Quote Of The Day (over "here")

[eye2i2hear]

=== with my default protest of even having a sub-forum titled as this one is, on a site espoused to be dedicated to a voluntary society --but out of respect, posted here ==

excerpt:

Adam Lee, in Another Day, Another Dragon Wrote:
Like it or not, it's one of the defining struggles of our time. And there are many decent, well-intentioned people who don't want to confront the full scope of the problem, who turn their gazes from it or try to paper it over with soothing platitudes. (Or worse, they claim that we, the people who are pointing out the problem, are the ones who started it all, and everything would be fine if we'd just be quieter and more respectful.)

I'd like to write about ... other things, but this fight is important. I hate that it's necessary to have these fights...there are so many more interesting things we could be talking about - so many real, fascinating, important problems we could be solving - that we're not addressing because the endless battles over antiquated superstition distract us and consume our time and energy.

Whatever technological or scientific advances we make, humanity won't be truly enlightened, and won't inherit a peaceful future, until we kick off the religious shackles that have been holding us back; until we overthrow the supernatural beliefs that teach people to fear science, to oppress women, to rule by dogma rather than by reason.

I'm not saying that religion is the sole cause of every evil we suffer, but I am saying that we have no chance of ridding ourselves of many of those evils until humanity is less religious. That's why we have to fight against religion. Of course, the battle has to be waged by peaceful persuasion, otherwise we betray the very ideals we're trying to uphold - but it does have to be waged. These bad ideas are like dragons - ugly, venomous serpents coiling and hissing, keeping us from getting at the treasures they guard.

source: http://bigthink.com/ideas/42304

[next: get Mr Lee to see that Statism, (f)actually, is also a religion, of which he unbeknownst equally addresses; thus rather than "less religious" we get to non-religious = non-Authoritarian-think; where perhaps he'd rephrase one sentence as: "until we overthrow the supernatural beliefs that teach people to have Faith in what other people merely say..."]

[boyntonstu]

If you get it and others don't, it is more frustrating than being around people who do not 'get' the state issue.

This is the core:

"until we overthrow the supernatural beliefs that teach people to have Faith in what other people merely say..."]

stU

[eye2i2hear]

LessWrong.com forum posters in the Comments on a thread titled Raising the Sanity Waterline, Wrote:
Plug that data we call 'living' into a brain that's been optimized by evolution for thinking about agents and their motives rather than about atmospheric physics, and it's no surprise that you get outputs like "Who threw that lightning at me!? What'd I ever do to you, thunder-Agent? Why are you pissed off at me? What can I do to make you do what I want you to do?"
Our default belief state is one full of scary beasts trying to kill us and flashing lights flying around overhead and "Oh no, what's-this-loud-noise and why am I soaking wet...!?!"
I can't imagine a human ancestor in those kinds of situations not coming up with some kind of desperate Pascal's Wager of, "I'll do this ritualistic dance to the harvest Father because it's not really that much trouble to do in the grand scheme of things, and man if there's any chance of improving the odds of a good harvest and not starving, I'm shakin' my rain-maker." "And if bowing before this scrap of pretty cloth and saying these certain words keeps our warriors killing their warriors, I'm down with it." Soon enough you can add, "and everyone else says it works" to the list, and bam, religion.

[some creative licensing, wording wise, mine --3y32i]
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1e/raising_the_s...waterline/

[sidebar: KC & The Sunshine Band's "shake-shake-shake... shake-shake-shake, shake your bootie", ala virgins and all such, optional for "rain-maker"]

[bonus consideration: "back in The Day", were there psychopaths then, too? hero-wanna-bes? bureaucrats = witchdoctors/scribes/priests?]

---

The System of Nature, Volume 1 by baron d' Paul Henri Thiry Holbach, Introduction:

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., University of Denver Wrote:Paul Henri Thiery, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), was the center of the radical wing of the _philosophes_. He was friend, host, and patron to a wide circle that included Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Hume. Holbach wrote, translated, edited, and issued a stream of books and pamphlets, often under other names, that has made him the despair of bibliographers but has connected his name, by innuendo, gossip, and association, with most of what was written in defense of atheistic materialism in late eighteenth-century France.

Holbach is best known for _The System of Nature_ (1770) and deservedly, since it is a clear and reasonably systematic exposition of his main ideas. His initial position determines all the rest of his argument. "There is not, there can be nothing out of that Nature which includes all beings." Conceiving of nature as strictly limited to matter and motion, both of which have always existed, he flatly denies that there is any such thing as spirit or a supernatural. Mythology began, Holbach claims, when men were still in a state of nature and at the point when wise, strong, and for the most part benign men were arising as leaders and lawgivers. These leaders "formed discourses by which they spoke to the imaginations of their willing auditors," using the medium of poetry, because it "seem[ed] best adapted to strike the mind." Through poetry, then, and by means of "its images, its fictions, its numbers, its rhyme, its harmony... the entire of nature, as well as all its parts, was personified, by its beautiful allegories." Thus mythology is given an essentially political origin. These early poets are literally legislators of mankind. "The first institutors of nations, and their immediate successors in authority, only spoke to the people by fables, allegories, enigmas, of which they reserved to themselves the right of giving an explanation." Holbach is rather condescending about the process, but since mythology is a representation of nature itself, he is far more tolerant of mythology than he is of the next step. "Natural philosophers and poets were transformed by leisure into metaphysicians and theologians," and at this point a fatal error was introduced: the theologians made a distinction between the power of nature and nature itself, separated the two, made the power of nature prior to nature, and called it God. Thus man was left with an abstract and chimerical being on one side and a despoiled inert nature, destitute of power, on the other. In Holbach's critique the point at which theology split off from mythology marks the moment of nature's alienation from itself and paves the way for man's alienation from nature.
... Holbach was a standing challenge to such writers as Coleridge and Goethe and was reprinted and retranslated extensively in America, where his work was well known to the rationalist circle around Jefferson and Barlow.

Issued in 1770 as though by Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud (a former perpetual secretary to the Académie française who had died ten years before), _La Système de la nature_ was translated and reprinted frequently. The Samuel Wilkinson translation we have chosen to reprint was the most often reprinted or pirated version in English.

Online Reader - Project Gutenberg

[Dionysus]

^^ Speaking of such things, I thought this article was amazing:

Finding the Divine

[eye2i2hear]

(03-23-2012 11:06 AM)Dionysus Wrote:  ^^ Speaking of such things, I thought this article was amazing:

Finding the Divine

from that linked source:

Quote:The cruel and violent nature of coercive government is inherent and cannot be restrained or even disguised for long because any organization that funds itself via coercion and which imposes its rules on people coercively is psychopathic by definition and naturally draws psychopathic and sociopathic personalities to itself – creating an unhealthy feedback loop that ratchets up the coercion, corruption, and cruelty of a Government over time.

http://www.strike-the-root.com/finding-divine
--Finding the Divine | Strike-The-Root: A Journal Of Liberty

eye2i notes:
* "coercive government" as distinctive from "self government" (ie self control), where self government is simply grounded in voluntary consent (if one hears "love it or leave it" then there is coercion hiding behind a cloak called voluntary choice); The Declaration of Independence, and The Constitution even moreso, being demonstrably such cloaks
* capitol 'G'overnment modification, mine
* the author clarifies his article title usage of the term the divine as simply being that which is commonly, practically in each and every individual

---

caveat: while I indeed, find insightful and informative most of what the author says, his slipping in (?) of specific quotes from "The Bible" and or "Jesus" prompt me to calling "Bullshit." For as Marc Stevens might likely say (tho for equally likely 180 degrees opposite reason), you gotta keep it in context; and the context is that "Jesus" is said to have said all sorts of contradictory, to nigh delusional if not insane and/or impossible, things; quoting "Jesus" is nigh to quoting the likes of Charles Manson if you found a couple of things he said that agreed with your point --giving Manson a couple of thousands of years of course to have special other's sort out what he said and didn't say, did and didn't "officially" do; dittoing all that per his "disciples/followers" (equally imprisoned for their beliefs, etc, etc ad obsurdem). [and lest one think Manson a horrible comparison, well, again, see what has been done in "Jesus" aka "God"'s name aka The Crusades, consider that "Jesus" is said to have said he authored "The Bible", "Old"-and-"New", and any and all "Lost/Non-Canonized Books", etc, etc]

[NonEntity]

(03-23-2012 10:50 AM)eye2i2hear Wrote:  [bonus consideration: "back in The Day", were there psychopaths then, too? hero-wanna-bes? bureaucrats = witchdoctors/scribes/priests?]

---

Interesting question. From what I've recently read it appears that psychopaths are created by certain conditions in their very early upbringing. If that is so, then it would indicate that possibly different cultures and different social conditions might create greater or lesser percentages of psychopaths in a given population.

- NonE

[eye2i2hear]

(03-23-2012 01:11 PM)NonEntity Wrote:  From what I've recently read it appears that psychopaths are created by certain conditions in their very early upbringing.

Any specific sources on that you recall?
And if memory serves, some clinicians actually would make a distinction, based upon such evidence, and use the term sociopath?

Quote:If that is so, then it would indicate that possibly different cultures and different social conditions might create greater or lesser percentages of psychopaths in a given population.

It clogs my drain brain [sic] to try to determine which familial and/or general social conditions through the past might more 'naturally' produce the most sociopaths (again, assuming psychopaths are not genetic/biological, and rather are sociological productions*). My intuition (?) leans towards it being the agri-industrial forms to do such. But man, there's been some brutal 'parenting' apparently through the ages, period.


* speaking of the two terms, as two distinctions in reality: are there (possibly) both types/forms? or is it perhaps more a combination ie there being a genetic 'predisposition' nature that manifests in or from the necessary familial/social lack of nurturing? (my hunch is, it's just little known as a science discipline to date)

[NonEntity]

(03-23-2012 03:14 PM)eye2i2hear Wrote:  

(03-23-2012 01:11 PM)NonEntity Wrote:  From what I've recently read it appears that psychopaths are created by certain conditions in their very early upbringing.

Any specific sources on that you recall?
And if memory serves, some clinicians actually would make a distinction, based upon such evidence, and use the term sociopath?

Quote:If that is so, then it would indicate that possibly different cultures and different social conditions might create greater or lesser percentages of psychopaths in a given population.

It clogs my drain brain [sic] to try to determine which familial and/or general social conditions through the past might more 'naturally' produce the most sociopaths (again, assuming psychopaths are not genetic/biological, and rather are sociological productions*). My intuition (?) leans towards it being the agri-industrial forms to do such. But man, there's been some brutal 'parenting' apparently through the ages, period.


* speaking of the two terms, as two distinctions in reality: are there (possibly) both types/forms? or is it perhaps more a combination ie there being a genetic 'predisposition' nature that manifests in or from the necessary familial/social lack of nurturing? (my hunch is, it's just little known as a science discipline to date)

As to your first comment/question, I've written several comments (I think) regarding the book "Born for Love," which lays out the case for specific needs being met at a very specific stage of a child's early development, otherwise empathy appears not to develop.

As to the second, I'm reminded of the opening stories in Zin's People's History of the United States wherein he describes the openness and generosity of the native cultures Columbus met upon landing wherever the hell it was that he landed.

So I'm just putting those two things together in my mind and speculating that the culture described by Zin (Zinn?) would probably be one which would tend to nurture their youth well and so...

- NonE

[eye2i2hear]

This part:

(03-23-2012 03:23 PM)NonEntity Wrote:  ... regarding the book "Born for Love," which lays out the case for specific needs being met at a very specific stage of a child's early development, otherwise empathy appears not to develop.

...reminded me of a bit in the article Dionysus linked (and something Stefban often stated, referring to our being born with brilliance regarding social interaction):

Quote:
...each person is an instance of the divine – of the deep human tendency to express, seek, and foster the qualities of compassion and respect for others. Again, this is our core, primal nature (TedTalk video with Franz De Waals, 18 min 15 sec) – not some unattainable state that only Indian holy men can approach. If we simply stop hurting children, this healthy and fundamental human nature will become the norm, because it takes a lot of damage to crush the empathy and decency out of people.

Enjoyed the shared pondering on the matter (& the book sounds intriguing).

[from the article linked]



http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pla...e-74R9C6Bc

[eye2i2hear]

.

Professor Dan Dennet, in his book Breaking The Spell, pg 229 Wrote:...we might call [it] the inflation of credal athleticism: the boast that my faith is so strong that I can mentally embrace a bigger paradox than you can.

(the "boast" of course can be outward and/or inward)