many of my early encounters were via hallucinogens — Wayfarer

Harvey Cox, a Baptist, liberation theologist, professor in the Harvard Divinity School, and a fairly adventurous believer (he's a about 87 years old now) tried hallucinogens in a quite proper setting -- out in the desert with a bunch of others, a good sound system, wine, etc. He thought it was a worthwhile experience, but I don't think he repeated it. He also wrote a couple of books about eastern religion -- not as a believer, but in an ecumenical context. [Turning East: Why Americans Look to the Orient for Spirituality-And What That Search Can Mean to the West; Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths (1988), (Beacon Press reprint 1992)].

His next to last book was The Future of Faith (2009). Haven't read it, don't know whether I will. I got a great deal out of his earlier books (like The Secular City, 1964) but found some of his later books much less helpful. Anyway, in Future of Faith Cox analyzes the new grassroots Christianity of social activism and the kind of non-institutional spirituality we've been discussing.

Maybe his last book (last year) is/was The Market as God. Here's a link to an excerpt in The Atlantic Magazine

The thing that I dislike about "spiritualism" is that it is too individualized (to suit whatever idiosyncrasies happen to be in play) and it's way too private (related to too individualized).

One individual may return from a long fast in the desert and have a new revelation to report. When people engage in spiritual doodling by themselves, there is rarely revelation or insight. There is no one to challenge the quite likely solipsistic experience of their 'spiritualism'.

I wouldn't say that revelation, a pregnancy of celestial fire, or an anointing by the spirit CAN'T happen by one's self. It just isn't all that likely.

Well, go back into your post and break it up into paragraphs. Shirley you can manage that?

Having exhausted faith in the dead end of the Hive Mind you have moved on to pinning your hopes on Super AI?

What is the matter with you?

@NeverMind.com

Eh, what you say about gaining energy through forming a new denomination is undoubtedly true, but there are other reasons America is so Christian. And as far as ethnic sects of the same denomination of Christianity within America, those existed because of immigration; early immigrants stuck together with those of their same race; naturally their unique form of the faith remained in tact while those close-knit communities did so. Once those ethnic communities began to splinter, the ethnic sects of the denominations began to blur. — Noble Dust

The Second Great Awakening (late 18th, early 19th Centuries) was another reason for religion doing well in the U.S. The SGA was led by Methodist and Baptist preachers. (Baptists hadn't become conservative Southern Baptists yet). The SGA was a continuing stimulant well into the 19th Century.

Because Americans had no state-sponsored church, we were free to wander into all sorts of oddball beliefs. The SGA produced the "burnt over area" of Western New York--an area so heavily evangelized, that all the "fuel" for future conversions had been "burnt up". Several groups sprouted in that area about that time: Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Shakers, et al. In addition, the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Women's suffrage movement started here. The Fourierist utopian socialists, as well as the Oneida Society began here. Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel came out of this area.

Immigration did influence Christian and Jewish religious activity. Over time (like, by the 1970s) the ethnic-religious nexus was dissipating.

During the 1960, American religious participation and religious affiliation crashed. The Methodists, for instance, lost 5 million members during the 1960s. This 5 million didn't go somewhere else, apparently, and they never returned. Other denominations experienced the same severe losses. The Roman Catholic educational. medical, and social ministries were greatly diminished by professed nuns and monks leaving their orders. What began in the 1960s did not stop. Only the conservative evangelical and fundamentalists denominations have been able to actually increase their membership over the last 45 years. It is likely that they will experience a decline as well, at some point.

Even with these declines, however, religion and religious belief and activity is much higher than in Europe. "The Church" is in no danger of disappearing.

The chart below combines several measures, so there is no left-hand scale.




The Truth will set you free, but it costs money to report it.

As man started living in communities, to contain flagrant behavior of the members, communities started making rules. This is socialism. — Ashwin Poonawala

No, this is not socialism.

Isolated individuals who came together to form even a small community quickly discovered that rules are needed to enable ego-driven individuals (normal people are ego-driven) to get along together peaceably. Larger communities discovered that some sort of 'enforcer' was needed to help everyone abide by the rules. We can this enforcer 'government'.

Socialism is one of several economic / political arrangements which can exist in a community. In socialism, labor, operation and direction of the economy is the responsibility of the workers (who are, of course, the vast majority of any community). There are no capitalists in socialism (obviously). Another term for socialism is "economic democracy".

Capitalism is another way of arranging economic activity. In capitalism, the operation and direction of the economy is the responsibility of those who own factories, mines, railroads, etc. The object of capitalism is to extract a maximum of profit (surplus value) from the labor of workers. Capitalists are generally a small proportion of any community. Capitalists hate the idea of workers being in charge.

Capitalism is essentially economic terrorism.

In the USA, there is alot of denial about what 'equality" actually means as the founders intended. Originally the statement was that we are CREATED equal in accordance of the laws of nature and God. — ernestm

We are created innocent, and we are judged not for what we have, but what we do with it. — ernestm

I thought it was specifically dignity and rights. — unenlightened

There is some confusion about the Declaration of Independence, which is a good read, and the constitution which is less of a good read, but has the force of law.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness….” Thomas Jefferis--The Declaration of Independence — Thomas Jefferson

As for being created "innocent" and it being more important what we do with it than how much we started with, I don't know where you get that. Who said we were born innocent? (We may be born innocent, but there is a large industry devoted to the notion that we are actually not innocent, but carry the stain of Original Sin. And the notion that we are not judged by how much we have was not a very popular sentiment in the 18th Century. (It isn't all that popular now, either.) One of Jesus' parables points toward being good stewards of what you start with, but getting as much as possible was discouraged in another one.

Some of the FF probably thought we were innocent, but some FF wanted the phrase to be "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property". Franklin discouraged the "property" phrasing. So I have heard..

However nice it is, the Declaration of Independence is neither constitution nor law. It was a letter to King George III. It reads much better than a latter president's tweets (farts).

Carl Schmitt asserted that "All significant concepts in the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" — Cavacava

AT LAST!!! The occasion where one of my favorite quotes (since 1983) is appropriate: "Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics." Charles Peguy (a late 19th century early 20th century Frenchman).

And again, from the schism of 1054, to the birth of protestantism, to the splintering of countless denominations, it's all the same religion. This seems obvious to me. — Noble Dust

Some people wonder why Americans are so religious. (They are compared to Europe, especially). I would say it is (at least to some extent) BECAUSE there has been so much splintering. Every time a group divides, it is re-energized. Ethnic connections to specific denominations has strengthened church activity (in the past, largely). So, there were German Lutherans, Norwegian Lutheran, Swedish Lutherans, Danish Lutherans, Latvian Lutherans, etc. Now, there are mostly Evangelical American Lutheran Church members, because the ethnic and language connections aren't so important anymore.

There was quite a bit of competition: Baptists vs. Methodists; Lutherans vs. Catholics; Presbyterians vs. Congregationalists, etc. and not just good-natured competition.

The churches were more integrated into the daily life of many Americans, providing educational, social, and spiritual services. This has, of course, decreased, along with many kinds of civic engagement (as in "bowling alone").

That's one country. Various varieties of religious experience are provided by Christian churches around the world. As a whole (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox) the Church offers many flavors, even if the fundamental ingredients of the faith do not vary much from one denomination to another. This is an advantage (it might be a vulnerability too, but that's life.)

Events like the Reformation and Counter Reformation helped the entire western church adapt to modernity. (Not that every member, parish, or denomination has done super well adapting to modernity.)

But there comes a point where individuality doesn't serve a purpose beyond self interest and we are approaching that point rapidly. What purpose does the concept of individuality serve beyond self interest? — MonfortS26

You are running in circles here.

First, it simply is not the case that individuality has no purpose beyond self interest. Most living things (plants, animals, fungi, etc.) are individuals, and it is through the lives of individuals and the myriad unique challenges with which an individual will cope, that each species, and life in general, progresses.

Individuals hold the key to species' survival, because individuals can be lost without threatening the survival of the species. (Except that if too many individuals are lost, the species can not survive.)

It is through the endless recombination of genes (through non-reproductive-sharing or sexual reproduction) that life becomes tougher, more resilient, more abundant.

Hive-bound animals, like bees, still are individuals with unique (even if quite limited) features and behaviors. Individual bees can adapt to changes in the hive. Individual bees serve the interests of the collective hive by being adaptable individuals. Further, bees reproduce sexually. Finally, hives do not go on forever. Starting over is not a biological disaster -- it's a great benefit.

Since the hive mind is a creature of science fiction, bear in mind that they always turn out to be grotesquely malevolent, which is (as a fiction) purposeful. Malevolent grotesque creatures serve the needs of drama far more effectively than benevolent, beautiful entities.

...mind itself is magic
Coursing through the flesh
And flesh itself is magic
Dancing on a clock
And time itself
The magic length of God

Leonard Cohen

No, don't know what time is, or what time it is.

But if it wasn't for the New World, the sauce on the spaghetti would still be milk gravy.

In effect one sought fulfilment by overcoming the self, whereas in the absence of that part of the Christian ethos, all that remains is the individual ego as end in itself. — Wayfarer

It's all 'cheap grace' described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship.

Suppose at some point in the future we manage to create a 3d printer capable of printing on a subatomic level. Anyone would be able to use that device to create a nuclear bomb and immediately wipe out humanity. — MonfortS26

It would take more than 1 bomb to wipe out all of humanity. Besides, now we have thousands of bombs and effective delivery methods (I'd like to see you print out a ICBM on your home office 3D printer) and individuals will be responsible for wiping out humanity. Your worst possible scenario is already history.

There is nothing that would prevent a giant hive mind from going crazy and killing itself--and all of humanity along with it.

Let me back up and ask a question about your 'hive mind' idea: is the hive mind "one mind" composed of all the previous distinct minds in a mental puree, or is it a like a hive, where each mind is individual in it's own cell but is coordinated with all the other (7.2 billion) minds?

What I imagine you are thinking of is the pureed mind, where all individual distinctions have been lost.

"Spiritual" in the current common parlance of the US is such an extremely nebulous, vague, positive-sounding non-inferential term, that it isn't the same as "religion". In most cases, people use this term here as a 'cop out' meaning, "I don't want to talk about religion."

Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark by David Bentley Hart is a perhaps accessible sample of Hart's writing.

I was entirely unprepared for how bad an argument [Dennett's] latest book advances—so bad, in fact, that the truly fascinating question it raises is how so many otherwise intelligent persons could have mistaken it for a coherent or serious philosophical proposition. David Bentley Hart

The entire passage is a splendid specimen of Carroll’s nonpareil gift for capturing the voice of authority—or, rather, the authoritative tone of voice, which is, as often as not, entirely unrelated to any actual authority on the speaker’s part—in all its special cadences, inflections, and modulations. And what makes these particular verses so delightful is the way in which they mimic a certain style of exhaustive empirical exactitude while producing a conceptual result of utter vacuity. ...

Perhaps that is what makes them seem so exquisitely germane to Daniel Dennett’s most recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. This, I hasten to add, is neither a frivolous nor a malicious remark. The Bellman—like almost all of Carroll’s characters—is a rigorously, even remorselessly rational person and is moreover a figure cast in a decidedly heroic mould.

But, if one sets out in pursuit of beasts as fantastic, elusive, and protean as either Snarks or religion, one can proceed from only the vaguest idea of what one is looking for. So it is no great wonder that, in the special precision with which they define their respective quarries, in the quantity of farraginous [hodgepodge] detail they amass, in their insensibility to the incoherence of the portraits they have produced—in fact, in all things but felicity of expression—the Bellman and Dennett sound much alike. David Bentley Hart

It's a difficult job to sort out all of the influences -- philosophical social, political, theological, economic et al -- that shaped Western Civilization. I will readily grant that Christianity has been a critical--and positive--contributor most of the time, and no other contributor has always been positive, either.

Anthony Comstock, and his numerous co-agitators, performed a greater mischief than they perhaps did or could realize. Comstock was offended by discussions and depictions of sexuality. He worked as a postal inspector in the post-Civil War era, and came across sexual material that was frankly intended to sexually stimulate the reader. He thought it was wrong to stimulate sexual interest through print--or maybe at all, I don't know. Later on, he and his followers proved unable to distinguish between erotic literature and discussions of sexual health--and banned both.

The American Government's ON-then-OFF-then-ON-then OFF-now-back-ON policy (going back to Reagan) of not distributing birth control materials as part of foreign aid is a direct descendent of Anthony Comstock.

It is easy to get waylaid.

There is nothing particularly Christian in Comstock. There is nothing Christian about Capitalism, either. Much of the Christian religion has been governed by quite authoritarian systems, even though many of its values are very useful in democracy. A lot of Christians can not think calmly or positively about the Jewish atheist Karl Marx, even though much of what he said is boring economic theory and some of it is eminently humane.

I don't like any religion by the way and think the institutionalisation of religious experiences is the worst social construct invented so far. — Benkei

There are lots of good reasons (and no reasons needed at all, of course) for you to dislike religion, but the rest of this statement isn't sound. Individuals might have private "spiritual experiences", whatever those might be, in isolation from any recognizable belief system. But they can not have "religious experiences" without the institutions of religion, which defines what spiritual, god, holy, prayer, and so forth are.

Indeed, were there no constructed institutional religions, private spiritual experiences probably wouldn't exist as a construct either. They might end up being constructed as a psychopathology.

The principle of individual rights is attributable to the Christian West, where 'freedom of conscience', 'freedom of association', and so on. Of course it is true that many such reforms were fought tooth and nail by religious conservatives, but the reformers themselves were also Christian. — Wayfarer

Many were also deists, freethinkers, and various other sorts of non-Christian. — Arkady

I always thought that the pre-revolutionary American colonies were characterized by the very active Christianity that would dominate later on. Apparently this was not the case. There is no denying that New England was dominated by the descendants of English Puritans, but the intellectual core of the colonies was, as Arkady noted, free-thinking.

It was especially the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century that brought about the dominance of Evangelical Protestantism--Methodists and Baptists, particularly. Catholicism would become very important through immigration.

The free-thinkers were apparently not much exercised about abortion, sodomy, birth control (such as it was), and obscenity that became critical issues under a movement sponsored by Anthony Comstock beginning in the late 19th into the 20th century. Anthony Comstock, for instance, objected to the profanity used by his fellow Union soldiers in the Civil War. Had his compatriots said things like "Oh dear, my arm's just been shot off" or "Shucks, I missed" our history might have been very different.



So, some of our worst features were brought to us through our much honored religious American traditions, and some of our best features were delivered through the good offices of the Enlightenment.

American history isn't Australian history, of course.

I would sacrifice my life for your right to ignore my claims. — Mongrel

Should we expect any action on this offer in the near future?

Exactly — MonfortS26

What I meant is that the hive mind would be the equivalent of death.
-----

The Internet as a sample of "the hive mind" has one, critical essential feature: It's optional. One need not use the internet (just as one need not use a library) and the internet does not have direct access to anyone's mind, either for gaining or distributing information.

Hive minds figure into a number of science fiction stories. One I remember is about someone who enters a 'hive' of some sort and finds it quite comfortable, until the special Hive Mind is awakened by the workers to deal with this threat. The awakened mind is immensely powerful and very unfriendly.

But is there anything better? — MonfortS26

- There is no perfect system, but there are gradations of 'better'. A highly regulated capitalism, and tax law preventing excessive accumulation and intergenerational transmission is better than unfettered capitalism.

- Democratic socialism, the model of the democratic welfare state, allows the market economy of capitalism and maintains a very strong welfare (protective, supportive programs) state. Post WWII Europe has employed this approach.

- Socialism has been implemented in a number of places, but in a plainly authoritarian, dictatorial fashion wherein the downside of brute rule more than counterbalanced the upside of socialism. Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, and the USSR are examples.

- Workers Democracy would be, if implemented, the opposite pole of reigning capitalism.

The second option might be the best we can do.

it is an imperfect system — MonfortS26

because

It's a system that functions by exploiting people's selfish desires. — MonfortS26

And not even that, because most people are, and must be, on the "exploited" end of the stick.

Combining the alleged selfish motivations of 7 billion people into one mega-self might produce a hellish monster of cosmic-scale greed.

It could be a utilitarian utopia and I can't come up with any actual downsides to it. — MonfortS26

If you have not thought of any downsides to your utopia, than the task of imagining utopia is not even half done.

It may be uncomfortable to think about a loss of individuality, but once it was gone I don't think you would really care. — MonfortS26

It may be uncomfortable to think about being dead, but once you were dead, you wouldn't really care.

Same thing.

If we fused our minds, wouldn't that make everyone more interested in the greater good instead of constantly worrying about trivial things? — MonfortS26

If we fused our minds (perish the thought) there wouldn't be "everyone" any more, just one big ME. There would be no "greater good", only MY good. And who would ever remind the great ME to waste less than vast amounts of time on trivial matters? Nobody. There would be no one else.

I like my infinitesimally small me. You do your unplugged, unfused, fenced off, small-minded thing, and I'll do mine. If, by chance we should have an occasional, tentative, guarded, quite limited meeting of our small minds, that is beautiful. If not, it can't be helped. And besides, mind-melds are not to be desired too often. It's what drives Vulcans crazy.

Ask the Borg how vulnerable hive minds can be. (They were not assimilated. Their resistance was futile. They were destroyed.) Humans turned the Borg hive mind against itself. Which is what would happen to our hive mind in short order.

I'm not familiar with von Bingen, and I'm not sure what your argument is, in regards to her. The music sounds great, reminds me of gregorian chant, etc. But I'm not sure what you're arguing. — Noble Dust

What I'm arguing (and apparently not very well) is that music didn't evolve from Bingen (12th century) to say, Palestrina (16th century), or from Palestrina to Bach (overlapping 17th & 18th century). In between Bingen and Bach were a batch of composers, immersed below the horizons of their time (they couldn't hear what was coming next), each bringing a set of talents to the demands of the occasion -- what the king wanted to hear, how long the bishop wanted the mass to go on, what interested The People, whoever the people were that had to be pleased. This is still the case: Musicians coming to the task at hand with whatever they've got between their ears, and whatever music their ears pick up.

The Four Seasons is a piece I've always had a soft spot for — Noble Dust

Everybody has a soft spot for The Four Seasons, judging by how often Public Radio plays it. I thought it was pure heaven when I first heard it 50+ years ago, but after 1000 times, the charm is wearing off.

I like Ravel, but if I never heard Bolero again, it wouldn't be too soon. Also played to death.

Have you heard Eric Satie's Gymnopédies, written in the late 1880s? Very laid back mood music; he called it 'musical furniture'. The late 1800s early 1900s witnessed some very striking artistic experimentation and innovation in music and the representational arts.



Your collection of Ravel, Messiaen, Glass, and Radiohead was quite good. The Radiohead video reminded me of Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater who uses these very big puppets that look like that.

Honestly, you seem to have created a convenient straw-man for me, based on your own musical tastes here. — Noble Dust

Oh, actually, I can't stand to listen to very much of Bingen and there are large stretches of Bach that I find terminally boring. I picked Bingen because her music is so old and intact. It was just a starting point. Bach is a mountain, so he's hard to miss. But for that general period, I like Haydn, Mozart, and Handel far better.

And for contemporary pop music, I missed the boat on a lot of it the first time around, and have just recently discovered some of the stuff (as an old man) that has been famous for decades.

What seems to happen isn't so much "evolution" as "mining the past for current material". The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britton (20th century) was based on a piece by Henry Purcell, 17th century. Britton went back and got it, Purcell didn't evolve. Same thing with black music and rock and roll.

there's no "wrong" in art, there's only evolution. — Noble Dust

I disagree that art evolves. It doesn't evolve in the same way that sculpture, poetry or literature doesn't evolve.

Hildegard of Bingen--1098-1179; German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath--(sample below) worked in the milieu available to her-- Monastic chant. She brought her own creative process to the occasion of creating music or some other art form , which is what every artist does.

She is a one-off movement, mostly because almost no music survived from her day, and for several centuries after. Bach also composed in a particular milieu, and his imprint on music is much too big to count as "evolution". The same can be said for most composers who we mark as 'the greats'.

And there is 'wrong' in art, or so musicians tell me. Haydn's scores are polished, because Haydn's position gave him time to perfect. Mozart, on the other hand, was frequently rushed, under pressure, short of funds, and so on. His scores have rough passages (so I am told).

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) Didn't evolve from Hildegard or Johan Sebastion; his music is clearly 19th century, but he is a forerunner of jazz. Jazz didn't evolve from Gottschalk, he didn't cause jazz to happen, he just composed music which--looking back--has some aspects of early jazz.

So, Hildegard, Bach, Gottschalk, Adele: What evolutionary development do you see here?

Marinetti — csalisbury

G r i m.

We only have what survived. What we have of classical literature, philosophy, history, and so on is thought to be a small fragment of what was produced in that period of what, a thousand years? The Loeb Classical Library fits into a bookcase. There are less than 600 titles in all. If the entire corpus of ancient writing were suddenly to be discovered, it's hard to tell what we would then think of the Greeks and Romans.

Marble and bronze survived better than glass, leather, fabric, and the like. Whether the bird-glass is vernacular or high art, I don't know, and without a lot more samples, one wouldn't be able to tell. There is a range of glass pieces, some of them plain, some of them very elegant or fancy. My guess is that the Roman riff raff were not swilling cheap wine from anything like the bird glass.

If the bird-glass is quotidian, it still requires much the same technology as high art. Modern 'art glass' and glassware from IKEA both require much the same technology too. Some glassware dug out of Martin Luther's parents' midden from 600 years ago (+/-), where presumably it ended up because it wasn't valuable, looks like nice modern stemware (in shape, thickness, etc.). Maybe they had far better glasses to drink out of, but we don't have them.

I read in the Great Somewhere that the Egyptians maintained a very strict horizontal to vertical proportion in their burial chamber hieroglyphics for maybe a thousand years or two. The wall-covering script, was 'artful' but maybe not 'art'. The artisans were expected to not innovate, and techniques were devised to assure conformity to ancient norms.

Western pages of script, whether manuscript or print, have conformed to certain conventions for a long time too. It makes sense to standardize the width of a column, the amount of space between lines, the height vs. width of letters, and so forth -- apart from purely decorative features. There's a bit of art to it, but a lot of service to the needs of the human eye. Of course, a page is not the same as a large wall.

a glass is not Julius or Augustus Cesear — TimeLine

Curses, foiled again.

You have reduced the history into a mere object so no, it is not just a glass. It is a gateway to understanding what people were like 1900 years ago. — TimeLine

My apologies to the Romans. A display of common objects from Pompeii (fish hooks to frying pans)--and Pompeii itself or any other contemporary site--shows their handling of the material world was about the same as modern peoples'. That alone can shock our sensibilities. "What! They solved these problems 2000 years ago?"

On the other hand, Greco-Roman religion is more of a challenge to us militant monotheists. To us, the improper Priapus, the child of Dionysus and Aphrodite (who had their own weird origins) presents something of a challenge to understand. As an unreliable prick joke, we can understand him well enough; but as a god he had other functions aside from simple up-front fertility, or so I read somewhere, and that makes him more complicated. All the gods back then seemed to have had multiple personalities.

Greco-Roman politics, like Greco-Roman material culture, is not too hard to understand, once you have a cheat-sheet and Cliff Notes in hand. What's his name--Publicus Toiletus?--was governor over West Felafel during whose reign...

Many of the familiar elements of which organisms are constituted (excepting hydrogen, which was present in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, along with much more limited amounts of other trace elements such as helium and lithium IIRC) are formed by nuclear fusion in the cores of stars (the all-important carbon atom, for instance, is produced by jamming together 3 helium nuclei in the "triple alpha" process). Only the heaviest atoms (which include, as you note, gold) are produced in supernovae. — Arkady

Thanks for providing this correction -- it has been squirreled away for future reference.

We can look back to antiquity in architecture, the visual arts, literature and philosophy. For music, our furthest reach is a small collection of work going back to roughly the first millennium. Earlier than 1000 AD, there just isn't much trace, and what there is requires a great deal of sleuthing to reconstruct it. Some people have attempted to recreate Roman and Greek music (It's interesting, but who the hell knows whether it has a shred of validity?).

Classical work I feel holds it's reverence just because it's so original. — River

Maybe. Is it so 'original' or is it just the earliest example we have? Take a look at Roman glass. It's quite beautiful, at least in some cases. But form followed function for a lot of Roman glass, just as it does for contemporary glass. A cup a person can drink out of needs a certain shape. Romans didn't appreciate wine dribbling down their chin onto their clean clothes either, so their utensils needed to fit the human mouth, just like modern ones do. They decorated their utensils with motifs they liked, just as we do--but different motifs.

This Roman drinking glass was made about 1900 years ago. Nice. But... a glass is a glass is a glass.

"Classical Music" per se belongs to a specific period: roughly, the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Mozart and Haydn are the quintessential "classical" composers, with Beethoven being a bridge from the classical period into the Romantic Period. Compare Beethoven's symphony #1 with #9. In common parlance, classical music tends to mean "serious orchestral and choral music" including solo works for organ, piano, duets, trios, quartets, quintets, opera, oratorios, masses, requiems, and so on, written anytime between 1000 and 2017.

Is "Classical Music" any better than Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, or late 19th/early 20th century music written for orchestra? No, but it's definitely not the same.

One way to get at fascist values (as opposed to socialist values, or capitalist values, or democratic values...) is to taste the aesthetics of a regime. What do the uniforms look like? What style of march-step is used by the troops on parade? What sort of theatrics surround official events?

Perhaps there was something just "German" or Northwestern European about the torchlight parades at Nuremberg, presided over by Herr Hitler; maybe it wasn't all fascist. Germanic and Scandinavian people seem to like bonfires and nighttime rituals. It's difficult to imagine a Nuremberg kind of event in Washington. Similarly, I can't quite see British troops goose-stepping in front of the Queen.

Marches have a lot in common wherever they are written, but the Germans excelled at it. What does a movement's flag look like?

upper, Italian Fascist Party flag (the 'thing' on the flag is the 'fasces" -- a bundle and an axe)



The Nazi flag was red, black, and white, with the swastika. Is there something more threatening about red, black, and white than green, white and orange? Or red, white, and blue? Or red and yellow?

Red, white, and blue, of course, isn't exactly a Quaker color combination. Lots of military adventures have been undertaken under those colors.

How about the totenkopf on SS uniforms? (The SS wasn't the first to use the death head.)

If we can keep our government from meddling too much in our economy — Ashwin Poonawala

if we can find a way to restrain extreme greed — Ashwin Poonawala

We need to make the wealth distribution more just — Ashwin Poonawala

We can make the distribution of wealth more just, and greed can be restrained (not eliminated). But it will require government meddling in the economy. Tax law has aided and abetted the maldistribution of wealth and tax law will need to be changed to amend the maldistribution of wealth.

In the first place, business benefits a great deal from government meddling --

establishing fair trade practices
regulating trade (rationalizing it)
establishing something like a sort-of-level field
regulating competition
providing protection from foreign interference
providing essential infrastructure (ports, railroads, canals, airports, highways, etc.)

and so on. As Marx put it, "The government is a committee to organize the affairs of the bourgeoisie.

What? I'm typing in a phone — Mongrel

Why don't you use an app to dictate? The Google app is quite good. It's the 21st century, and all. Also, sorry you are stuck inside the phone. You should get out more.

But I think the 'warm little pond' type of neo-darwinism, which imagines life as a kind of chemical reaction that then gets elaborated by the 'darwinian algorithm' is a hopeless over-simplification. — Wayfarer

I don't think Darwin applies to the beginning of life, which before it becomes life is only chemistry.

Right, the warm slop in a ditch theory seems to not be the best bet, just because there is probably not enough going on in the hole, not enough energy, not enough chemical activity. Lately (maybe because it's just "hotter") the super-heated deep see vents are a preferred bet.

The deep sea vent bet is that all these chemicals and intense heat provided both raw material and sufficient energy to make something happen. The life that resulted would have derived it's energy from the active chemicals in the water, like sulfur. It wouldn't be very much like the carbon cycle bacteria of a later age. But it would be alive, reproducing, growing.

Don't ask me how. Don't know.

But... how do you know the Big Bango is dubious and inadequate. You got something better? (I certainly don't -- but then, Hoyle's Steady State theory would be fine by me.)

Fred Hoyle got a bad reputation because he was (presumably) wrong about the "big bang". He preferred the "steady state theory". It isn't like he came up with one idea in his life that happened to be wrong. He was a notable thinker.

Panspermia is an attractive theory from several POV, but it doesn't solve the problem of how organic molecules (like methane and a bunch of other ones) became life. Some process which we have not grasped took place which combined non-living matter in such a way, over time, that it could reproduce its simple 'self'.