spiritual universe — TranscendedRealms

human universe — T Clark

[quote=Bitter Crank)physical universe[/quote]

TR says in his introduction on Deviant Art: "Also, I would want you to read everything in my book and not skip past parts that I've already talked about in this summary."

That might be what you would want, but just because I look at a book doesn't mean I am going to read the whole thing--or any of it--especially if the author is telling me to read everything.

I demand the author seize my attention within seconds of my eyes landing on any of his or her text. This actually happens quite often: I'll open a book randomly, look at a paragraph and say, "Oh, this sounds interesting." Possible book purchase. Or "This sounds like bullshit". Back on the shelf it goes.

have to pretend I "respect" them! — T Clark

Intolerably inconvenient.

I'm an atheist, and would never claim that two Popes, especially one who protected child rapists, were "intellectuals." — LD Saunders

Well, really! A child rapist protector could certainly be an intellectual, even if he just happened to be neither a catholic priest nor a pope. Even an atheist child rapist could be an intellectual. Who one prefers to rape doesn't have much to do with how intellectual one is, after all.

[reply="Wayfarer;158550" Great title, "collapse now and avoid the rush"

"Going off the grid" is an interesting project. There is a short-of-post-collapse, or pre-collapse study group -- can't remember its name, there's a bunch of them scattered around the country. Many in the groups (the groups aren't actually big enough to have many anything) are planning on going off the grid to "survive".

I'm not a big fan of individual families going out on their own to survive the collapse. Very, very few families would have enough talents among them to succeed at really living off the grid, especially once it was no longer an option. For instance, if I killed a deer, I don't know how to preserve it (off the grid) so that we all wouldn't drop dead of food poisoning. I don't know how to turn a deer skin into a usable piece of hide. I don't know how to can (again, the food poisoning problem) assuming I had heat, a pressure cooker, glass jars, lids, rings, and lots of canning vegetables and fruits. My mechanical skills are poor to non-existent. Rig up a windmill to pump water or grind corn? I can theoretically imagine what that might look like; building it would be out of the question for me, even with all the power tools and metal one would need.

I could learn some of the skills, of course, but I'm hoping too be dead just in time to miss going off the grid. If not, I'll be very disappointed.

Even living off the grid with a truck full of supplies that doesn't get looted out from under one... don't lose the can opener.

Low-grade post-apocalyptic writers assume that people will revert to cannibalism 15 minutes after they discover the Internet is gone for good. They exaggerate. I hope. I think there is a fairly good chance, though, that a few people who were well supplied for 6 months and scattered around the countryside, would become objects of pretty intense begging and forced benevolent giving.

Better, I think, is to follow a community approach and band together to have more talent to pool, and a better chance of surviving. One would need a mix of ages (old people with more experience and young people with more energy. One would need a wide selection (and multiples) of hand tools. Forget about medication. If somebody is insulin dependent, they are just not going to make it. Ditto for all the other meds for chronic and acute (like infection) conditions. Need antidepressants? Anti-anxiety meds? Anti-psychotics? Fear not. The stress of the apocalypse with either kill you in short order, or it will cure you.

Most people in Europe and North America are going to have to learn to get along without caffeine and chocolate, bananas, pineapple, guavas, mangos, oranges, grapefruit, coconut, palm oil, olives and olive oil, cinnamon, cloves, black and white pepper, nutmeg, and the like. Cocaine, and other popular recreational drugs too will disappear, though opium poppies and marijuana can be grown even in Minnesota, so... might be a supply. Hallucinogens can be grown. So your post-apocalypse can be at least a little trippy.

If James Howard Kunstler doesn't depress you enough, another good writer is John Michael Greer (What's with using all three of one's names--is this a trend). He has been recommended to me for years, and I have always avoided him largely because of his "Arch Druid" blog schtick.

I'm reading now Star's Reach: A Novel Of The Deindustrial Future which is very good post post-apocalyptic fiction. I'm not recommending this, unless you have nothing better to do with your time.

I think writers like Kunstler and Greer take one of their tasks as convincing people that the multidimensional crises we face are very real. People who already know this don't need to be reminded every 15 minutes; maybe just once every other day is enough.

I find a great deal of hope in Kunstler's and Greer's depictions "after the eco-apocalypse" life styles which are basically those of the 19th century. Their solutions are, of course, post apocalypse. We aren't going to be feeding 9 billion people with kitchen gardens and home canning. Naturally, people who enjoyed pre-apocalypse life aren't going to much like post-apocalypse life much, at first anyway. It will be mostly hard work to eke out a living.

Another post-apocalypse book I liked very much, and which is hope-filled (a plague wiped out 99.99% of the earth's human population) is Earth Abides by George Stewart, I especially liked it because many of the appurtenances of our lives (TV, cell phones, computers, freeways, etc.) are absent. The main character drives across the US to see if other people survived the plague aside from the handful he knows about (just a few). He takes Route 66. At first I thought it odd he would opt for an old highway, then I remembered--oh, right - the book was published in 1949: no freeways yet.

gadflies and parasites — Agustino

My highest ambition was to be a gad flying parasitical professor. I have managed to achieve Gadfly Parasite Level 17, but I didn't make it into a professorship. Too bad. It's a pretty cushy position, from what I've seen, especially once one makes tenure. Or, at least, it used to be.

You are no doubt right that anti-intellectualism is a global phenomenon, just as at times intellectualism is IN and know-nothingism is OUT. Clearly know-nothingism is more IN than OUT at this point.

It will be difficult or intellectuals (defined very, very broadly) to stand in good stead again, while the world is going to hell in a hand basket. But yes, they do need to come back out of the woodwork and apply their intellectual capacities to the most significant problems at hand:

Over population - in the context of
Global warming - in the context of
Declining resources - leading to
Declining Q.O.L. - (quality of life)

We really do need to start preparing for, among other things, a population die off. We can't stop it, so we need to prepare psychologically, morally, ethically, and practically. 3 billion people won't die tomorrow (barring an atomic war) but within 40 years... it could be well under way.

We need to devise ways of life that are much simpler technologically. Do we need to start practicing home canning today? Tomorrow? Do we need to start hoarding seeds? Learn how to keep bees? Learn how to spin wool into yarn, then weave it into cloth? Not today, but eventually we won't be making oil-based clothing (polyester, nylon, etc.), or producing huge crops of sugar and cotton, or flying blueberries from Chile to New York.

Right now we need to figure out how to force our governments and industries to cut CO2 emissions. control reproduction, learn to do without common resources (like petroleum) and so on.

It doesn't make sense to wait until national governments, world commerce, local societies, and educational systems collapse to start figuring out how we are going to go forward.

Anti-intellectualism...

It's not an ideology. More of a sentiment originating from ignorance. — Posty McPostface

Or both? Or neither?

Some periods in history are more intellectually buoyant, ebullient, and productive than others, just as some periods are more economically exuberant than at other times.

When society is enjoying a strong high-pressure front, to use a meteorological term, of fresh air and new scientific discoveries, new products, economic growth, etc. It is easy and sensible to be enthusiastic about intellectuals, inventive engineers, new modes of production, and so on. There have been various "high-pressure fronts" episodes in history.

But in society, as in weather, depressing low-pressure fronts tend to follow bracing high pressure fronts. Economic expansion is followed by contraction; fresh new ideas become de rigueur. Reaction follows, and the new ideas become old hat, or maybe anathema.

It's not quite as mechanical as I put it (for brevity's sake).

The last big high-pressure front, in my humble opinion, was in the late 19th-early 20th century, lasting until... 1945, to pick an arbitrary date. That is the period of time when the transformative scientific, electronic, technical, economic, and intellectual with which we live were laid out. Needless to say, not all of this innovation and novelty was welcome, good for us (think of the automobile assembly line), or desirable (like atomic bombs). Antibiotics are good, global warming isn't.

We are now in a low-pressure zone. There have not been any new transformative developments that weren't invented by 1945. (Sorry, cell phones are old technology. If it wasn't for the idea of computers and telephone wires running into just about every house, the internet wouldn't exist.) Science, engineering, and intellectual pursuits just aren't delivering much uplift these days to most people, and there is a consequential low-pressure zone lack of enthusiasm for this stuff.

Hence, an "anti-intellectual flavor" to things.

When people are economically trapped, they generally don't turn to highfalutin ideas. Rather they turn on highfalutin ideas, with a vengeance. It isn't so much that they become anti-intellectual, as they become despairing. What good are the rovers on Mars and all this ivory tower crap doing me when I'm losing what little I had?

You posted your little screed 13 days ago and haven't responded to anyone, so apparently you shot your wad and that was that.

like a bull not get his eyes off the ball, — Agustino

Why are bulls so interested in the ball?

does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute... does not compute...

It's not the lack of oil that is going to be the problem, it's the intersection of environmental disaster, over-population and resource depletion, and consequent economic collapse. — Wayfarer

And oil is the critical resource that will be, one fine day, depleted. Oil powers agriculture; gas fertilizes agriculture; oil powers mining ["If it isn't grown, it's probably mined."]; oil powers transportation in trains, trucks, barges, ships and planes; oil and gas power a significant share of electrical generation; oil lubricates all gears, pistons, and shafts; it is the resource without which there are not too many other resources to be had (given the industrial revolution).

There is an oil empty well in the middle of the intersection of environmental disaster, over-population and resource depletion.

Capitalism is predicated on endless growth - value is underwritten by a projected, endless growth curve. — Wayfarer

Yes, Kunstler discusses that very thing at considerable length. Credit is borrowed, and is meant to be repaid in the future -- somehow. Most enterprises, whether for profit, non-profit, or governmental operate on at least short-term credit. Credit is also a lubricant of economic activity and is slicker than oil. Credit is great until the debtors ability to repay sinks beneath the surface like a stone. Then the boom is lowered on the debtors, and they are bankrupted.

When it becomes absolutely undeniable that the growth curves are unsustainable, then the world's financial systems really could collapse - meaning that currencies would lose all of their value. That is the 'financial apocalypse' that people mutter darkly about, and that nearly happened on September 18th 2008. — Wayfarer

Exactly -- a topic Kunstler returns to repeatedly.

I truly hope not - the one hope that I have is that there are people in the world economic system that understand these threats ... — Wayfarer

Abandon hope ye who see that our desired growth curves are unsustainable. Abandon hope ye who recognize the Troika of Apocalypse: environmental disaster, over-population and resource depletion. Abandon hope ye who can see the black magic of capitalism's scheme of endless growth. Eyes that have observed these things can not un-see them.

He has loaded up the cannon with the grape-shot of His wrath
He is poised to set the charge off and smash us up like glass...

Software engineers, on the other hand, are incredibly brilliant. They turn out new products, and new versions of old products that work PERFECTLY, never crashing or causing to crash, never slowing down their host, always being transparently intuitive, always meeting if not exceeding expectations, and delivering lavish benefits to purchasers.

Clearly they should be fathering the next generation of children.

I believed in ‘peak oil’ back then, but i think the predictions have been shown to be false — Wayfarer

Yes, this is a bit tricky. For one thing, oil production is driven by price, and the price-production relationship can be chaotic, with big peaks and valleys in price/production. But then peak oil doesn't mean no oil, it just means that the maximum amount of oil identified isn't continuing to increase. As far as I know, there are no huge new oil fields which haven't been identified.

The other thing is that when prices are high, it makes sense to pursue marginal oil fields, like the fields over the Bakken formation in North Dakota. It takes fracking, which is expensive, but if oil is selling at $140 a barrel, it's worth it. At $50 a barrel, it isn't. Also, wells like those in North Dakota and gas wells in Pennsylvania and New York tend to be exhausted fairly quickly, barely repaying the cost of drilling and fracking.

It takes a lot of energy to get at deep oil, deep under the oceans especially. It takes a lot of energy to move oil from the well head to storage and refineries; it takes a lot of energy to refine oil (heat, pressure), and some of the rare earths are used to catalyze gasoline out of heavier fluids. Then it takes more energy to move refined oil to the end user. What Kunstler sees is a downward feedback spiral of costs, decreased supply, decreased economic activity, etc. which makes expensive oil unaffordable, and so on.

Like I said, his timeline is too compressed, and he expects disaster to be fully unfolding by 2020. A disaster is unfolding, no doubt, just slower than he describes. Let's say 2035, instead of 2020.

I also agree with Kunstler that everybody in the oil business, and everybody who wants things to continue on as they have been will be EXTREMELY reluctant to explore in public what it will mean to run out of cheap abundant oil.

And yes, if running out of oil doesn't get us, global warming will, or both.

I'm grateful for being 71 and not 21. With any luck cancer, a heart attack, stroke, or a fast large truck will happen before things get way too bad.

Here is below:

There are heaps of problems, enormous problems, nobody can ever doubt that. — Wayfarer

I'm very confident we could solve these environmental issues if we'd be willing. — Benkei

For a really depressing read, try Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation or The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century James Howard Kunstler.

Kunstler writes both fiction (A World Made By Hand series) and books about the environment and urban design (The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape is a book written in 1993 by James Howard Kunstler exploring the effects of suburban sprawl, civil planning and the automobile on American society). He is, essentially, a journalist, lecturer, and gadfly (an honorific in my opinion).

Kunstler's thesis in Too Much Magic and The Long Emergency is simple to state, complex to explicate:

We passed Peak Oil in 2006, the result of which is a long-term decline in oil production. The absolute end of oil will be when it takes more energy to extract oil from the ground than is in the oil itself. At the same time, the world population continues to grow, global warming continues, and many consequences flow from those three trends.

All of this is economically, politically, socially, and environmentally destabilizing.

COAL, OIL, and GAS have no replacements, and the world built and maintained since the industrial revolution until now can not be maintained without abundant supplies of these three fuels, particularly petroleum. Further, the would-be substitutes like solar and wind are most economically feasible when oil is relatively inexpensive and rare earths (Lanthanum, Yttrium, Scandium, Neodymium, Praseodymium, Cerium, Samarium, Promethium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Erbium, Thulium, Holmium, Ytterbium, Lutetium) are on hand. The rare earths are also necessary for mathematics professor Tom Lehrer's Elements song. [see below]

It isn't that the rare earths are necessarily as rare as hen's teeth; some of them are not common; they just aren't everywhere; they often occur in combination; they are hard to separate out, and so on. The properties of rare earths are critical to a lot of our stuff -- the magnets in windmill generators, solar panels, all sorts of communication equipment, cancer medications, big batteries, etc.

The message of Too Much Magic is that our high tech culture requires cheap energy and petrochemicals to build it, operate it, and then replace it with more.

High tech will be the least of our worries when food and fresh water become scarce, which will happen whether we run short of cheap petroleum or not. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11... billion people can not be sustained, and human population will crash at some point.

I pretty much agree with Kunstler's scenario, though I find his timeline a bit too short and his estimations overly pessimistic, mostly because of the short timeline.

Kunstler dismisses renewable energy out of hand. That despite some states generating a significant portion of their electricity (15% to 30%) from wind, solar, and hydro 4 years after he published Too Much Magic. On one particular sunny, windy day Germany produced 85% of its energy from wind and solar, at least for a few hours. After that happy day there was a month of clouds and still cold air and half the country froze to death.

but global warming is fixing that within my lifetime — Benkei

So is rising ocean levels. The Dutch Riviera will be in Belgium. More gratitude.

Wisconsin state license plate motto: EAT CHEESE OR DIE

as does eating imported goods like mozzarella — Pseudonym

Imported? What do you think all those cheese plants in Wisconsin are for?

Abortion should first be legal, then we can limit it.

If labor has begun, it's just too late, no matter what.

1.3% of abortions are performed past 21 weeks, and most of these are performed because there is something seriously wrong with the fetus. There are a few -- a handful -- of very late term abortions performed. These would typically be a teenager who had been raped but was not believed earlier, or someone who was seriously mentally ill and the pregnancy had become psychologically intolerable.

become fashionable for students at many American universities to hoist Soviet era "Hammer and Sickle" banners on campus and paste or paint up revolutionary slogans from Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book". Why on earth would young people in the West do something as offensive and mindless as this? — Dachshund

Largely because the Soviet Union flag and Mao's Little Red Book are sufficiently antiquated that they have become graphics which can be associated with "resistance' or 'rebellion" whether the connection makes any sense or not.

Actually composted and sterilized horse manure was the preferred medium. Why sterilized? Growers want only the specific variety of mushroom inoculated - NO volunteers, any one of which could be poisonous.

More good insight. Unfortunately, you might not have been born yet when I most needed your helpful guidance counseling. We all got about zero guidance counseling in school.

Yes, entrepreneurship in social causes would have been the ticket had I enough brains at the time to realize that. And the three jobs I really liked (tutoring college students, AIDS prevention, and smoking cessation classes) were all more or less entrepreneurial in nature. I was great at getting programs launched. The guy who was the first director of the AIDS Project where I worked for 7 years was similar -- a great program starter, not so hot as a program administrator. 7 years was about as long as I could stand even the good jobs.

My main problem, Hanover, was that I was an idiot when it came to figuring out how to get along in the world in a productive and happy way. Plus I had a lot of other crap to figure out, like extricating myself from a religious milieu that was increasingly unsatisfactory.

At one point (about 6th grade) I had an entrepreneurial impulse: I was going to raise mushrooms. In 5th grade I developed a fascination with fungi which has endured; I still enjoy finding the odd fungus; a few years ago I came across a bright cadmium yellow wood shelf fungi. I passed it every day, so watched it fade to the more typical gray-brown shelf. It was really beautiful when it first appeared.

Needless to say, there are numerous reasons why mushroom farming would not have worked out well.

You consistently place employment as the source of your past unhappiness and that seems to define your world view in many ways. — Hanover

Good observation. I do, and it does. I did have some really rewarding, good job experiences, but I didn't know how to make more of them happen.

Well, if they suspect you of being a Moscow agent, I guess that would be true.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a Moscow Agent, WISDOMfromPO-MO, and why did you quit?

For a good time, see the Multi Dimensional Human Embryo Site



Chicken, Fish, Human, Dolphin, Alien, and Cat

So, I think you will find the approach of differentiating human fetuses from pig fetuses to be not too helpful.

The developing mammalian fetus seems to recapitulate some aspects of mammalian evolution. For instance, mammalian fetuses form gill slits at one point. Why do they do this? See Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. It's a good book. Mammals evolved from fish. The fish body plan is pretty much the standard vertebrate model, and it goes beyond bones. The cranial nerves coming out of a shark brain are organized pretty much the way our own cranial nerves are organized. Our inner ear bones were once parts of the fish jaw.

Mammalian fetuses also follow the same course of development from fertilized egg to the first breath of air whether they are whales, walruses or Windsors. At some point a Windsor fetus is distinct from a whale fetus. The Windsor blow hole is in the front of its face, rather than on top of its head, for instance. You can see this feature clearly on Queen Elizabeth II's face.



see below

Mainly a feeling of infinitesimally small significance in the grand scheme of things. Leaves me feeling quite futile, although that hasn't happened in the recent past. Other instances would include feeling inadequate or of low-self esteem. The most recent psychotic or verging on the psychotic was the belief that I was sexually abused as a child. I have good reason to believe this might have happened, though nothing definitive. — Posty McPostface

None of that sounds like psychosis to me, but who am I to judge?

I do have an anti-social or verging on schizotypical personality, so that's quite a pickle. — Posty McPostface

Pickle-Ish indeed.

Sometimes when I look back at my life, and some of the screwy, maladaptive, self-defeating behavior I have displayed on occasion, I sometimes wonder how many screws were (or are) loose. Like, how was I so self-deceived that I thought I would be a successful high school teacher (I flunked student teaching; that was a clue, maybe? Do you think?) Why did I keep taking short term jobs that I knew damn well I would loathe after 15 minutes? Why do I have so many problems with people in authority?

How come I so often didn't perceive just how counter-productive some of my behavior was on the job, and how pissed off supervisors were getting? Or did I just not care? Do I have an antisocial streak? Could be.

I like to be around people for a while, but then enough is enough. I then need a quiet, empty room to recover in. I can see the good sense in a psychiatrist's warning that if I wasn't careful, I'd end up being one of those old guys sitting on his porch with a rifle yelling at the neighbor's kids to get off his lawn.

That was 30 years ago and a) I've been careful b) I don't own a rifle, c) I don't have a porch, and d) the neighbor's kids don't bother me. Fuck the lawn.

Maybe one should just chalk it up to the psychopathology of everyday life. Isn't being deluded a default condition? A supervisor at the U seemed like such a mature stable person. A happy woman, church lady, competent administrator, mother, wife. One day she up and divorced her husband and married an employee half-her-age -- my replacement after I quit the job, as it happened.

Who knows just how crazy everybody actually are? (everybody actually is or actually are?)

I've heard the argument that abortion is actually self-defense - that the "mother" is defending herself against the intruding fetus. — Buxtebuddha

I think it's nonsense.

Aborting a human fetus is as repulsive to me as the examples I just mentioned — Buxtebuddha

And finding abortions repulsive strikes me as a perfectly normal reaction. It's an invasive bloody procedure. However, lots of medical procedures are at least repulsive, some are ghastly. Some are perfectly horrible by any stretch of the meaning of repulsive, ghastly, and horrible.

I find the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" positions on abortion about equally convincing. To take a position is to decide whether the fetus takes priority over the mother's wishes and needs. Before that decision one has to decide what the existential reality of a fetus is. When does it become a viable life, a person? Does a non-viable fetus have an existential condition yet? Maybe one has to decide whether the existential condition of a woman changes when she becomes pregnant. Does pregnancy require the woman to exist as a vessel for the developing fetus?

Those who oppose abortion in all circumstances clearly decided that a woman is a vessel in service to the fetus and has a subordinate position. If a woman can be forced to be pregnant (by rape or consensual marital sex) then the woman is also subordinate to the man -- any man, really. The woman has never seen the rapist before, he rapes her, she becomes pregnant, and then is required to bear the child he fathered.

The opposite extreme position is that a woman has zero responsibility to the father or to the fetus. If she feels like it, she may abort without mentioning it to the father. If she prefers to drink heavily during pregnancy, that's the fetus's problem. Smoke crack, shoot up heroin, do the latest pain killer to hit the streets, fine. "Hey it's my life, my body; I'll do what I want with it."

Bothe the extremophile pro-life and the extremophile pro-choice positions are kind of repulsive to me. Are there too many abortions? 700,000 abortions is 700,000 couples who couldn't be bothered to manage relatively simple contraception. One pill a day too complicated? Put the condom on first too complex? Get a vasectomy if you don't want to father children too difficult? Get an implant if you can't manage one pill every day too difficult? Get your tubes tied if you don't like taking medication?

Apparently.

Wallows away... — Posty McPostface

Can a person be without ego? In my model, no.

In common parlance, "ego" means a person's sense of self-esteem or self-importance.
self-esteem, self-importance, self-worth, self-respect, self-image, self-confidence

The latin "ego" is the first person pronoun, I.

The psychoanalytic meaning of "ego" is the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity.

On most counts, you seem to have (to be) an ego; you are a definite "I", not some nebula who isn't sure if you really exist or not.

Do you feel like your personality, your "you", is maybe not quite a fully realized personality? Do you think your personal identity is not complete? Do you feel that you carry out reality testing fairly well? How have you experienced psychosis (it doesn't seem to be "one size fits all")?

Who is your current avatar?

A living thing isn't "alive"? Dafuq? I'm sure you mean to suggest that being "alive" means being conscious, but biologically speaking, that's not what constitutes being alive. — Buxtebuddha

By "alive" I meant "an independently living being". At 4 or 5 months, the fetus isn't an independently living being. A 100 pound person is 100 pounds of living tissue; any single pound of their tissue, removed from the body, ceases to live because it can't live on it's own, cut off from the rest of the body. At 4 or 5 months, the fetus is in the same situation, not able to live on its own (to breathe, for instance, or swallow).

I agree, consciousness isn't a requirement for "aliveness".

I've not really stated my moral position on abortion, but for what it's worth, I don't consider pain the most important determining factor in the morality or immorality of an action. — Buxtebuddha

Some anti-abortion groups suggest that the process of abortion (before 24 weeks) would be painful for the fetus. That's why I brought up pain.

Whether pain in any situation would be a determining factor in the morality of an action would, for me, depend on the severity and duration of the pain. Causing severe long-lasting pain might make an act immoral. If injuring someone to some degree in the act of defending property was moral, causing long-lasting and severe pain in the defense of property wouldn't be.

Of course, severity of pain is somewhat subjective, but I suspect that many injuries that one person finds extremely painful, most other people will also find extremely painful.

What's your point?
Christians are not Jews — charleton

It is difficult to peaceably agree with some people around here.

I was merely explicating how there were conflicts between Roman Law and local law -- Christian, Jewish, or what have you. There were no Christians when Jesus was alive. Jesus was Jewish and was preaching to Jews.

I have no doubt that women regularly aborted unwanted fetuses in the ancient world. It is, however, difficult to build a case on what Jesus didn't say. Jesus didn't say anything about homosexuality, either -- who knows, maybe Jesus was gay. There was, for instance, the belovéd disciple.

I am strictly pro-choice and support Planned Parenthood.

So, stop snarling.

You are talking nonsense. Jesus and all his followers were under the Lex Romana. Jesus' silence speaks volumes. — charleton

Lots of Roman provinces were "occupied territories" from the POV of the natives, and they had various religions, coinages, laws, traditions, gods, and so forth. There was a very strong financial incentive behind Roman expansion, and as long as a given province produced sufficient income, fine -- believe in whatever worthless gods you want, follow your own stupid laws, use your own coins (but pay us in Roman coinage), and follow your own ways, only as long as it doesn't inconvenience Rome.

The Romans said, "Cultural diversity and inclusive sensitivity is all fine and dandy, but we're here for the greater glory of Rome, not yours, so sell us your grain, wine, dried fish, olive oil, and so forth at an attractive price, pay your taxes on time and in the right currency, and you can continue to live."

Yes, the Jews were under the Lex Romana, and they were also under their own law -- a situation which was not unusual in the empire, but problematic. Jews and later, Christians were expected to live within the legal system of Rome, but could maintain their own religious and cultural traditions -- as long as Roman taxes got paid, markets were open to Roman buyers, and there were no insurrections. So, when presented with a trap, Jesus said to the Pharisees, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and render unto God the things that are God's."

Jesus' answer was both a dodge to avoid the legalistic traps pharisees liked to set, and a reflection of necessary common practice. Rome's Internal Revenue Service could be quite aggressive.

Jesus didn't have secretaries following him around jotting down his every utterance. What the Gospels report him saying was a combination of edited oral accounts and invented dialogue inserted to address needs that didn't exist when Jesus was alive--like the Lord's Prayer, a formulaic prayer that may have developed in very early Christian worship. There are a lot of things Jesus is not reported saying anything about -- like homosexuality, why lobster is not kosher, whether beer is better than wine, abortion, birth control methods, and other such burning issues.

Is this an infomercial. — René Descartes

Tourism is good for their economies.

There is one report on the execution which says that the firing squad shot once Scott and missed every major organs. They reloaded and shot him again, hitting him once in the chest but not killing him. Then, Riel's general walked up to him and shot him in the face, but apparently only managed to blow away his jaw. They then buried him alive. — Akanthinos

"This has been one hell of a bad day" he said, as the shovels full of dirt started hitting the top of the coffin.

Some people think that murder is just problem resolution by another name — Bitter Crank

On some dark days at work I've thought about that myself.

So now it's fine to let people commit murder? — René Descartes

Some people think that murder is just problem resolution by another name, like war is diplomacy conducted by other means.

No, it isn't fine to murder people who are all hatched out and busy leading interesting, productive, philosophically well-informed interesting lives, or whatever the hell they are doing, even if it's cursing the day they were born.

Almost 700,000 abortions per year, in the U.S. alone, is not a small figure, no matter how much it has statistically declined. The 32,000 gun deaths in the U.S. is couched as a nightmarish figure according to my interlocutors in the gun control thread, so I don't think Buxte is being hyperbolic if one accepts our premise that abortion is murder. — Thorongil

There is a difference (you and Buxte will readily agree) between being a squishy little 6 week old fetus and a 6 year old child learning arithmetic when some well armed angry male decides to wipe out a batch of people. It's gunning down people who made it all the way to personhood, a name, preferences, friends, lovers, etc. that outrages people.

you can also apply that bumper sticker to: — René Descartes

And one should!

then why does the U.S still use the death penalty, isn't that murder. — René Descartes

It IS murder. But let's give credit where credit is due: Some states give the death row resident a choice about how they would like to be executed. In addition to lethal injection which comes standard, one can opt for...

Electrocution in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
Gas inhalation in Arizona and California.
Firing squad in Utah.
Hanging in Washington.

I don't know... Firing squad is probably effective, and it's traditional, to boot. So many cartoons feature a firing squad. The last person executed by Firing Squad in Utah was in 2010.

Hanging has a fairly long history of being kind of botchy -- heads ripping off, rope giving way, trap door not opening properly, person not dropping far enough to die quickly, etc. Gas isn't quick enough, and electrocution goes haywire sometimes too.

so I don't think Buxte is being hyperbolic if one accepts our premise that abortion is murder. — Thorongil

And if one doesn't think that abortion is murder, then preventing 700,000 unwanted children is a most desirable outcome. (Are you on the Pay4Care4 700,000 Unwanted Children A Year committee?) The simple concept behind birth control, including abortion, is that one should have children IF and WHEN one desires to have them. Bearing children merely because sperm met egg is not a sufficient reason.

We have more than a sufficient number of our species. 7.6+ billion people is more than too many.