Actually, it is. From their perspective, such killing is fine because it serves a higher goal, namely, that of establishing the worldwide caliphate and so on and so forth. How does this objectively differs from, say, Western liberals thinking that to kill human fetuses is perfectly fine since it serves a higher goal, namely, that of preserving women rights over their own bodies? There's no difference other than the hierarchy of moral values. In the first case, "caliphate" comes dozens of floors above "women rights". In the other, it's exactly reversed. Seen from the outside, however, both are equally arbitrary, and it all comes down to what hierarchy of values a society as a whole decides to follow: the former, the later, or some 3rd option from the many, many, MANY available out there.
That is still pretty loathsome. If a being loves you, it will not affect you in ways which cause you unnecessary suffering...
The idea is that the alternative is non-existence. To simplify things quite a bit, it'd go more or less like this: God is the basic source of stuff existing. Any stuff. So, if it isn't present, that stuff is nothing, not even a possibility, which would be akin to not merely killing, but making it never have existed to begin with. Now, you can enjoy existing or you can not enjoy existing, but the same way that blaming your non-enjoyment in, say, the atoms of which you're composed doesn't quite make sense, the same applies for all other properties of yours, not only your atomicity.
It's also quite contrived to take the concepts you used (omnipotent etc.) and read them it as some kind of superpower and God as a kind of superman. Omnipotence, for example, doesn't mean a guy who can wish stuff to happens. It means "all the possibilities". So, "God is omnipotent" means something akin of "one meaning of the word 'God' is 'the set of all possibilities'"; "God is omniscient" means something akin to "one meaning of the word 'God' is 'the set of all data and its mutual relationships'"; "God is omnipresent" means something akin to "one meaning of the word 'God' is 'the set of all space-time coordinates and spacial and temporal relationships'"; and "God is omnibenevolent" means something akin to "one definition of the word 'God' is as 'the process of moving possibilities into existence'", given that the other definitions have existence of anything and everything that can exist as a prerequisite for the "all" part. So, as long as one piece from the whole "suffering" results in more existence all around, that suffering is as "good" as it gets, otherwise things would just remain incomplete. Also, manyworlds.
Not that most Christian would actually like me describing this in such an analytic fashion. Even though the above isn't contradictory with Christian beliefs, they certainly tend to prefer approaching the notion of God under a more mythological light.
I've said it before, most religions have parts in their books that are horrible and anti-social; yet they won't update or revise their central books/bibles/etc. that's really problem #1. fix that - remove the hate speech and the 'you must be like us or we kill you' stuff and most of the rest can fix itself over time.
Actually, the major ones, both within Christianity and Islam, as well as others, do fix those things by way of reinterpretation. It mostly works very well, but given that the original text is a given and no one can prevent someone from simply getting the original text and going with it, it's easy for less thought out versions of all that stuff to reappear, and worse, wrapped in a "back to the origins" aura. The results of these "restoration efforts" are rarely, if ever, good.
Let me give you an example from Christianity. Dumb denominations like to play the Hell's fire and brimstone card to scare people into doing this or that, and believing stuff like Young Earth, Creationism and the like. Now, what does a more developed version, such as Orthodox Christianity mysticism, say about Hell? They say Hell isn't a place, but a human reaction to God's love, in that "Hell's fire" is actually the same "warm light of pure love" that emanates from God and embraces all of creation, it just so happens that some people embrace it and feel it like bliss, while others reject it and feel it like suffering, but in any case it's people doing this to themselves, not God going out of his way to punish them for this or that petty act of theirs.
So, it isn't that this stuff hasn't been done, it's just that in every generation you'll find tons of people just not giving a shit, and going for the easy, moralistic idiocy (including among those same Orthodox Christians, evidently, as they don't have any more of a "defense against dumb" than you or I).
You've evidently never heard of the phrase 'cuius regius eius regio' - the faith of the ruler is the faith of the ruled. It's only very recently in Christian history that it has been widely accepted that people have a right to a personal religion that is different from that of their neighbours or ruler. It is certainly not a foundational Christian belief.
No, I know of it. My point is more focused, in that, while in Christianity you don't find the New Testament saying this must be so (and neither providing full blown civil and criminal law codes), in the case of Islam you do. Hence, while a Christian can adopt an individualist approach to religion without necessarily giving up or overly reinterpreting certain verses, a Muslim cannot. Sure, Islam could go the same path of Judaism and so over-reinterpret things that in the end it'd work, but as with Judaism, that'd require lots of stuff happening all around, in the right direction, to work.
The problem is the Koran explicitly says that, except for some very specific situations such as initial conversion into (never out of) Islam, it's not a personal choice, it's a social choice, so the community's decision on the matter is binding to all its members. What this means then, basically, is that requiring of a Muslim to adopt the (Christian, of all things) notion of religion as being a "personal-anything" (no matter the anything: for Islam, from lifestyle to politics, it is never personal), is actually asking him to give up Islam itself. Which is why Muslims tend to become upset when Western powers try to impose their individualist worldview on Islamic collectivist societies. It just doesn't mix well, no matter how much you try to soften the cultural blow.
So the developers of MariaDB took all their experience and knowledge that they obtained at Oracle while working on MySQL
No. Oracle purchased bits and pieces of technologies used by MySQL (the product), while MySQL (the company) was purchased by Sun. Then Sun itself was purchased by Oracle, which ended up owning both those previous pieces as well as the core of MySQL. In any case, none, or very little, of the technologies that go into MySQL were developed by or at Oracle. And even if something was, since MySQL, being GPL, comes with full blown, official patent licenses to all employed technologies to anyone who downloads, uses, changes or redistributes it (when one selects to GPL-license something, one also selects to license all patents one owns that go into that something), it'd be free for the use no matter what. So, they're in the clear. Those guys left Oracle to continue working on what they were doing before even joining Oracle in the first place. Nothing, absolutely nothing, requires them to stay with Oracle, or play in Oracle's interests. And Oracle itself is fine with it. Because they explicitly said so in the GPL license. Which they could have changed if they so wished, but didn't.
the abomination of "extrajudicial killings" of US citizens will finally end.
As a non-US citizen that never went to the US, I'd like to propose something even more radical: ending the abomination of "extrajudicial killings" of non-US citizens too. It'd come a long way towards making most non-US citizens out there start ignoring, or even liking, the US again.
I'm not saying the govt should specifically tax religions, I'm saying they should stop giving them preferential treatment and treat them like every other organized group.
The problem in this is with the very notion that a religion is merely other organized group. This might be the case with smallish derivative sects, but those that pop to mind whenever one thinks "religion" tend to be older and more solid than governments, countries or entire political regimes, not to mention wider and farthest reaching than countries and whole regional blocks. That's why you don't find stuff like "separation between farming cartels and state": because a state doesn't need clear, specific protections from something that's smaller and less powerful than itself. Or, putting it another way, religions aren't things states look down upon and frown about, they're something states up to and tremble about.
Yes, I'm aware this might sound like I'm contradicting myself compared to my previous post, but in fact both things are true. States can be menacing to small religions and to specific subgroups within major religions, but the major religions are themselves menacing to states. So, pretty much like the US doesn't go around treating, say, China or Europe as "just some groups", it also shouldn't go around treating, say the Catholic Church or the Shia Islam as "just some groups". They aren't. It's a matter of realpolitik as much as anything else one's posed to do at this scale.
The tax exemption law is already used to play favorites as the govt is allowed to determine who qualifies as a religious group. If you're a group of people that worship a Christian god and follow a mainstream religion then you're tax exempt. If you're a small group of a non-typical religion or atheists then you're not.
And this, as I see it, is clearly something in need of fixing, not of further expansion.
Since you think the Indians deserve special treatment with respect to class 2 drugs, perhaps you feel the govt should exempt the Mormons from the laws regarding polygamy and underage sex as well?
Ah, yes, most certainly. If it isn't something that threatens the very existence of the state, I don't see why it should be restricted to begin with. For starters, I'd like to see the concept of "marriage" removed from civil law. It'd be a nice start, as it'd solve in a single move every useless discussion we see on what the government should or shouldn't consider "marriage" to be.
And it will be fewer killings, since people who actually use their brain prefer other options to killing whenever reasonable; which is almost all the time.
Intelligent people, religious or not, prefer other options.
As for Lenin, if you're a Marxist-Leninist I find it interesting you don't know the difference between a discourse crafted for the consumption of the uneducated masses (the actual proletariat) and one made for the vanguard of the proletariat, a.k.a. all the buddies who despise the actual proletariat but like to pretend their own thirst for power is actually for them. LOL, you History-worshipers.
Don't you notice all your quotes argue counter your notice? They list what one does to merit death, and what one must do (or not do) to not be killed. That's quite different from a Nazi's "everyone born a Jew must die". There's nothing a Jew can do to not be born a Jew.
As for the Crusades, two things: first, the above applies; second, crusaders weren't under the orders of the Church. The Catholic Church (the institution) doing something is quite distinct from Catholics (people) being inspired by it to do something. If we go this route, then that old adage applies: 100% of the cases of murder are caused by human beings, so, let's extinguish humanity and the problem ends.
I don't think you understand what separation of Church and State means.
If the government where to be allowed to to charge taxes from a religion, it'd be able to extinguish any specific one by carefully crafting a generic sounding law to target and disable those it doesn't approve of while leaving those it does approve of, thus de fact establishing an unofficially official State religion. This is kind of like it does with copyright, that becomes eternal by successive time additions whenever it's going to expire, or to private cannabis consumption, which gets restricted even if you plant it yourself based on the interstate commerce clause (your planting of interferes with its marker price over state borders, or so the argument goes), or to war operations, which sidestep war restrictions by simply not being declared as such, and so on and so forth. Governments are quite creative when it comes to this kind of stuff, so not giving them an opening to exploit is the only smart move.
Since I talked about cannabis, let me mention this related example: the Native American Church was almost extinguished due to laws on peyote being considered a drug. Who sided with them? Christian churches, afraid such a law could be used against them and their wine-based rites. And the anti-NAC judge who was after them back then? His argument was basically (I paraphrase) that the US already had lots of churches, so fuck those Native Americans. In the end the NAC won, but it took an enormous effort. Why? Because there was a small opening that allowed the government to go after some "undesirables".
The no tax for churches concept is one of the ways to concretely and effectively preserve the 1st Amendment. Removing it is providing all the tools the government need to violate its spirit without actually going against its letter.
So you're saying no religion had ideologies that explicitly called for the extinction of sizable chunks of the population? Remember you said "religion" which includes people other than Christians and you have to defend over 5000 years of history.
Fair enough. Let me qualify that statement then, while also trying to avoid the No True Scotsman fallacy. A modern homicidal ideology, such as that of the French Revolutionaries, Nazis, Marxists etc., usually carries a belief that some people, defined by an inherent trait (something they are, not something they do), are inherently evil or the equivalent moral concept in that belief system, and that for the good guys to improve and arrive at some desired utopic state it's necessary to cleanse said evil.
The current existing religions can be quite bad in many aspects, but they don't carry this kind of overkill perspective. For them, the perceived evil isn't so radically inherent to the evil person that nothing short from murdering her can fix it. Where her to stop doing the perceived evil, and started doing what's considered good, and presto, now she's one of the good guys too. Now, if she chooses to go with her "evil" ways no matter what, then more radical approaches are called for. But for most part they'd be pretty satisfied with the current existing human beings simply converting, no widespread murder spree needed. And yes, this includes Jews for the Koran (and the other way around), Protestants for Catholics (ditto), Shia for Sunnis (ditto), and even Old Testament massacred cities for the Hebrews of old (ditto too). Even Aztecs weren't out to just wipe their neighbors: except on specific events in which they required tons of human sacrifices at once, they mostly left everyone else alive. Usually enslaved or in a state similar to that, sure, but alive nonetheless.
So, one way to look at the difference of perspective is by the historical change of meaning of the word "decimate". While both in the past and currently it named and names one of the most horrific things one group of people can do to another, while nowadays it means "to only let one in ten alive", in the past it meant "to kill one in every ten". This change isn't accidental. It reflects the cultural changes brought forth by modern political ideologies over the last centuries.
well if you add up all the bodies over time due to religious reasons, and religion ruled governments, I think you will find that number is slightly larger than non religion run governments
You assertion is incorrect. There's been actual studies on this, and while religions have been violent, none of them had ideologies that explicitly called for the extinction of sizable chunks of the population. Hence, their wars and violence have on the aggregate been tame compared to those of murderous political ideologies, many of which self-declared atheistic. Both in absolute and percentual scales, religious violence's been historically less violent than non-religious one.
Google the subject and you'll find tons of hard numbers on this.
Hitler would love to have a body count that even came close to a small fraction of the Catholic church
Well, I think we'd all love if Hitler's body count were a fraction of the hundred of thousands concretely attributable to the Church. Not to mention it's accumulated over several hundred years, and averaged, on the darker periods of the Inquisition, about one or two executions per week, going down to about one per month most of the time during the Modern Era, and just a few per year during the Middle Ages.
If a kid goes missing in your neighbourhood, and you saw some guy cruising around the playground earlier, are you still going to refuse to talk to the cops on a matter of principle? How would you feel if it was your kid, and some self-righteous prick didn't talk?
It depends. How much do you want to bet on your not finding yourself in this scenario:
The cop you talked to, in front of the judge, months later: "Yes, your honor, he confessed to have been watching the playground earlier that day, and to have been carefully focusing on the movements of both minors and non-minors alike. No, your honor, he couldn't provided any proof of where he were between the moment he told he had been watching the kids and their parents in the playground and the moment he contacted us. Yes, your honor, that was the time frame that kid disappeared. Yes, your honor, we found 3 volumes of so called 'manga comics' depicting relationship and implied sexual intercourse with minors in his house. Yes, your honor, his computer was full of pornographic imagery too."
I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem for a while, but when a single representative's vote is deemed to be worth too little, then maybe the representatives could instead vote for a smaller number of super-representatives to represent them.
Which is what happens with the European Union, with the end result of the secondarily (tertiarily?) represented don't actually feeling that much represented, if at all.
This is an issue only because Congress does not increase the number of Representatives, which is within its power.
It'd be a fake improvement. 'N' people would elect one representative, but then that representative own vote would be worth less and less in both absolute and relative terms as the representative population increases following the increase in the general voting population.
1. Neural Networks, they have been getting better and faster at an almost scary rate lately
No, what I mean is much more random than neural networks. While the input data and weights and other numeric stuff are probabilistically dealt with, the inner logic and data paths are still mostly deterministic.
Let's put it this way: do you know INTERCAL (that funny joke language)'s amazingly absurd control flow mechanism, "COME FROM"? It is an inverse of the infamous GOTO, in that any place in the program can interrupt any other routine, causing it to jump from whatever it's doing and continuing from here. It makes following a program, or even debugging, practically impossible. Or, taking another analogy: a program/OS in which unprotected memory access, buffer overflows, anti-patterns and the like aren't errors in need of correction, but the basic mechanisms upon which (and by which, and not despite) everything works (strong emphasis on "works"). In short: something that worked based on allowing anything to do anything at anything whenever and wherever, all the while not catastrophically crashing. That, IMHO, is what it'd take to for a strong AI to emerge, because that's what our own neurons do.
AI when/if it ever materializes. At this time, nobody has even a working theory, so > 100 years from now is a realistic estimate for general availability of AI. Without AI, robots are nothing special though.
The problem with AI is that for it to work in any way even barely similar to the human it would need to be massively, and I mean MASSIVELY, parallel. Think hundreds of thousands of cores, each one running thousands of threads, at a bare minimum. With provisions for extreme levels of fault tolerance in their physical, logical and networking levels. And and ability to establish new communication paths and processing at seemingly random.
Someone has said that the difference between software engineering and other kinds, such as civil engineering, is that in the later, if the power switch you installed in a room breaks, the house doesn't collapse, whereas in software a single byte that changes value, or a simple incorrect value passed to a function and not error checked against, is enough to crash the application or even halt the OS. As long as the building blocks remain that fragile, strong AI, which requires several orders of magnitude better robustness than we have, cannot start happening.
My guess then is the sequence would be something like this then:
1) Get hardware such that hammering or even shooting a few random components in a motherboard during operation only slightly disturbs the processing running in it (which isn't the same of removing a defective node from an otherwise working cluster), it being admissible to have a full halt only if entire racks are destroyed. For good measure, add self-repairability;
2) Write an OS for it a completely non-deterministic language, the compiled version itself running on a non-deterministic machine language;
3) ???
4) Profit!
We haven't reached 1 by any means, much less 2. If anything, 100 years is optimistic.:)
Irony. You'd think that a country home to so many Jews would remember how well that worked in Germany.
The problem is that Israel didn't become independent by the acts of the Jews who directly experienced the horrors of Nazism, but mostly by those of these guys here:
Holocaust survivors entered the picture more as propaganda boosts than prominent actors, and as a result much of Irgun's mentality carried over into the new independent Israel.
Slashdot Mirror
Must be a 'Social thing, eh?
Actually, it is. From their perspective, such killing is fine because it serves a higher goal, namely, that of establishing the worldwide caliphate and so on and so forth. How does this objectively differs from, say, Western liberals thinking that to kill human fetuses is perfectly fine since it serves a higher goal, namely, that of preserving women rights over their own bodies? There's no difference other than the hierarchy of moral values. In the first case, "caliphate" comes dozens of floors above "women rights". In the other, it's exactly reversed. Seen from the outside, however, both are equally arbitrary, and it all comes down to what hierarchy of values a society as a whole decides to follow: the former, the later, or some 3rd option from the many, many, MANY available out there.
That is still pretty loathsome. If a being loves you, it will not affect you in ways which cause you unnecessary suffering...
The idea is that the alternative is non-existence. To simplify things quite a bit, it'd go more or less like this: God is the basic source of stuff existing. Any stuff. So, if it isn't present, that stuff is nothing, not even a possibility, which would be akin to not merely killing, but making it never have existed to begin with. Now, you can enjoy existing or you can not enjoy existing, but the same way that blaming your non-enjoyment in, say, the atoms of which you're composed doesn't quite make sense, the same applies for all other properties of yours, not only your atomicity.
It's also quite contrived to take the concepts you used (omnipotent etc.) and read them it as some kind of superpower and God as a kind of superman. Omnipotence, for example, doesn't mean a guy who can wish stuff to happens. It means "all the possibilities". So, "God is omnipotent" means something akin of "one meaning of the word 'God' is 'the set of all possibilities'"; "God is omniscient" means something akin to "one meaning of the word 'God' is 'the set of all data and its mutual relationships'"; "God is omnipresent" means something akin to "one meaning of the word 'God' is 'the set of all space-time coordinates and spacial and temporal relationships'"; and "God is omnibenevolent" means something akin to "one definition of the word 'God' is as 'the process of moving possibilities into existence'", given that the other definitions have existence of anything and everything that can exist as a prerequisite for the "all" part. So, as long as one piece from the whole "suffering" results in more existence all around, that suffering is as "good" as it gets, otherwise things would just remain incomplete. Also, manyworlds.
Not that most Christian would actually like me describing this in such an analytic fashion. Even though the above isn't contradictory with Christian beliefs, they certainly tend to prefer approaching the notion of God under a more mythological light.
I've said it before, most religions have parts in their books that are horrible and anti-social; yet they won't update or revise their central books/bibles/etc. that's really problem #1. fix that - remove the hate speech and the 'you must be like us or we kill you' stuff and most of the rest can fix itself over time.
Actually, the major ones, both within Christianity and Islam, as well as others, do fix those things by way of reinterpretation. It mostly works very well, but given that the original text is a given and no one can prevent someone from simply getting the original text and going with it, it's easy for less thought out versions of all that stuff to reappear, and worse, wrapped in a "back to the origins" aura. The results of these "restoration efforts" are rarely, if ever, good.
Let me give you an example from Christianity. Dumb denominations like to play the Hell's fire and brimstone card to scare people into doing this or that, and believing stuff like Young Earth, Creationism and the like. Now, what does a more developed version, such as Orthodox Christianity mysticism, say about Hell? They say Hell isn't a place, but a human reaction to God's love, in that "Hell's fire" is actually the same "warm light of pure love" that emanates from God and embraces all of creation, it just so happens that some people embrace it and feel it like bliss, while others reject it and feel it like suffering, but in any case it's people doing this to themselves, not God going out of his way to punish them for this or that petty act of theirs.
So, it isn't that this stuff hasn't been done, it's just that in every generation you'll find tons of people just not giving a shit, and going for the easy, moralistic idiocy (including among those same Orthodox Christians, evidently, as they don't have any more of a "defense against dumb" than you or I).
You've evidently never heard of the phrase 'cuius regius eius regio' - the faith of the ruler is the faith of the ruled. It's only very recently in Christian history that it has been widely accepted that people have a right to a personal religion that is different from that of their neighbours or ruler. It is certainly not a foundational Christian belief.
No, I know of it. My point is more focused, in that, while in Christianity you don't find the New Testament saying this must be so (and neither providing full blown civil and criminal law codes), in the case of Islam you do. Hence, while a Christian can adopt an individualist approach to religion without necessarily giving up or overly reinterpreting certain verses, a Muslim cannot. Sure, Islam could go the same path of Judaism and so over-reinterpret things that in the end it'd work, but as with Judaism, that'd require lots of stuff happening all around, in the right direction, to work.
Religion is a personal choice.
The problem is the Koran explicitly says that, except for some very specific situations such as initial conversion into (never out of) Islam, it's not a personal choice, it's a social choice, so the community's decision on the matter is binding to all its members. What this means then, basically, is that requiring of a Muslim to adopt the (Christian, of all things) notion of religion as being a "personal-anything" (no matter the anything: for Islam, from lifestyle to politics, it is never personal), is actually asking him to give up Islam itself. Which is why Muslims tend to become upset when Western powers try to impose their individualist worldview on Islamic collectivist societies. It just doesn't mix well, no matter how much you try to soften the cultural blow.
So the developers of MariaDB took all their experience and knowledge that they obtained at Oracle while working on MySQL
No. Oracle purchased bits and pieces of technologies used by MySQL (the product), while MySQL (the company) was purchased by Sun. Then Sun itself was purchased by Oracle, which ended up owning both those previous pieces as well as the core of MySQL. In any case, none, or very little, of the technologies that go into MySQL were developed by or at Oracle. And even if something was, since MySQL, being GPL, comes with full blown, official patent licenses to all employed technologies to anyone who downloads, uses, changes or redistributes it (when one selects to GPL-license something, one also selects to license all patents one owns that go into that something), it'd be free for the use no matter what. So, they're in the clear. Those guys left Oracle to continue working on what they were doing before even joining Oracle in the first place. Nothing, absolutely nothing, requires them to stay with Oracle, or play in Oracle's interests. And Oracle itself is fine with it. Because they explicitly said so in the GPL license. Which they could have changed if they so wished, but didn't.
the abomination of "extrajudicial killings" of US citizens will finally end.
As a non-US citizen that never went to the US, I'd like to propose something even more radical: ending the abomination of "extrajudicial killings" of non-US citizens too. It'd come a long way towards making most non-US citizens out there start ignoring, or even liking, the US again.
I'm not saying the govt should specifically tax religions, I'm saying they should stop giving them preferential treatment and treat them like every other organized group.
The problem in this is with the very notion that a religion is merely other organized group. This might be the case with smallish derivative sects, but those that pop to mind whenever one thinks "religion" tend to be older and more solid than governments, countries or entire political regimes, not to mention wider and farthest reaching than countries and whole regional blocks. That's why you don't find stuff like "separation between farming cartels and state": because a state doesn't need clear, specific protections from something that's smaller and less powerful than itself. Or, putting it another way, religions aren't things states look down upon and frown about, they're something states up to and tremble about.
Yes, I'm aware this might sound like I'm contradicting myself compared to my previous post, but in fact both things are true. States can be menacing to small religions and to specific subgroups within major religions, but the major religions are themselves menacing to states. So, pretty much like the US doesn't go around treating, say, China or Europe as "just some groups", it also shouldn't go around treating, say the Catholic Church or the Shia Islam as "just some groups". They aren't. It's a matter of realpolitik as much as anything else one's posed to do at this scale.
The tax exemption law is already used to play favorites as the govt is allowed to determine who qualifies as a religious group. If you're a group of people that worship a Christian god and follow a mainstream religion then you're tax exempt. If you're a small group of a non-typical religion or atheists then you're not.
And this, as I see it, is clearly something in need of fixing, not of further expansion.
Since you think the Indians deserve special treatment with respect to class 2 drugs, perhaps you feel the govt should exempt the Mormons from the laws regarding polygamy and underage sex as well?
Ah, yes, most certainly. If it isn't something that threatens the very existence of the state, I don't see why it should be restricted to begin with. For starters, I'd like to see the concept of "marriage" removed from civil law. It'd be a nice start, as it'd solve in a single move every useless discussion we see on what the government should or shouldn't consider "marriage" to be.
And it will be fewer killings, since people who actually use their brain prefer other options to killing whenever reasonable; which is almost all the time.
Intelligent people, religious or not, prefer other options.
As for Lenin, if you're a Marxist-Leninist I find it interesting you don't know the difference between a discourse crafted for the consumption of the uneducated masses (the actual proletariat) and one made for the vanguard of the proletariat, a.k.a. all the buddies who despise the actual proletariat but like to pretend their own thirst for power is actually for them. LOL, you History-worshipers.
I'm sorry, you were saying?
Don't you notice all your quotes argue counter your notice? They list what one does to merit death, and what one must do (or not do) to not be killed. That's quite different from a Nazi's "everyone born a Jew must die". There's nothing a Jew can do to not be born a Jew.
As for the Crusades, two things: first, the above applies; second, crusaders weren't under the orders of the Church. The Catholic Church (the institution) doing something is quite distinct from Catholics (people) being inspired by it to do something. If we go this route, then that old adage applies: 100% of the cases of murder are caused by human beings, so, let's extinguish humanity and the problem ends.
I don't think you understand what separation of Church and State means.
If the government where to be allowed to to charge taxes from a religion, it'd be able to extinguish any specific one by carefully crafting a generic sounding law to target and disable those it doesn't approve of while leaving those it does approve of, thus de fact establishing an unofficially official State religion. This is kind of like it does with copyright, that becomes eternal by successive time additions whenever it's going to expire, or to private cannabis consumption, which gets restricted even if you plant it yourself based on the interstate commerce clause (your planting of interferes with its marker price over state borders, or so the argument goes), or to war operations, which sidestep war restrictions by simply not being declared as such, and so on and so forth. Governments are quite creative when it comes to this kind of stuff, so not giving them an opening to exploit is the only smart move.
Since I talked about cannabis, let me mention this related example: the Native American Church was almost extinguished due to laws on peyote being considered a drug. Who sided with them? Christian churches, afraid such a law could be used against them and their wine-based rites. And the anti-NAC judge who was after them back then? His argument was basically (I paraphrase) that the US already had lots of churches, so fuck those Native Americans. In the end the NAC won, but it took an enormous effort. Why? Because there was a small opening that allowed the government to go after some "undesirables".
The no tax for churches concept is one of the ways to concretely and effectively preserve the 1st Amendment. Removing it is providing all the tools the government need to violate its spirit without actually going against its letter.
So you're saying no religion had ideologies that explicitly called for the extinction of sizable chunks of the population? Remember you said "religion" which includes people other than Christians and you have to defend over 5000 years of history.
Fair enough. Let me qualify that statement then, while also trying to avoid the No True Scotsman fallacy. A modern homicidal ideology, such as that of the French Revolutionaries, Nazis, Marxists etc., usually carries a belief that some people, defined by an inherent trait (something they are, not something they do), are inherently evil or the equivalent moral concept in that belief system, and that for the good guys to improve and arrive at some desired utopic state it's necessary to cleanse said evil.
The current existing religions can be quite bad in many aspects, but they don't carry this kind of overkill perspective. For them, the perceived evil isn't so radically inherent to the evil person that nothing short from murdering her can fix it. Where her to stop doing the perceived evil, and started doing what's considered good, and presto, now she's one of the good guys too. Now, if she chooses to go with her "evil" ways no matter what, then more radical approaches are called for. But for most part they'd be pretty satisfied with the current existing human beings simply converting, no widespread murder spree needed. And yes, this includes Jews for the Koran (and the other way around), Protestants for Catholics (ditto), Shia for Sunnis (ditto), and even Old Testament massacred cities for the Hebrews of old (ditto too). Even Aztecs weren't out to just wipe their neighbors: except on specific events in which they required tons of human sacrifices at once, they mostly left everyone else alive. Usually enslaved or in a state similar to that, sure, but alive nonetheless.
So, one way to look at the difference of perspective is by the historical change of meaning of the word "decimate". While both in the past and currently it named and names one of the most horrific things one group of people can do to another, while nowadays it means "to only let one in ten alive", in the past it meant "to kill one in every ten". This change isn't accidental. It reflects the cultural changes brought forth by modern political ideologies over the last centuries.
well if you add up all the bodies over time due to religious reasons, and religion ruled governments, I think you will find that number is slightly larger than non religion run governments
You assertion is incorrect. There's been actual studies on this, and while religions have been violent, none of them had ideologies that explicitly called for the extinction of sizable chunks of the population. Hence, their wars and violence have on the aggregate been tame compared to those of murderous political ideologies, many of which self-declared atheistic. Both in absolute and percentual scales, religious violence's been historically less violent than non-religious one.
Google the subject and you'll find tons of hard numbers on this.
Hitler would love to have a body count that even came close to a small fraction of the Catholic church
Well, I think we'd all love if Hitler's body count were a fraction of the hundred of thousands concretely attributable to the Church. Not to mention it's accumulated over several hundred years, and averaged, on the darker periods of the Inquisition, about one or two executions per week, going down to about one per month most of the time during the Modern Era, and just a few per year during the Middle Ages.
If we were actually interested in reducing violence we would tax religion to death.
And that would affect Marxism and its dictatorial derivatives how, exactly, given they are all explicitly atheistic?
Why NOT taxes churches.
Because of the separation between church and state. It works both ways, you know.
the US seems to have freedom fought a youth into killing himself.
FTFY
If a kid goes missing in your neighbourhood, and you saw some guy cruising around the playground earlier, are you still going to refuse to talk to the cops on a matter of principle? How would you feel if it was your kid, and some self-righteous prick didn't talk?
It depends. How much do you want to bet on your not finding yourself in this scenario:
The cop you talked to, in front of the judge, months later: "Yes, your honor, he confessed to have been watching the playground earlier that day, and to have been carefully focusing on the movements of both minors and non-minors alike. No, your honor, he couldn't provided any proof of where he were between the moment he told he had been watching the kids and their parents in the playground and the moment he contacted us. Yes, your honor, that was the time frame that kid disappeared. Yes, your honor, we found 3 volumes of so called 'manga comics' depicting relationship and implied sexual intercourse with minors in his house. Yes, your honor, his computer was full of pornographic imagery too."
in game assassin. 200 bucks a day, plus expenses. I can even see the misspelled gold lettering on my office door.
And the professional association of in game assassins would be "The Assassins' Creed".
I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem for a while, but when a single representative's vote is deemed to be worth too little, then maybe the representatives could instead vote for a smaller number of super-representatives to represent them.
Which is what happens with the European Union, with the end result of the secondarily (tertiarily?) represented don't actually feeling that much represented, if at all.
This is an issue only because Congress does not increase the number of Representatives, which is within its power.
It'd be a fake improvement. 'N' people would elect one representative, but then that representative own vote would be worth less and less in both absolute and relative terms as the representative population increases following the increase in the general voting population.
Nothing says democratic process and representation like randomly having your vote count.
As opposed to it being worth less and less in both absolute and relative terms as the voting population increases?
Of course the Republican party would oppose it
Exactly! Unlike Democrats, who would never, ever, accept money from Hollywood studi... er, wait.
1. Neural Networks, they have been getting better and faster at an almost scary rate lately
No, what I mean is much more random than neural networks. While the input data and weights and other numeric stuff are probabilistically dealt with, the inner logic and data paths are still mostly deterministic.
Let's put it this way: do you know INTERCAL (that funny joke language)'s amazingly absurd control flow mechanism, "COME FROM"? It is an inverse of the infamous GOTO, in that any place in the program can interrupt any other routine, causing it to jump from whatever it's doing and continuing from here. It makes following a program, or even debugging, practically impossible. Or, taking another analogy: a program/OS in which unprotected memory access, buffer overflows, anti-patterns and the like aren't errors in need of correction, but the basic mechanisms upon which (and by which, and not despite) everything works (strong emphasis on "works"). In short: something that worked based on allowing anything to do anything at anything whenever and wherever, all the while not catastrophically crashing. That, IMHO, is what it'd take to for a strong AI to emerge, because that's what our own neurons do.
AI when/if it ever materializes. At this time, nobody has even a working theory, so > 100 years from now is a realistic estimate for general availability of AI. Without AI, robots are nothing special though.
The problem with AI is that for it to work in any way even barely similar to the human it would need to be massively, and I mean MASSIVELY, parallel. Think hundreds of thousands of cores, each one running thousands of threads, at a bare minimum. With provisions for extreme levels of fault tolerance in their physical, logical and networking levels. And and ability to establish new communication paths and processing at seemingly random.
Someone has said that the difference between software engineering and other kinds, such as civil engineering, is that in the later, if the power switch you installed in a room breaks, the house doesn't collapse, whereas in software a single byte that changes value, or a simple incorrect value passed to a function and not error checked against, is enough to crash the application or even halt the OS. As long as the building blocks remain that fragile, strong AI, which requires several orders of magnitude better robustness than we have, cannot start happening.
My guess then is the sequence would be something like this then:
1) Get hardware such that hammering or even shooting a few random components in a motherboard during operation only slightly disturbs the processing running in it (which isn't the same of removing a defective node from an otherwise working cluster), it being admissible to have a full halt only if entire racks are destroyed. For good measure, add self-repairability;
2) Write an OS for it a completely non-deterministic language, the compiled version itself running on a non-deterministic machine language;
3) ???
4) Profit!
We haven't reached 1 by any means, much less 2. If anything, 100 years is optimistic. :)
Irony. You'd think that a country home to so many Jews would remember how well that worked in Germany.
The problem is that Israel didn't become independent by the acts of the Jews who directly experienced the horrors of Nazism, but mostly by those of these guys here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
Holocaust survivors entered the picture more as propaganda boosts than prominent actors, and as a result much of Irgun's mentality carried over into the new independent Israel.