Religion, also, assimilated from other sources, and humans have, over the aeons, developed their ability, whether that individual belonged to a religion or not.

The religious often like to say that their reason led them religion, so you see, our ability to see the value in some moral teaching, is linked to our capacity to reason. And our capacity to reason has slowly developed, and it has developed over a much longer timespan, it actually predates the major religions. That's where our morality "comes from". It all arose together, and so I don't think you can just separate one area (religion) from the rest of society and claim that it was only religion which drove things.

Consider, I can't actually feel the pain another person feels, especially if they are living on the other side of the world and I have never met them. But I can perform a cognitive trick, and I can ask myself rationally, "If I was them, would I be suffering?"

That's the Golden Rule, and it is very old rule. The key is that it relies on our ability to rationally ask a question which then leads to an imaginary leap of empathy.

I can't feel what it is like to be that person, in their shoes, but I can rationally pose the question, and then consciously bring it up in my imagination, to try to see a story, about what I might be feeling if I was that other person. Cognition is key.

And cognition is hard. Over time we gradually learnt to apply that rule to more people. We didn't used to apply it to slaves, you know, the slaves who had very religious owners. Did religion stop slavery? Doesn't look like it. No, we gradually applied the golden rule, rationally, to more and more situations. Today we use it even when imaging the biosphere.

So atheists, insofar as they have a brain, can very well think about morality and ethics and come up with answers, and our answers today are better than the typical answer you got 2000 years ago. Which isn't to say that a Buddha or a Jesus or a Lao Tzu couldn't still best us today, but they were ahead of their time.

Of course, thinking rationally about ethical problems, is hard. It is hard to try to act in the interests of the whole world. And so people can and do disagree. But that doesn't mean it is hopelessly relative and self-indulgent. Humanity is gradually pulling itself up to become better. Now, this doesn't preclude an afterlife and so on, but we have almost NO evidence for such, and all the major religions disagree on this anyway, some say you have original sin, some say you have your previous karma, some say you can be saved, some say you can only save yourself, and so on, so until we get some real evidence, we are simply having to make do with not knowing.

And that's ok, because maybe, if you wonder that there is more to life, maybe us not knowing is part of the situation, and you'll be tested at the end, and maybe they'll ask, so what did you think of the golden rule, did you use it much?

Interesting dilemma. I guess the key is to raise people's intelligence, for whilst the "experts" might be doing a good job, the wider populace has to be able to correct their mistakes. So we hope that for every nut who makes a truly awful reading of some moral issue, there are hundreds around who can come up with a better reading and then let the best ideas compete and spread. And as more people are exposed to more ideas, they (hopefully) become smarter.

For example, many people have the notion that there is something "wrong" with life, and so they turn to religion, on that basic belief that life is "wrong", and so some end up wanting something "pure" and "holy" which, by definition, is not part of normal life, because normal life is "bad". That then leads to them coming up with ludicrous fantasies about what is "pure". So they come up with their "pure" idea, and they notice then that 99.999% of people will think they are wrong, and really, the more people say you're wrong, the more "pure" your ideas seem to be, so you must be on the right track to being the chosen one.

The idea that you have to declare life "bad" and then toil and suffer to "achieve" purity and salvation, is pernicious and a key assumption of the monotheistic religions, and some other ones also. Yet also an idea that is very easily undone:

Consider the lilies of the field...

Kinda know the feeling. When I was 7 I drew a picture of a dog in a space capsule. The teacher said that dogs haven't gone to space.

It was a little early in life to conclude that teachers can't be trusted. Sigh.

Slight quibble: you might think it is safe ground to claim that, but we have no idea what sentience is nor how it works nor which creatures have it. Is an ape sentient? Is an ant sentient?

Claiming we are "human" or "ape" or "just an animal" is about as proven as claiming we are "God's children" or "living in the matrix" whatever other claptrap. We know we are sentient of the world, but we haven't located sentience IN the world. We know that what we experience can be altered by altering the brain, but what is doing the experiencing is unknown. The brain is the TV. But what is experiencing the TV picture? This is not a trivial problem to be overlooked. We don't know what we are. Would you still feel you if you were not sentient, but otherwise a human going about behaving like any other human? Just "human" instead of "human being"?

But that aside, yes by all means let's go to space.

Would it help if the people who came up with a password policy were then tasked with thinking up 100 passwords (each one to be used for one day) ?
And then check back with them at the end and see what they chose for the last 20?

So what did He say?

DDoS? Come to think of it, that would explain why God never answers prayers.

Between 9 and 10, apparently, as the boffins claim you have to steep for like, 4 mins or something, I forget, should be an app for that.

(No reply necessary, IANATD, all I drink is coooooooffffffffeeeeeeee)

But would the rates have gone down without pilots there at all?

It may be just a case of the pilots having more time to sit and watch what's going on.

Isn't there a philosophical difference on whether the machine should watch the pilot (and override the pilot if the machine thinks the pilot is making a mistake) and the pilot watching the machine (and overriding the machine when the pilot thinks the machine is making a mistake) ?

Don't you mean "crashes a dozen planes" ?

A "resource" can also be people's brains, just as it used to mean people's muscles, ie. slavery.

The point is, people invented stuff, which meant we could do far more, using stuff which was previously of no use. Resources can be "created".

I mean, that's the whole point about green technology isn't it? Use something which was previous mostly useless, like tides and wind. Likewise, we'll "create" new "resources" if we can invent new ways of doing stuff. And if you're worried about running out of rocks, well we might be able to invent ways of using asteroids.

You can't "run out of resources" as such, rather, you can run out of imagination and science.

I mean, I agree it is a race, population versus ingenuity, but we've always had that race, there has always been survival pressure.

And the "let's just stop" option, doesn't put off the inevitable "running out" either, it just means a long period of stagnation, followed by extinction anyhow.

It is "create" or "die".

You're quite sure who setup the Iran-Iraq war?

You've got a point (I agree) about the monotheistic religions: they are inherently divisive.

Of course, before that, people divided according to blood ties, clans, tribes, etc., so monotheism was in a way an improvement... 2500 years ago, if resources were scarce and tribes were fighting. (If you're on Pandora and the next tribe is a whole forest away, with plenty of luscious food available for all, fine, stay in tribes).

But today we need so much more than, my group is going to Heaven and yours is inferior and going to Hell.

You can keep the afterlife, you can keep notions of eternal consciousness transcending material existence, you can keep the notion of higher wisdom, you can keep flying saucers and ghosts and all that, you can keep reincarnation, you just need to admit all humans equally to your club. Whether in this life or the next, you'd want ALL humans to be treated fairly and equally, and none of this, "we are the chosen ones, y'all are heathens, kaffirs, fallen", whatever.

Maybe you're a sentience which exists forever, OK, so what, you are here now, be nice to people equally.

What if therapy doesn't work, what's the correlation between the age of these school kids and the first appearance of therapists as a regular presence in schools?

When people migrate from a small village to the city, they can't go on treating strangers with contempt and fear, instead, they have to learn to live being surrounded by thousands of strangers everyday. There is some suggestion that it's the move to cities which has something to do with the civilising process (ie. a reduction in common violence), although it also has its own kinds of stresses.

Likewise, the internet allows people to interact across cities and nations and with thousands of people and frequently, and so it may be that it is a new challenge to our social behaviour. It isn't that cell phones are the problem, it may just be that the new complexity of a wider-connected environment means people have to learn new ways of dealing with it, mainly because everyone is going to be a victim to it, so everyone will need to start extending their empathy much further, not just to their village neighbour, not just the the stranger on the city bus next to you, but to "abstract" "avatars", human beings, out there. And also learn new skills for coping.