from the I'm-handing-out-infinite-punishment-for-finite-crime,-spread-the-word-and-take-donations dept.
Complex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around: study
"It has been a debate for centuries why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals," says Seshat director and co-author Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Factors such as agriculture, warfare, or religion have been proposed as main driving forces.
One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs were key. According to this theory, people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity." Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods who cared about human morality.
When ancient societies hit a million people, vengeful gods appeared
The God depicted in the Old Testament may sometimes seem wrathful. And in that, he's not alone; supernatural forces that punish evil play a central role in many modern religions.
[...] But which came first: complex societies or the belief in a punishing god?
The researchers found that belief in moralizing gods usually followed increases in social complexity, generally appearing after the emergence of civilizations with populations of more than about 1 million people.
"It was particularly striking how consistent it was [that] this phenomenon emerged at the million-person level," Savage said. "First, you get big societies, and these beliefs then come."
All in all, "our research suggests that religion is playing a functional role throughout world history, helping stabilize societies and people cooperate overall," Savage said. "In really small societies, like very small groups of hunter-gatherers, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone's keeping an eye on everyone else to make sure they're behaving well. Bigger societies are more anonymous, so you might not know who to trust."
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday March 25 2019, @08:57AM
... is a complex society, and Linus isn't a small guy, so I'd agree with that headline.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @09:22AM (12 children)
Einstein claimed we live in a matrix but totally misunderstood what the matrix is. His BS theories are part of the matrix which is why he is treated like a god hero in this mind box of lies. Of course you can exceed the speed of light, gravity is the weakest of the forces that can be easily overcome by the electromagnetic force. You know, the one that has no problem simultaneously stopping you from falling through the floor and powers your computer. Gravity is incapable of achieving anything like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @09:32AM (8 children)
Then there is the quantum multiverse theory. Scientists claimed that the secrets of the universe unravelled before their eyes when they put their pet cats into boxes filled with radioactive stones.Upon opening the box the cat had collapsed about half the time, from which they concluded every possible universe exists. This makes little sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @09:45AM (7 children)
Quantum effects don't work in macro world (as far as I'm aware at the moment). Q'Cat was an attempt to disprove quantum theory using “common sense”.
// Not that you were serious or anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @10:21AM (6 children)
Interesting. Perhaps in another multiverse the attempt worked. There is a street in London where the separation between multiverses is exceptionally thin. If you enter a nulll state, you may be able to see people walking into the other multiverse from there. Be warned, most people immediately disbelieve what they see, wipe it from their memories, and claim to see nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @10:32AM (4 children)
Are you having fun talking to yourself?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @10:42AM (2 children)
All talking is to oneself in a sense. We are all made of the same single universal electron/positron (forward/backwards through time respectively) in a knotted worldline. What appears to be many is actually just one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @03:45PM (1 child)
We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @05:05PM
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday March 25 2019, @09:27PM
Whenever I see a string of conversations between AC, I of course assume it's someone having fun talking to himself. What else to assume of a coward?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Sourcery42 on Monday March 25 2019, @05:00PM
I once saw a middle aged British man flying there. He appeared to be falling, but then he inexplicably missed the ground. While I thought it rather strange, it just isn't my problem.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday March 25 2019, @01:01PM
Actually, no he didn't.
Which is irrelevant since speed of light is a electromagnetism phenomenon in the first place. One of Einstein's key innovations was developing a theory where gravity and matter is also subject to speed of light restrictions.
(Score: 2) by number6x on Monday March 25 2019, @05:28PM (1 child)
WTF???
Einstein used matrices and linear algebra in a system of geometry (Riemann Geometry) to describe a mathematical framework for 4 dimensional space time.
This in no way implies 'We live in a Matrix'. The idea is completely ridiculous!
Your comment sounds wacky to think that linear algebra could be misinterpreted to mean 'living in a matrix'.
It would be as if someone made a statement: "My friend, Joe, lives at the bottom of a hill."
And then, someone else interpreting that statement to mean that Joe was depressed and needs counseling.
Maybe English is not your first language?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2019, @03:20AM
He said we lived in a "optical delusion" (simulation), and wanted to break out of it:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/369-a-human-being-is-a-part-of-the-whole-called [goodreads.com]
This is basically the plot of the matrix.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday March 25 2019, @09:36AM (8 children)
is orthogonal to its accuracy.
Quick proof:
- hey you look beautiful today!
- you only say that because you want to borrow my car again!
Question, is the first sentence sincere? what about the second?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @10:04AM (3 children)
Neither is sincere, because both were made up by you to serve as an example.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Monday March 25 2019, @11:32AM (2 children)
This proves my point regardless.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 25 2019, @05:50PM (1 child)
1 out of 0 moderators prefer pointless bots? Or, 0 out of 1 moderators prefer pointy bots? I'm not sure how to interpret that moderation. I guess I should plug it into a matrix.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 26 2019, @09:42PM
You should skip the details and go to interpret TFS, for instance:
In the sky, among the clouds, exterior, day.
- chief?
- yes, I know.
- another civilization...
- ...has grown to more than a million.
- is it time to give them the talk?
- sure thing. Send gabriel, and tell him I don't want incidents, last time I had to stop a guy who was an inch from knifing his only son.
- don't worry chief, besides, these aztec look peaceful enough.
- you'll see...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @11:32AM (3 children)
Both. They are linearly dependent, thus not orthogonal.
QED; and shut yourself down, you start spewing more non-sense that usual - probably the diodes on the left side again.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @11:43AM (1 child)
Bot got logic bombed by a Sony cd in 2005 and was never the same since.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 26 2019, @09:46PM
that cannot be, as the boycott of sony because of the rootkit was earlier than that.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 26 2019, @09:48PM
orthogonal adjective
or·thog·o·nal | \ ȯr-ˈthä-gə-nᵊl
\
Definition of orthogonal
1a : intersecting or lying at right angles In orthogonal cutting, the cutting edge is perpendicular to the direction of tool travel.
b : having perpendicular slopes or tangents at the point of intersection orthogonal curves
2 : having a sum of products or an integral (see integral entry 1 sense 1b) that is zero or sometimes one under specified conditions: such as
a of real-valued functions : having the integral of the product of each pair of functions over a specific interval equal to zero
b of vectors : having the scalar product equal to zero
c of a square matrix : having the sum of products of corresponding elements in any two rows or any two columns equal to one if the rows or columns are the same and equal to zero otherwise : having a transpose with which the product equals the identity matrix
3 of a linear transformation : having a matrix (see matrix sense 5a) that is orthogonal : preserving length and distance
4 : composed of mutually orthogonal elements an orthogonal basis of a vector space
5 : statistically independent mental ability may be classified into several orthogonal … factors— O. D. Duncan
6 : orthographic sense 1
I'll go for #5
In probability theory, two events are independent, statistically independent, or stochastically independent[1] if the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of occurrence of the other (equivalently, does not affect the odds).
If your parser has troubles getting context, just ask.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday March 25 2019, @10:35AM (33 children)
I'm a great believer in feedback. I would hypothesize that the rituals and behavioral codes evolve to reflect and codify the society's standards and needs, and society itself reinforces those religious beliefs.
Even though I am not religious myself, I find myself fascinated by the cathedrals and chapels all over Europe. Especially the old ones that were built when much of Europe was dirt poor. Every village older than a couple hundred years has at least one little chapel built on the highest and most inaccessible hill the people could find. The town I live in is no exception, with a smallish cathedral built more than 900 years ago.
Huge amounts of effort - why? I suggest precisely because the people were dirt poor. They needed some sign of hope, even if it was hope of a reward after death, and they were willing to invest time and sweat that they could hardly spare, to create visible symbols of that hope. The flip-side, of course, is that religion was was happily exploited by the powers of the day, as a great way to exploit and control the lower classes. All part and parcel of the same pattern in European society of a thousand years ago.
As living standards increased, is it a coincidence that the Puritans, Calvinists and others started emphasizing the benefits of hard work? One could argue that this was an essential accompaniment to the increase of mechanization and ultimately the industrial revolution. People working - no longer just to survive - but with the hope of bettering themselves and providing a better life for their children.
Or take Islam. The Middle East preserved a great deal of Roman knowledge that Europe lost during the Dark Ages. Islamic countries didn't invent much, but they served as a kind of time capsule. Islam itself is all about preserving the status quo, believing that the Prophet got it right, and never questioning or altering anything. Again, it seems more like a feedback cycle, the society guiding the development of the religion, which in turn reinforces the society.
I'm sure someone with a better grounding in history can tell me where I'm full of it :-)
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday March 25 2019, @01:04PM (6 children)
The coincidence probably didn't exist in the first place. Work ethic probably preceded Protestantism by a bunch - particularly since you just described older societies which would have needed that work ethic in order to survive.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday March 25 2019, @03:40PM (5 children)
Well that's the kicker, isn't it? If you need to work hard in order to survive, then you don't actually need a work ethic, you just need a survival impulse. And those come installed as part of the standard biological package.
You don't need a work ethic as a cultural concept until it's possible for people to survive without working hard. Once a society is rich enough for people to survive by begging or by doing some sort of minimum-effort labor, then a work ethic promotes greater overall productivity from society.
And as an added bonus (or perhaps the primary purpose...), a strong cultural work ethic is also the cornerstone of the popular delusion that your wealth is primarily the result of your own hard work, and that poverty is thus all the result of moral weakness, rather than misfortune and systematic social problems. Which goes a long way toward soothing the conscience of those who had the good fortune to be born into wealth and opportunity, and helps to justify the exploitation and dehumanization of the poor.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @02:14AM (4 children)
Needing to survive doesn't mean you know how to survive.
Lo! The Narrative appears. I'm not feeling the alleged delusional nature of this.
Funny how fact-free this narrative is.
All I can say is that I have lived among the poor for decades and so many of them do have those flaws which they are alleged not to have. Again and again, I see this mysterious phenomena happen. People figure out that working hard, putting their finances in order, cutting back on the drugs (including alcohol and tobacco), and other basic stuff makes them not poor.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 26 2019, @04:47AM (3 children)
>Needing to survive doesn't mean you know how to survive.
Nope, but starvation goes a long way to motivate you to do whatever is needed. And any individual that fails is eliminated from the gene pool, so if somebody "doesn't know how to survive", it's because we created a society so alien from the natural order that instinct is insufficient.
> I'm not feeling the alleged delusional nature of this.
And I'm getting the feeling you didn't work your way up from staving on the street as a dark-skinned child.
>so many of them do have those flaws which they are alleged not to have.
I'm not alleging those flaws don't exist, nor that they contribute to poverty. But to someone born to such flawed and impoverished parents, no amount of hard work alone will ever make them ridiculously wealthy. You need a whole lot of good luck as well to be able to climb far up the social ladder. Less now than in eras past - but we're talking about past eras.
Conversely, most wealthy people are born into that state, and the only virtue implied by remaining there is a lack of irredeemable incompetence. A virtue shared by the majority of the population, who would be able maintain their wealth just as easily, had they been fortunate enough to be born into it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:39PM
Well, that's what technological and infrastructural advancement does. Fortunately, the alien nature is to make it easier to survive. So we can use that non-instinctual brain matter for figuring out what we really want instead of merely to survive. That's where things like work ethic can kick in.
It's almost like my society figured out some shit already even though we didn't have a proper UBI, isn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @11:55AM (1 child)
ridiculously wealthy indeed requires a great amount of luck (and yes the easiest way to be lucky is to have ridiculously wealthy parents)
regular wealthy does not require luck, absent ridiculously bad luck, that's achievable for everyone in western society
it does require the self-discipline to be financially responsible, and not do dumb things like becoming a parent out of wedlock, or not finishing highschool.
f you look around there's plenty of examples that proof the above to be true (any succesfull black american over 50, and most of the succesfull first-generation immigrants for starters)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 28 2019, @02:35PM
>regular wealthy does not require luck, absent ridiculously bad luck, that's achievable for everyone in western society
Not so - our current economy requires a large number of low-wage workers in order to operate as it does. It's just not structurally possible for everyone to be middle-class, there's not enough middle-class jobs available for them. Which means that, at a minimum, you need to be lucky enough to be born with enough aptitudes, opportunities, and drive to out-compete everyone else trying to be middle-class. That was the original motivation of minimum wage laws in the U.S. - anyone willing to work a full-time job should be able to live a comfortable, upwardly mobile life (and conversely, anyone whose business requires exploiting workers so that they *can't* live that way, should not be allowed to exist).
There's also the cultural component - if you're born to middle-class parents you learn about all those financially responsible behaviors on your mother's knee. As you enter adulthood, you also have access to easy routes to comfortable jobs such as parental networking, college, and unpaid internships that poor people just can't afford to donate time to. If you can't afford to pay for college yourself, then you have to rely on being able to compete your way into limited financial-aid slots - colleges are for-profit businesses that routinely give preference to legacy students and those able to pay their way over much superior students that require assistance.
If you're born poor, you also have to be willing and able to basically completely ignore a constant bombardment of advertising based on well-tested psychological manipulation techniques to get you to spend money like you're in the middle class, as well as a media saturated with displaying upper-middle-class lifestyles. Financial responsibility comes at a much higher cost for the poor.
It's not that it's impossible to climb the economic ladder - it's just that the lower you start, the more difficult the climb. A slacker born to middle class parents will be able to keep their life on a mildly-upward trajectory with the same amount of effort and aptitude that would send them into a vicious downward spiral had they been born poor instead.
If you want proof - look around at just how few successful Americans climbed out of poverty, compared to the number who started out middle class. The majority of the U.S population is born poor to lower-middle class - if the system wasn't strongly biased against them, that would mean that the majority of successful Americans should have started there.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by curunir_wolf on Monday March 25 2019, @01:33PM (18 children)
Okay, here's where you're full of it. :)
You're making the same mistake as the postmodernists and the enlightenment philosophers back in the day: that there was no value in the religions to the mass of people, only to those at the top of the hierarchies. And that religion was just a means for the powerful to keep the idiots they rule in line.
Yet societies have never really worked that way. The people have no problem tearing down institutions that don't serve them well. As this study points out, civilizations got large BEFORE religions were established. The rituals showed up before that. And the purpose of all that is to codify lessons learned building civilizations into low-resolution principles that anyone can understand. Religions were just a way to impart knowledge to avoid mistakes the societies learned as their civilization grew.
This was the great (and fully realized) fear of Nietzsche, that with rationality of the age killing God, people would descend into nihilism or, worse, a kind of Marxist vision that viewed the hierarchies as unnecessary and seek to tear them down. Of course it wasn't known as Marxism at the time, but Nietzsche saw the ideology developing, and only opined that it may be worth it if 10 million died if mankind learned the hard lesson of such schemes.
He didn't realize it would be more like 100 million, nor that adherents would refuse to even take the lesson to heart.
So I think it's more a case of "hey, this is how we need to act to advance and have a functioning society," but then, especially when most people are illiterate, explaining all the lessons in detail was just more difficult than just saying "it's gods and magic."
Nobody accepts that definition today, and we are still struggling with how to give people meaning, and only hoping that hedonism and nihilism and postmodernist/Marxist ideologies don't completely destroy society before we can figure it out.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday March 25 2019, @04:02PM (17 children)
You seem to be overlooking one important details in connecting the tearing-down of hierarchy with the World Wars. Namely, that no one on either side had any interest in tearing down hierarchies. The "communist" countries often talked a good line during the revolution, but all they did was transfer wealth from private hands to government hands, so that the political hierarchy stood unchallenged, and thus politicians with minimal practical skills were making important practical economic decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of people with a proven track record of success.
We won't even be able to test the viability of large-scale centralized communism until we've mastered large-scale democracy, so that wealth controlled by the government is in fact truly controlled by the citizenry rather than a political hierarchy. It will probably still have some major problems, but trying to take the failures of communist-in-name-only governments that never actually tried to implement *any* of its primary tenets, as a failure of communism itself, is every bit as foolish as trying to to implement centralized communism without first having mastered a method to keep the citizens in control of their goverment.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 25 2019, @06:04PM (16 children)
From my seat, it appears that communist/socialist regimes do indeed spend a lot of time tearing stuff down. When you're killing people by the tens of millions, there is SOMETHING wrong, isn't there? Or, is it only wrong when a more right-centric regime is doing it?
(Score: 4, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 25 2019, @09:37PM (14 children)
The problem with your "Communism murdered millions of people, therefore it's bad" trope is that it's not really true.
What is true is that in both the Soviet Union and China millions died during periods of political upheaval, but when you assert "Communism killed them" you're over simplifying it.
You should also ask yourself why, if communism is such a bad idea, do we in the west invade countries that decide to try it? Why wouldn't we just leave them alone to figure out how bad it is by themselves?
If you were a young man growing up in 1950's Nicaragua, you would be a communist, because the alternative would be living as a slave of the United Fruit Company. Brutal, corrupt dictatorships propped up by the West is one of the reasons communism is tried repeatedly. See also Cuba
There is a comment on this thread:
which completely ignores the fact that in both Russia and China the communists won because they were not replacing people with a proven track record of success, they were replacing brutal, corrupt warlords or dictators.
You should read some history books, the 20th century was much more nuanced than you seem to think.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday March 26 2019, @12:15AM (4 children)
And they proceeded to kill or imprison the people with the proven track record of success.
This policy, in fact, was the direct cause of the starvation that caused so many deaths and sufferings in both countries. With the successful farmers taken out and the farms distributed to the collective, production on the farms collapsed. The central authority swept through the farms confiscating every scrap of grain for the loyalists in the central government, not even leaving enough for the peasants to survive the harsh Russian winters.
Your attitude is "oh, well, it didn't work because they didn't do it right, but I know how to make it work!" The height of hubris.
It's not the implementation, nor outside forces that caused all those deaths, it was the ideology itself. I suggest you educate yourself with some history, before you convince others that somehow this deadly idea should be tried again, only with a bigger hammer.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, it's a really good place to start.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @12:52AM (1 child)
None of that is true, I'm sorry to tell you.
No, they didn't. They killed and imprisoned the people who had enslaved them for generations. In the case of Russia, serfs had only been freed from bondage a generation before and plenty of serfs starved under the old order.
China had been ruled by warlords for nearly a hundred years, and plenty of people were starved or worked to death under those regimes as well.
That's just bullshit. I have not advocated for communism. What I have done is attempted to understand why people all over the world have attempted to set up communist governments regularly during the 20th century and why the West has repeatedly used violence to stop them.
No body pretends the The Gulag Archipilago is history, in fact this is from the Wikipedia article about it:
Oh, and I have read it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:44PM
Bullshit. Kulaks were a common target, for example in Russia (frequently to the point of false accusations in order to make quota [wikipedia.org]), but those guys couldn't have enslaved anyone.
Second, "enslaved them for generations" indicates that one is blaming people for the sins of their ancestors - which isn't a premise of any sane legal system. And there are ways to fix such inequalities fairly without becoming genocidal maniacs in the process.
It's funny how many apologists there are for the worst governments of the world.
(Score: 2, Troll) by dry on Tuesday March 26 2019, @04:29AM (1 child)
The problem with communism is that it was usually used or taken over by, totalitarians. For a country full of serfs or the equivalent, communism sounds great, get rid of the government, share everything and have a pure democracy, but it seems every communist revolution saw totalitarians take charge and do what totalitarians do.
The real problem is simply that ruthless totalitarians usually win and take over when the revolution involves really poor people with no experience with self government.
OTOH, you have revolutions like America's where the people revolted due to their rights as Englishmen being abused and had rallying cries like "no taxation without representation" because they were used to self government, at least to some degree and went on to create a system of government similar to what they were already used to.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Friday April 05 2019, @09:46PM
Actually, the problem is it doesn't work at all in a society with more than 50-100 people, because then the population starts competing to be the most needy or the least able.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @02:22AM (7 children)
They wouldn't have starved under a capitalist system.
Because communists routinely steal the assets of the capitalists. Which works for the communists when they can executive said capitalsts, and doesn't work so well, when the capitalists were from a country with a powerful military.
Presumably the subsequent grab-assing of the past few decades has cured Nicaragua of that false dilemma.
Who often happened to be more competent than the communists who replaced them. I don't buy, for example, that the Holodomor [wikipedia.org] would have happened under the Czarists.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @07:02AM (4 children)
Why not? This one killed a third of the population. [wikipedia.org]
This one contributed to the Czarist government's overthrow. [wikipedia.org]
Let's not pretend the Czarist regime was anything but brutal and incompetent. They couldn't beat the Bolsheviks even with France, Britain and the US sending troops to help.
No-one seems keen to explain why, if Communism is so bad that we have to kill people when they want to give it a try.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:52PM
Brutal and incompetent is relative.
Which is irrelevant for two reasons. The Czars were already dead and gone by the second year of the civil war. The Czarist advocates were only a part of a greater opposition, including a democratic component. Second, not winning a war doesn't indicate incompetence in agricultural policy.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 26 2019, @10:03PM (2 children)
> if Communism is so bad that we have to kill people when they want to give it a try
Wait. AFAIK it's communists that have to kill people when they want to give it a try. Class struggle, remember? They only are half of the game? it's likely.
Of course, the fact that some of them actively deny being involved in any killing for 40 years, when they are safely abroad, only to confess when caught, so that they get only 12 years for 4 homicides might have thrown you off.
Happened yesterday BTW and one guy was killed in my town. Such a little world.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/italian-ex-militant-battisti-confesses-144316367.html [yahoo.com]
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @10:19PM (1 child)
I was thinking about places like Chile, who elected a President who ran as a Communist, began to implement the campaign promises he made, then was shot during a CIA coup.
Nicaragua is a particularly interesting one, as the people there also elected a communist government, perfectly legally, but the president of the US illegally sold guns to Iran to help fund actual death squads in an effort to overthrow them.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 27 2019, @06:15PM
Stopping two neighbours to be satellites of an URSS you are fighting against is fair game. They forgot to fix Venezuela, guess how it turned out.
JK, the USA is a rogue state. Just not because of some illegal ops they got exposed doing. But I said half of the game.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 26 2019, @03:05PM (1 child)
I question your certainty. It's fair to say that we've not seen mass starvation under capitalism - I'll support you that far. But, I'm not willing to claim that it can't, or won't, happen.
It is also fair to say that mass starvation wouldn't have happened under capitalism, in Russia. China is another story - and - I wonder. It's probably safe to say that if China had experienced all of the same catastrophes and disasters, including the invasion by Japan, capitalism would have served them better after the dust settles, and fewer people would have starved. Far fewer, actually.
But, let us remember, the capitalist west had their own crisis during the 1930's. It was pretty touch and go for most of that decade.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @10:24PM
Thanks for that balanced comment.
I am trying not to defend communism, because I agree it is a much worse system of government, particularly the way the Soviets did it, but I am trying to make the point that when we in the West bomb people back to the stone age just because they choose a different system to us, maybe we ought to ask some questions?
In my view maybe Vietnam was handled poorly in the 1940's and 1950's.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2019, @04:17AM
whoa dude! the fact that every AC before you is a complete moron who's never read anything buy official history don't give you the right of spew all these unconfortable truths! also it's a complete waste like you know throwing pearls to pigs
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 26 2019, @05:17AM
No question that "stuff" was torn down - but the only "stuff" relevant to CW's comment is hierarchy, which was decidedly NOT torn down. There was no lack of hierarchy in the new order, just a change in who was at the top.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @04:13PM
they were willing to invest time and sweat that they could hardly spare
I don't know if everybody in Europe spent their entire lives pulling ox carts full of rotting cadavers. They may have spent most of their time getting drunk off of very "ripe" fermented fruits and grains. Maybe they built the things because they got so bored. I mean, really, no internet? C'mon!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 25 2019, @05:58PM (5 children)
I've always thought that people built those cathedrals precisely because they were dirt poor. If you and all your kin live in mud huts with thatch roofs that can be readily blow away by a modest storm, you may just want to build a substantial community shelter. Those huge cathedrals weren't knocked over by blizzards, hurricanes, nuclear bombs, or other acts of God, were they? They incidentally provided rallying points for villagers when ravenous hordes appeared on the horizon. I've always suspected that they were miserably cold in the winter though.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 25 2019, @09:16PM (4 children)
I had the pleasure of visiting a tiny Norman chapel in Kent once. I was told it was one of the first churches built after the 1066 invasion, which may well be true.
The walls are about 1.5 metres thick stone, and the windows are arrow slits. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out why they built it like that, as it is less than a days' walk from the coast.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:37AM (3 children)
Eastern Pennsylvania, one of those little towns near Hershey, has something similar. The settlers built their fort out of slate, approximately a yard thick. It's the only structure I've ever seen built of flint. The sheets of rock weren't trimmed very meticulously, especially on the outside, they were just cut very roughly and stacked up, with the same slits you mention. Today, the old fortress has been turned into a business park, with half a dozen businesses operating out of it. I didn't get to spend any time there, I was just there to make a delivery. It's not open for tours or anything, either, so I couldn't have poked around very much anyway.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @02:23AM (2 children)
That is interesting. I would not have thought of any American towns being walled like so many European ones are, but I suppose during the colonial period they needed to be.
Interestingly the walls of Canterbury in Kent are made of flint too. The Romans built them and they were maintained ever since. I suppose people just use whatever rock is local.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 26 2019, @02:42AM
Oh, the town isn't walled, I don't think it ever was. The fortress, as it stands today, is a two story structure, approximately 100 yards long, and maybe 75 yards deep. Back when the town was beginning, it was probably large enough for the entire population to get inside.
I don't even know if the fortress was built to repel Indians, or to hold the British off, or maybe it was built by the British to house troops. All I know about it is, it's a unique structure, and looks really cool.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday March 26 2019, @04:37AM
Quebec city was walled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramparts_of_Quebec_City [wikipedia.org] and I believe the Spanish also built walls around some (many?) of their cities. Forts all over N. America were usually walled with logs and the townspeople would retreat to them in case of attack.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @10:42AM (1 child)
A lot has to do with how awareness and consciousness work.
That is of course beyond understanding, and therefore articles containing shit are published.
As example, all know, that if a nation has shortage of resources, or too many man that have nothing to do, it is wartime.
Also, all know that when a lot of competent men die in defending a nation, there will be "intelligent" and feminine jews who take advantage of situation.
Eventually, strong intelligent but in the end unloved and unwanted men become aware of this, and at some point "history" (as in set of all possible events) decide to gas jews.
Of course the woman and other soft trash does not want the authoritarian, hard men, they want the soft shitty jews, and that is understandable.
And so on...
Of course you can not admit that you actually understand everything, so there must be some smoke and mask and shit to motivate actions...
PS. Here is one more for you: why are swedish woman antiracist?
Cuz the arab nations have burned out, that means all the warrior times are lost long time ago.
The immigrants are psychologicallt and emotinally close to women, then men.
They are literally women trapped in the bodys of men.
The women have esier time having empathy for them, then the men of strength and authority of their own "race"...
and so forth...
/zug
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @02:22PM
Swedish women are antiracist due to to kind good natured temperament of swedes in Sweden.
It is a pity their centuries old culture is being destroyed by immigrants but that's their own fault. They made the problem. They must fix it. Their ancestors knew how. They must learn from the past to have a future.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Roo_Boy on Monday March 25 2019, @12:24PM
"Phwar, look at that ass the neighbour just got"
"No honey, your not allowed to covet that because, um, er.... god said so"
"Aww crap, well, how about I kill the neighbour, take his ass and while I'm at it I'll 'take' his wife"
"Woo, no, god also said killing would send you to hell and having relations with another woman is just as bad. Sorry bucko, your stuck with me"
"Huh, well, what if I wanted another god?"
"Nope, thats out too, you gotta use this one"
"Jesus!"
"Woah there! You're skating on pretty thin ice!"
--- The S.I. prototype "Average Punter" is kept in a tube of inert gas in Geneva.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @01:25PM (4 children)
But Jewish bullshit artists research this?
Counter example: The Chinese. They pretty much never went for macro scale organized religion, and they've been a complex society for a while.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday March 25 2019, @03:33PM (3 children)
The paper('s summary's first few sentences; I'm not reading this nonsense either...) says big Gods always come from big societies. Not that big societies always create big Gods.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @03:40PM (2 children)
Delusions of grandeur aside, the Jews were (and are) a micro tribe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @04:16PM
With a big mouth!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @08:13PM
Numerically, sure. But who's the smaller man, the Jew praising himself or the non-Jew who obsesses over the Jews?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday March 25 2019, @01:47PM (2 children)
So in other words, humans do the right thing for the wrong reasons because humans are stupid.
Instead of behaving themselves because they are supposed to be civilized people in a large civilization, they make up some imaginary friend with superpowers that will magically punish anyone that disagrees with them. But only after that person moves to an imaginary magic land after they "die", which conveniently is a tad hard to disprove to brainless idiots.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @04:04PM (1 child)
The Christian god, whether the angry, abusive one or the rebooted loving and forgiving one, and the associated myths are nothing but a hodge-podge assembly cherry-picked from a slough of other, earlier gods and myths.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @07:22AM
If so then anything descended from Christianity is likewise pure crap. Islam for example.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by meustrus on Monday March 25 2019, @02:29PM (7 children)
People are still trying to figure out the purpose of religion, assuming that people consciously invented it. But I highly doubt it was all that intentional. This study implies that religion is a consequence of complex society, and I would interpret this to mean that it arose out of many people independently trying to explain things they were not able to understand.
Consider this: past a certain population, nobody can keep track of all the social relationships anymore. You might as well try to understand the sand by studying individual grains of it. Nevertheless, we can observe trends and create abstractions like the angle of repose [wikipedia.org].
Complex society is similar. Sometimes bad things happen to people, and we can't blame it on Thog anymore. So why did that person fall into poverty? Simple: God hates him.
Gods can be viewed not just as supernatural persons, but as forces of nature. The God of the Sea creates the tides, and while we may now relate it to the gravity impact of the Moon, Poseidon's will made a reasonable substitute in ancient times.
The Gods of the ancient world are largely personifications of social forces. Death, revelry, fertility; these are all things that are difficult to understand as they apply to a complex society.
I suggest that the origin of these moral Gods followed what people in these societies observed to be related to the bad things that happened to people. Sex is one great example, especially the double standard applied to women: if you have lots of it, you tend to have lots of kids you don't have the resources to care for. Therefore, that woman's life was ruined by sleeping around. Therefore, God hates too much sex.
Repeat this for murder (kill and be killed), lying and cheating (trust has real economic value)...really any moral ill can be explained as "people did this, then bad things happened to them, ergo it was their own fault for angering the Gods".
It's doubly effective at easing our own fears that these bad things can happen to us at any time. Simply avoid angering the Gods, and dismiss those poor people as immoral. Frankly, we still do this, even when the gods are not GOD.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 25 2019, @06:18PM (6 children)
I think you missed part of the conclusion. Religions with powerful gods are a consequence of a complex society. Less complex societies have less powerful gods. Animists and others who prayed to animals and a myriad of natural forces had their religions, but none of those gods were powerful enough to protect from all calamities. Nor were they powerful enough to provide all of man's needs. Thus, a family might have a shrine at which they worshipped their 1, or 6, or 30 most important gods. A town might have 1, or 3, or 9 temples dedicated to as many gods, and a larger city might have 50 temples.
A really complex society will kill off all the lesser gods, and/or assimilate all those lesser gods into one supreme god.
I suspect that there may be something of a feed-back loop in there, too. Maybe as society gets more complex, it begins killing off the least gods, keeping only a small assemblage of gods. As it grows more complex, more of the assembly is killed off, simplifying worship even more, as time goes on. And, maybe lesser complexity in the worship allows people to spend more of their thinking power to create that more complex society.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 26 2019, @05:00AM (5 children)
>Religions with powerful gods are a consequence of a complex society
I think you're overreaching, their findings were "moralizing gods usually followed increases in social complexity". Not powerful, monotheistic gods, just moralizing ones - as in they are claimed to care about the way people conduct their day-to-day lives, rather than being focused on more cosmological concerns.
Plenty of complex societies never adopted monotheism - China and India both have ancient, complex societies whose population, knowledge and technology long dwarfed that of of the West, and they still dwarf our size. And neither have ever been monotheistic.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 26 2019, @03:10PM (4 children)
Point taken. I did overstate my point. Thank you for that perspective.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 26 2019, @05:35PM (3 children)
You're welcome.
Now that I think of it, the authors of the study may be overreaching as well - I'm no expert in Eastern "religions", especially the ancient ones, but my limited understanding of Hinduism is that most of the gods have very little to say about human affairs. Bhuddism is generally unconcerned with morality, and has no gods at all (though it acknowledges their existence). Taoism is similar. I don't think Confucianism has any gods. And while I think the traditional Chinese ancestor-worship involves gods as well, I get the impression they're more of the "manage the world" type, which is why you pray to your ancestors to intervene on your behalf.
A "general trend" that doesn't actually hold for the majority of the world's population sounds more like the researchers forgot to consider that their own cultural is a historical minority.
I remember reading another study long ago that instead broke down religions as "jungle based" and "desert based". Cultures that developed in jungles where resources are plentiful tend to have lots of gods, and little overarching moralizing, while cultures that develop in resource-poor deserts (the Abrahamic religions and their predecessors being the primary examples) tend to have a single god-king who sets a lot of rules. Rules that are generally conductive to the concentration and control of resources by a clergy-endorsed king.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 26 2019, @05:44PM (2 children)
A side effect. In my mind, an undesirable side effect. To the clergy, a highly desirable side effect.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 26 2019, @07:57PM (1 child)
I would be more convinced of that if it didn't benefit the very people responsible for creating the and spreading the religion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 28 2019, @07:20AM
People using religion as a front to wage war and profit from the toil of others? Shocking. Just shocking I say.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 25 2019, @04:00PM
maybe there was this one dude in the smallish hunter-gatherer group who
was a bit taller, stronger and quicker then the rest and he did many things
that helped the group survive better and have more surviving offsprings (in dunno, maybe
he single-highhandedly build a fence or stone wall towards the north side of the village or
went thru the trouble to anneal the arrow heads, or ... whatever.) dude put in alot of time,
saved everybody alot of time and was more then well respected ... instead of abusing his
physical and intellectual superiority.
any any case, let's call him "gent"; fathers and moms would tell their children to be more
like "gent". and he was imposing.
so over time, the village grew, gent was long dead but the stories and some of his works
continued to exist. alas his name was forgotten ... but not totally. they now call him "god".
or sumething ^_^
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday March 25 2019, @06:11PM (1 child)
And, per Peter Gabriel, we shall worship in a big church, and heaven will be a big heaven and we will walk through the front door?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nobuddy on Tuesday March 26 2019, @12:46PM
I don't know about you, but I'm on my way. I'm making it.