Reminds me of a picture I saw in The Economist a few years ago of Buddhist monks in Korea rioting with clubs.

Despite the Dali Lama's successful Holywood PR compaign, Tibetan Buddhism was a corrupt theocratic protection racket before the Chinese invaded.

Paganism is harder to compare, because it's more of a vaguely defined counter-culture style than a religion with an organization or a theology. But if we count historic so-called 'pagan' religions then I'd say that human sacrifice is a pretty serious skeleton, if a few hundred years is 'recent' enough. Most of Christianity's worst abuses stopped that log ago also.

Animism is messed up also. And of course Hinduism had the caste system, among other evils, many still persistent. And atheism had the genocides in Cambodia, China, and Ukraine, if we want to include anti-theistic thought systems.

Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are bad too, but putting other more 'exotic' religions on a higher plane seems to me to require unfamiliarity of their actual features, or at least selective unfamiliarity.

I think if you want to learn anything definite about god/providence/spirit you have to fixate less on the fact that all religions and all 'alternative' religious teachings are mostly nonsense. Yeah I know it's maddening that people would just make all that shit up and call it 'truth', but we can't fix them. In my experience you can find out something for yourself though, if you are patient and work at it.

I think it's worth drawing addition attention to the predatory nature of the Christian Science theology. It's not just that they believe in 'mind over matter', which can be a defensible position if sensibly qualified. They set it up so that top church members grow rich from the fear and suffering that their theology causes among their followers. When you're seriously sick, believing that the cause of your sickness is your faith in doctors, they'll pray for you, but for a fee. Ostensibly the fee is a 'gift', but the church even has standard rates per prayer 'treatment'. Becoming wealthy through faith is also a core part of their teaching though - belief in limitation is what stands between you and 'abundance'. So through that lens, the I'll-gotten wealth of top members is evidence of their righteousness.

Christian Science is deeply anti-science. To quote their founder, 'matter is error'. She taught that the only thing that stands between what you and you want is the belief that nature is anything other than a mistake. With that outlook it makes no sense to study how nature works, the only thing that matters is holy will.

Nobody can embrace a theology that is that deeply and starkly at odds with reality without being conflicted. So of course there will be Christian Scientists who are not wholly against science. But their teaching is diametrically against science, as well as being immoral. I think the fact that they choose to call their outlook 'scientific' says more about how dishonest or brainwashed they are than it says about their regard for science. But then L. Ron Hubbard used the word science a lot also.

His parents were rich.

Though I suppose the decoy idea makes sense for avoiding being eaten by birds. In which case this isn't the only species of spider that does that, there is at least one more in North America.

How do they know that's a decoy? I've seen other spiders that put stuff in their web. I remember a big black and yellow spider in the garden when I was a kid that had something similar. I speculated that it was there to help prevent birds from flying into it and destroying the web. In this case, the spidery appearance of the junk in the web appears to follow from the fact that the junk has been stuck to the strands of the web, which radiate out from the center much like the legs of a spider.

OK. I mean both, and can give different kinds of examples.

In Patanjali's yoga sutras, we're told that we can obtain definite knowledge on subjects through contemplation. This contrasts to the modern method of reasoning about sensate experience, performing experiments, and checking results. As I see it, that belief amounts to a kind of appeal to authority, an 'inner' authority, corroborated by the authority historically accepted religious teachers. So its a self-reinforcing belief system, and when they're wrong about stuff they're not very good about recognizing it and correcting it. So I'd write it all off as bullshit. Trouble is, I thought about this stuff with an open mind for about five years before I recognized it was largely bullshit, and it changed me somehow. Section III of the sutras describe mystic powers that a person can supposedly obtain through mental control. I have some of that now, not enough that I can prove it in a rigorous, publishable scientific sense, but enough to produce sufficiently objective results to know that I'm not delusional or seeing patterns where there aren't any. One aspect of this involves some kind of extra-sensory information about things that will happen, and its not information that can be extrapolated from past experience. One example I sometimes give is I dreamed of the airplane bird-strike and landing on the Hudson river during a nap a few hours before it happened, and I e-mailed the dream to someone before the event occurred. For the past several years this kind of thing happens to me almost daily, but usually not in relation to public events. And often the subjective or metaphorical aspect is strong enough that it doesn't sound very convincing to a skeptic. For example, on the morning of the school massacre last week, I woke up with the words "I hunt, therefore I am" in my head, from the song "Of Wolf and Man" from ~1990. At that moment I felt that I'm unhappy in life because I'm not true to my nature, which is to kill. Later in the day I recoiled from the predatory feeling after finding out what happened in Connecticut. That experience, having felt that aggression first, then its consequence, changed me a little bit in a way that I would not have changed otherwise. This subjective aspect of the experience is more valuable to me than something more objective like predicting a train wreck, because I can do something with it that makes a small difference. You can look at yourself and believe that you should be better than you are, but that only goes so far. When you feel and understand what something is in the same part of yourself that is that way, then you can move something.

I know that many other people have these kinds of experiences also. But usually they're prone to partially fabricating their experiences, or drawing unsupportable conclusions from them, and so are viewed as untrustworthy. Or they're more scientific and objective and keep their mouths shut because they don't want to be considered crazy. And a lot of people just ignore stuff that they don't know how to process, and don't explore such subjects enough to open the door very much to start with.

Second example: Gospel of Thomas, which the next poster quoted from. It contains a lot of cryptic stuff about reconciling and integrating the masculine and feminine parts of one's psyche. And it states that very radical results follow. The 'experts' mostly interpret this as advocating some kind of asceticism, and maybe that's even what it meant to the people who wrote it. But that's not what it means to me at all. I guess this is similar to the jnana yoga example. I think that the vision of escaping nature, which is central to Buddhism and similar Vedic doctrines, is wrong, and that the standard doctrine of karma is largely wrong. But if you do this thing of developing the capacity to feel, and relating that capacity to your will and other aspects of your mind, and not shrinking away from the difficult things you find out about yourself, it does do something significant.

Many early Greek Christians clearly believed that individual people could be perfected, and that this would result in an actual physical resurrection from the human condition. It seems doubtful to me that they were right: we all share a genome, and a psychological substrate, and even a physics, for the most part. To a significant extent we're locked into what we are and can't individually overcome it, at least not within the scope of a human life, by grace or otherwise. Usually this problem is addressed by watering down the doctrine so that it doesn't mean as much. For example, Paul said a man born of God can not sin. And yet, its generally acknowledged that all Christians sin. So it follows that Christians aren't really born again, have not really fulfilled the requirements for what was promised. What then of redemption? It will all be taken care of after we're dead. How convenient.

I realize that Christian faith is transformative for a lot of people, and I don't dismiss the value of that. My point is that its not transformative enough to be squared with the everlasting life vs eternal damnation difference in outcomes that the religion is based on. If you've been changed enough to justify eternal life in place of oblivion, then the differences in life should be comparably radical. If we have souls we have them when we're alive too, the condition of those souls does have outward effects. ("There is nothing hidden which will not become manifest.") For me one value of the older religious texts is the ideas haven't been watered down as much to reconcile them with the more depressing aspects of human life and natural history. Of course we do have to reconcile mystic ideas with reality if we're going to do anything useful with them, but its a project that requires a lot more work in that direction.

I have two problems with pretty much all "experts". One is that they're concerned with maintaining their position as experts, and generally won't engage with other people except insofar as it supports that. My other problem, which is closely related, is that they all regard some kind of philosophy or doctrine as authoritative, whether it is atheist science, or Jungian psychology, or Tibetan Buddhism, or whatever. And every one of these doctrines is both dated and intentionally skewed to give relative advantage to the priests and followers of it. It seems that nobody is willing and able to step outside of that and look honestly at everything. And so there are two factions, one that regards mystic phenomena as delusional, and one that embraces some preferred but largely unworkable explanation for such phenomena.

Third example: The I Ching. It works pretty well, both as a philosophy and as an oracle, even though the theory of five elements that its based upon is in my mind quite implausible. Jung was an 'expert' who understood that the I Ching works, and he described its working in terms of 'synchronicity'. Elsewhere he stated that the 'collective unconscious' is collective purely as a result of people being similar to each other, that there isn't actually anything magical going on. And so synchronicity all comes down to a combination of mechanistic effects and selective extraction of patterns from noise. That view allowed him to maintain his respectable reputation. But by leaving that unstated most of the time, and never confronting the contradiction, he also positioned himself as an authority on mystic phenomena that can't possibly be accounted for that way.

Other examples: Secret of Golden Flower, the Buddhist/Taoist text: to me its a form of mental yoga with a slightly different vocabulary. The Tao Te Ching: that thought does things also. Jumping back to what I said about becoming more psychologically developed....If you ask the 'who am I' question, in whatever manner, one effect it has is you learn to move your sense of identity. To some extent you may move it in a delusional way, but that's not all that's going on. For instance, you can give yourself out of body experiences even though superficially there isn't actually anything going "out of body", you're just manipulating a mental map of where you are. And yet, somehow you're doing more "just" manipulating a model, you can produce effects that can't be accounted for that way, such as moving objects without touching them. Your sensate reality is a model that connects to the world some way that is not currently explained, its more than just a physiological focusing and interpretation of electromagnetic and chemical information. When you find you can change it, and that you have some power to change who you are, this has results. The descriptions and explanations of this sort of thing in old scriptures may be wrong, but they're at least attempting to deal with aspects of it that aren't touched by modern scientific, philosophical, and scientific theories.

I think the philosophical aspects of all this are a lot more important than the pheomenological aspects. But its all interrelated, you can't be wrong in one area without being at least a little bit wrong in the other area also. You can't do real philososophy without a realistic view of how the world works, any more than you can do psychology well without any knowledge of neurology. So I think that modern philosophical views are severely distorted by the disconnect between mystic experience and scientific knowledge. Speaking for myself anyway. Even small steps in reconciling the two seem to produce fairly big experiential changes.

I guess I've got to stop somewhere, so I'll leave it at that.

It might be worth at least skimming a translation of the scrolls before forming a strong opinion about their content and value.

Yeah I know what site this is, and I'm not new here.

Something I think is worth keeping in mind....Just as there is ignorance now that rivals ancient ignorance, there was also intelligence in ancient times that rivals the best the modern world has to offer. Though its true that religious writings are largely fiction, a lot of very intelligent people worked on them, and there is significant understanding mixed in unevenly with the nonsense.

Modern academics are very good at understanding subjects where the same observations consistently yield the same statistical distribution of results. They're even better at studying things that can be perturbed in a controlled way, and dynamics that can be modeled well mathematically. They're generally very bad at understanding anything else. Many go so far as to assert that if a phenomena can't be modeled in a predictive way then for practical purposes it doesn't even exist. In this manner they ignore everything they're not good at solving. In my experience some ancient scriptures describe discoverably real aspects of life that modern experts are mostly ignorant of.

I didn't find much of interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but a lot of that is just me personally, it doesn't mean there's nothing there for anyone. Other old writings such as in the Nag Hammadi discovery have a lot of interesting content though, notwithstanding that they're not trustworthy as standards of truth. And I don't mean interesting from a historical perspective, I mean there is insight there that can not be found elsewhere.

US rate is 75 times higher according to your numbers, not 7.5.

I think the demographic and economic differences between the two countries dwarf the differences in laws relating to firearms.

I'm not saying this pro or against gun control laws, just pointing out how misleading it is to compare the two countries without attempting to account for that.

I'm not a global warming skeptic. But having done grant research for many years, I can say that yes, the imperative to keep the money flowing tremendously skews science. Its not a conspiracy so much as thousands of individual choices about what to look at and what not to look at for the sake of the next grant cycle. But the end result is much the same. A science illiterate person who understands this can't tell who to trust. Similar situation with evolution. The science is really, really solid, and the counter-arguments are complete bunk. But a non-expert can't always evaluate that. And although its true that a person can't make much of a living as a scientist, its usually easier to win government research money than to find funding from a private company. Private companies just aren't spending money on research in most fields, and where they are its often not being spread around as widely.

Its true of course that skeptics' views on this sort of thing are skewed by dishonest selfishness and stupidity: its OK to trash the planet because Jesus will come fix it all for us. Global warming aside, it astounds me that a valuable resource has been accumulating for a half billion years and 'conservatives' want to pump it all out and burn it in a couple hundred. And pumping water and toxic chemicals into the ground to shatter the rock is to me twice again as stupid. That's what's going to happen though, no matter who is in charge. Oil companies have done pretty well under Obama. Best case scenario for people on the left is to use global warming as a pretext for steering investment money in a healthier direction. But its also true that some of that amounts to a power grab. Its not as if anything is actually going to be done about the global warming problem, the problem is too big. Its kind of like bailing out a flooded ship with a teaspoon. Unlike with other easier kinds of pollutant problems, a little bit of effort doesn't help much.

I've bought new Dover books within the past 10 years.

Off topic comment and question:

Physicists tend not to speculate about things that can't be rigorously pinned down with math or in a lab experiment. At least not publicly. Non-physicists generally don't know what they're talking about when they discuss physics. And all people tend to overlook or dismiss experiential data points that lie outside of their existing mental models of how the world works - they don't know what to do with it.

Attempts I've seen to explain or lend credibility to religious or paranormal phenomena in terms of 'modern physics' are clearly mostly nonsense. I have unusual but recurring and objectively verifiable experiences that I've been trying to make sense of, and I'd sort of concluded that they are completely outside of what can be accounted for by existing scientific theories. More recently I'm not so sure though. If this doesn't sound too vague and flaky to you, and you're interested in kicking around some ideas offline, I'm interested in doing that.

One other thing....

When you force someone to work in support of an evil system, you set him at war with himself. He wants to work hard, love the fruit of his labor, and care for his family. But he also hates what he's supporting, and consequently hates what he's doing, and eventually hates himself. How can he not? Every day it takes an honorable and capable man, already imperfect like everyone else, and drives him toward becoming someone just a little bit more insolent and slothful. Of course he is responsible to fight against the evil in his heart. But its not a fair fight, his very ability to fight for what is right is what has been assaulted. Then after you've worn him down this way for 400 years, or for a half billion, in one way or another (we're all human), its his fault if he can't instantly spring into angelic perfection as if it never happened? Suddenly its all a "choice"? This is bullshit. I've experienced both sides of this, and its bullshit. Yes the first thing he needs back is his strength of character, and bankrolling his life or making excuses for him isn't going to give him that. He has to pull himself up, nobody else can do it for him. But at the same time, pretending that his condition is primarily his doing because there is no longer significant white racism, that its his moral failure, is just wrong.

If it looks to you like black culture is doing more damage than white racism, I won't argue with that. I'm not going to deny the reality of what someone else can see, and I'm not in a good position to judge which of two diseases is worse. I was just trying to point out this other side too, what I see.

I recognize that we are all the same, even though every individual is also a little bit unique, and even though there are relationships between groups of individuals. I agree that everyone deserves a chance to aspire to what they want to aspire to, without being told that they can't because they belong to the wrong group.

I do feel some anti-black hatred in my heart, and emote some of it by reflex. Where it comes from I don't know. I wasn't taught it by my parents or my peers, and I haven't been significantly harmed by black people in my life. Maybe I'm psychically picking it up from other people, or maybe its an instinct for 'us' to survive at the expense of 'them'. Maybe I've created it myself in response to other analogous experiences, trying to do to others what has been done to me.

I won't apologize for the honesty of my perceptions. But certainly my perceptions are not perfect, not complete. If I've harmed anyone by a 'soft bigotry of low expectations', I am sincerely sorry, just as I'm sorry for where I've expected too much. And where I've done real harm by being too open and honest, I'm sorry for that also.

Identity is a subtle and fluid thing to me, like a big ever-changing fractal, not defined in terms of any group that I'm a part of, but not defined exclusively by my own 'personaI' collection of nerve responses either. I am an individual, but at the same time tribe is not nothing to me, spirit is not nothing to me. I take some responsibility for the racial hatred I feel, irrespective of its origin. And its utterly wrong and unjustified, however great or little it may be.

To whatever extent I have wronged you, or 'disliked' you rather than giving you the respect and love that all people deserve, I am truly sorry. Someday I will atone for it if I can, I swear. Maybe words like love and atonement are too personally intimate, too presumptuous, or too pretentiously dramatic. But I can't think of another way to say what I really feel.