WIP

O'Reilly was a journalist a long, long time ago....and a particularly bad one! That's how he ended up hosting that Hollywood infotainment crap program back in the 80's, before he got the chance to play a news man on TV. It seems that when he talks, BS comes rolling out, and he's finally being called for it. But, what's equally damning is what he didn't talk about back in the days when he was supposed to be a real reporter: like ignoring a REAL massacre in El Salvador, while he was a CBS foreign correspondent: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13291

There are a lot of evolutionary psychologists claiming that rape, warfare, patriarchal monogamous relationships etc., are all genetic/ rather than adaptive behaviours. If our cultures are a product of adapting to environmental conditions, there is little time to have much of an impact on core human nature, compared to the 200,000 years living in small hunter-gatherer bands...and including the previous millions of years of evolution from earlier ancestors. How does "mass communication" intersect with "societies that adapted agriculture?" Permanent, fixed agriculture started becoming the normal patter thousands of years before we had TV, radio, newspapers.......what sort of mass communications existed thousands of years ago? Regardless, most of our evolutionary adaptations are not for the kind of living we do today. Which is likely why we have such a huge percentage of the population dependent on antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs! Our genetic adaptations are for: active living - that is moving about most of the day..not being sedentary; living in small communities where we all know each other; those communities are egalitarian with food-sharing for common meals; temporary sexual pairings (none are permanently monogamous); child-rearing duties are shared.....and there's likely many other common cultural traits among hunter-gatherers that have lived in everything from forests to desert environments. These societies are where we are going to look for what is really 'natural' or hardwired as human behaviour. When it comes to modern cultures, we could expect the healthiest modern societies to be ones that have the most in common with early primitive societies. So, for one example: if the rise of hierarchies didn't become established until the first human societies started living in fixed or semi-permanent locations, where they could acquire possessions and build up food stores, we should expect that the most egalitarian societies, with the least amount of gaps in income and wealth, should be less violent, and have better mental and physical health stats than the less equal societies...and guess what! That's exactly what the numbers tell us from a wide array of epidemiological research cross-referenced by income disparities in both poor and relatively wealthy countries: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger Paperback – Apr 26 2011 by Richard Wilkinson (Author), Kate Pickett (Author)

I'm always amazed how many atheists are putting faith in Ray Kurzweil's secular version of heaven!

I wonder if you've given any thought to how dangerously overpopulated this world is because of the patriarchal cultures you have such high esteem for? A world with 7 billion is a temporary situation, because it's only managed now with high consumption of a non-renewable resource - oil, and the most productive agricultural zones in the world are being destroyed by topsoil erosion and depletion of aquifers and surface freshwater supplies. If populations don't drop dramatically, die-offs will be the end result! Nature has to return to a balance at some point in the future, regardless of the wishes of patriarchs.

Where's your evidence? Just because that fits your theory of human nature doesn't make it so! The weight of evidence shows that hunter-gatherer groups have had a high stake in promoting harmony and little to gain from excessive aggression...which should be plainly obvious: until there's something to fight for, there's nothing to gain! If violence and killing came so natural to us, it wouldn't be a universal taboo, and killing would come more naturally, with much less psychological distress. Right now, the people who can kill without remorse or psychological trauma, are considered psychopaths for good reason. Because normal people experience some level of psychological trauma from war. And people today, are no different than the ancient warriors two or three thousand years ago: http://phdiva.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/rage-of-achilles-and-ptsd-in-antiquity.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/warriors-in-ancient-iraq-suffered-posttraumatic-stress-disorder-more-than-3000-years-ago-say-researchers-10000953.html http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.ca/2015/01/ancient-warriors-suffered-from-post.html#.VO7iHsm9as4

Thanks for stopping by! I think we already know that there are bible-thumping fundagelicals in this Province....not very many...and certainly not enough to make the Premier's sexual orientation relevant to political debate...but, it's nice to have at least one around, so we know what the Christian Right is thinking. Let's keep our kids in the dark about sex and sexual issues, just like they are in the U.S. Bible Belt...where they lead the way in teen pregnancies and STD rates!

They're not the only ones who are tired of Jared Diamond propagating the theme of the"Myth of the Savage," as John Horgan does here in this Scientific American article. Christopher Ryan, a psychologist who designs experiments for anthropological fieldwork, and has been in the field meeting Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribes himself, has also complained about Diamond continuing to reference the work of long-discredited French anthropologist - Napolean Chagnon. I don't have time to look it up right now,, but Chagnon's work with the Yanomamo tribes of southern Venezuela made him a star 30 or 40 years ago, when he produced a documentary about how the Yanomami were savage killers for no good reason...since they had plenty of food etc.. As it turned out, Chagnon staged the fighting that led to a number of deaths by distributing gifts, including metal knives and hand-axes to some of the tribesmen.....and then he filmed the chaos that ensued....something that should have brought criminal charges down on him. And certainly something that makes Diamond contemptible for continuing to reference Chagnon's work! Right now, I am about halfway through the long volume on history of warfare compiled by Douglas Fry...I mentioned earlier. I'm on a chapter dealing with studies from North American anthropology, and I'm surprised how much new research and answers are available compared to when I took a nightschool class on native history over 30 years ago. In brief, the aboriginal societies of the Americas provide opportunities to study a range of culture that was not available in the Old World after large empires became established 3 to 4 thousand years ago, and started obliterating pre-existing cultures. In North America, we find the same trend as the Old World, thousands of years ago, where agriculture slowly developed from hunter-gatherers scattering seeds and the settling in permanent locations once population sizes grew large. In North America, there was an interesting cycle as populations rapidly increase, and a transition to permanent settlement, but followed by periods of population die-off, likely because of violence and long, persistent droughts. After population collapse, many of these groups return to their former hunter-gatherer lifestyles until population pressures increase again, to make permanent settlement farming essential....which is where things were in the Eastern Woodlands when the first Europeans were arriving. So, the takeaway seems to be that farming is never a first option and a desired goal anywhere in the world...civilization or not! Just as in the Old World, New World empires like the Aztecs, Incas, Toltecs, and others had to enslave foreign tribes to work the fields to provide the quantity of food needed to maintain their city states. The summary again is that violence is not something that is part of human nature....something genetically predestined even for more aggressive males. The new world hunter-gatherers had a variety of conflict resolution strategies to prevent violence from escalating, and tribes would separate and even move to less desired locations than to go to war over a particular area. This does not change until population pressures reach a critical mass, where some groups will raid other settlements for food and other valuables. So, war is learned behaviour...just as patriarchal family structures are.....if we ever get back to the topic!

The atheist bible and the atheist preachers and churches are an online phenomena. So, it is coming together. I find a sense of orthodoxy developing online, because a lack of belief is just a void waiting to be filled! Most atheists atheist groups who have the most attention online, are: -antitheist....and badger and harass any who don't follow this line of thinking. -are on the political right, varying somewhere between standard liberal and extreme libertarian. Modern liberalism is an attempt to reform/not change the system we live under now, so I notice the lack of critics of capitalism and individualistic ethics systems among atheists, compared to those in liberal Christian or others with vaguely spiritual or pantheistic beliefs. -are techno-optimists, and see a better future...in spite of what is in front of our eyes right now. -that future optimism is likely an essential ingredient to rally around an atheist flag, since critical or pessimistic view of the future can't provide a useful reason to convert/or deconvert believers away from their religions and embrace an atheistic worldview. So, those who claim to be driven solely by reason and evidence, betray that principle every time they try to paint a picture of a glorious humanistic future that looks like something from a Star Trek movie or TV episode. So, the atheist bible may already be essentially out there....it just has several different versions online today, that are repeating most of the same things among themselves. And, since this thread is about a very loud atheist who according to many witness statements was loud about his antitheistic beliefs and hostile in particular to these three Muslim students who lived near him, I can say for certain, that being part of the online atheist culture (if he wasn't part of a real world atheist meetup group) did not prevent him from committing this crime. So, will you have a slightly different fallback position when some atheist does fly a plane into a building?

Hitler wanted a patriotic Christianity....which is why dissident clerics like Dietrict Bonhoeffer were sent to the concentration camps! Just a thought for you and MSJ(since I do not want to have to repeat the point) - would an atheist be as likely to risk death by acting on principle as Bonhoeffer did? Or would an atheist be more likely to go along/to get along? I'm inclined to think the latter, and since you guys want to trot out every story where some religious fanatic did something awful, if we are going to use the Nazis as a reference point, then you have to admit that there were some guided by their religious faith who did great things in spite of the certain risks of torture, imprisonment and death! And, that's my point: religion and ALL belief systems, including naturalistic philosophies created by atheists, have the potential to try to reach for a universal appreciation of life and everyone's welfare....regardless of what they believe. Or the belief system can separate "the sheep from the goats," so to speak, and have such disregard for out-group members that their lives are of no consequence!

I heard several commentaries about increase in highway driving and corresponding increases in highway death tolls after 9/11. And, there may have been a trend towards inflating the numbers as time went on, and the original stories passed through two, three, four and more sources in the online game of telephone. One of the original studies is commented on her on this Sciencedaily article: In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many Americans started driving more due to a fear of flying -- and lost their lives in traffic accidents. But why did this happen more frequently in some states than in others? And why didn't Spanish driving habits change in the same way following the 2004 train bombings in Madrid? Wolfgang Gaissmaier and Gerd Gigerenzer from the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin present new findings on this topic in the journal Psychological Science. As we all know, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed the world: The feeling of vulnerability led to the so-called "war on terror." New laws were passed and surveillance intensified to reduce the risk of direct damage resulting from terrorism. But terrorist attacks also cause indirect damage. This comes about through people's thoughts and fears in reaction to such attacks. In the case of 9/11, it was primarily severe losses in the aviation and tourism industries. Earlier studies showed that, following the terrorist attacks, more people chose to drive rather than fly, feeling it was safer. The result was not just a greater risk of traffic congestion: in the twelve months following September 11, 2001, there were an estimated 1,600 more accident-related deaths on American roads than would have been expected statistically. But why would such an increase in traffic and, with it, also in traffic deaths, be observed only in some states and not in others? And why was no increase in driving and in traffic accidents seen following the likewise devastating train bombings in Madrid in 2004? Psychologists Gaissmaier and Gigerenzer from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Harding Center for Risk Literacy based there present new analyses, which will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science. In the analyses, they show that car traffic increased particularly in the New York vicinity. The main attacks were focused on the World Trade Center located there. These images, and thus also the fear, were presumably particularly present for people who lived in the surrounding area; other studies also support this assumption. However, the authors further identify a second, even stronger factor that could explain why the traffic volume increased sharply even in some states far away from New York, especially in the Midwest: there, the infrastructure was simply very well suited to replace flying with driving. The streets were very well developed in relation to the number of inhabitants, and many cars were registered. "Our study findings support the assumption that the fear created by terrorist attacks can cause potentially risky behaviour. But they also make it clear that fear alone is not enough to understand where indirect damage can occur in the wake fatal events like those of 9/11," says Wolfgang Gaissmaier. "To predict where the indirect damage of terrorist attacks can have particularly fatal consequences, and to possibly curb a secondary, psychological attack, we must pay very close attention to the general conditions that first make it possible for risky, fear-induced behaviours to express themselves -- such as the respective infrastructure." That could also explain why there were fewer Spanish train travellers following the train bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2004, but without any corresponding increase in car travel. Spain simply has a less pronounced car-driving culture, and Gaissmaier and Gigerenzer also express this in numbers: in 2001 in the US, there were around 800 cars registered per 1,000 inhabitants, while in 2004 in Spain, this figure was just around 600. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120911091338.htm So, what have we got here? 1. A substantial increase in highway related deaths during a 12 month period after 9/11. Even your site shows this period bucks the gradual trend of decline in highway deaths that's usually attributed to cars having added safety features in recent years. 2. Fear alone doesn't fully explain the spike in deaths, because a similar train-bombings by Basque separatists I believe...does not cause the spike in highway deaths in Spain in the year afterwards. The authors point to infrastructure as a clue to explain the difference between how Spain and the U.S. reacted after terrorist attacks. In brief, Spain has fewer car-drivers per capita and much greater infrastructure (so the Spanish train riders may have been taking longer trips by bus instead...an option that is not very convenient for most Americans! 3. I would add a third factor that the authors didn't mention: fear generated by infotainment news sources which have a high stake in making their audience as fearful as possible! It is often noted (and I can look it up if you don't believe it) that the more hours a TV viewer watches newscasts/the more fearful they are of crime, and the more inclined they are to exaggerate the risks of crime when they are away from their homes. I don't know much about Spain, except that they do have a public media, like just about every other European nation. This may not present useful news and information (the BBC is really becoming abysmal and hardly worth watching), but they also don't have a vested interest in exaggerating threats and risks....like every U.S. network is doing right now that they don't have to follow Fairness Doctrine guidelines and their network sponsors are heavily financed by weapons-makers! How does all this connect with Harper, and his attempts to Americanize us into a junior version of the U.S. military-industrial police state? Sad fact is that if the latest polling numbers are even slightly accurate, Canadians are at least as gullible as Americans, and just as easily corralled into a pen that promises protection while they can very easily expand on their definition of "terrorism" to suit their evil purposes!

So be it! I post what I believe to be honest and important/ not to tickle people's ears or tell them what they want to hear! How many cities do we have today that are 2000 years old? It is widely noted that something cataclysmic happened about 7 to 8000 years ago, that caused wide upheavals in early societies. There are periodic times of cataclysm where a lot of civilizations are unable to cope with and collapse...so why would you expect anything different from the earliest large village settlements? The basic facts are that: it was something built, or just grew together, a long time ago resembling a city...since we have no way of knowing if it even had any organizational structure, which later cities built along river valleys had. But, no walls, no fortifications, no signs among the bodies exhumed that there was any mass killings or organized violence...that should tell us something..but it is not what a lot of people want to hear! And the problem in evaluating anthropology is that so much depends on how evidence is interpreted after it is acquired. This is one of the major objections in ch. 7 of a large volume edited by anthropologist Douglas Fry: War, Peace and Human Nature. In ch.7, contributor Brian Ferguson goes over the anthropological evidence of primeval war contained in Stephen Pinker's popular book: Our Better Angels, and finds many of Pinker's 21 examples of prehistoric warfare include mis-categorized archaeological remains and even at least two duplications of the same evidence by different authors. This is the problem when an expert in one field steps into a completely different realm he has no basic grounding in, and just takes the advice of one or two experts...who were already in agreement with Pinker on violence in the past. From the conclusion of chapter 7: Is this sample representative of war death rates among prehistoric populations? Hardly. It is a selective compilation of highly unusual cases, grossly distorting war's antiquity and lethality. The elaborate castle of evolutionary and other theorizing that rises on this sample is built upon sand. Is there an alternative way of assessing the presence of war in prehistory, and of evaluating whether making war is the expectable expression of evolved tendencies to kill? Yes. Is there archaeological evidence indicating war was absent in entire prehistoric war mortality is demonstrated in ch.11, which surveys all Europe and that is done, with careful attention and vagaries of evidence, an entirely different story unfolds. War does not go forever backwards in time. It had a beginning. We are not hardwired for war. We learn it. Ferguson points out that a general, overall view of prehistory would provide a more accurate assessment of the distant past than taking snapshots in time of the examples of large scale violence. Warfare is not a constant even in recorded history, and the recent evidence from early written works that display possible descriptions of PTSD in ancient warriors, indicates that most of us have a hardwired aversion to this sort of violence and become psychologically unbalanced when exposed to it. That last line is the crux of this issue on the normalization of war and violence in our time. Violence and warfare are learned behaviours, not something that we do naturally for no reason! Times in the past where there are examples of great violent upheavals, we find other correlating factors with climate change and food shortages....something to keep in mind for the times ahead! Already covered above, but once again: war and violence are learned human behaviours that arise during times of stress. In the distant past, when people could not claim land or acquire possessions to fight over, violence was generally much less than in more modern times. And before I forget, I hate seeing Jared Diamond trotted out over and over again as the supreme expert on all things anthropology. Fact is that his career contains a number of mistakes...even ones he refused to retract when evidence has come in against them - such as his famous book: Collapse - about his theory of how civilizations rise and fall, omits evidence from botanists and other scientists that overturned the long-held theory of a large civilization on East Island consuming all the trees for monument building and then cannabalizing themselves to extinction. The trees started dying out much earlier from diseases and rat infestations from the ships of early explorers, and Easter Island did not grow as large/ nor collapse as greatly as the mythologized disaster scenario portrays it. But Diamond had a book to write...and he didn't want to make any changes to it before sending it off for publishing. So, let's just say he's done some sloppy work himself to be regarded as an unquestioned authority. The Papuans issue is very valid if you want to read it. They, like all remaining hunter-gatherers in the world, are being forced out of the forests by often brutal governments and commercial exploiters of the land. Diamond's descriptions of them are usually sympathetic, but extremely patronizing, indicating that he doesn't really consider them to be on the level of what he calls "the moderns."

The anti-theist has turned atheism into a distinct in-group! And that is ultimately what this is all about: in-group/out-group behaviour! The rest of the baggage being cobbled together around anti-theism...that all beliefs must be based in reason and science, cannot be demonstrated as having universal benefits. Simple fact is that a lot of people are going to find the atheist universe lacking.....and continue invoking new ways to place a supernatural force in charge of creating a universe, and having a special purpose for everyone. No doubt a lot of this is sourced in fear of death....like just about every other aspect of culture....but many people find an aversion to thinking about a universe coming together without predetermined design or purpose. What is crucial here is how much importance you put on your and everyone's metaphysical beliefs. How important are they in regards to dealing with others and going about daily life. Not every religious adherent is a fundamentalist.....not even many of those who belong to fundamentalist religions. An anti-theist is the doppleganger of any believer in an exclusive religion that separates believers and unbelievers for eternal life in some sort of paradise. Both groups are not necessarily going to kill or do any act of violence against those who are on the other side. Think of the Mennonites or the Amish. these are Christian sects founded on pacifist traditions, and yet believe that God will cast everyone outside of their faith into hell! Can't get more judgmental than that! But, they go about peacefully in their daily lives, refusing even retaliation when assaulted by others. For my part, I would favour all universalist belief systems that do not judge people by their core beliefs. Atheists who fall in this antitheist category, are going to be inclined to consider all believers as the out-group.....hopefully not targeting them in a murderous attack like this one, but still showing contempt for them, and less willing to consider what they have to say on many subjects to be of value. So, you're joining in with the band of atheist bloggers and podcasters I've come across lately, who are trotting out the No True Scotsman fallacy to explain this crime: he may have been an atheist, but atheism played no part of his decision to commit the crime...and it just so happened that it was the Muslim students he had been harassing because of their religion, whom he decided to kill!

In general, Ontario voters don't like keeping a government in power too long, and the opposition has to fail badly to make third terms possible...which is why I'm surprised that the Tories gave Hudak a second chance. This isn't Texas, and he was carrying too much baggage to cast himself as anything other than an extreme right winger. The other general trend in Ontario politics, is that Ontario often uses Queens Park as a hedge against the Federal Government in Ottawa....sort of like what Americans used to often do before their election system turned into a total farce controlled by a few wealthy interests. Historically, the U.S. avoided having the same party controlling the White House and both branches of Congress. The other thing that strikes me here, is that if your main complaint is about the corrupting influence of majority governments that remain in power for long periods of time (something I agree with), how do you feel about proportional representative government? The former McGuinty Government had no intentions of allowing an informed public the opportunity to make the choice freely (all three major parties cooperated in the disinformation campaign), but every time we have a Harper or a Wynne or....choose the premier...who has a majority government, we are reminded once again that a leader with a parliamentary majority is a potential dictator under our system of government until they have to call the next election! I don't know what Wynne's percentage of the vote was, but there's Harper sitting in Ottawa, after already making major structural changes to our Government, and he's doing it with only 38% of the votes cast in the last Federal Election! If you want more democracy, support PV, otherwise you're just mad that the dictator on your side didn't win!

Thanks for this one! I have heard all kinds of muddled, confusing versions of this quote, and never got around to looking for the original. Martin Niemoller....so, now we know who to thank for this. It's a shame that most don't seem to catch on to the divide-and-conquer strategy until it's too late!

Most Ontarians have low expectations from government, so we are rarely disappointed. What we don't want is radical, ideologically-driven government. Bob Rae discovered this, and abandoned many of his campaign promises as NDP Premier, like nationalizing auto insurance. And when Mike Harris started enacting a radical libertarian economic vision, he was quick to tell the Tory ministers in the social issues clown car, to shut up if they wanted to stay in the Government. The reason why we re-elected Kathleen Wynne is because the NDP leader was in say-anything/promise-anything mode and no one knew where she stood on any important issue, while we sure knew as hell where Tim Hudak stood! And hell will freeze over before this dominionist right wing crackpot becomes premier! So, for Ontario voters, it was once again choosing the lesser of three evils....and that's why we still have Kathleen Wynne!

I don't recall saying they were all united. In fact, most of the caliphate governments....at least the successful ones, were very secular and pragmatic in application. The Caliph delegated authority to local officials, who were often non-Muslims to begin with. Once the Caliphate had no reasonable expectations of advancing their armies any further, they left empire-building for maintaining the empire, and what they wanted most were governors who could collect the taxes without incurring unrest or uprisings that would require raising armies to quell and re-establish order. By the time we get to the last caliphate of the Ottoman Turks, the Middle East had all sorts of pockets with small enclaves of ethnic and religious minorities. Except during times of trouble, Christians, Jews, Druze, Muslim sects - Sunnis, Shias, Sufis, and even heretical Muslim sects like the Alawites, Ahmadiyis, Yezidis, Ismailis, and Bahai's......all of these groups are able to carry on, living in the same place generation after generation, and what is supremely ironic is that what's called Islamism or Islamofascism here, is a modern phenomena that grew up after the last caliphate was abolished. Now, there's a strong likelihood of a major regional war of Sunni vs. Shia by way of a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia & Gulf states, while all of the minorities that lived undisturbed for centuries are on the run. And that is my main objection to this presentation here that the source of the problem is their religious beliefs. If that were true, WHY is the ethnic cleansings and extreme violence happening now, after allowing groups to live together in the same places for centuries? The U.S. spent a century making itself the global economic empire, and after WWII, set a course to rapidly expand its military forces to ridiculous proportions....mostly to be the enforcer of a New World Order that it is not even clear now how much is actually American or acting in U.S. interests! When America spends billions on a carrier fleet that secures the flow of oil from the Gulf, it does so for all of the oil states and the major oil companies, whether they are based in the U.S. and have majority U.S. shareholders! For all we know, the American Empire may be like the ant, that leaves the work on behalf of its colony to run up to the top of blades of grass endlessly, because it serves the interests of a fungus that has infected its brain, and is deliberately commandeering the ant to self-destruct. Maybe the U.S. Empire that has all of these chest-thumping patriots behind it, has been similarly hijacked!

I haven't mentioned technology issues here because it has little to do with the core subject, but my primary objection with the way new technologies, green technology solutions and similar TED Talk buzzwords are tossed in the air as solutions to our problems, is that a belief that there are future technological solutions to problems waiting out there or somewhere in the future, is that it is a faith-based belief to begin with! On another topic, it is the one thing I find highly ironic about the new atheist/humanist movement: a faith, yes FAITH that can't be substantiated in evidence, that technology paves the way for a better and brighter tomorrow. But, techno-faith is so omnipresent in modern culture, that techno-optimism is part of almost every religion...regardless of how fundamentalist, and every social movement....including environment and economic issues. So, technology faith tells us that new machines will take our problems away...until we make a careful analysis of the progress of technology and realize that new technologies carry a lot of unexpected baggage with them......new, usually unexpected problems that often require the invention of "counter-technologies" to fix. While the counter-technological solutions often lead to further problems etc. About five years ago, I came across a book by Michael & Joyce Huesemann, after hearing an internet radio interview they did: Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won't Save Us or the Environment. And it struck me that this was the first time I had heard any real criticism of the common faith-based assumption that technology will save us all. The truth seems more likely that - until we take a skeptical look at technology and demand that new tech is thoroughly tested before being applied, we will follow the technology genie till the end! From the book: “We live in a highly complex and dynamic world where, according to Barry Commoner’s amusing but insightful first law of ecology, ‘Everything is Connected to Everything Else.’ Although we may perceive the natural environment as consisting of many different and isolated components and processes, these are all derivatives of the same cosmos, interrelated and linked together through mutual cause and effect. Science, of course, has been very successful in elucidating some of these causal relationships, but, as will be discussed below, only a subset of the totality of such relationships. The fact that ‘all is connected to all’ has profound implications for the application of technology, particularly with respect to unintended consequences.” (p. 3) “Because the negative consequences of science and technology often occur in unanticipated forms and in distant locations, and sometimes after significant time intervals, they are often not perceived as related to their causes. Nevertheless, technology will necessarily produce both positive and negative effects. This character of technology creates a serious intellectual challenge for technological optimists who exclusively focus on the positive aspects of technology while ignoring the, often enormous, negatives.” The book also notes the energy-dependence of new technologies....something that is going to be a huge problem in the coming years if no new cheap sources of clean energy are developed. NO it isn't! Just repeating it over and over and over doesn't make it true! The claim that violence and warfare is part of basic human nature is used by everyone...including Barack Obama at his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech (if that wasn't a tip-off of his future plans!) to justify today's violence and warfare! There are a lot of people in the war business today, and the war lobby has a huge stake in promoting the use of warfare as foreign policy and the use of violence at home to maintain control, so they keep on re-inventing the past no matter how many times claims of prehistoric warfare are knocked down under careful outside investigation. And, they have loads of willing accomplices in re-inventing the past as something barbaric and relatively sub-human...because it's the only way now to try to create a future that looks better than the past! The archaeologists and anthropologists (and there are loads of them) who believe in a Hobbesian theory of the past, keep sifting through archaeological digs, looking for something that is more than 8000 years old that could be interpreted as a sign of warfare and violence; and every damn time they find even the smallest shard of evidence to justify the claim, it's on the front page of Time magazine, Discover, the science websites etc.! While at the same time they avoid commentary on facts that don't fit the claim, such as the most ancient city in Anatolia - Catalhoyuk, gathered together several thousand people for almost two thousand years up till less than 8000 years ago, and yet this city never had a wall constructed around its perimeter in all that time, nor have archaeologists found any weapons specifically designed for warfare/ rather than hunting! Why? If violence is primeval, an unorganized gathering together of large numbers of Natufians, building mud-brick houses in chaotic-looking undesigned city (something more akin to a refugee camp) would surely have left lots of evidence for warfare and violence, if it was happening at that time. Instead, the pro-war researchers highlight the end period of Catalhoyuk (just as they do with Mohenjo-Daro on the Indus River) when a period of chaos of some sorts, led to the destruction of the cities and mass slaughter, as their evidence that hunter-gatherers were really violent by nature. It's not a pleasant thought that our best days may have passed us by long ago....as the longing myths of primeval paradise like the Garden of Eden apparently tell us; but if that's how it's happened, we either accept it, or live in delusion that it is natural for the human race to be violent, narcissistic, and ruthlessly hierarchical. Actually, it hasn't! I've heard more than one sociologist comment that the most people we can carry on a personal relationship with is still 200....long believed to be the upper limit in size of a hunter-gatherer community. You can have thousands of facebook friends, but those are friends in name only. The likely reason why we developed organized religion that codified beliefs and set them apart from daily life, is because of the need to bind large numbers of people together for common purpose. Same goes for nationalistic ideologies! What does it mean to be patriotic? My nation is for a bunch of muddled, undefined reasons superior to those other countries? Same idiocy is found in big league sports....which I haven't taken seriously since I turned 13 and discovered girls! A hockey team or a football team owned by some corporation or billionaire, which has players gathered from who knows where, represents my city! And I'm supposed to fork out thousands of dollars every year on seasons tickets to watch other people playing a game? Not that I don't watch a few games every now and then, but I'm not going to paint my face blue or believe that my town will be different the next day if "our" team wins the series! The whole topic of sports fandom is another example of irrational behaviour that should be explored in greater detail, especially nowadays since it has become so profitable for a few owners. But, all of these idiotic manifestations of tribalism are created to make modern life acceptable. The major religions of the world tried to develop an understanding of universalism, but any real attempts at universal brotherhood and sisterhood are stymied by real life objectives of empire builders who want to fight for all of the pieces on the board! And how is that working? Do you see any signs that capitalism and the trend towards corporate globalization (the only global movement that works) has reduced warfare, inequality, environmental destruction etc.? In fact, the exact opposite has happened! Capitalism and it's trajectory towards monopolistic ownership of wealth and productivity, has created more wars, more civil wars, more undeclared/unlawful wars, while a handful have become filthy rich...with a few of their hangers-on swimming in their wake and gaining also...with the vast majority mired in worse poverty in the new slave-industrial cities than they were when they scratched out a simple living as itinerant farmers! And even on the environment, we have discovered that since the age of globalization and so called free trade, the increased specialization of world economies has dramatically increased cargo transport over the oceans and overland, so globalization...even without the consumerist pressures it puts on economies to continually increase production, is still an environmental disaster that is playing a part in the exponential increases in Co2 levels in our time. Yes, we should eliminate this winners-and-losers crap before we're all fighting to protect whatever we got! We live in a crowded world with diminishing returns...because of environmental failure and resource declines. So, all of this competition crap has to be ended or even those who consider themselves "winners" will find that they are perpetually at risk by everyone who will become more willing to take what they've got by force! I discovered many years ago that the "winners" in poor third world nations were spending thousands of dollars a year to send their children to expensive private schools in the U.S., Canada and Europe, not so much for better education as it was to avoid the risk of having to pay even more money to kidnappers holding their children for ransom. Our undeserved rich, who think they are better than everyone else....even if they were born in wealth and privilege, have come up at a time when the general increases in wealth in western nations was increasing rapidly, and the wealth was being distributed throughout....until 25 or 30 years ago! Since that time, income and wealth has become increasingly stratified along class lines, and upward mobility has declined precipitously as higher education becomes more and more the privilege of the minority who can afford it. So, what does our future hold? The billionaires already have security licensed to carry automatic weapons, so it's probably not that far till they equip their limo's with flamethrowers along the undercarriage and similar protection devices like the rich use in South Africa. There are a lot of reasons why we should be transitioning towards a much more equal world, but I'm not sure what the odds are of ever getting there, because the siren song of greed is still being heard by the majority of people.

Exactly! Every one of us who has attended a demonstration or a protest march in the last 10 years, has had their picture taken and matched to find our identities...and who knows how much information about our private lives....it's not hard to figure out that the government is trying to establish the same chilling effects on all dissent that is typical for fascist and authoritarian societies.

I think the only thing that really frightens non-conservatives is how easily conservatives can be gathered together and herded into their pens whenever their leaders tell them to be scared of something....anything! You think a terrorist is a Muslim with a beard, so you'll give our rulers carte blanche to put us all under surveillance, because you think you have nothing to hide, and stomp all of our civil rights into the ground. When the convenient label - terrorist, is expanded to include pipeline and factory farm protesters, and anti-globalization protesters, you and your ilk are still cheering them on. Until one day, when even the godfearing/ flagwaving conservatives find themselves on the outs with an authoritarian leadership, and discover that the government is sifting through their records and creating a file to use at some future date, when and if necessary! And then, all of a sudden, the conservatives will be trying to protest against government overreach.....but, it will be toooooo late!

Read it again! Those who want more government surveillance are trying to portray everyone opposed as anarchists.

Why? It seems to me that most people believe in some sort of supernatural forces and a purposeful universe because their intuitions tell them this is how the world works......somebody must have made it etc.. Some psychologists call it problem created by our predisposition to detect agency in everything that seems to move independently. But, what if they're right, and skeptics have narrowed their range of acceptable understandings too much? I'm an atheist because I don't see anything more than wishful thinking and faulty reasons to believe in anything supernatural, but I'm also not an antitheist, because I see that as an equally dogmatic position to take, considering how limited our knowledge may still be in this general subject area. So, I would rather live in a world where a lot of people believe in a lot of different ideas...but can still get along together, than in one where everybody is thinking the same way. But, my big issue with antitheism in principle, is that it takes on the aspects of in-group thinking and behaviour that we always worry about from the religious crowd. The big problem with this gun nut in North Carolina was....well he's a gun nut! But, if he was an atheist who did not share some level of contempt for those who believe in God, he would have had one less reason to kill three people! *I should mention again that I don't believe this excuse about the parking situation in his building at all! From witness testimony, he had parking disputes with all of his neighbours, but he targeted these three for other reasons.

And, what will your excuse be if that happens? Until two weeks ago, you could run around declaring that nobody has killed in the cause of atheism...until it begins to happen. *I want to reiterate on a point I've made before that the category "state-sponsored terrorism" should include nations that claim some veneer of legitimacy by using their armies to kill large numbers of civilians. This is after all, one of the major motivators for opposing sides to use terrorist tactics also. If beheading hostages, suicide bombings and shootings are terrorist attacks, what are "double tap" drone strikes? And are these double taps - used in at least five different target zones, Christian terrorism/or secular terrorism? And should Obama, the CIA which is conducting these strikes, and assorted other flunkies be regarded as war criminals who need to be brought before a war crimes trials in a fair world?...which would mean hypothetically of course.

And what about when the non-religious kill people? Like the "gun-toting" atheist who decided to kill three Muslim students....which is supposed to be the topic of this thread btw!

I haven't talked much about my metaphysical beliefs lately, because I don't think it's what's really important for others to know or consider. What is important is what we value/not how whether we think we live in a universe built by design or indifferent to our desires and wishes. I am part of that "evil atheist" category also, when it comes to metaphysical beliefs, because I also don't see evidence that our world is designed....except in the sense of emergent design forces in nature. Some physicists believe our universe can be described as a "complexity engine" that appears likely to achieve the required organizational complexity to create carbon-based lifeforms, so who knows! Whether someone believes they live in universe built with a pre-intended purpose, and that they themselves may play a part in that grand design, I don't really care....I just want to know what they value and how much do they value the interests of others when there is no personal or financial benefits involved. Some people believe in a "fairy tale" because they decide more from intuitions than trying to rationalize these sorts of subjects, while others are highly skeptical and want to see evidence of design first. On this point, it's worth noting that a research paper by a Finnish psychologist - Marjanna Lindeman, published a few years ago, examining test subjects looking for images in static on an analog television screen, showed that the religious believers were more likely to see images in the white noise, that weren't there, BUT it was also revealing that the skeptics missed images that were presented to them, because of their high levels of skepticism! Just goes to show that it takes all kinds of people to make a world, and we shouldn't all be thinking the same things in the same ways!

I think the trends on declines and growths of religions show us that organized religions came in to fill a gap or a series of gaps that would otherwise be left hanging. In most of the developed world, there has been a trend towards secularization, but it hasn't been the linear story of progress that those who think history moves towards progress and modernity would like to believe! History is more correctly interpreted by the old standard as being cyclical...and we are likely heading back into another dark...very dark age again sooner than we think! In the secular/fundamentalism battle, there was a "Golden Age of Freethought" over a century ago, and then it was followed by a return to fundamentalism during WWI. Just goes to show that the forces of fear and deprivation are going to beat back every trend towards atheism and secularism as soon as people get scared and worried about the future! Same thing happened in Muslim nations also...which I have been trying to point out several times in a futile effort to get people to consider history. The reasons for declines in secularism and nationalism in the Arab World are many, but there are common factors: the Saud/Wahabb Alliance in Arabia, U.S. interference and support for local despots, OIL, the trend away from narrow and dogmatic interpretations of Islam and subjugation of women would have continued in the Arabian Peninsula, but instead they have funded the reactionary counter-attack through their madrassahs and clerics...all under the watchful eye of a series of U.S. administrations! So, you would rather throw out the book, and leave nothing but a load of competing and confusing drivel from the collection of atheist-humanist writers today? If Christians were "following the book" they would act much better than they do today. Perhaps the secular forces of hedonism, materialism and self-interest are too strong for most serious Christians to remain true to Christian ethics! Still, I would rather see a revival of Christian ethics than the continued trend towards bastardizing Christian tradition by the new teachings of Prosperity Gospel, Christian nations or Christian libertarianism! It should be obvious by now, that what is/or is not in the books, matters little to leaders and the majority of a religion's adherents! If a Christian or a Muslim wants to go to war, they'll find some scriptural reasons, if they want to acquire great wealth, they'll find justification for that too, and if they want to dump their wives for their new girlfriends, they'll go hiking on the Appalachian Trail and come back with a useful alibi after "talking" to God. So, the only thing we can hope for is that religious adherents use their faith for good rather than for doing evil. But when it comes to secular atheism, it's a blank slate....as was proven a week ago when that clown in North Carolina proved that an atheistic ideology can be used to diminish the humanity of outsiders...and make it easier to kill them!