You might enjoy a series of "sort of sci-fi but more about energy and technology" books by James Howard Kunstler. It's his "World Made by Hand" series. The story begins with an off stage event involving just a very few atomic explosions, a few EMPs, and fried electronics. As is well known, integrated/printed/miniaturized electronics are very susceptible to EMPs, and very few people are still using vacuum tube devices which aren't susceptible.

The country is cast back into the late 19th century as far as technology is concerned. From now on, they will have to make what they need by hand -- hence the title. The story is NOT about lovely hand-made furniture.

WMBH is set in a very small upstate New York village. Recovery is difficult, and there aren't really any miracles to help them out. If I remember correctly, the story covers 2 or 3 years, maybe a little longer. The reduced population of the village survive, and life goes on -- but in a very reduced way. Very large numbers of people in the country died off because adaptation was impossible for most people. (take Chicago, New York, LA, Houston -- feeding that many people can't be done without modern transportation. True, New York was large and was fed in the late 19th Century; so was Chicago and many other cities. But the existing organization and animal-based traction technology long since disappeared. Yes, 19th century tech can be recovered, but not in one or two years. It would take decades to reconstruct.

There are several volumes in the series; they are realistic, pessimistic, but in someways hopeful. That's what Kunstler's lecturing and non-fiction books are about -- if we are going to survive as a species, we are going to have to radically change the kind of life we maintain and exist in. It will probably need to resemble the 19th century in many ways (animal traction, minimal electronic devices, a far less centralized economy, smaller population, etc.). We would have to live much like the Amish live.

A World Made By Hand isn't going to change your ideas about the world, but they are very interesting stories.

EARTH ABIDES is another one -- this much older, written in 1949. It posits a plague that quickly kills most of the world's population -- like... 99.99%. There's no horror in the novel. The story focuses on a small group's efforts to survive in Oakland, CA. They do survive, though along much different lines than their tech-oriented leader had thought they would.

Earth Abides is interesting because the world that ended in 1949 was so much less "technical" than the present one. For instance, the star of the novel decides to drive across country and decides that Highway 66 would be the best bet. When I read that I thought... "why would he not travel on the interstate freeways?"... Oh right, they hadn't been built yet. Television? Invented, but barely in use; radio, yes; telephone, yes; electric lights, yes; refrigeration and natural gas, yes. All that was now gone. So there were many adaptations necessary. A surprising and interesting conclusion to the book.

It is ironic that serial killers in America were allowed to marry in prison whilst gay people were not allowed to marry at all.

I think this reflects on the warped values in this area. Marriage is for children and serial killers — Andrew4Handel

You sound a bit unhinged when you make statements like "marriage is for children and serial killers". A free rhetorical tip: don't go off the deep end too often.

Yes, sometimes people who are very poorly equipped to bear children do so, with adverse consequences for everyone concerned. Yes, people have difficulty managing fertility. Yes, some children (a few million) are exploited, are made to work, are abused, and so on.

Conversely, don't forget, millions of children are born to capable parents, raised well, and become sensible adults.

Yes, I think there are too many children in the world. Over-population will continue to be an issue, and of necessity, will focus attention on how many children people are having. However, the demographics are tricky. China succeeded in reducing its birthrate because it had a strong and capable central government and a reasonably cohesive society. The 1-child policy produced a mushroom-shaped demographic: many older people on top supported by a relatively narrow stem of younger people. The 1 child policy has been relaxed, and this will in time produce more problems (inevitably).

The heart of the population problem is that 7.3 billion individuals make the decision to have sex and 3.15 billion women decide to bear the resulting children (or not). Controlling 7.3 (soon to be 8) billion people sufficiently to make childbearing a means-tested option involves a level of bureaucratic interference most people do not want--at all.

Look: we're probably screwed no matter what. The climate is warming; no country is close to achieving reductions of CO2 and other gases which cause climate change. Never mind peak oil. We are past peak fresh water. It is estimated that about 1 billion people are now dealing with insufficient fresh water supplies. One billion will be two and three billion fairly soon. We face too many challenges to address. We have neither the resources nor the organizational wherewithal to deal with all of the effects of global warming, over population, resource depletion (which includes depletion of fertile soils), and so forth that we are up against.

Humans have never been able to solve all of their problems. When societies have reached a limit on their various adaptive capacities, they collapse. That doesn't mean they all drop dead (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how fatalistic one is). It means that it may be centuries before a given area has recovered.

Handel, Schubert — Andrew4Handel

Handel and Schubert may have been childless, but J. S. Bach fathered and supported 20 children plus turning out a massive amount of music (and he was Lutheran, not Catholic).

There are a number of features of gay culture that heterosexuals would do well to imitate -- one is the openness about who, what, and how one finds somebody attractive, and saying so. Also, clarity about what kind of sex one likes -- and asking for that kind (it's usually not unusual). Of course there are other parts of gay culture...

"Well... why don't straight men play around like gay men?" "Because straight women don't let them." (interchange at a health conference)

in the movie "Isadora" about Isadora Duncan, the famous dancer, she is rehearsing with a Russian dancer; he speaks no English, she no Russian. Each asks their interpreter how to say something to the other... He learns to say "let's make love like tigers" she learns to say "You have beautiful thighs" -- then they fall into bed and do make love like tigers, beautiful thighs and all.

She's an example of the way one wishes people could interact -- expressing ideas about beauty openly. Another example, she calls one of her piano accompanists "a toad". He's not very attractive. None the less, she falls in love with him (or falls in lust) and says, "Oh, my beautiful toad" -- something to that effect.

It isn't all sex; Vanessa Redgrave plays the part of Isadora Duncan -- loved the performance. Zvonimir Crnko is the one with the beautiful thighs (I think).

Oh come on, commit yourself: is God in or out of the material world?

What do you prefer? God in the material world, or absent?

Take your pick. You're as qualified to edit God's profile as anybody else is.

What is God?
Magic Sky Dad
Everything in existence — Lif3r

Many of us grew up in the fading age of the triple-decker universe: heaven up there, hell down there, earth in between. God was definitely Big Daddy. All this was very old school.

The Sky God was apparently a creator apart from his creation. God made the cosmos; did God then inhabit the cosmos, or did God exist outside the cosmos? Well, damned if I know. But that is one of the questions.

Another question which I am damned if I know or not is this: Is God co-terminus with the cosmos? God is everywhere the cosmos is. How big is God? As big as the Cosmos. How old is God? As long as time. ("Time is the magic length of God" Buffy St. Marie sang... "God is alive, magic is afoot...").

If God is coextensive with the material universe, is even one with the material universe yet more than a mere god of rocks, trees, hills, and rivers), is that consistent with OT/NT beliefs about God?

In one interpretation of the Gospel story of Jesus' birth, the Great God of heaven lay in a manger. God became Jesus. What about mein Gott in Himmel? if God lies in a manger, in flesh now appearing, then heaven must be empty. God gave up godhood to become human. Jesus wasn't a small graft of got inserted in the BVM by the Archangel. Jesus was God, lock stock and barrel.

This God, formerly sky god, Big Daddy, formerly coterminous with creation, etc. etc. etc., reduced himself to the most ungodly existence of humanity. This God, formerly immortal, invincible, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omni-everything else, cashed it all in on behalf of humanity. Christ wasn't an affordable sacrifice of an offshoot of Jesse's Branch -- the death of Christ was the death of the whole kit and caboodle.

Now we have an invisible God spread over the earth who lacks the power and glory of heaven. God with us.

You like that version, Lif3r?

Just a few years ago I was an anonymous professor of history specialising in medieval history and my audience was about five people around the world who read my articles. — Yuval Noah Harari

In just a few years, how did this medievalist suddenly have the knowledge to write a book about our ancient past AND our distant future? Pass the salt shaker, please.

I bought SAPIENS and started reading it, then was distracted. A bird flew by. Maybe I'll be able to try again, if that bird will just stay put.

Lately I've been thinking about how uncommon is for people to call men beautiful, gorgeous, or attractive. — Abel Alarco

Among gay men these terms (beautiful, gorgeous, hunk, etc.) are common. But you are speaking of straight men and women interacting. I am guessing that your observations are spot on.

In communications designed and distributed by mass media, and then consumed and at least somewhat imitated by masses of people, it certainly seems like there is, and has been for quite a long time, a narrowing of male and female stereotypes. There are just a few types of women and fewer types of men who are project as the "averaged ideal".

I don't suspect any sort of conspiracy by the media -- their output is just not all that imaginative and they are always concerned about appealing to the largest number of people -- that's why we call them "mass media". The media project what they perceive the public perceives as the most common definition of "gorgeous", "beautiful", "handsome", and so on.

If you can find pictures of men who were considered "handsome" in the late 1800s and early 1900s, (described in books or newspapers as handsome or beautiful) they are quite often rather unlike the conventional contemporary stereotype. Early movie idols do not look like the current crop of most popular male actors.

Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) was a very popular / famous man about Hollywood in the (relatively) early days of Hollywood.


I think his son, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. who died in 2000, is closer to current definitions of handsome, beautiful, etc. than his father was. Nothing wrong with either one of them, just that "style" definitions change.


You can see the same thing in women -- maybe more so, because women's clothing and hair style change more dramatically than they do for men. Like, silent movie star Mary Pickford (1918)

You are quite right that survival requires technology. That has been true for at least... maybe 200,000 years? Ever since we started to employ stone tools. Marx observed that "reproducing society" was an essential task of (who? Working Class? Middle Class? Ruling Class?). Reproducing society is more than repopulating it. Culture, technology, agriculture, language, art, etc. ALL of it had to be reproduced, or we would crash as a species.

Whoever it is the responsibility of, society gets reproduced. Social reproduction (cultural, technological, population, etc.) is not an individual task--it's a collective, cultural task. Two crows can repopulate Crow City, but two humans by themselves can not perpetuate human society. Without an intact culture, humans would devolve very rapidly (or maybe they'd just drop dead). I can imagine millions of Americans dying from shock if television were to just disappear--probably within 24 to 48 hours of its disappearance. One very big EMP over North America and the lights would go out, zillions of printed circuits would be fried, and everything would come to a screeching halt. Sic transit gloria technocracy.

So, there is much more than the individual delusions of prospective parents at work.

IF society crashed, and 99.9% of the population were dead, I think the remaining remnant would be hard pressed to imagine that they were producing children so that they would be happy.

But then, were you ever positing that parents "individually apart from society" imagined that their children would find happiness and nice technology?

Per Nietzsche: "He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."

If you gaze into an abbess, she'll probably be quite annoyed.

Perdidi corpus meum = I lost my body (Mary, that's the second one this week!); perdidi corpus = I lost the body; (I don't know -- it was in the kitchen 15 minutes ago.); perdidit corpus = lost body (something fishy happened between the O.R. and the morgue). Est vivens mortua est = the dead are alive; let's get the hell out of here.

They are short and enigmatic.

What does the hairdresser see between the two mirrors? If the mirrors are back to back (or front to front) he or she probably can't see anything between the two mirrors. What can you see between two bricks? It depends how far apart the two bricks are, for starters.

What happens when you stare into the abyss?

those claiming to have kids intentionally, in order so that a new human can experience happiness, but are really doing it to advance technology. — schopenhauer1

There are two assumptions here, one possibly supportable. It may be that people have children so that a new human can experience happiness. That only sounds good. I don't know whether it is true or not. I think it is more true that people HOPE the child will experience happiness. That parents HOPE the child will be happy suggests that they are aware happiness isn't guaranteed. If happiness isn't guaranteed, then there must be some other reason for having a child.

The claim that they are having the child to advance technology strikes me as altogether unsupportable. I just don't see any evidence of that. Where are you finding factual support for this view? Post hoc ergo propter hoc, anyone? (After this therefore because of this.)

Schop, how forward thinking are most reproductive decisions? Having a child for any specific reason is a major gamble for most people. Produce workers to keep the tribe going? Produce cheap help on the farm? Produce people who will be smart and will keep the cultural fires burning? A farmer who is planning on sons but gets only daughters won't have the kind of workforce he was planning on. Parents planning on keeping the tribe a going concern assume the children won't leave to join a different group. Or all die of bubonic plague.

I still think people have children because we, like other animals, are set up to reproduce whether we especially want to or not. Having children is the default mode. NOT having children takes special planning and effort. Once the kid is on its way, we start coming up with justifications and plans -- which might be more of a salvage operation than a celebration of EVEN MORE CHILDREN. I was not a wanted child. My parents had already had 7 (2 died early on) and were tired. WWII had just ended, everything was in short supply. None the less, Sex + fertility = baby. One woman in my home town had 18 children (!). Did she want 18 children? I don't know about the husband, but she DID NOT. According to her older children, it was a living nightmare. (Some of the 18 are apparently happy within reasonable bounds, some are decidedly not happy.)

Does anyone happen to know how discussion proceeds in non-North American settings? Do discussions of politics on the Internet deteriorate into verbal dung throwing in South America? China? India? Africa? the Arab world? Europe? Is everybody always civil and thoughtful in Europe--especially northern Europe?

I'll respond later; right now I must go and exploit technology that already exists and purchase food and beer. It's warm and humid outside. Were I a young hot het instead of an old cold homo, I'd go breed with a female to produce spring lambs for the purpose of producing more and better technology. There are many devices that do not work very well, wear out too soon, break too easily, are not smart enough (many of them are incorrigibly stupid), and use too many resources to remain plentiful and cheap.

So breed, you bastards, breed. Better technology tomorrow!

People should definitely spend less time on social media, whatever their ideological leaning. Have I ever met an "incel" in real life? I don't know. If I did, I'd refer them on for psychiatric assistance.

I don't like lists of words that are verboten.

It's good to know where words come from, but just because their source isn't kosher, doesn't mean they aren't handy terms. I've been a "social justice warrior" much longer than the phrase has been around. I like the term, both in its ameliorative and denigrating sense. I like "snowflake" too, and the type exists, left-right-and center. Pains in the ass, all of them. POMO is a favorite term too. Cuck? Cuckold has been around for a long time--Old French into Old English.

Today's campus 'marxism" is pretty much exsanguinated; poor Karl.

In 1964 the conservative Republican candidate for POTUS said in his nomination acceptance speech, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" Dangerous Speech! some said. Too extreme.

I was just 17 that summer, and found the Goldwater rhetoric pretty arousing. I had been inoculated with the virus of John Birch Society anti-communism, which Goldwater echoed. I still think his quote is is good, even if it comes from a man whom the liberal democrats portrayed as a nuclear trigger. (Goldwater was actually fairly reasonable, especially later on.)

Are humans part of the biological continuum (nature)? If we are, then it would seem to be the case that we reproduce for the same reason that all other creatures reproduce: we are programmed to engage in behaviors that result in off-spring.

If you lab-raised a group of people from infancy and you carefully avoided teaching this group anything about sex and reproduction of any species--especially their own--would they desire to reproduce? And if, predictably, a male and female in this group had sex and the female became pregnant, would the resulting delivery of the baby be considered a miracle of birth or a nightmare? Left uninformed and unprepared for the delivery, I would think it would be closer to a nightmare than miracle.

What about oxytocin? It seems like oxytocin is more evidence that "nature" intervenes to make sure the baby isn't tossed aside for all the pain and inconvenience it just caused.

Perhaps we don't reproduce for any "reason" at all. Maybe we are naturally more a-natalists, rather than pro-natalists? (Granted, there is plenty of intense propaganda in favor of natalism.)

the child is born to produce and promote the growth of technology. — schopenhauer1

This is the least persuasive of reasons for reproduction that you have come up with. In our long history of mindless reproducing, very very few children have produced any growth in technology. For most of our history (as the species we have been for several hundred thousand years--and before that, millions of years) children duplicated the existing technology--knapping pieces of rock into tools, cooking birch bark to get a strong pitch adhesive, food preparation, etc. We know they duplicated technology (rather than innovating) because the styles of knapping rock change very slowly.

Reproduction is the essence of life: the first life forms (simple one celled animals) reproduced. Life has been doing that for billions of years--not because it is in favor of reproduction. Life has no choice in the matter. It is designed from the molecular level and up (maybe the atomic level and up? Sub atomically and up?) to reproduce.

every snowflake on Mars is unique — Marchesk

I hope we don't run into too many Martians who think they are novel snowflakes.

snow — Marchesk

Nice fluffy 6 sided crystals of H2O = snow. What do the crystals on the south pole of Mars look like? Cubes.

(Btw 'pissed' means 'drunk' not 'angry' in real language.) — Baden

We knew that already because half of Ireland lives in the US.

you get the U.S. — Baden

You Europeans (counting the Brits as Europeans as much as they hate that) are responsible for just about everything bad that happened in the US. Everything from Plymouth Rock onward. By the time the colonies became states and got their various acts together (around 1960) we were pretty much ruined by continental influences. Vietnam? We got sucked in by helping the failed French out. Iraq? The French and the British screwed that whole area up. Israel? Look to the UK, as usual. Child abusing priests? Italian and Irish Catholics.

Americans are pretty much innocent of everything.

And lest we forget, the Brits still haven't returned the statues they swiped off the Parthenon. Last time I looked they were still in the British Museum, along with the Rosetta Stone (France swiped from Egypt, England swiped from France). A Greek delegation visited the Queen to talk about getting the stonework back and she sicced her pack of killer corgis on them and they had to beat a hasty retreat, bleeding ankles and all.

Presumably that advice would have been the same had Sam stolen the ring. Would that advice have been the same had Sam stolen the ring a long time ago? — Jake

Stealing a ring is not the same as finding a ring.

But while were on the subject of theft, somebody should write a book on the ethics of theft, because clearly theft is frequently "Business conducted by other means."

We tend to look down our noses at petty thieves and honor major league thieves (like banks, corporations, etc.). Some theft is OK and some isn't. If one is starving, stealing food is OK. If one is homeless, stealing space (squatting) is OK. Some people believe that taking money away from the rich is a moral imperative, because the rich got it through some sort of swindle in the first place.

Does anybody actually buy office supplies? Isn't that what the supply room is for? There are ethical limits, however. One should not steal carpeting, lighting fixtures, plumbing, windows, doors... basic infrastructure. It's hard to get this stuff in the elevator and out the back door without some nosy person noticing.

Are we ethically bound to return all the stolen property we are in possession of? — Jake

If one has a lot of stolen property laying around, returning the goods to their rightful owner is probably not the first item on their to do list. Nor is it at the top of their list of things to worry about. Personally, I would be more worried about prosecution.

Then too it depends on from whom one stole the property. Stealing goods from a luxury retailer is one thing; stealing stuff from the local mafia boss is something else.

Would that advice have been the same had Sam stolen the ring a long time ago? — Jake

Eventually who stole what from whom becomes a moot point. Time makes ancient good uncouth and elevates many a crime to nobility. Many nations have been built on a foundation of organized theft, and once the theft becomes the narrative of Empire, westward expansion or manifest destiny... who cares? (aside from the losers...)

If we don't like universal relativism ("whatever any culture or any person believes to be right is right") then we have to find a way to locate a moral foundation for universally objective standards of right and wrong. This isn't a new problem, of course. It's rather ancient.

It seems to be the case that we have located foundational moral standards in religion -- and that location was carried out two to three thousand years ago. These foundational moral standards have held fairly well. That certainly doesn't mean that they have always been rigorously followed, of course.

Where did the religious foundations come from? God? Gods? No - they came from the inventors of the gods -- human beings. The invention of religion and the establishment of at least some minimum standards of good and bad behavior, was a major cultural achievement. Once civil institutions arose further elaboration and implementation of rules and regulations occurred. Hammurabi, would be an early example.

Once supranational entities were organized (the Roman Empire or the International Court of Justice are examples) some universal standards of behavior were extended across cultures. Of course, none of these efforts at establishing objective right and wrong standards at the local, regional, national, or supranational have been totally successful--we being the less-than-totally-evolved primates that we are.

Why is a religion so good at commanding people to behave a certain way — Posty McPostface

Religions may or may not have authority and power. If they have authority, it is because the authority is recognized by the people, then commands are effective; people will not only obey, they will affirm the rightness of their obedience.

If the religion lacks authority, but has power, people can be compelled to obey, whether they affirm the rightness of their obedience or not.

Sometimes religions have both authority and power, sometimes one and not the other, and sometimes neither. Where religions have neither authority and power, the religions is likely to be increasingly irrelevant and on the way to extinction (unless the religion can resurrect its authority).

The same situation applies to secular institutions too. Donald Trump has real power--no doubt about it. Presidents have power. Among many Americans Trump has both authority and power, and among others he has only power and no authority whatsoever. I grant Trump no authority, but I recognize he has power -- which is why I find him upsetting. If he was merely the village idiot, he wouldn't be a problem. Instead he is a village idiot with a shady past and nuclear weapons at his disposal. That's quite unsettling.

In many communities, the police have both authority (the people grant them the rightness to command them) and they also have power. Where there are communities who do not grant the police authority, police have to depend on the exercise of power -- usually brute force. If they have neither authority nor power (such as UN Peace Keeper forces), they are pretty much useless.

Freedom from, liberty to.

Tyranny is representation without consent. — Bliss

Could be. Or, "Tyranny is government without representation" as in "No taxation without representation".

When a person votes, he is giving one of two or more candidates permission to represent him (under your formulation). If the candidate to whom he did not give permission to represent him wins, is this voter then subject to tyranny?

To be represented is necessarily to be less free, because being represented by a person implies you act in accordance with that person's will, and that person's will is inevitably not always your own. If you are completely represented by others, then you have no freedom. — Bliss

It seems like if I am governed by people who share none of my concerns, but who force me to worry about their concerns, then I am subjected to tyranny. I guess my definition of tyranny requires more than a little coercion.

I believe we are governed by people who, by and large, do not represent us even if they were voted into office by us people, and whose interests are, in many cases, altogether opposed to mine/ouea. Still, I don't feel I am subjected to tyranny because there is not much coercion. I'm well aware that IF I were to step too far out of line, I might be subjected to very effective coercion.

I keep accidentally typing things that I feel are informative, when in reality they can easily be construed as snide or rude. (For example: assuming that there is a joke when there is not) — Lif3r

digital text communication has been problematic ever since e-mail came along, and continues. The thing that is different about e-mail, text messages, and anonymous boards such as this is speed and casualness. The psychology of writing on a screen is different than writing on paper.

When we depended on hand-written or typed messages on paper (in the ancient world of 40 years ago) we tended to exercise more reserve and we had time to proofread and reflect on what we had written before we put it into an envelope, addressed it, and dropped it in a mail box. The commitment to words and sentences written on paper is deeper than the commitment to text written on a screen.

I have found that my dry, sarcastic humor misfires more often on line than it does in person. People seem to read text on line differently than they 'read' or 'hear' communication in person. On line responses to text seems to be more literal, less subtle. So it is that a rather casual off-the-cuff comment can come across as a body slam.

Sociology, however, is bunk! — Pseudonym

Can we be clearer? "What" about sociology is "bunk"? Is it not a science? A sociologist could state a falsifiable hypothesis: "Rental agents discriminate against black people". The hypothesis can be tested by presenting potential renters to agents where the only significant difference is being a black person. This experiment has been done and it has been found that rental agents discriminate against black people -- when they are visually identified as black and when they are aurally identified as black (speech patterns tested in phone calls to rental agents).

What is not scientific about that sort of sociological experiment?

Much of sociology is descriptive or speculative. Many books, some of them in the category of sociology rather than history or psychology, have assessed the degree of acceptance by Germans of the National Socialist (Nazi) government between 1934 and 1945. The results vary by the methods of determining acceptance, approval, endorsement, etc. We Thought We Were Free by Milton Meyer conducted long interviews with 10 men from one medium sized German city immediately after the war (well, within a year or two). They represented the sort of vocational and class divisions one would have found in Germany during the first half of the 20th Century. Most of the men thought they were had been free, and were enthusiastic about the years during Nazi rule.

There is nothing "scientific" about Mayer's book, or most of the other books written about the Nazi Germany. The various books can be criticized for being poorly researched, being inaccurate, being very well documented, being thorough, and so on -- but they fit into the categories of history, or descriptive social studies.

History isn't a science either -- since we can't run experiments on the past (at least until we steal some really good time machines from an alien civilization). That doesn't mean "history is bunk" as Henry Ford thought.

Of course. You might be right; maybe black holes will turn out to be the lairs of dragons guarding their gold, but probably not. Not every theory has been succeeded by its opposite (except in nutrition where every recommendation is flipped a week later. Fat is good today, bad last week; sugar will kill you this week, just make you fat last week; 1 drink is healthy for you last week; this week, no alcohol whatsoever is safe.)

Once the anatomists in the late 18th century nailed down quite a bit of how the body worked, their findings have held true. The germ theory (Koch's Postulates) have held good for 150 years. On the other hand, the discovery of plate tectonics dumped a batch of theories that turned out to be false. But, I bet you a 6 pack of beer that plate tectonics is still valid at the end of this century.

What happens more often these days is that MORE information is found, showing previous theories to be incomplete. Less often are scientific theories revealed as just plain wrong, or not even wrong.

If all knowledge were ours, would we still be humans? Or would we have evolved, through knowledge into a new kind of being, not by divinity, but by our knowledge, augmenting ourselves into a self-controlled evolution? — Christoffer

All the knowledge that "is" has always been ours, hasn't it? Who else possessed knowledge? Even when we thought that the world was made of fire, water, earth, and air, and that we were the center of the cosmos, all that knowledge was all ours. Our knowledge is much greater now than it was 2500 years ago. It is greater than it was 25 years ago.

It seems like we have already evolved into a 'new kind of being'. We have been 'homo sapiens' for what... 2, 3, 400,000 years, but our evolution either took a turn, or maybe it just finally paid off, somewhere around 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. (It depends on what one uses as a sign of major advance -- cave paintings or agriculture or writing.) The last 300 years (Age of Enlightenment) is perhaps another turning point.

Essentially becoming a cosmological irony, in which we used science to prove that god doesn't exist and explain everything about our universe, but becoming such agents of the universe that we would by any standard measurements be considered gods ourselves. — Christoffer

Godhood is generally a true diagnostic test for first-class hubris. We have quite a ways to go before we will be all-knowing, everywhere present, and omnipotent.

My personal view -- and it is neither original nor mine alone -- is that we invented the gods. Our conception of gods has evolved along with us. We progressed from gods of trees and rocks to sky gods. I think its progress, anyway, moving from the concrete to the abstract. We need not be embarrassed by our cultural creations; the gods are no more embarrassing than Hobbits or Superman.

The First Cause is a problem, because "what came before what came before what came before... is perhaps infinitely recursive. Maybe at the end of an exceeding long chain of causations we will find a willful deity who got the ball rolling.

Quite so. Totally agree.

I don't mean to be negative, or to chastise. — Lif3r

I wasn't being serious. I was joking.

If I were to grade myself on my ethics in this situation, I would give myself a B-) — Sam Sam

Because you got quite a bit of assistance during the exam?

Here is your next more difficult moral challenge?

On the way back from reclaiming a ring that somebody found in a train set at a yard sale, I ran over the neighbor's dog. It was a quick but messy kill. I threw the dog body into a ravine (the usual and customary method of disposing of dead bodies). Now I am perplexed.

A. Should I pretend it never happened?
B. Should I inform my neighbor I ran over her yappy dog.
C. Should I offer to compensate my neighbor for the loss of this dearly loved but exquisitely annoying dog?
D. Should I retrieve the corpse and leave it on her front step so that she would at least be able to give it a dog funeral.
E. Should I run over the neighbor so that she can not annoy me further by getting another, larger, louder, yappier dog?

For the sake of simplicity, I have decided to ignore reality and just forget about it. If she ever mentions it, I'll just say, "Oh, what dog was that? I didn't know you had a dog."

I think the only thing we didn't mention here is to ask the person to describe the ring — Lif3r

It was a round yellowish ring with a glittery thing on it. It must be mine.

Guess not then. — Posty McPostface

Probably not. I'd find it interesting, but I'm not all that interested in 'academic philosophy' anyway.

Why ask?

You already know what you ought do — creativesoul

Ethics would be simple indeed if we we able to mechanically follow ethical rules. We are not able. On the one hand we have ethical rules which are reasonably clear and on the other hand we have desires (emotions) which are often at least as strong as our commitment to ethical behavior.

Probably most people (just guessing) are able to keep their urges/wishes/desires under control--but not always. When the "not always" moment arrives we breach the barriers.

Having breached the barriers that keep us ethical, the next question is "how much do we regret it". If we don't regret it much or at all, we're more likely to behave improperly in the future. If we behave that way long enough, our practical use of "proper" and "improper" will have changed.

Everybody knows it's more fun to play with other people's junk! — VagabondSpectre

In ever so many ways...

People go to yard sales to replace the junk they sold at their own yard sales.

Of course - competition and collaboration are productive when people behave fairly. If they don't, then nothing will help. People have to be honest for business to get done properly.

Yes 2 minds are better than one. Unless it's me, then the other mind is redundant. (joke)