text:
Posts Tagged 'Religion'
The Republic Is The Religion, Tolerate Only Vaccinated Superstitions!
Superstitious faiths are not just private matters, as soon as they impact others. In a Republic, the default religion is the Republic itself: it ties (ligare) people again (re). Being in a Republic requires to believe in the religion of the Republic, and other faiths are tolerated only when they don't contradict the Republic and its laws.
History provides with many catastrophic examples of what happens when a superstition takes over the state. The Judea war of 66-73 CE is an example: fanatical Jews didn't just attack Roman soldiers, they heavily fought each others. Jerusalem in the end was sieged by Titus and his legions, while inside the capital, Jewish sects were fighting each other to death. The end result was the annihilation of Israel as a state, an administration, and even a location where Jews were found.
It helped, in seducing the Mediterranean basin, that the Roman Republic outlawed all religions calling for human sacrifices. To keep itself together, the Roman empire had to become tolerant to all religions, as long as they forbid human sacrifices…
However, the "Catholic Orthodox" took over under Constantine (Nikea Council, 323 CE). Soon enough heretics could be executed (380 CE), libraries and books were burned, freedom of expression and reflection were outlawed, the justice system gutted, etc. Rendered mad and stupid by Christianity, the empire collapsed quasi-instantaneously (Arbogast and his Western empire, secular Frankish army go defeated by Theodosius at the Frigidus battle in 394 CE, the great invasions happened in 406 CE, Rome fell to the Goths in 410 CE).
Thus, it is important to draw the line. The state religion is the Republic: the public is god, and the public comes with human ethology, the practice of reason… enshrined by law. As the Romans used to say under the Republic: the law is hard, but it's the law.
When one doesn't respect the laws of the Republic, the Republic collapses: this is what happened in slow motion with the Roman Republic over 550 years:
During the Renaissance, in the Sixteenth Century, Pope Julius II ordered the destruction of Roman monuments, even using stones to make cement with! Prior to this, Roman monuments were mostly intact. Thus Roman catholicism destroyed Rome twice; in the Fourth Century, for real, and in the Sixteenth Century, in memoriam. my opinion? Roman monuments should be rebuilt! Precisely, so we can remember better the rage of those mad with god.Starting in 150 BCE (say), the spirit of the Republic, that the most powerful shouldn't be too powerful, was violated. That spirit was enforced by laws against excessive wealth and expenses (sumptuary laws). They got eroded beyond sustainability, the Gracchi brothers and their supporters noticed, and tried to correct. The lack of replenishment of the Republic led to a strange combination of collapse and expansion… both driven by increasing fascism which culminated in the installment of "Orthodox Catholicism" as state religion by emperor Constantine. That in turn brought further mental and cognitive collapse… A collapse which went, even though the Renaissance was launched: arguably the Renaissance was on as early as the Seventh Century (outlawing slavery) and the Eight Century (mandatory education). However, as the example of the disastrous Sixteenth Century shows, collapsing feature driven by religion, or, more exactly plutocratic superstition, led not just to the destruction of the Roman Forum then, but also of a quick succession of devastating religious wars.
Actually "Orthodox Catholicism" got horrendous in the Fourth Century and then again ramped up its terror starting in 1026 CE… precisely because a striking Renaissance was in full swing in Normandy and surrounding regions…. While Rome also stirred (an attempt to relaunch the Senate happened then), and the Italian Republics became ever stronger.
There is little doubt that Catholicism endowed fascism for centuries… not just as the Occidental Roman state collapsed… But all the way to 1789 CE…
So what to do, as Sharia raises its ugly primitivism? Well, be vigilant!
An example is vaccinations. Vaccinations protect the vaccinated, and others too, as the disease vaccinated against finds it hard to get a grip in the public. Not to vaccinate a child is a crime, against the child, and against other children and all citizens (as vaccinations protect all). Crimes against the Republic should be punished… Be it only to show which religion is the boss… namely the religion of secular law, the skeleton of the state.
The preceding was inspired by a NYT article on Orthodox Jews in the New York area refusing vaccinations, which brought an epidemic of dangerous measles. We Are Taking Religious Freedom Too Far
We have a right to practice our beliefs, but we don't have the right to discriminate against others, or endanger their lives.
Here is the conclusion of that article:
Before you ask an entire student body to bow their heads and pray, remember that banning prayer in public school never stopped any child from praying. It just prevents students who don't belong to the dominant religion from feeling ostracized.
Religious faith is a private matter between a believer and God. But how a believer lives in community with other people is something different altogether. It's time to stop giving believers a pass just because their beliefs happen to run counter to the laws of the nation they live in. Human lives may depend on it.
Tags:Measles, Religion, superstition
Posted in Abrahamism | Leave a Comment »
Ignore Moods, Ignore Minds.
ONE CAN IGNORE MOODS, BUT THEY RULE MINDS.
It seems to me that some of Wittgenstein's views on religion boil down to him trying to say: There is an emotional logic which accompanies "religion", but it doesn't reduce to geometric logic. (Compare with Pascal, three centuries earlier: "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison n'a point"… Heart has its reasons, that reason does not have.)
One has to talk precisely, and with discernment: religious beliefs come in two different types: secular and superstitious.
Football is a religion for its fanatics, so is patriotism (doing like one's fathers), so is the Republic (consider Republican Rome and the heroes who gave their lives for it)… Then there are beliefs like monarchism, or Confucianism, nearly a superstition. Then there are outright superstitions. Superstitions believe extraordinary things, which, as their label denotes, stand above (reality), like blind love for the god who wants to kill children, or the prophet who flew on a winged horse to Jerusalem, or the hummingbird god, etc.
So one should distinguish between superstition based religions and religions based on tying up together again (re-ligare)… without any superstitious element… call the latter secular religions.
There is a huge difference, an unfathomable abyss, between superstitious religions and secular religions. The latter has a reference: the genus Homo. The former, superstition, refer to the inhuman: god. Superstition based religion asks to believe, all the same, in something unbelievable: it asks to commit to a faith in… irrationality. Once one has left irrationality at the door, one has committed the greatest fraud and sacrifice against human nature. Then everything else is permitted, such as killing the innocents. It's no accident: that was the aim. Consider the Tangut empire, a Buddhist empire (destroyed by Genghis Khan). There the slightest fault was punished by death.
This is the main interest of superstitious religions for potentates: teaching the subjects to leave reason at the door, robbing them of their free will. In the Tangut empire, the top dogs had the right to have sex with all and any brides (Genghis Khan didn't like that).
Wittgenstein seems to have suggested that logical expression in different groups can be connected to different emotions. For example "God is Great" means "the universe is great" for the followers of the Abrahamist cults. Indeed.
But Abrahamist emotions at their peak were much stronger and nefarious: when in full control, the Abrahamist cults killed dozens of millions or more, burned libraries, 99.9% of books, eradicated most science, terrorized populations and thinkers for many centuries, throwing civilization off its tracks.
For example in the Thirteenth Century 4 to 5 millions Cathars got exterminated by the Papacy, in several countries, down to the last person. And all their books. The reason to mention the Cathars is that they were hyper pacifist, to the point of vegetarianism (some of them ate fish, though…) Cathars rejected all wealth and materialism. There were Cathars all the way to Constantinople, where the faith got established long before it was in France. There were female Cathar bishops ("parfaites"). Many were tortured, burned alive by the sexist Catholic male chauvinist pigs. (Cathars were "Christians"… but not Catholic, thus exterminable according to Roman emperor Theodosius' decrees of 380 CE…)
Cathar Parfaite (a Cathar bishop) flogged prior to being burned alive. Thirteenth Century Catholic amusement. Catholics, who detested women from the start, hated the gender equality of the Cathars. The Cathar ,
The holocaust of the gentle Cathars by Catholicism illustrates perfectly the insane cruelty and power obsession of the Catholic sect.
So the Abrahamists don't just mean "the universe is great", when they say "god is great". They mean: "I have decided that my god is so great He gave me a reason to kill you, if you don't submit to me". One can see this logical emotion at work in Arabia and the Middle East, to this day. One saw this logical emotion at work in the Americas.
One of the conquistadores ordered the massacre of the nation west of the Aztecs, which was at always been at peace with Spain. He thoroughly explained his cynical usage of religion. He said, his true aim was not at all to impose "Christ", but not to leave a free, strong, fully armed, technologically advanced, smart Native American state in Mexico. Religion was just a pretext, he shrugged, when he wrote his justifications in his old age.
Believing in nonsensical stuff fabricates neurohormones and a way to use the brain in common: it fabricates inhuman robots all programmed the same, subscribing to the defense of the organization (the "faith").
"Jesus rose from the grave" is not just fake news, it is a way to have similarly twisted brains in common. It is goose stepping in a common robotization of the mind, the most basic way to build a human community. It can be efficient. Hence the Catholic Church is the world's oldest institution.
What Wittgenstein may have tried to say, is that there is emotional logic, and humanity crucially depends on it. Logic is not just all about the games languages play.
The evidence is strong: axons are the wormholes of the brain, carrying information far away and speedily. They incarnate geometrical logic. However they are built from neurohormonal topology… the emotional logic! The emotions, the moods!
Note 1: the preceding was a comment on a murky essay in Aeon: "Wittgenstein and religion In the case atheists vs religious belief, Ludwig Wittgenstein is called to the stand. Whose side does his testimony serve?" The title says it all: Wittgenstein was full of mumbo-jumbo. However, his family was one of the top plutocratic families in Austria-Hungary, so he was like god to English plutocrats, Bertrand Russell and his ilk. And, generally, in the plutophile Anglosphere, Wittgenstein and his rocky wit still has divine status….
Note 2: The essay made a big deal of an old Christian quandary: trying to deny the existence of god by pointing at evil is only a problem if one believes that "god" is a good god. But assuredly, the god of the old testament is worse than the worst human tyrants, so it's both devil and the good lord. Building on this, Islam postulates that Satan and Jinns exist… apparently independently of Allah. In the Qur'an, Allah is asked why, and He replies: mind your own business, understanding this is beyond you, humans.
Tags:Emotional Logic, Religion, Wittgenstein
Posted in Abrahamism, Systems Of Mind | 12 Comments »
Want Human Development? Beware Religious Superstition
American God Is Also the One Roman Emperors Invented, For the Same Awful Reasons Which In US America Festered:
As US America is the mentally leading nation it matters to all what the USA thinks (yes, there are five times more Chinese, and soon, Indians, and Europe has thrice the population; however US institutions dominate world institutions… and it's more than a habit; as I said, it's instituted and people are "cool" with it, worldwide… Because they tend to distrust their neighbour more than the USA… Maybe Russia went back to disastrous, Putin friendly Orthodox Christianism, precisely because the USA's propaganda was impelling the notion that Christ was "cool", the indispensable and easiest way to gain respect…).
Observes The Economist in "Young Americans believe in a vengeful God"
"Their deity offers relatively little protection and plenty of punishment.
The more stupid one is metaphysically, the less developed in all other ways one tends to be.
FEW rich nations are as God-fearing as America. A global poll by Gallup in 2009 found that 69% of the country's adults consider religion an important part of their daily life, more than twice the share in Britain, France or Japan. A new survey by the Pew Research Centre shows that young Americans, though less devout than their elders, are still much more so than their peers in Europe.
Five-sixths of those aged 18 to 29 believe in some kind of deity, but their generation is the least likely to worship God as described in the Bible (43%). This is not because they have switched en masse to another mainstream religion: only 8% of them follow non-Christian faiths, just slightly above the national average of 6%. Rather, a large share of young people profess to believe in another higher power (39%), whatever that may mean.
God, as young Americans see her, is a bit less likely to be all-knowing and all-powerful than the God their parents worship. However, compared with their elders, young people see God as less likely to protect them and more likely to punish them. Alas, there are no historical data to reveal whether youngsters have always felt so cursed—or if the current crop are experiencing an unusual amount of divine persecution."
It is easier to believe in the Biblical or Islamist God, than to gather the motivation to learn history and geography… or just to acquire a sophisticated common sense. Instead, the common sense of the ambient rabble fits all, is ready to wear, and indispensable to arrivistes. This is why US common sense arrives so well, all over.
Also the US god, was, originally, not that of North America, but the plain old God of Europe, the God which presided over the destruction of Greco-Roman civilization. Believing in a God made in the image of the all-powerful, all-knowing masters of the Roman empire, who imposed and engineered Christianism, is highly compatible with The Empire, having been devised by those at the helm of The Empire.
Embracing Constantine's terror god shows to all others that one respects authority, one is anxious to please it, and Constantine, and today's replacement of Constantine, and one is endowed with proper naivety and anxiety to fit among one's peers, and have a beautiful career. This is also why so many politicians in the West, including the revered Obama told us Islam was a religion of peace and Angelina Jolie, a movie star and UN ambassador tried to imprint on us, sotto voce, that "Islam is a beautiful religion". (The rest of Jolie's speech was commendable, of course, and indeed, that's how manipulative politicians do it; at least since Adolf Hitler… Dilute lethal venom, in an appealing drink.)
India is on the left…
These properties, the awe for plutocrats, wealth, fate, and the vengeful, jealous common deity, enable those immigrants or descendants of rather recent immigrants who constitute most of the US citizenry to fit with each other, a common way to empathy.
The problem is all this indeed, sets the same sort of mood which presided over the fall of the Roman empire, and one can expect the same results. Believing in the vengeful, all-everything Lord sets a belief in vengeance and justice in another world, not in the one at hand…. meanwhile, obey the boss! Faith in the Christo-Islamist god replaces the drive to progress with the patience of resentment. It makes the youth inclined to respect omnipotence (the NSA) and omniscience (Facebook) and the power of politicians, rather than to fight plutocracy, and for progress. After all, the biblical God is, at least symbolically, the ultimate plutocrat: owning everything, knowing everything and ready to use violence and ultimate cruelty to impose her glory and jealousy.
The biblical God is the perfect God for the rule of wealth and evil, and in America, this enormous (mostly) European colony stolen from the Natives, it justifies the very existence of the society: a precious gift.
SUPERSTITIOUS religion tends to make its practitioners believe that, whatever happens to be, was ordained by the organizer of the universe. So it is fundamentally friendly to the powers that be. That is tyrants, dictators, plutocrats… And force, and wealth. So this is what the USA preach.
And another point: China is imminently non-religious. In the last two millennia, China had disastrous experiences with state mandated Confucianism at one point, and state mandated Buddhism, at another. And entire dynasties or states were affected. In the end, the experienced of the state of Qin, first to unify China as the Qin dynasty, in the last three millennia, was that, it was better to depend upon secular law (like its contemporary, the Roman Republic).
Modern China is pretty much following the same model as Qin… or Rome: law and public works (the ascent of Qin culminated with the short-lived Qin dynasty, However the state of Qin itself had lasted centuries before that, and its model got launched by Lord Shang Yang, circa 361 BCE, advocating the philosophy of Legalism (also translatable as "rationalism": Cartesianism, 20 centuries before Descartes…)
Secularism of China goes a long way to explain its spectacular development… By the way, it goes without saying that, should one be a potentate, or a class of potentates anxious to prevent the human development of We The People, a most efficient way to do this is to foster religious superstition. So watch the construction of gigantic mosques and associated buildings in Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey… Algeria, flush with enormous oil and gas revenue, has one of the world's worst educational level (127th in world rankings… although better than Morocco with 152th… Morocco has only 75% of the phosphate reserves of the world! Such countries do so poorly, because their elites do so well…)
Religion is not just the opium of the people, it is the politics of the soul.
And then, of course, superstitious religions foster a respect for mental ways friendly to losing a grip on reality. When one has no grip whatsoever, one offers oneself to be trampled by the powers that be. It's hard to imagine carpets happy. Nor can they make their friends as happy as could be, either!
Note: Karl Marx: "religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself" [The German-French Yearbooks, 1842.] In 1843, Marx in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions"….
Thus, for example, US citizens withstand US plutocracy the easier, the more they embrace their belief in the vengeful deity… So it's a self-feeding, vicious spiral… Fortunately, in Europe, the strong identification of fascism with superstitious religion damaged both (clearly in Spain, Italy, Germany with the SS' "Gott Mit Uns!"… But even in Marxist fascist countries with living deities such as Stalin, Ceausescu, Tito, etc.)
Tags:Human Development Index, Religion, superstition
Posted in Reality, Reason, religion, superstition | 6 Comments »
Giving A Meaning To It All
Intelligence, A Religion For Our Times, Just The Same As In The Oldest Times:
Religion gives life meaning. But yesterday's superstitious religions have become too implausible, even for modestly educated people in the developed world (to compensate, there is an increasing number of self-advancing cynics who make a profession of embracing completely idiotic religions under the umbrella of moronic "multiculturalistm")
Could we turn to public good as a religion? It was done, long ago, in the best republics, or even kingdoms. This is the way the Athenians, Romans, and the old Swiss had it. No such luck: the non-superstitious religion, the devotion to the Res-Publica, the sort of religion the Romans practiced 23 centuries ago, at the height of their Republic, is sinking in a sea of corruption.
Beauty. Something to understand, as it differs so much from the mundane. Do the esthetics of the rare and mysterious appeal to us so much because we are compelled to figure it out? Thus is it the desire to understand the root of the craving for the beautiful?
The corruption is not just by politicians and their friend getting extremely wealthy (exhibit number one here is the US "Democratic" Party, where a respected demoncrat such as Senior Senator Diane Feinstein made a billion dollars no questions asked, except yesterday, April 18, when some real democratic activist interrogated her directly something related; Feinstein took it really badly and told them that, if they didn't like her, they could leave the meeting…).
The corruption to the "representative democracy" system is intrinsic from having too few people with way too much power.
So what's left to venerate? Well, the very essence of humanity. The core, the essence of humanity, is intelligence. It should be an object of veneration, a cult (as I already argued). Praying to that god will mean thinking hard enough to stop believing in what one was believing before, to some extent, in many ways.
Some will scoff that my new religion does not answer the traditional metaphysical questions, such as:
Why is there something rather than nothing? What's the meaning of life? Is there a god? Is there a notion of good?
But actually my religion answers the last three: there is no god of the type people believed in previously, not anymore that there is a god of a type the local chimpanzee troop believes in. God is a question of intelligence, yesterday's god is not any smarter than yesterday's society.
There is a notion of good, scientifically defined, because there is a notion of pleasure, and a notion of pain, and the gradient between them defines the well ordering of goodness (I just used mathematical notions from set theory and advanced calculus, to provide me with a semantic, harnessing the casual power of mathematics).
"Scientifically defined" means that a theory can be made, and experiences conducted, confirming the theory. "Good" is not that relative. It's absolute, given the circumstances.
The new religion, same as the oldest religion ever? Intelligence.
Turn intelligence towards all metaphysical questions.
Example: It's there an afterlife? Intelligence will turn the question around: Why don't people ask whether there was a prelife? (OK, some Hinduists claim to remember when they were meritorious cockroaches… Intelligence will scoff with disbelief.)
The meaning of life? Figuring all out which is in the way. The fact there is something rather than nothing is not in the way, it's no urgent problem which we need to figure out. Whereas we have countless dramatic problems to figure out, lest we want to become bad, rather than good! (Besides, contemporary Big Bang physics, takes for granted that one gets universes out of nothing continually, or, at least, once. I think that's crazy, but that's just me, and my opinion is little more supported than that of the herd, some will argue…)
The preceding shows that striking a metaphysical pose can be highly practical. Oh, and then what is the common practical metaphysics of common people throughout NATO and the rest of the West? Doing the ostrich, head deep in the sand: warm and dark down there, a womb for the incurious.
Some will object that "my religion" the cult of intelligence, is not really new: didn't Voltaire have Candide declaring:"Il faut cultiver son jardin"? (One must cultivate one's garden, the fundamental cult of civilization, since, without culture there would neither cult nor food). However, the cult of intelligence is much deeper than agricultural imagery. Human intelligence is several million years old, agriculture, only 10,000 years old, at most (the first cities appeared in Anatolia… before agriculture…)
Intelligence yearns to make the universe into its garden. Instead of the inwardly mood of Voltaire, akin to putting one head's below some of the green leafy vegetables in one's garden, akin to putting one's head in the sand, intelligence desires to fill space and the universe. Fundamentally, the cult of intelligence is the opposite mood, of just cultivating one's garden. Even if that search for what makes the universe tick and what it's made of, and how comfy it can be rendered, passes through the inner sanctum of why and how is it that one thinks, or feels, this way, or that.
Thus, the cult of intelligence has to cultivate one's garden to, but to go "plus oultre", as Charles Quint put it (Charles V stopped the Conquista of America, for committing a holocaust there; hence we see that Charles V's intelligence extended not just in physical space, conquering the Americas, but also in ethical space, stopping said conquest! A nice example of the cult of intelligence in action; later emperor Charles V retired to a monastery)
The cult of intelligence was implicitly practiced by the greatest leaders, such as Akhenaten, Solon, Pericles, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Otto I, even Genghis Khan, etc…
Time to go back to our roots; all-devouring intelligence, cult of the strong, the weak, the caring and the human. Civilization has to construct and deconstruct, with maximal intelligent design, anyway. One can argue that life evolved as the architecture of intelligence, even intelligent design, and so it was, long before nerve cells appeared. The teleonomy (managing at a distance) of Quantum Physics enables to see far out, and implement the smartest (lowest energy) outcomes. Life as intelligence: one cannot get more essential than that.
Tags:Cult, Intelligence, Religion
Posted in Esthetics, Metaphysics, religion | 2 Comments »
RELIGIOUS IRRATIONALITY RATIONALE
Ruling Classes Subjugate Opposition With Irrationality, Not Just Human Sacrifices (And Their Variants: Killings, Jihad, Signature Strikes).
Say you are a tyrant, You want Your rule as absolute as possible. You may have ecological problems, and you may need to decimate your subjects, or make them work harder. What is the best way to do this? Controlling your subjects' minds, and not just with fear. Notice the sheep: they follow the pastor who milks them, and occasionally, cut their throats. What is the difference between flock and pastor? The pastor is much more clever, much more rational. The pastor is endowed with reason. Actually more than one. The pastor is full of reasons. The sheep is deprived of reason. Irrational. So, as a tyrant, irrationality you shall preach.
So how are you going to turn simple folks into a flock deprived of reason? Well, human sacrifices are a way to do this. Notice the king in the drawing below, sitting under an umbrella, just like a US president under his White House. A study published in Nature, in April 2016, explains that "Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies".
Sacrifice Of The Annual Customs At Dahomey. Drawing By Foulquier, 1776. Engraving In "Le Tour Du Monde, 1865."
The "Annual Customs" in Dahomey were also tax day for the free citizens of Dahomey (only war captives and criminals were sacrificed). The massive (several thousands) sacrifices stopped when the slave trade became too irresistibly profitable (the empire of Dahomey provided roughly 20% of the transatlantic slaves).
Honored European guests were allowed to attend the Annual Customs, as Dahomey had guns made locally, a professional army, and was perfectly capable of defending itself against the white man (as the British army found out, in Ashanti next door, suffering a terrible defeat where all soldiers were killed, but two, and the Anglo-Saxon commander was eaten, cooked like Cook).
But the outrages of superstitious religion go well beyond just roasting people alive, and are otherwise subtle in their deepest forms. The Bible evokes the Golden Calf, and rejects its cult. But that may have been a red herring. What upper classes need to rule best is for the lower classes to:
ADORE IRRATIONALITY!
Adore irrationality, reject reason. Rejecting reason, makes one the master's slave, because one becomes so stupid, one gets feeble-minded. Thus all enslaving religions trample reason, as reason is the weapon which could destroy them most. Reason, not love.
This is why all religions which help enforce plutocracy train their followers to obey senseless orders, such as not eating pig, crustacean, and only eating animals who were agitated by spasms, while experiencing anxiety and suffering as their throats were slit, etc.
Jared Diamond gives more examples in his book "The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?":
"Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion's adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion. For example, Hindus believe there is a monkey god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault. Catholics believe a woman who had not yet been fertilized by a man became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often represented as being located in the sky. The Jewish faith believes that a supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the being's favorite people, as their home forever."
One should not forget a Prophet (Muhammad) who flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse, before ascending to heavens, just like that other guy had done before. (Curious that Diamond forgot the founder of the second most major superstition.)
Superstitious religions sound very stupid, but the cult of unreason has its reasons that only the masters understand. Some of these orders are not just irrational, they are lethal: if they can claim you insult(ed) their little godly doggie god in the sky the excellent Judeo-Christiano-Muslim authorities could, or would outright order you killed.
Hence irrationality did not just rule, it killed, and demanded the utmost respect, doing so, lest it would have another irrational reason to kill you.
Let me insist: the very irrationality of religious commands enables the authorities to exert power whimsically. So it is the reign of Sharia, not Human Ethology (the later been approached by Roman law).
In the third century BCE, Chinese administrator Li Bing eliminated the sacrifice of young maidens to a river god during the conquest of Sichuan by the First Emperor. He called the bluff of a local racket in which families rid themselves of unwanted daughters while getting rich on the compensation they received. Thus "irrational" rituals bring all too rational, very prosaic gain.
Jared Diamond observes that embracing irrationality is the greatest divide between the fanatics and the rest (fanatics means: coming out of the FANUM, the temple):
"No other feature of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone could entertain such beliefs. No other feature creates a bigger divide between believers in two different religions, each of whom firmly believes its own beliefs but considers it absurd that the other religion's believers believe those other beliefs. Why, nevertheless, are supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions?"
As we just saw, "irrational" beliefs are something else reason to get ahead. Pure irrationality is rare. Searching the reasons behind apparent irrationality, what's hiding in the Dark, oft reveals causality in full.
Jared Diamond rejects the explanation that believing in irrational things is just due to ignorance. Instead he views it as necessary for identifying in groups. There is no doubt that this is a factor. But one does not need sheer absurdities to identify in a group. Middle Age Muslims for example requested Jews and Christians to wear clothing which could identify them. So dressing in a special way can work.
In conclusion, Jared Diamond claims that "it's irrational to be religious. Supernatural beliefs might not make sense, but they endure because they're so emotionally satisfying."
Well, sorry Jared, that's mostly missing the point. There is a higher reason for imposing (the religion of) irrationality. The point is that irrationality makes people brainless, and thus easy to rule.
However, humans are naturally rational. So irrationality has to be taught, and preached. Some may sneer and ponder what's in it for We The People. Why would We The People be so easily seduced by their own subjugation?
It is not as if the subjugation was a secret: Christianism brandishes "The Lord", and compare people to "sheep" to be led (to slaughter?). Islam literally means: "submission", from root of aslama "he resigned, he surrendered, he submitted."
So what We The People get in exchange is… irrationality, a rest from the human condition. And just like the Lords themselves, brandishing irrationality to generate fear, cruelty, submission… We The People can do the same.
In almost all societies, killing "legally" within a tribe or clan is granted only to those with great authority. Thus ritual human sacrifice serves power structures—who sits at the top of the social hierarchy.
In a study published in Nature, Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and colleagues analysed 93 traditional cultures in Austronesia (the region that embraces dozens of thousands of islands in the Pacific and Indonesia). The key was to analyze them before they were influenced by colonization and major world religions (generally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).
Ethnographic records, show that the prevalence of sacrifice increased with increased social stratification: it occurred in 25% of cultures with little or no stratification, 37% of those with moderately stratified societies, and 67% of those with a pronounced hierarchy.
Mapping the evolutionary relationships between cultures, the researchers found that human sacrifice and social hierarchy co-evolved. Social stratification can change over time. However, societies that practised human sacrifice were less apt to revert to milder degrees of stratification.
In other words, human sacrifice seems to bolster stratification: it helped to stabilize hierarchy, and conceivably, therefore, had a common role in the development of highly stratified societies that generally persist even today.
I hold that extremely lethal Jihadism is a form of human sacrifice, so this analysis carries to Literal Shia or Salafist Wahhabist Islam directly, and explained why these Muslim societies were unable to progress.
Human sacrifice is the privilege of priests or those who claim religious authority. Watts and colleagues say that this discloses a "Dark Side" to the social role of religion. (They have previously shown that belief in supernatural punishing agencies in Austronesian cultures encouraged moral observance, and thereby promoted the emergence of stratified, complex social structures).
Watts's team reveals that human sacrifice wasn't conducted for ostensibly religious reasons alone. Taboo violations, demoralization the underclasses, imposing class boundaries and instil fear of social elites, all build and maintain social control. In India, Untouchable touching higher caste individuals could suffer what are nowadays unimaginable punishments such as amputation, sitting in a red hot metal seat, etc.
Here is the conclusion of Watts and colleagues:
"Religion has long been proposed to play a functional role in society and is commonly claimed to underpin morality. Recent evolutionary theories of religion have focused on the potential of pro-social and moral religious beliefs to increase cooperation. Our findings suggest that religious rituals also played a darker role in the evolution of modern complex societies. In traditional Austronesian cultures there was substantial religious and political overlap, and ritualised human sacrifice may have been co-opted by elites as a
divinely sanctioned means of social control. The approach adopted in this paper demonstrates the way causal hypotheses about major transitions in human social organization can be tested by combining computational models and language phylogenies with a wealth of cultural and historical data. Unpalatable as it might be, our results suggest that ritual killing helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors, to the large stratified societies we live in today."
Say You are a tyrant, You want all to understand that Your rule is absolute, global as the plutocracy you lead with relish. So You order "Signature Strikes", thus telling the world that any wedding You can kill, if such is Your good pleasure, as long as it happens in a far away land.
Were the killing by drones in "signature strikes" personally ordered by president Obama for all to see a form of ritual killing, of human sacrifices for all to see? Certainly. The scariest part is that ordering kills for all to see is something that even Chancellor-President Hitler, a solid reference for human sacrifices, was careful not to be associated to! This means that the Obama administration developed momentum to change the public's mind about human sacrifice.
Human sacrifices violate human ethology, the evolution-given morality humans come equipped with. In the small groups in which humanity evolved for millions of years, human life was most precious, because the life of others was necessary to pursue one's life.
So this means that the rise of civilization and its accompanying religions comprised a violation of human ethology.
The main theme of this essay is even more general: it considers not just the violation of evolution given morality, by "stratified societies", but the violation of reason itself. Violating reason itself compounds the preceding moral problem: human ethology does not come just from "instincts" (whatever that means), but also from the usage of rationality (within a culture, or the individual).
The superstitious religions associated to the rise of demonic upper classes, plutocracy, have attacked reason itself. They are as inhuman as one can get, and survive. They enabled war maximally, annihilating their competition fully (although secular Rome and Literal Islam have unfinished business). Superstitious religions come short, for the future. Their carefully engineered irrationality and willingness to kill at the drop of a hat, will decapitate us, if we do not decapitate them first.
Make no mistake: irrationality has its uses, it allows to jump out of mental boxes. However, irrationality in a religion is different; it creates a common box, and create common, shared respect for irrational elements. Adoration for the Golden Calf is itself a particular case of irrationality. Making irrationality itself an object of adoration is a generalization of the cult of the Golden Calf, to the point of adoring the whims of the satanic masters themselves.
Collective adoration of senseless ways is collective adoration for the mania of the crowd, intellectual fascism at its worst. It's a moral duty, moral from the ways of Homo, moral to go back to the free ways of our genus, which have made us what we are, the crown of the creation of reason, by enforcing reason, and not its exact opposite.
Tags:Crown of Reason, Dahomey, irrationality, Rationale, Religion, Senseless Beliefs, superstition, Systems of Mind
Posted in Abrahamism, Christianism, Cruelty, Culture, Islam, Plutocracy, superstition, Systems Of Mind, Systems Of Moods, Systems Of Thought, Theory of Plutocracy | 7 Comments »
Can A Religion Be Abject?
Are there abject religions? Yes, of course. Their annihilation, or transformation into higher forms, describe the progress of civilization. Nineteen-nine percent, 99% at least, of the known superstitious religions or sects were rejected, or outlawed, and buried in the night of aeons passed, because, precisely, they were abject. (Some non-superstitious religions, such as militarism, or Marxism, or even Stoicism, in excess, can be abject too. But this essay will focus on superstitious religions… which are generally what people have been trained to recognize as "religious".)
Is there an objective criterion to find out if a religion is abject? Of course. The Romans, who launched our civilization, or, at least, our legal system, taught us that a religion is abject, and should be made unlawful, when it practices human sacrifices. Let's outlaw religions clamoring for human sacrifices! Our ancestors did it, let's heed their example!
Rome, invaded and occupied by a Gallic tribe, or others, sacrificed a couple or two… of human beings. The Romans, though, were ashamed by what they had done. Human sacrifice was formally outlawed by senatorial decree in 97 BCE under the consulship of P. Licinius Crassus.
The Romans accused Carthage of killing children. Thus Romans acquired moral superiority on Carthage which created a mood conducive to the annihilation of that Punic civilization. (Whether Carthage sacrificed children is still researched; archeological evidence points increasingly to the correctness of the Roman descriptions.)
Aztecs' Description Of Paris, November 13, 2015: Jihadist Sacrificing Gourmet
[Codex Laud, folio 8.]
The Romans prohibited human sacrifices by the peoples they conquered (and used human sacrifices as a justification to conquer them). Romans advertised human sacrifices as barbaric.
Outlawing human sacrifices distinguished civilization from barbarity, said Rome. Rome was also critical of Greek mythology for celebrating human sacrifices in disguise, and that refined intellectual critique helped promote the switch to Christianism…
The same mood, of revulsion to human sacrifices, presided over the annihilation of the Aztecs. Criticized for their deliberate annihilation of Mesoamerican states (not just the Aztecs), some violently invasive conquistadores claimed they had to do it to clean thoroughly the evil mood of human sacrifices…
The mood of being horrified by human sacrifices originated in Rome. However, human sacrifices were practiced in disguise for centuries (by gladiators' deaths and the occasional sacrificed Vestal as happened once under emperor Domitian, because the chief Vestal engaged in sexual activity).
Our civilization is Rome Renovated (as the Franks proclaimed in 800 CE). And the next question naturally is: is there any religion today which practices human sacrifices?
Some have tried to deny that any religion practiced human sacrifices. Maybe because of the natural question: Does Islam Practices Human Sacrifices In Disguise?
When a religion organizes human sacrifices, it orders to kill some particular individuals, under some circumstances. As Wikipedia says: "Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more human beings, usually as an offering to a deity, as part of a religious ritual. Human sacrifice has been practiced in various cultures throughout history."
Is there, today, a religion which orders to kill other people and claims that those who kill other people go to paradise? Of course there is.
A religion which orders to kill "apostates", "unbelievers", "pagans", "idolaters" of food, music and the good life in general, consists in practicing human sacrifices in disguise. Or, actually, come to think of it, not in disguise at all, but full view. The emperor wear no clothes, He is just drenched in blood. Islam also punishes homosexuals by stoning, to death (on the ground that this is the punishment in the Bible), "Adulterous" women get the same treatment: stoning by a crowd practicing human sacrifice.
LOL, Muslims of the Fundamental sort, why don't you call all your stoning, stoning, crucifixion, and whipping to death, human sacrifices? Because it does not sound good? Because it sounds all too true? [1]
So why is Fundamentalist Islam lawful? Maybe I should ask the question in reverse: is (Literal, Salafist, Wahhabist) Islam lawful because it was not pointed out that all its most troubling practices amount to human sacrifices? Let's point out, that's what thinking is all about. And a last question: are those who promote Islam, thus the Qur'an, as Obama had done, promoting what is inside the Qur'an, namely the orders from God detailing when and when the believers are to engage in human sacrifices? And if not, why not?
Tip for anti-terrorism: stop calling them monsters "suicide bombers" or "Jihadists". Call them what they are: human sacrificers.
But then, of course, one will have to overcome first the mood that simply describing the Qur'an in its own words is racism, as the Common (Plutocratic, Democracy-Destroying) Mood has it. Can reality be racist? This whiff of realism could well end up with the wealthiest paying 93% tax, as they did under Republican president Eisenhower, lest the realistic mood takes over, and various superstitions squirm back to the unspeakable shadows they should have never left.
[1] The Shia and Sunni sects of Islam are favorable to the violent, hence human sacrificing aspects of Islam. Others, like the older sect known as the Ibadis, were not, and insisted that the Qur'an was indicative and allegoric, not to be interpreted literally. The point became more saillant after the Fourth Caliph, Uthman, selected what he wanted to see in the Qur'an, and boiled alternative Qur'ans (this started the Muslim religious wars which go on to this day).
Tags:Civilization, civilization., Human Sacrifices, Idolaters, Islam, Pagans, Religion, Romans, Stoning, Superstitious Religion, Unbelievers
Posted in Human Rights, Islam, Reason, religion | 11 Comments »
Delusion here, observation there
A delusion is a belief held with conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. Yes, but what is a "belief", and what is the "evidence" and who holds it? Moreover, who is "superior"? Well, of course, the holder of superior wisdom.
Thus "delusion" is an imminently relative term.
Sometimes, it can be profitable to entertain a delusion, points out a professional philosopher in Scientia Salon in "The upside of delusional beliefs". Just as many a psychoactive drug can be beneficial to avoid pain.
To a non-theist, all theists are delusional. And their madness is far from being always innocuous.
Viewed As A "Jew", Freud Had To Flee His Native Austria
What's a "belief"? First of all, it's a conclusion, an abstraction. Sincere Muslims of the Wahhabist cult decided the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sunna are real.
Someone who is not a Muslim, reading an Hadith saying that the "Messenger of God" ordered to kill all Muslims who were viewed as having abandoned Islam, will feel that the Muslims are gravely deluded.
Deluded about what?
Deluded about the whole thing. Deluded about the existence of the "Messenger of God" as really a messenger of god, and a messenger of a real god, deluded to believe really Muhammad said this, and deluded that this so-called "Messenger of God" still should be admired, followed, enacted, etc.
Tied to any delusion are entire systems of thought and moods. Including a universe of "observations".
Once people have decided something is real, it becomes real enough. At least for them. If it has become real for them, it's not a delusion anymore. As far as they are concerned.
Many people with cancer entertaining the delusion that they have been cured, although they are dying from it, have made the decision, at the deepest levels of their minds, to believe that they are doing well. So does the antelope devoured by the predator. What choice do they have? Making themselves even more unhappy by giving up all hope?
"Delusionem" means a "deceiving". Sometimes we have interest to deceive ourselves. But then the question arises whether the interest is short, medium, or long term. Or if it profits one's parents, friends, tribe, species, or highest valued principles.
American humor tends to be delusional: under the guise of playing around (ludere), it plays down ("de"), the dignity of the human spirit. That's why it tends to be self-deprecatory.
What would be the interest of that delusion?
To please those who fear the honor of the human spirit, the plutocrats…
Self-imposed delusion is a belief that, though initially known to be false, or unlikely, has been surrendered to and accepted by the whole mind as a truth; illusion is an impression that, though false, is entertained provisionally on the recommendation of the senses or the imagination, but awaits full acceptance and may not influence action.
Delusions can hide in moods. In the USA, height is more important than in Europe.
The Fed website gave the physical height of its chair, Janet Yellen. Now that it's clear that Yellen is not a towering figure, it will be felt that her ideas are coming short…
American CEOs, and other leaders are, in general taller (in absolute and relative terms) than their European peers. The best way to measure ideas?
This shows a delusion can show up as a mood, mostly: the citizens of the USA, at least the upper class, is more impressed by sheer physical size (reflecting a lack of other factors to evaluate greatness?)
Have human minds been designed?
Conventional Delusion: No. Evolution proceeds haphazardly.
Advanced Wisdom: Yes. Even so-called "Darwinism" selects a selection process explaining evolution is adaptable. "Signare" means to choose, mark, appoint. Clearly, at the very least "natural selection" (and especially of the quantum kind, soon to become evident) is such a choosing.
And what is selected by natural selection? A species survival. Species are designed to survive.
Survival can be short term, and psychological, in term of a dying patient, or being measured in terms of hundreds of millions of years.
Blaise Pascal wrote:'Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà' (Truth becomes falsehood when crossing a mountain range). Delusion here, observation there, goes even further.
Plato in his cave, complained all was illusion. However, the entire evolution of the human species is about acquainting ourselves with truth, abhorring illusions, embracing delusions only as drugs, psychological extensions of massive endorphin release ("useful" when devoured… Useful to the one devouring, of course!)
Evolution is a complicated thing, delusion, simple.
Tags:delusion, Freud, Illusion, Islam, Plato, Religion
Posted in Evolution, Systems Of Moods, Systems Of Thought | 23 Comments »
Religion: Delusion Serves Tribalization
[The following was censored by an American philosophy site. Why? It "exacerbates things".]
In culturally advanced countries, such as the USA, religious believers with a modicum of general culture and awareness, know very well that, when they embrace a superstition, a so-called religion, they fancy something that is not the truth.
So what is going on? Why do they outwardly believe in something, that they truly do not believe in?
(For the purpose of this essay, I will override the joke that the difference between the USA and yogurt, is that yogurt has live culture.)
Thus believers know that they do not believe in the truth, they just have "faith" that they will get away with it. In advanced countries, believers have seen enough TV, and videos, to know this.
So why do they embrace something that they do not believe in, deep down inside? If you ask them, they will say because so did their parents, or that it's a "tradition".
Thus the motivation of believers is essentially tribal: I believe what my tribe believes, however absurd (and the more absurd, the more well defined it is). Religion is not just tribalism, it's in-your-face tribalism. No wonder the so-called Islamist State behaves just the same. They heed the example generously provided by the USA (or, more exactly the leading, opinion making circles, of the USA; thus: are Islamists Americanists in heavy disguise?)
This is evidenced by the situation in Israel. Weirdly dressed people, often coming from overseas, namely the USA, have decided to occupy the land of others, and, if one observes this, they brandish racism, or even dark allusions to Nazism.
Tribalists always call critiques unduly offensive, or even racist and disrespectful of their religion (it is a sin, precisely because religion is tribal, and thus, attacking religion is attacking the tribe).
This, religion being a deliberate lie masking a tribal purpose, is why the god delusion has deflated in Europe: Europeans, deep inside, know that the old religions were essentially tribal excuses to go to war manipulated by elites for their own profit (see Israel again for a live example). And Europeans have had enough of wars.
(By the way, Putin's invasion of Ukraine killed at least 4,500 people, it was announced today.)
The rejection of religion by Europeans was helped by the SS motto: "Gott Mit Uns" (God With Us). Nazism evoked "Gott" a lot, and Biblical semantics (superior race versus "Elected People", "Lebensraum", the vital space to the east, as in the Bible, in parallel with "Promised Land", without counting the many god-organized genocides of the Bible, etc…)
It dawned on Europeans that the old elites walloped in faith. With the enthusiasm of various predatory beasts, walloping in gore. This is not meant to be an insult, by the way. It's a description: predators rub themselves in the smell of decaying flesh of their prey to disguise their true nature, and make it easier to approach the next meal.
Thus Christianism did with love. Love was rubbed all over it, but the purpose was just the opposite: Christianism killed millions…. Yet, it did not even originate European style welfare, nationalization, and socialism (the Franks did that).
If, as I asserted, believers have made a conscious decision to believe in lies, what does that tell us? That here are people whose meta-ethics is lying.
Do we want to encourage this? Do we even want to tolerate this? Should this be viewed as a deviant psychological behavior? This is what somebody such as Dawkins believe. I do not like Dawkins on genes, but I approve him on that.
One cannot have faith, a faith one knows is a lie, a faith that lies should rule the minds, and it is of no consequence.
We encourage meta-lying by not calling, at least among intellectuals, the God Delusion for what it is. Not just a delusion, but a tribalization. The delusion of tribalization.
It is not a question of telling a child dying of cancer that god does not exist, and will not take care of her. I am ready, and I certainly will lie, in such a case, as I comfort a child, and not just a child, with such lies… And maybe they are not lies, gods know…
By the way, Christians ought to stop holding the Solstice hostage. The Winter Solstice feasts, complete with cut conifers, lights, decorations and gift giving, are known to be older than Christianism by more than five centuries.
An exasperated Imperator Augustus passed a law to limit the "Saturnials", as the Romans called the solstice feasts, to less than three weeks.
In a debate among intellectuals, the connection between gods' delusion and tribalization ought not to be censored.
That such a connection is censored in American "philosophical" sites is telling.
Primitives go to war. Those who claim to be primitive enough to persuade themselves that they are primitive, will also go to war, because, once they have persuaded themselves that they are primitive, they are free to act like the primitives they have persuaded themselves they are. When Bush invaded Iraq, in 2003, monolithic war thinking ruled all over. USA media systematically censored all my comments (although the New York Times editorial board was reading them for themselves, as they communicated with me).
Religionism is tribalism by another name. Tribes are the primitive war units. However, war fabricates history.
Europe is anxious to forget war. But the feeling is not reciprocal. The American leadership, by making sure that the population does not forget religion, thus tribalism, makes sure that most of the military budget of the planet originates in the USA.
Thus religion is at the core of the military-industrial complex. They are both strong in the USA, because they are related.
The USA was also spectacularly in denial about the poisoning of the biosphere by CO2. That, too, is related to religion: after all, why to worry? God is omnipotent, remember? And no need to do anything about a violent society, violent police, and the might of plutocrats: God is in charge.
Religion does not just organize tribalism, it can make it conservative, that is, in a few hands. Don't ask why American universities censor agnosticism, ask why they should censor those who want a society less defined by the few, who make them rich.
Time to "exacerbate things"?
Tags:delusion, Lies, Religion, Tribalism, USA
Posted in Education, Systems Of Moods, Systems Of Thought, Tribalism, USA | 16 Comments »
State Religion Unavoidable. Now Republican Secularism. Or Die
Give Me A State, I Will Show You A Religion:
Any state needs a way to tie up its citizens together again, after whatever trials and divisions they have been through. Trials and divisions there always are.
Said otherwise: having a state means having a religion. As the regime changes, so will the religion.
A clear example is Rome. In the five centuries of continual regime change, from the collapse of the Republic, to the establishment of the Frankish Empire in 507 (defeat of the Goths), Rome continually changed religions. There was the Imperial Cult, and later the cult around "Sol Invictus". The Nicene Faith of Constantine (325 CE) was not the "Christian Republic" of the Franks (although both were outwardly "Catholic").
Real Revolutions Need, And Are, New Religions.
[Demachy, Fete de L'Etre Supreme.]
In the USA, the de facto religion has been a mix of secularism and obsequious reverence to "Jesus Christ", a guy supposed to say good things, whom one is supposed to love, to prove one is so good, one can go shoot the Indian heathens in full good conscience, and religious justification. Amen.
Thus, not believing in "god", or Jesus-love, in the USA, tends to show one is not looking for justification to dispose of Indians and the like (Saddam Hussein), and thus one is treacherous to the nation.
The necessity of a state to have a religion is why, after a revolution, or serious change of regime, any really new state that fought a previous state (of things) dominated by a previous religion, establish a new religion.
An example is Henry VIII, establishing the Anglican Church, or what happened throughout German speaking lands after Luther appeared, and many local lords opted to play a game with the new religion, Reform, to further their own power. Even the French Revolution introduced the "Culte de l'Être suprême ".
This is why all significantly new regime, such as the "Socialist/Communist" regimes establish "Personality Cults", which are religions by another name.
The vanishing of the old religions in Europe is directly related to the progressive political changes there: the Nazis hid behind "Gott": "Gott Mit Uns" (God with us) was the motto of the SS. All other old regimes were tied to Christianism. As the regimes lost power, because of the rise of the European Union, if not outright apocalypse (Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italian monarchy, and countless smaller empires… in the "imperare" sense), the old religion lost its reason for being.
It has been replaced by a mild version of the Republican religion, which was very strong in France, ever since 1789.
The Republican religion was actually strong before that, throughout the centuries, simmering below the surface. Thus, even during the Middle Ages, republics were allowed within the Renovated (Roman) Empire. Venice was the most famous, and Charlemagne let it be (although Venice had a gigantic fleet, and the Franks very little).
This underground Republicanism is why King Louis the XVI decided to create the American republic. Yes, create: without massive French support the pathetically weak American Revolution would have failed. Louis was told by his advisers, his cabinet members, and his own brother, that he was creating a Republic, and that he would be next. He was explicitly told that he had lost his head, and that this decapitation would be made public all too soon. His brother kindly hanged the famous painting of the decapitation of the English monarch, upon Parliamentary vote (the exact same mechanism that would cost Louis his head). Louis shrugged.
Why? Louis, a deeply religious man, deep down inside himself, having tried everything else, had clearly deduced, subconsciously, that it was time for a new religion. A new way to tie the People together again. So Louis convoked the "General Estates". The "Third Estate" (namely not the aristocracy and the Catholic Church) promptly proclaimed itself to be a Constituent Assembly (similar to the one then sieging in the USA).
Louis indeed lost his head. But he went to death very calmly, in full respect, in full faith, of the new Republic that he had contributed to create. Louis was a sort of real Jesus Christ, dying from his own mechanism.
A lot of the trouble of the European Union have to do with not having enough of a common Republic, to have faith in it. Let's have enough faith in the Republic, for the European Union to become a new religion. Otherwise, it will fail.
And this true, worldwide.
Secularism, living in one's age, is not new: it has been around for millions of years, for the most successful, precisely our ancestors: others died off. Secularism, living in one's age, is part of human ethology. Fighting secularism is fighting the essence of what it means to be human.
Secularism is another word for accepting science and technology. Those have never changed faster. States which don't adopt and create them swiftly will be left behind: China has understood this very well.
Yet, to create significantly new science and technology one needs intelligence, thus enough democracy to be called a Republic. Absent the preceding, states who are not Secular and Republican enough, will have a higher probability to lose the next big war (when push comes to shove, and the seas rise big time).
We are in the age of Republican Secularism. This is all the religion we need. But we need it bad.
P/S: To broach a subject I generally avoid: does the preceding mean Israel will die, as the Crusader States did? Well, any regime comparison is relative to its environment. But it sure means that "Orthodox Judaism" is a deadly danger for Israel. It certainly means the EU will die, lest it accelerates progress and democracy enough to look better than the alternative.
Tags:Religion, Republic, Republican Secularism, Secularism
Posted in Barbarians, religion, Republic | 10 Comments »
Western Civilization Is Not Christian
Needed Guidance For Naïve, Deluded Christians:
Let me emphasize at the outset that there is everything good in embracing the good aspects of Christianity, as those fit human ethology at its best. Ethics, indeed, is absolute.
Christianism is, of course, much more than ethics at its best. It is also the superstition tyrannical Roman emperors running out of ideas, but not of Satanism, imposed on the Greco-Roman Empire.
The creator of Christianism was Emperor Constantine. He killed many, including most of those closest to him: his wife (steamed), his famous and talented son, and his nephew.
Thirteenth Apostle, Emperor Constantine: Homicidal Tyrant, Founder, Christian State Religion
Christianism, hopefully, is a spent force. Yet it retains some vitality, as it rests on some myths, which are outright lies. It's important to demolish them, be it only as an example to Islamism.
Among those lies was that the Roman Empire hated Christians and killed millions of them. The truth is the exact opposite: imperial Christians killed millions.
Another myth is Jesus himself. Still another myth is that France was a very Catholic country with a special relationship to the Church (France was said to be the "eldest daughter of the [Catholic] Church").
The importance of the latter myth is that the Franks, Francia, created Western Civilization, by "renovating", as they put it themselves, the Roman Empire.
By claiming that Francia was infeodated to the Catholic Church, the Christians were able to claim that we, who owe everything to Western Civilization, owe something to the "Lord" (allegedly their nowhere man, Christ, but actually any plutocrat above, who wanted to be called "Lord").
Thus arose the myth that Western Civilization was, somehow, "Christian Civilization".
Yet, a quick study of Charlemagne's life shows that he certainly believed in study and philosophy (some of his closest advisers were the top philosophers of the time, for example Prime Minister Alcuin). Charles also believed Christianism was a very efficient military weapon. And that having ten wives was better than having just one. And that to be called "David" as if he were the king of the Jews was a good approach to life (for those in the know, God, aka Jesus' dad, tortured to death David's son… to punish David… that's the Christian way…)
So let's now dispel those myths with a bit more description of what happened:
The Roman Empire was pretty well organized: we know that exactly 6 people got executed under Marcus Aurelius for charges related to Christianity. The most famous case was that of a high officer and author who rejected his military oath. He was made into a Saint, of course.
There is no direct evidence for a Mr. Jesus Christ having ever lived. Three Christ-like Bible inspired crazies, with fates broadly similar to the fate of the alleged Jesus got duly condemned, and executed, during that century when Jesus was supposed to live. We have detailed proofs of their existences. The contrast is striking between the evidence in these historical cases and the total lack of direct historical evidence for Jesus.
It is enlightening to read that Saint Paul, the first human to evoke Mr. Jesus Christ, admits that he never met Jesus in the flesh… but in his head.
Only fools could not suspect something fishy: is not Saint Paul admitting he made up Jesus in his head? (Saint Paul, a Roman prosecutor condemned to death by the Jews, was spirited away by Roman authorities; nobody knows what happened to him, as Roman officialdom was anxious not to spite the Jewish authorities too blatantly).
There were only around 3,000 Christians executed under Emperors Diocletian and Galerius (it all started with too many very high officials and at Court, making the sign of the cross!).
With those Christians executed for which ever reasons over more than 250 years, maybe we have been double that number of Christians executed. But there were never millions of Christians executed. It was actually legal to be a Christian (with freedom of cult but for a very few years, when Christians, and especially priests, were required to take an oath to the state… Not differently than what would happened during the French Revolution, 15 centuries later).
Yet, because of their secretive, paramilitary ways, and dislike of Jews (extremely numerous in the Empire), Christians often got in trouble.
Galerius, maybe delirious from cancer, called off the Diocletianic Persecution when he issued an edict of toleration in 311.
The Roman emperor Constantine, the self-declared "13th Apostle" (and, of course, a Saint, like the famous sadist Saint Louis) selected and invented Catholicism (Constantine called and presided the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE). Constantine imposed Christianism fiscally on the empire. Emperor Theodosius, a Spanish general, imposed it with lethal force (so the Christians killed millions, and this is why they pretend it was the other way around)…
So Christianism aka "Orthodox Catholicism", as it was known, became the Roman State religion. Only the Jews got tolerated enough to not be massacred outright.
Thus, far from being eaten by lions in the millions, imperial Christians devoured civilization for more than three centuries as deranged tyrants. All the books and intellectuals fled to Persia. The empire got immensely weakened by the flight of the intellectuals. (Then the Muslim raiders swooped in, gobbling Persia and much of the empire in a few years.)
In the North-West of the Empire, the Franks took power and humbled the Catholic Church, while re-establishing the freedom of cult, de facto.
Catholics, mostly because of the dreadful influences of the semi-demented tyrant, Louis XIV, and the slave master Napoleon, had acquired an imbalanced power in France that they did not have before, in most of the history of France.
There were Protestants in France since the 12th Century, and they were sometimes top rulers: the Comte de Toulouse, Admiral Coligny (who was Prime Minister), and even the most admired Henri IV.
The Jews were treated equally for 6 centuries, throughout the Renovated Roman Empire, until the First Crusade (pogroms in Alsace and further east), and the rule of dictators like the abominable Saint Louis. The thoroughly despicable Louis XIV threw millions of Protestants out of France, terrifying, molesting and torturing the rest. France, the place were Protestantism was invented, degenerated into infamy. France became a shadow of her former self. Louis' grandfather, Henri… had been the Protestant-in-Chief. What a dreadful piece of history!
Jews were re-recognized as full citizens in 1789.
All this to say that real "French Intellectuals" cannot be Catholic (apparent exceptions are illusions).
The famed relationship between France and the Catholic Church was that of master (the Franks) to a tool.
Yet, as Catholicism is intrinsically fascist, Absolute Monarchy, when it arose, starting with the first official king of France, Philippe-Auguste (1165-1223), found in Catholicism a convenient justification for its tyranny of biblical proportion. Just as Constantine had.
Tags:Catholicism, Christian Myths, Constantine, France, Franks, Religion, State Religion
Posted in Psychology, religion, Roman History | 22 Comments »


Pictures of patio cover building materials is created to be the inspiration of for you. This image was published on January 21, 2017 and published by admin this is fall into the category Exterior, the size of image is 800 x 600 and this post has 15 related images. If you have any questions please Contact Us. Hope it could inspire you, our beloved reader in lonelybloggers.com, back to article please click Prettify the Outer Side of the House with Covered Patio Plans.


Clone A20 reacts with the murine CD45.1 alloantigen of CD45, a membrane glycoprotein also known as leukocyte common antigen or Ly-5. CD45.1 is expressed by all leukocytes in mouse strains SJL/J, STS/A, RIII, and DA. CD45 is a member of the protein tyrosine phosphatase family and is involved in the regulation of T and B cell antigen receptor signaling. Antibody clone A20 does not react with the CD45.2 alloantigen expressed by most mouse strains.
Analyzer. Cells labeled with CD45.1-Biotin were stained with Anti-Biotin-PE. Cell debris and dead cells were excluded from the analysis based on scatter signals and propidium iodide fluorescence.


You will Watch Winx Club Season 2 Episode 17 online for free episodes with HQ / high quality. Stream cartoons Winx Club Season 2 Episode 17 Exchange Students. The Winx Club go to Cloudtower with Mirta as a guide to protect a piece of the witch school's piece of the Codex.


Based on the acclaimed book Denial: Holocaust History on Trial, DENIAL recounts Deborah E. Lipstadt's legal battle for historical truth against David Irving (BAFTA nominee Timothy Spall), who accused her of libel when she declared him a Holocaust denier. In the English legal system, in cases of libel, the burden of proof is on the defendant, therefore it was up to Lipstadt and her legal team, led by Richard Rampton, to prove the essential truth that the Holocaust occurred. DENIAL is directed by Emmy Award winner Mick Jackson ("Temple Grandin") and adapted for the screen by BAFTA and Academy Award nominated writer David Hare. Producers are Gary Foster and Russ Krasnoff.


Within New York, women have many options for where they choose to have their breast cancer treated. Some insurance companies may require patients to use one medical service, or they may allow the patient some options for their cancer care. There are many treatment centers in the state that are licensed to administer chemotherapy to breast cancer patients in particular. If you received Taxotere in the state of New York, you may have treated at one of the following treatment centers. These facilities fall into a broad spectrum and vary in size, the types of cancer that they treat, the number of full-time oncologists, and the length of time they have been serving the public.


The purpose of this study was to cast light on the factors of interest in the evaluation of natural sciences research jobs in high-technology organizations. A list of 20 factors, consisting of the dimensions of the Peromnes System and others selected from the literature, was drawn up. Eight, which, in the opinion of the author, support the mission and objectives of the organization investigated, were chosen from the list. Based on the findings of the research, an opinion was given on the suitability of the Peromnes System. From the literature study it appeared that no clear distinction is made between job requirements and human requirements in the case of natural sciences jobs. A limitation of the study is that only natural scientists of the organization investigated were used as respondents; therefore the selected factors do not necessarily have a bearing on other high-technology organizations.


The Winners Circle Running Club is once again organizing summer cookouts/pool party. The club will provide the food for the grill, the host will provide the pool, and you can BYO your favorite beverages. This is a WCRC members and guests only event.
The 2018 WCRC summer beach party / cookout will be Saturday, July 21st starting at 9:30 am hosted by Scarlette and Larry Smth at 10th Street Salisbury Beach. The party ends when everyone goes home!
The beach party! The WCRC is sponsoring this summer fun, and Scarlette has secured the catering services of Tennesse Barbecue. Due to liability issues for both the WCRC and the host, this is a BYOB (cans if possible) event. Guests should also bring a towel, bathing suits, chair and any other beach paraphenalia. A ready to eat dish or dessert to share would be welcome as well. Scarlette will have plenty of beach games and activities planned.
Come early and park anywhere on North End Boulevard but don't park on corners or where there is a painted yellow line. Some parking is available in Scarlette's neighborhood. Also, keep in mind that this is along the beach so plan your travel time accordingly.
For planning purposes, runners and/or partiers should let Scarlette know in advance if they plan on coming. We need a reasonable count to avoid wasting a large amount of food or alternatively running out of food in the first hour. Email Scarlette at: runningcops@aol.com to let her know you'll be there.


text:
Q: regular expression conditional to extract domain name of email address I want to extract the domain name of an email address but only the part before the domain.
@([\w]+)

with an email address like "john@telenet.be", I can extract telenet. However, when the email address is "john@invoice.telenet.be" I get "invoice" instead of "telenet".
I tried with a condition, but I can't get it working.

A: According to rfc522, which defines the format of a valid email address, the local part of an email address, i.e. the part that precedes @domain_name, can contain a '@' character if it is within a quoted string. So you want to be sure that you start scanning following the final '@'.
The following regex is specific and will scan into capture group 1 the next to last level of the domain name:
[@.]([^.@]+)\.([^.@]+)$

*

*[@.] - Matches either a '@' or a '.'. This matches the start of a new domain level. The rest of the regex will guarantee that there are no '@' characters in the remaining characters to be scanned.

*([^.@]+) - Scans in to capture group 1 one or more characters that are either '.' nor '@'.

*. - Matches a '.'.

*([^.@]+) - Matches one or more characters that are either '.' nor '@'.

*$ - Matches the end of string.

See Regex demo.
A second approach uses a simpler regex to first scan whatever follows the final '@' to capture the full domain:
(?<=@)[^@]+$

*

*(?<=@) - A Positive lookbehind assertion stating that the preceding character is a '@'.

*[^@]+ - Matches 1 or more non-'@' characters.

*$ - Matches the end of the string.

See Regex Demo
If your regex engine does not support lookbehind assertions, then use instead the following regex in which case the domain will be in capture group 1:
@([^@]+)$

Then you can split the scanned domain on the . character and select any N parts of the domain as follows (the code is Python):
import re

email = "john@invoice.telenet.be"

m = re.search(r'@([^@]+)$', email)
if m:
    # We have a match
    domain = m.group(0)
    domain_parts = domain.split('.')
    # the penultimate part: 'telnet'
    print(domain_parts[-2])
    # the last 2 parts: telnet.be
    print('.'.join(domain_parts[-2:]))

Prints:
telenet
telenet.be

See Python demo

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Best and TOP Models in our agency "EuroGirls" can help you more enjoy your life after long travel, stress, hard work or when you feel lonely. Our models can go with you to romantic dinner or to have a fun in Dubai together! Or just take your hand and ask, "What do you prefer honey?" and make all your fantasy become true!


"Armedia" IAA presents an exclusive interview with James Bagian, the only Armenian in the world, who has traveled into Space.
– Mr Bagian, what made you want to become an astronaut?
I had always been interested in aviation from the time I was a little boy. My father, Philip Bagian, had been a highly decorated fighter pilot in World War 2 and I suppose I developed my interest from the stories he would tell my brother and me about the enjoyment, challenge, and satisfaction he experienced from flying. Having developed an avid interest in aviation at such a young age it was only natural to become interested in spaceflight and becoming an astronaut.
-You have logged over 337 hours in space. What is the outer space like? What feelings did You experience?
-Seeing the Earth from space with your own eyes gives a much greater appreciation for the planet than pictures or videos are capable of imparting. The beauty and seeing the Earth, its land masses, and oceans with no political boundaries definitely impresses one that all the peoples of the Earth and their activities ultimately can impact everyone regardless of where they live.
I was also impressed with the tremendous technical achievement that launching a spacecraft is and how fortunate I was to have been allowed to make my flights as well as the debt of thanks I felt to all of the people whose good work made the experience possible for me to have.
-What is the most memorable moment for you in space?
-I most vividly remember the first time I was in orbit and looked out of the window at the horizon to see the thin blue line that was the atmosphere that envelopes the Earth. It was a beautiful electric blue color and it was particularly striking to me because of how small and fragile it appeared especially as I contemplated how all the people on Earth depend on it for our survival every day.
-Please, tell us about your family and their Armenian traditions.
-Grandparents on my father's side emigrated to the United States just after 1900. My father and his brothers and sister were the first ones in their family born in the United States. They were always proud of their Armenian heritage and I fondly remember spending times together with my family enjoying Armenian delicacies and hearing from my father's parents stories about "the old country".
-As we know, you have not been to Armenia yet. Would you like to ever visit Armenia?
-You are correct, I have never been to Armenia but I would be interested to do so.


text:
January 17, 2014 November 14, 2021 Camelids1 Comment on Wife swapping and summoning angels, the supernatural John Dee
Wife swapping and summoning angels, the supernatural John Dee
Blue skies and sunshine have been hard to come by in London recently, and the weather forecast is relentlessly grim. When the sun does shine, there is a limited window of opportunity to enjoy it. During these short winter days a cold but sunny day is special. The light lasts longer into the afternoon; a sign of things to come, that the worst of winter is behind us.
I decided I'd walk along the Thames from Barnes Bridge to Kew Bridge. The tide was high and parts of the path were flooded and impassable. This proved lucky, I came off the river at Mortlake and discovered the lovely Church of St. Mary the Virgin. The stonework of the church tower looked old, the cemetery was atmospheric, but the supernatural connections of a person buried here makes St. Mary's special.
Chiswick Bridge from the Thames Path, London, England
St. Mary the Virgin Church, Mortlake, London, England
Plaque to John Dee, St. Mary the Virgin Church, Mortlake, London, England
Inside the church is a plaque to John Dee. The name was familiar, but I couldn't remember why. With access to a computer, it dawned on me that a modern opera, Dr. Dee, recently celebrated his life. The work of Blur frontman, Damian Albarn, and future head of the National Theatre, Rufus Norris, it premiered in 2012. This isn't the first time Dee's featured on stage, Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest is thought to be based on him. A fitting portrayal since Dee is credited with summoning the storm that smashed the Spanish Armada. He's also fictionalised in Peter Ackroyd's novel, The House of Doctor Dee.
A trusted adviser to Queen Elizabeth I and her court, Dee was a mathematician, alchemist, astronomer, mystic, astrologer, geographer and occultist. He was rumoured to be a spy and he famously owned one of the largest libraries in Europe. He was a student of the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, a pre-Christian writer/prophet, possibly a contemporary of Moses, who influenced many early Christian thinkers. This is the sort of discovery that happens when the Thames floods.
Portrait of John Dee
John Dee's 'Seal of God' in the British Museum © Vassil
John Dee had an extraordinary life. During the reign of Mary Tudor, he was imprisoned for for attempting to murder the Queen through black magic. He was lucky to keep his head. Considered an intellectual giant in his time, at the age of twenty he lectured at the University of Paris on algebra. He was deeply religious, but in a superstitious era, when people grasped at anything to make sense of the mysteries of the physical world, his 'knowledge' of astrology and the supernatural made him invaluable to Elizabeth I. He chose her coronation date to ensure it was auspicious.
John Dee demonstrating an experiment at Court, © The Wellcome Trust
His study of astronomy made him an 'expert' in navigation, at a time when Europeans were starting to explore the New World. Dee had made friends with legendary map maker, Gerardus Mercator, while in Belgium. It seems he stole some of Mercator's maps and on his return to Britain published a book, General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation. This proposed English expansion around the world – a blueprint for empire. Established as the foremost expert on navigation, he trained many of England's merchant adventurers before they set sail for the New World.
To a modern mind, Dee's mysticism took him in bizarre directions, including communing with angels, by which he believed it possible to understand the divine fabric of the world. He seems to have believed a confidence trickster, the 'spirit medium' Edward Kelley, who claimed to be able to hold 'spiritual conferences' with angels in Enochian, the angel language. The angels dictated several books to Kelley and the 'spiritual conferences' were taken seriously – both men were invited to the court of the King of Poland.
Gravestone, St. Mary the Virgin Church, Mortlake, London, England
In 1587, Kelley told Dee that an angel had ordered both men to share everything in common, including Dee's much younger wife. If that doesn't set alarm bells ringing, I don't know what does? Dee believed this to be a divine order and complied. History doesn't record how Mrs. Dee felt about this divinely inspired arrangement. We do know that she died of plague in 1604, there is no evidence to suggest this was divine vengeance.
Today, Dee would be seen as a deluded religious fantasist, but that is the benefit of living in an age of science. In his own time he was considered one of Europe's foremost scholars, taken seriously by Kings, Queens and religious authorities. He was, after all, a contemporary of Nostradamus. Sadly Dee's grave has been lost over time, but he was buried at St. Mary the Virgin in 1609. The church itself was constructed in 1543 on the instruction of King Henry VIII and makes for happy wandering.
In another coincidence, just over the road from the church I came across a memorial to the the Lower Dutch House, part of the Mortlake Tapestry Works. The Tapestry Works were established in the 1620s on the site where John Dee's house had stood and, as so often in English history, it attracted highly skilled immigrant Flemish tapestry workers. The tapestries made here were famous and very valuable.
The Lower Dutch House, Mortlake Tapestry Works, London, England
Back on the river, the tide was going out and I could continue on my merry way to Kew Bridge…
Categories England, Europe, London, Mortlake, United Kingdom, West LondonTags England, Europe, London, Mortlake, River Thames, Travel, West London
1 thought on "Wife swapping and summoning angels, the supernatural John Dee"
Pingback: High Magic's Aid Part 2 | Ceremonial Magick Musings
Previous Whitehaven, the American War of Independence and a question of 'What if?'
Next Tales from the riverbank, a walk around Kew

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
The Open Agriculture Journal
Characterization and Classification of Soils of a Toposequence in a Derived Savannah Agroecological Zone of Nigeria
Kehinde A. Adegbite, Millicent E. Okafor, Aruna O. Adekiya*, Elizabeth T. Alori, Ojo T. V. Adebiyi
College of Agricultural Sciences, Landmark University, P. M. B. 1001, Omu-Aran, Nigeria
Soil properties are anisotropic in nature, hence the need to study soil associations and regional landscapes for sustainable nutrient management and soil profile is an important tool which can be utilized for this purpose.
The objectives of the study are to describe the morphology of the soils of the toposequence, determine their physical and chemical properties, classify them and make an appraisal of their agricultural potentials.
Three slope classes were considered and a total of three profile pits, one on each slope were studied and described in the field morphologically at Eleyin Farms Omu-Aran, Kwara State, Nigeria, which was a newly opened up plantation. Samples of soil were collected from the horizons of the profile pits. The soil samples were analyzed for their physical and chemical properties.
All the three pedons showed appreciable differences in physical, chemical, and morphological characteristics of the soils and their classifications were determined as guided by their characteristics. The textural classes were defined mainly by the sand compositions which decreased from the upper and middle slopes down to the bottom slope, and the clay compositions which increased progressively from the uppermost slope through the middle slope to the bottom slope. Silt compositions did not exhibit any particular pattern.
Thus, sand and clay compositions were more significant and relevant to the textural classification of the soils of the area than silt. The low nutrient status of the soils can be ameliorated by incorporation of organic or farm residues to increase the organic matter content of the soil, and also improve management practices and guided chemical fertilizer use. The soils of the area were classified as Typic Haplustalf (USDA), and Ferric Luvisol (FAO).
Keywords: Morphological characteristics, Physicochemical properties, Soil profile, Toposequence, Anisotropic, Agricultural potentials.
Identifiers and Pagination:
First Page: 44
Last Page: 50
Publisher Id: TOASJ-13-44
Article History:
Received Date: 10/01/2019
Revision Received Date: 13/02/2019
Article Metrics:
CrossRef Citations:
Total Statistics:
Full-Text HTML Views: 700
Abstract HTML Views: 561
PDF Downloads: 275
ePub Downloads: 192
Total Views/Downloads: 1728
Unique Statistics:
Geographical View
© 2019 Adegbite et al.
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
* Address correspondence to this author at the College of Agricultural Sciences, Landmark University, P. M. B. 1001, Omu-Aran, Nigeria; Tel: +2348034813715; E-mails: adekiya2009@yahoo.com, adekiya.aruna@lmu.edu.ng


After receiving questions as to why the Taylorsville Police Department didn't do more or didn't carry the case that led to the arrest of two teenagers for having a gun on school property on Feb. 26, Police Chief Toby Lewis addressed the issue publicly at last Tuesday's City Commission meeting.
"To clarify that we did not do our part, I think we very much did our part," Lewis told the commission.
Four agencies have agreed to and signed the memorandum of understanding from the Spencer County Sheriff's Department and Spencer County EMS regarding the use of their radio frequencies, but the Taylorsville Police Department and the Taylorsville-Spencer County Fire Department are not on that list.
Thus far, Mount Eden Fire and Rescue, Northeast Nelson Fire Department, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Mount Washington Police Department have returned signed copies of the MOU, Spencer County Sheriff Donald "Buddy" Stump said Thursday.
After discussion and votes on multiple resolutions over the past four years, Taylorsville will officially become a fourth-class city in a matter of four months.
The Kentucky General Assembly approved a bill, cosponsored by Reps. Brad Montell and Kim King on Taylorsville's part, according to a memo from Mayor Don Pay to the city commissioners. The commission unanimously approved a resolution supporting the move in January.
Spencer County Public Schools and the city of Taylorsville could soon reach a partnership to place a school resource officer on a rotating schedule within the district's schools.
Both the board of education and the city commission have been in discussions since December about the possibility and it appears the agreement might come in the form of two part-time Taylorsville Police Department officers fulfilling the 172-school-day commitment desired by the board.
A Taylorsville woman indicted in January on charges for allegedly stealing more than $12,000 from a local senior citizen's checking account has now been indicted on separate charges for illegally obtaining or attempting to obtain controlled substances from doctor's offices and pharmacies around the area.
An election will be held in the first week in April for commissioners of the levee district in Taylorsville. Candidates must own property within the levee district. Anyone interested in being a candidate can contact Deputy Judge Karen Curtsinger at 477-3206.
Mayor Don Pay and Taylorsville Police Chief Toby Lewis pose for a picture during last Tuesday's City Commission meeting. At the meeting, Pay presented Lewis with a proclamation specifically honoring him and participants of the Shelby County Detention Center's Class D felon program for the work completed around Taylorsville over the past few months.
My mom used to have a small, three-legged wooden stool. I don't remember the stool being used for any reason, just something to set a newspaper or magazine on for a minute.
It was small and thus not sturdy enough to hold anything of weight.
But no matter if it was strong and sturdy, the three-legged stool was no good if something happened to one of the legs. It couldn't stand on just two.
You're probably already wondering what a three-legged stool has to do with the newspaper business.
Open government is a three-legged stool.
Spencer County Fiscal Court's building committee Monday rejected all bids received thus far and decided to obtain plans for the Spencer County EMS headquarters remodel from an architect.
Monday marked the second time the committee had met to discuss the bids submitted for the project, but the committee voted to take no action at its first meeting until a building inspector could be present and certain questions were answered about the bids received.
Mark Bruner, charged with the brutal beating of a woman left by the side of the road, was scheduled for trial Monday, but prosecutors say it has been postponed.
Instead, he has a status conference scheduled for next Monday, according to online court dockets.
Shelby County Assistant Commonwealth Attorney Melanie Carroll, who is handling the case, did not return phone calls from The Sentinel-News. Shelby County Commonwealth Attorney Laura Donnell said that Bruner's trial had been postponed but that she did not know why.


Five parkinsonian patients were transplanted bilaterally into the putamen and caudate nucleus with human embryonic mesencephalic tissue from between seven and nine donors. To increase graft survival, the lipid peroxidation inhibitor tirilazad mesylate was administered to the tissue before implantation and intravenously to the patients for 3 days thereafter. During the second postoperative year, the mean daily L-dopa dose was reduced by 54% and the UPDRS (Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale) motor score in 'off' phase was reduced by a mean of 40%. At 10-23 months after grafting, PET showed a mean 61% increase of 6-L-[(18)F]fluorodopa uptake in the putamen, and 24% increase in the caudate nucleus, compared with preoperative values. No obvious differences in the pattern of motor recovery were observed between these and other previously studied cases with putamen grafts alone. The amount of mesencephalic tissue implanted in each putamen and caudate nucleus was 42 and 50% lower, respectively, compared with previously transplanted patients from our centre. Despite this reduction in grafted tissue, the magnitudes of symptomatic relief and graft survival were very similar. These findings suggest that tirilazad mesylate may improve survival of grafted dopamine neurons in patients, which is in agreement with observations in experimental animals.


text:
Home » All India Radio, Applications, Internet, Mobile, music streaming, RAAGAM
AIR launches radio streaming app for Android, iOS & Windows
By Vivek Pai	vivek@medianama.com January 28, 2016
All India Radio (AIR) has launched an audio broadcast channel over free dish and the internet called RAAGAM. The channel is currently available as an app over Android, iOS and Windows. A Financial Express report mentions that the channel will also be beamed through one of Digital Terrestrial Channel (DTT) of Doordarshan.
The RAAGAM app streams quite a few AIR channels; we found 13 in our area which included AIR Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Vividh Bharati, FM Gold, FM Rainbow etc. Tapping a channel takes the user to a new screen and starts streaming whatever is playing on the channel. Users have limited controls, to go to the next or previous channel, increase, decrease the volume and to pause the music. However, pausing is pretty temporary as switching channels or the screen restores the channel to its default playing location.
The worst thing about the app is its inability to run in the background. This is a major oversight on AIR's part, as users can do nothing else but keep that app in the foreground if they want to continue playing music. Switching screens, tapping on notifications or leaving the app screen for even a moment instantly stops the music. However, users can keep it on in the foreground and switch off their phone screen, so the app is much more useful for playing music when doing something else that doesn't require phone usage.
The app also lacks notification bar and lockscreen controls, but then again these features are pretty useless on an app that can't run in the background. As of now, the app version on Android is 0.0.4, which hints that AIR knows it has a long way to go towards being a stable, fully functional app release. Hopefully, the next update will let the app run in the background to make it much more useful. Note that the app is especially useful for users living outside India or outside their state, wanting access to local radio channels.
Other developments at AIR:
– In October last year, AIR appointed releaseMyAd as a virtual agency to let advertisers book ads for all of AIR's stations online. releaseMyAd would accept and process radio ads for AIR's network stations including Akashvani, Vividh Bharati, FM Rainbow & FM Gold.
– In March, the agency had to stop operations of Gyan Vani FM because Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) had stopped its payments.
– In September 2014, AIR updated its text updates for news service from the originally launched English to add 5 regional languages of Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Dogri, and Nepali to the service.
TRAI's reserve price for spectrum auctions could mean more 4G or none
Facebook net profit soars 122% to $1.56B on the back of ads
ByteDance tests new music streaming app 'Resso' in India