things that you couldn't do before. Those savages who didn't believe were defeated by the weaknesses of their perspective.
There was a time when we knew that the earth was a round globe that the sun revolved around.
It was wise that we knew the sun thus. We spent so long worrying about offending that thing, ascribing motives to it that didn't exist, being blinded to the inconsistencies of our view.
Now we could predict its motion around the earth as we travelled its survace. We could do all sorts of useful things with this knowledge that we couldn't do before. Those who didn't believe as we did were defeated by the weaknesses of their perspective. Those who believed as we believed thrived and multiplied. This was knowledge.
Except that it was an arbitrary truth. It wasn't true. But it was useful. So it was good. This was knowledge.
Now we know that the earth revolves around the sun, and so do the rest of the planets. This is a useful perspective. It has empowered us.
The truth is, we see glimpses of the nature of the universe. We make a bunch of things up, and the more useful those made up things prove to be in helping us continue to exist, the more you see them among us as knowledge and truth.
Now, we have scientists contemplating the microscale of the universe, the macroscale of the universe.
Can you consider the effects your actions when you get up in the morning on the microscale? Or how what's happening on the microscale at the moment should influence what it's wise to do? What it's good or evil to do?
Could you consider how what's happening on the macroscale relates to the morality of your existance and your actions?
You can't.
You can't consider these things.
You're floating along with a whole bunch of made up rules that are there because they're empowering. Inevitably, the falseness of them will come along to bite you on the ass as you struggle to make some sense of the universe with these crude tools that are our truths and perspectives and knowledge.
At the end of the day, you must not get too caught up in defending the truths of things.
You must look around you.
Look at what truths you see bandied about, and try to understand what the purpose of those truths is.
Understand that none of this is really the truth, but every bit of it has some utility that is the reason for its existance.
Try to understand what that utility is.
This will help you deal with the ugliness in the world.
Every ugly evil thing you see has a reason why it is there, that is why its evil ugliness is tolerated.
The thing people who think in black and white terms about religion versus science don't get is that there are important lessons about humanity and what it really needs to survive buried in these religions.
These religions are so heinous, so terrible, that one looks at them and thinks, how could these be allowed to exist?
The problem comes up in that these religions are survival mechanisms, that have been subjected to evolutionary pressure just like the people that compose them, they are right in particular ways that we don't necessarily appreciate. They are right in such crucial ways that all the terribleness they bring is overcome by the survival capacities they bring with that terribleness.
When a civilization decides to just discard the lessons entirely and switch to an enlightened and free age of science and reason, they only survive a few generations before their decline and collapse. Happens over and over again through history.
Islam might have declined the Arab worlds capacity for science, but the Arab world is not weak because of it. We are. We are weaklings with clever tricks. We are few where we might have been many, we are soft and spoiled where we might have been hard and powerful, and we did it to ourselves.
It really pisses me off... the so-called reasonable people are making magic tricks with flammable powders for the delight of the peasants while Rome burns. Meanwhile, the people who have an insight into what the important lessons our religions have to bring us can't think critically enough to identify which are important and relevant, let alone think about why that is or convince anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
If the universe isn't infinite, but just gigantic, and there are multiple dimensions, rather than just one, and time branches into multiple dimensions in response to possibilities, one dead cat and one live cat instead of one cat floating in an indeterminate state, then that would imply that the universe is a finite set, time is a path through permutations of that set, and time travel would consist of mapping these permutations to a degree that one is able to follow non-obvious and improbable paths through the set.
That's another way of looking at it. Another way is that they were given a shitload of money from people in the large media industries, and a red carpet right into the service-provider model that they so desperately want, only people are attempting to rebel against this, so they need to find another way to deliver the locks and keys onto peoples desktops.
No, privacy protects people in power from abuse by you. The people in power already have access to the things you're trying to keep private, and the things your neighbour is trying to keep private. They are holding all the cards already, and trying to keep you from getting your hands on them.
No, you won't. You have no idea how many hops the data is making, who is in the middle, where copies are being stored.
If you live your life in a way that demands privacy to assure your personal security, you will be disappointed.
The privacy debates going these days are a bunch of bullshit. Privacy is a myth, and it serves the interests of those who already have access to all the data and don't want to lose that edge by sharing it with everyone else.
We should be striving towards dismantling the myth, banishing hypocrisy and helping people deal with their deep dark secrets that they hide because of the real and present danger of being singled out and made to take responsibility for human failings they share with those who are judging them.
It's a pull cord. Like what you'd find on a lawnmower or a chainsaw.
If your kid likes Squeak, you might want to take a look at the Scratch project. It's somewhat similar, released by MIT, and there are a ton of projects you can tear apart and modify released Creative Commons - Sharealike Attribution on the site.
Only Windows/Mac unfortunately, but there is a Linux version planned apparently.
Doesn't sound very labour intensive to me. They made a robot arm that dips a piece of glass into a dispersion of nanosheets, then dips it into the glue, over and over again. That sounds trivially easy, like something you could do in your backyard.
I imagine you could produce some pretty interesting seamless objects with this... just smash it on the ground when you're done and shake the broken glass out.
Nanosheets don't look that terribly hard to grow, and this polymer they're talking about is apparently similar to white glue.
This looks like something fun to try out.
Not for much longer they don't. Those days are numbered. Better get used to it.
I know I'll be buying four of them for Xmas, two for poor kids, one for my daughter, one for my niece. She's only just turned seven, and is already designing video games in Squeak, which comes with the OLPC, so I imagine this will work well for her.
No, although I'd like to know those things about the people I deal with, and I don't really see any justification for why compromises in health care and infotech and my own capacity to decide who I wish to have dealings with, just to keep someones deep, dark secrets. I wouldn't say there should be any entitlement to damages either.
Every example you gave was a choice, not a disease.
Why should we be helping the alcoholic keep his job? Why should we be helping the transsexual, who we've already established to have a mental disorder? Why should it be impossible to decide to help young mothers-to-be instead of baby killing little sluts?
Seriously, what justification for any of this beyond live and let live? Is society meant to enshrine peoples right to trick people into thinking they're something they're not?
Aside from all that, does anyone find the idea that hospitals could be shut down with no more difficulty than erasing an illegally copied politically newscast off a TCP compliant DVR intimidating?
What happens when a small county hospital can't afford to pay, so they lose access to the data they depend on to treat people? Spend a few years in court establishing that this is a problem?
Hell, there seems to be a lot of concern about foreign nations using cyber-warfare to attack another nations critical infrastructure. So, that being the case, why in the sweet hell would you want to take something as critical to human life as medical records and centralize them?
Wouldn't we be safer making do with a little less privacy and having them replicated automatically from hospital to hospital?
Honestly... I don't care if you guys know that I broke 5 ribs 15 years ago, have bad eyesight and am allergic to Ceclor. Snoop away, no skin off my ass. But you better fucking believe I want every hospital worker and their mom to know all about it.
Heh, you want something that's a real bitch to tune, get a harmonica.
It's a delicate process involving emery paper, jewelers files, modeling knives, tiny screwdrivers, beeswax and tape. You slip up, you need a new harmonica.
If this system is fast enough, it could re-tune between each strum so you can play an entire song on nothing but open chords!
Then you could set it up with little hammers to hit the strings, and make rolled up punch cards to store the data on.
They use piezoelectric pickups. The thing I thought was kind of weird is that they use the strings as the conductor for the signals to the servo-motors. If the building got hit by lightning, would you look like Yahoo Serious?
The alternative is Sun and Novell forming their private militia and sending hitmen to hit their competitors. In a country with a developed legal system, we rather slap each other with licenses. Nothing's perfect.
Why am I reminded of the time someone told me their city was safer than other cities because "around here, we fight with knives instead of guns".
When you respect people who haven't earned it, like drug addicts and mental patients, you end up with things like "Major Linux Hardware Donor Is a CNN Hero". Take a fucking note.
Respect is not given but earned. I needn't respect them.
Yeah, that's why they want to kill your people.
Right now it appears cohesive because it has a common cause to fight against. Leave it on it's own and it's just a big mob of separate nations.
Isn't that how a democracy with freedom is supposed to work? When there is no need to be ruled, there is no central rule, and when there is a common threat, there is cohesion. Despite cowards dropping bombs from the sky and laying their cities to waste, they still are not ruled in their hearts and continue to fight.
Seriously, show some fucking respect. The respect due a valiant enemy, if nothing else.
Why don't you go look up "Usury" and how it relates to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Hebrew_Bible
Let me sum it up for you:
Judaism: It is an evil thing to loan money on interest and place people in bondage to you. You should only do it to foreigners. [And no conversions. We are the people of God.]
Christianity: There is nothing wrong with charging interest on people and placing them in bondage to you. You may do it to each other if you wish. [Oh, and go convert more people. Bring your sword.]
Islam: It is an evil thing to loan money on interest and place people in bondage to you. You should not do it. If you have excess to loan, give it charitably. [Oh, and go convert more people. Bring your sword.]
Lets not pretend there are people around here with clean hands, eh?
Jews and Judaism have never crusaded against anyone or instituted any forced conversions ever. We actually have a law against prosyletization, saying that I can't so much as hand you flyers on the street to make you become Jewish.
That's because followers of Judaism are conspiratorial racists. Followers of Christianity and Islam are taught to treat humans who are not faithful as dangerous threats, regardless of tribe, who should be either converted into a resource or eradicated.
Followers of Judaism are taught to treat members of their own tribe with dignity due to the people of God, but to treat members of other tribes as chattel to be exploited. Basically, according to your doctrine, we're not good enough to be Jewish, and we're not enough of a threat for it to be wise to eradicate us, but rather, we should be economically ruled.
I'd suggest you to stop acting superior, but you're not going to listen to me anyways.
Using outcomes from inequal start conditions as a measure of objective superiority only works on infinitely long timescales. In the real world, it's a poor metric.
Measures of what civilizations ought to think, what it's wise to think, are always measured on long time scales. In the real world, that is to say, what we can see and touch, we are incapable of experimentation, because our own lives are smaller than the scope of the experiment. Therefore, anything you have to say on the subject that isn't based on successful multi-generational practices of the past is conjecture. That is why science can't deal with the problems religions are meant to cope with. You'd need a time machine to test things. This is what we get, deal with it or don't.
In the absence of modern contraception, homosexuality is a powerful disease vector. Cultural acceptance of it leads to declining birth rates in a civilization. Therefore, civilizations that accept it in the absence of modern contraception and in the presence of civilizations that would compete for resources die off.
The idealists who deny the existence and relevance of these factors in their pursuit of freedom for the individual above all else are no better than the fundamentalists who refuse to apply critical thinking to their own beliefs, and therefore cannot properly justify their social systems to critical thinkers. Neither group is fit to dictate policy.
Jewish peoples dietary constrictions are the same sort of thing. In the absence of modern pasteurization, sterilization, packaging and cooking techniques, their system of beliefs kept them alive when other peoples poisoned themselves. And again, they do not apply critical thinking to their own beliefs in the modern age.
The problem with a religion is that in order to achieve the goal of convincing those who cannot critically think to act in their own best interest, it denies critical justifications from existing within itself, and therefore its followers are unable to tell when the advice has gotten stale.
It really doesn't have a damn thing to do with the existence or lack of existence of God. I'm an atheist, but to speak using the metaphors, God is everything.
When you conduct an experiment to prove your hypothesis, if your experiment is wrong, that means you didn't understand God properly, because you didn't understand the universe properly.
When people say "I don't believe in God", they're either saying "I don't believe in your hypothesis of what God wants" or "I don't understand that the concept of God as a person you're putting forward is really a hypothesis about what will happen to us if we do these actions, and I think you're just babbling nonsense". Usually, they are babbling nonsense, because they don't understand what they're talking about as they parrot these things.
None of this changes the fact that modern religions are each and every one successful experiments on human groups through multiple generations, something that science simply cannot achieve because if you were to set out to try, you'd be dead before the relevant data started coming back. Just like Joseph Smith.
Anyone whose mind is worthlessly closed will be unable to grasp simple truths that challenge them.
Your mind is "worthlessly closed" to the simple truth that this is a very characteristically human thing, that it's not unique in our history, that it led those who believed in it to survival where those who believed differently are no longer with us, and that it is a human survival mechanism that should be appreciated in that light and learned from.
If it wasn't any of these things, the horrible truths you have already noticed about it would have led to its destruction long ago.
There's a lot I want to say to that, but I wrote a blog entry six months ago that makes the point I'm trying to get across better and more eloquently than I have the time to do right now, so I'm just going to copy-paste it in here as my retort and get some work done.
There is no truth, and there is no knowledge.
All the things we know are things which we have decided, and we have decided them from a position of gross ignorance.
There was a time when we knew of the great and terrible fire god in the sky.
It was wise that we knew of him thus. To know of him thus was to understand that our lives sprung from him, that without his presence we would die. It was to understand his terrible power and be wary of it, lest he burn you to death. It was to understand that there was a pattern to his actions, and that we could build patterns among ourselves that were supported by the resolute and predictable nature of his actions. We could create time and history where once there was only timeless story and myth and the endless now.
This was not the truth. It was an arbitrary decision that we believe this, and that decision withstood the test of time because it was useful to view things in this fashion. It was a viewpoint that let you do things that you couldn't do before. Those savages who didn't believe were defeated by the weaknesses of their perspective.
There was a time when we knew that the earth was a round globe that the sun revolved around.
It was wise that we knew the sun thus. We spent so long worrying about offending that thing, ascribing motives to it that didn't exist, being blinded to the inconsistencies of our view.
Now we could predict its motion around the earth as we travelled its survace. We could do all sorts of useful things with this knowledge that we couldn't do before. Those who didn't believe as we did were defeated by the weaknesses of their perspective. Those who believed as we believed thrived and multiplied. This was knowledge.
Except that it was an arbitrary truth. It wasn't true. But it was useful. So it was good. This was knowledge.
Now we know that the earth revolves around the sun, and so do the rest of the planets. This is a useful perspective. It has empowered us.
The truth is, we see glimpses of the nature of the universe. We make a bunch of things up, and the more useful those made up things prove to be in helping us continue to exist, the more you see them among us as knowledge and truth.
Now, we have scientists contemplating the microscale of the universe, the macroscale of the universe.
Can you consider the effects your actions when you get up in the morning on the microscale? Or how what's happening on the microscale at the moment should influence what it's wise to do? What it's good or evil to do?
Could you consider how what's happening on the macroscale relates to the morality of your existance and your actions?
You can't.
You can't consider these things.
You're floating along with a whole bunch of made up rules that are there because they're empowering. Inevitably, the falseness of them will come along to bite you on the ass as you struggle to make some sense of the universe with these crude tools that are our truths and perspectives and knowledge.
At the end of the day, you must not get too caught up in defending the truths of things.
You must look around you.
Look at what truths you see bandied about, and try to understand what the purpose of those truths is.
Understand that none of this is really the truth, but every bit of it has some utility that is the reason for its existance.
Try to understand what that utility is.
This will help you deal with the ugliness in the world.
Every ugly evil thing you see has a reason why it is there, that is why its evil ugliness is tolerated.
It serves a moral
The thing people who think in black and white terms about religion versus science don't get is that there are important lessons about humanity and what it really needs to survive buried in these religions.
These religions are so heinous, so terrible, that one looks at them and thinks, how could these be allowed to exist?
The problem comes up in that these religions are survival mechanisms, that have been subjected to evolutionary pressure just like the people that compose them, they are right in particular ways that we don't necessarily appreciate. They are right in such crucial ways that all the terribleness they bring is overcome by the survival capacities they bring with that terribleness.
When a civilization decides to just discard the lessons entirely and switch to an enlightened and free age of science and reason, they only survive a few generations before their decline and collapse. Happens over and over again through history.
Islam might have declined the Arab worlds capacity for science, but the Arab world is not weak because of it. We are. We are weaklings with clever tricks. We are few where we might have been many, we are soft and spoiled where we might have been hard and powerful, and we did it to ourselves.
It really pisses me off... the so-called reasonable people are making magic tricks with flammable powders for the delight of the peasants while Rome burns. Meanwhile, the people who have an insight into what the important lessons our religions have to bring us can't think critically enough to identify which are important and relevant, let alone think about why that is or convince anyone else.