You get the point, I think. Though I'm sure you'll be able to find a way to explain it all away. But I say there's no smoke without fire. — S

Can you use another term instead of "racism"? It does seem to imply that "Mexican" is a race, "Muslim" is a race, and "illegal immigrant" is a separate race too. Perhaps you mean Trump wants to filter out people who don´t have the level of civilization (democratic values, respect for secular Law, respect for human rights, and the abstract thinking skills required to understand those notions) that is required to live in a civilized society; and people who try to enter the U.S. illegally. Leave races for Indianapolis I recommend!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVKpM6d3xow

There´s too much soy and too little animal fat in this conversation to produce smart brain outcomes. I quit it.

but going vegan doesn´t prevent systematic and deliberate killing and torturing of animals; I suggest you visit an organic farm and ask the farmers what they do to make sure they have a good harvest. If you really want to prevent animal suffering, you need to eat only fruits from trees that have grown naturally in natural parks. Other than that, an inmense amout of animal suffering is implied; going veg will only restrict the suffering to animals that don´t look like potential cute pets.

The definition of religion is inadequate, if communism is not in it. We must not define social realities from inside the discourse that those phenomena use to live and prosper. It is possible that our popular definitions of religion are too contaminated from religious discourse.

For me, it makes no sense to distinguish between political and religious discourses. For example, up to the seventeenth century or later, all ideologies had some religious ground; if you read the Torah with Iron Age eyes, you will discover that is a very political pamphlet: a monarchy with its clergy that aspired to control the Levant and be independent from Persia and Egypt (which they eventually achieved for two centuries before the Romans). If you started a political movement, say, in the VII century, you would include at least one god in the discourse because it was addressed to people who could not conceive power without being sanctioned by some daemonic figure.
Nowadays, neither new religions nor new political movements have a total need for a personal, angry or loving, deity; because there is more than a critical mass of people with abstract thinking. Even so, all social movements tend to develop "religious" traits that will increase over time. North Korea is closer and closer to call his piggy leader the Son of God.

Communism is teleological, it has a symbolic metanarrative, all kind of symbols and rituals and texts that are more than texts, and idealized personalities. It doesn´t just organize economic life, but also culture and the very way people think and feel and behave about themselves and family and friends. What more is needed to call it a religion? It´s both a religion and a political movement, just like Christianity, Judaism and Islamism. Or like Feminism or Nationalism.

So, it's all stages of expanding awareness. We begin with ourselves - not killing each other. Then we begin to feel for animals - we become vegetarians. This is followed by recognizing the value of the eco-system - we become environmentally friendly. — TheMadFool

Where, in this process of expanded awareness, does rational thinking play a part? Or is it all feelings and emotions? Because without rational and experimental efforts, there is no ethical behaviour.

Personally, I care about Life; surely less than other people, but I do my bit. I love farm animals, and that is why I try to eat them all; except for goats and cows that I only like for the milk. I just don´t want them to disappear, not even already endangered local varieties. I also support bullfighting, even if I don´t like corridas, because I understood rationally that without bull fighting there are no lidia bulls. And the places where these amazing animals live would be under much greater pressure to be full of houses.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HIQnVtu5ng8/S4WD45OaufI/AAAAAAAAA0M/-n3UcUAOJOU/s640/Veletos.jpg

the human soul is all the sum of all the contents of our metaphysical selves. The culture, the spiritual, our values, symbols, rituals, our tastes, beliefs, notions, ways of behaving, relationships. Everything that makes human kind possible but it is invisible.
I tried to guess an emotional activation as the cause of you failing to understand what I wrote after reading it, It was not an insult or anything S.

For example when I write: "To call for much better treatment of animals and plants that are part of us is very easy to defend ethically; for their own good and ours" you somehow understood: "The human "soul" (whatever the heck you mean by that) requires us to lock up billions of animals in over-crowded factories, torture them their whole lives, and then slit their throats?".

I agree with that line of thought, but do you realize that it does not need to be restricted to fire arms, but to all possible tools and technologies that can be used for harm? If we ban guns because they can be used to kill people, and they are indeed; for the very same reason and more scary stats to support it, we should ban motor vehicles. And kitchen knives (people in London, the capital of knife crimes, will know what I mean). And we need to ban stock markets, as they are used to commit much graver crimes each day that anything you can do with a gun or a knife. This might lead us all the way back to the trees, so there must be other way.

My solution is: to restrict the use of tools that are dangerous to people and places that minimize the risk; for example, only clinically sane people that never were convicted of violent crimes should have them, and not on the streets but in their homes or cars. Religious and political books that advocate violence and hate (Quran, Mein kampff, Comunist Manifesto...) should only be read by people who have critical skills and sufficient cognitive abilities to understand that they are bad, and not by children or ignorant people without those personal defenses. This really means that adults have no right to force these pamphlets on vulnerable people, meaning young children, people with psychological ailments and the iliterate.

The bottom line is that any tool or power in our hands, must go together with the power and responsibility to use it for good and not to harm others or oneself. The advocates of a religion, must prove that their texts and rituals are safe to use by the people are directed to; and they lose the "right" to express that religion (or political ideology) as soon as what they do is not in accordance with the ethical standard of a society.
On the other hand, cults that are ready to prove that they are good for society should be permitted and welcome; for example I think that Wiccans are more good than harm, or Quakers with their eight Peace Nobel prizes (so far).

you haven´t read my comment, but an imaginary comment concocted by your mind. This is probably due to an excessive emotional implication; I suffer it myself when I discuss the future of my country with Spanish globalists, I find difficult to understand them because "what they are supposed to mean" interferes with my comprehension.

In this case, there is nothing in the real comment requiring over-crowded factories, which disgust me, and nothing about slitting throats. I advocate ethical farming and legal procedures to sacrifice animals, that in Europe (except for Muslim slaughterhouses) exclude blades and knifes entirely. The legal procedure is to let animal calm down, then put them to sleep, and electrocution. The animals (except for the Islamic slaughter houses, and illegal slaughtering) in Europe are not supposed to feel pain or hear other animal suffer when they are sacrificed, for ethical reasons and also for purely industrial reasons (the organoleptic properties of the meat are impaired by animal stress; and bloody killing makes higiene standards more expensive to keep).

https://ec.europa.eu/food/animals/welfare_en

Ethical farming is not so expensive, if we are prepared to eat less meat and more dairy and pulses, and we find local providers. I´m very lucky to have an ALDI supermarket in my quarter, for they have all kind of organic items and they are very cheap.

Veganism is partly a consequence of considering the animal kingdom as a collection of Pokemon trading cards, as early biologists and pseudobiologists like Darwin taught us to do (Darwin himself was a great collector).

However, the truth is that farm animals, pet animals and pest animals are all part of the human phenomenon, just like the trillions of unicellular and pluricellular beings living inside and all over our bodies. What makes us human, biologically, spiritually, socially, can not be explained without them.

For that reason, to stop our relationship with them, that is: to let them go extinct, is equivalent to mutilate further the human event. A dog is not a species: a dog is the wolf structure incorporated to the human system. A pig is not a species: a pig is the boar structure that has changed to become part of our digestive system, just like we are part of his extended family and his feeding and reproductive systems.

To call for much better treatment of animals and plants that are part of us is very easy to defend ethically; for their own good and ours. However, veganism is not ethically sound as it implies the destruction of a huge part of the human phenomenon and the human soul, incarnated in these life forms and the ways in which we engage with them culturally and personally. Plus, they also contribute to the wider phenomenon of the biosphere producing organic supplies to countless other species, and also DNA memory.

An individual can be a vegan and it might be a good thing, as more vegans means less demand of animal products in our critically overpopulated world; however, society as a whole can not be vegan entirely, if the values of life, identity and compassion are to be preserved.

Why aren´t these things obvious?

3. "It´s only immoral to cause pain to innocent organisms when there are viable alternatives" is my favourite. Sometimes pain and heavy torture is the most ethical available option; like when doctors and nurses need to puncture, drug, cut, and burn us when we are ill. If the alternative is death, we are ready to praise the application of a number of terrible medical tortures inflicted on the most innocent child.

There´s no harvest without suffering. We do not need to discover pain in plants; growing vegetables and fruit for food means an inmense amount of suffering, killing and expelling animals from the places where they can feed and reproduce: birds, snails, all kind of insects, frogs, moles and other small mammals, reptiles. Even the most organic farm has to do away with many of them, and that implies who knows how many little tragedies for these beings that, it has been proved, experience fear and pain subjectively.

Fortunately, most of those animals are not potential pets so vegans don´t give a shit about them; otherwise they´d all have to commit suicide.

Personally, I have adapted my own garden to maximize the presence of birds and invertebrates. I´m especially fond of spiders, and I have been able to spot 20 different species so far in my small garden (not all of them resident, as spiders can fly long distances).

A word, in my understanding, is defined by the use in context that speakers of a language apply; its meaning is not derived from entries in dictionaries, and that is why with most of the words we use, we never had to look them up. If an alien doing ethnographic research tried to find out what white, racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, fascist, ableist actually mean when humans use these words in context, he´d probably report that they are all different ways of saying "shut up! you have no right to say what you think!"; and the choice of one or another would be determined by how a person looks; in similar fashion to how we choose to say lunch, dinner or supper depending not on the content of the meal itself, but the orientation of the Earth in relation to its star.

We can do this experiment: ask an Artificial Intelligence program to guess what those words mean, without official definitions, only by how they are used in real contexts.

I think it is better to talk about what Trump does or doesn´t and explain why we think is wise or unwise to follow that path, and what we would do instead, and why is a better option.

thank you, I did not know how to do it!

If you mean communist mass killings in Russia (gulags, purges...) or in Republican side of Spanish war (checas), it is true they were atheistic, but still very religious. Communism is a religion proper, another Judeo-Christian spin-off yet where the "Chosen people" was redefined in political terms, and "the Promised Land conquest", that in the Biblical (entirely mythical fortunately) account involved the systematic genocide of Canaanites; is in communism called Revolution. The idea that the definition of religion requires a personal God is a religious undestanding of this sociocultural phenomenon; but a scientific and rational study of Religion must include cults that don´t use the word "God" in their programming discourse, when they fulfill all the requirements of religions as social institutions and symbolic structures. If Socialism survives one more century, it will look very much like Islamism, that also started as a political ideology. In fact, Judaism itself was more political than religious in the beginning, and "kings who sinned against Yahweh" in the Bible are those kings that did not follow this political program, with disregard of their personal morality.

It´s human nature. So to be really atheistic, you have to be: an individual separated from the mass, and understand that your own religious beliefs are not the ultimate truth. All spiritual leaders are atheistic at some stage: Zoroaster, Jesus, Paul, Buddha: they all had to reject energetically the gods they were told to believe and doubt of their own beliefs, to reach a point where they could communicate with phenomenal reality with new rules and images.

If I have flaws in reasoning I do want to know; it´s obvious I have failed in detecting them. What is "my kind of violence"? I have not defended any kind of violence in any post.

Then you must simply not be looking hard enough. Hmm, what possible similarities could there be between a white, male, racist, xenophobic, authoritarian-style leader, with a penchant for hyperbole and inflammatory rhetoric, and who calls the media the enemy of the people, and Hitler?

Are you serious S? White is a colour, like the skin of albino types in Africa that are killed to perform traditional African rites. Trump´s skin is not exactly that colour. Perhaps you mean he looks European? Like Hitler, but also like Einstein or Erasmus of Rotterdam or Marion Cotillard or Rafa Nadal? Male is a sexual condition, that Trump shares with half of our species (and many other species). We must need males, or Mother Nature would not make that huge investment. Racist means nothing, like xenophobic. These are words that don´t describe reality, they are only a stone thrown at people. Authoritarian-style is one possible style of management, perfectly legal and acceptable so far as it is carried out under the law. As for hyperbole and inflammatory rhetoric; in comparison with whom? Who do you think, among the politicians and communicators criticizing Trump today, is moderate and conciliatory?

Hitler was vegetarian, had a taste for classical music, believed in protecting natural parks with laws, and like Walt Disney or myself, loved Bavaria. What do we say to people who share these interests with the ultimate evil dictator? Are they suspicious? S, please do not use reductio ad hitlerum. It´s not a rational argument.

that comment was not a call to shoot anybody. If you go to the original quote in context, it was a mere use of exageration (the basis of humour together with irony) to express how loyal was his electorade. If you remove the context and the human faculty for communicating and understanding humour, yes, it is horrible!

All presidents have showed some sense of humour, and that´s something very commendable about the U.S.A. presidential institution.

the two things I most like about Trump, is that he prevented Clinton from being president; and also his sense of humour. I totally love sense of humour in people who are under huge pressure; it tells me that they are intelligent and rational. Not sarcasm and vitriolic insults to prompt "yes, me too hate who you hate", but real humour. Trump has a sense of self-deprecating humour that I find very civilized.

the positive influences of Christianity are endless. Also the negative ones; simply because Christianity is the channel and network that the West end of Civilization used to survive invasions and prosper. It could have been reformed mythraism, or some other ideology. Christianity was the national religion of the united country that Europe would have become if it did not have so many enemies inside and outside.

All good and bad things about Christianity, are good and bad things of European and Western culture. The Left hates Christianity or anything that attacks Christian and Post-Christian culture, because they recognize this connection. For some reason, they don´t realize that the Left itself is a Post-Christian sect. Christian churches have their political leanings; for example, in the Catholic Church, if you believe in God but not the Church, you may join base communities (like I did in my time). If you believe in both God and the Church, you can join Opus dei for example. If you believe in the Church but not God, you may like "Theology of Liberation" groups; and if you believe in neither God nor the Church, you can join Jesuit ranks like Pope Francisco.

These different political groups were translated to the secular society; with Protestant Europe contributing their own.

We don´t really know why Socrates was sentenced. Plato is not a good reporter; he was a fan and he also had a powerful imagination. It might be that Socrates did spread harmful and nihilistic notions to the young, like some influencers do today.

All holy books have good advice about being better humans. They all contain the high points of human wisdom or they would not have been reserved. The bible says things like we should forgive people their debts in 7 years. This does not apply to 30 year contracts, but we might apply it to debts that were not an agreed on contract? Giving a person a clean start is one of the most humane things we can do for each other. It boosts the spirit of love and I think that is important. - Athena

Okay, the institution of the Jubilee did not only applied to 7 years cycles, there were also major jubilees every 50 years if my memory is right; the purpose of these periodical redemptions was to help to prevent inequality; or stress that the only inequality that mattered was to either be part of the new national identity or social contract, or remain a gentile. Jews have always had this idea that they are all equals before God, that was adopted by Christian and Gnostic New Age cults. It is easy to see how this notion, that was not Egyptian, that was not Greek or Roman, helped to create the ideology behind Democracy.

It does not mean, as Jews think, that ideas of equality before the law or democracy are Jewish contributions to Civilization. More realistic and closer to the truth, would be to understand that the Mediterranean melting pot (Judaism is a Mediterranean, "European" religion, and not a Semite or Oriental religion as Jews believe) brewed new ways of understanding society that were universal; it´s a Post-Alexander world where the polis or the ethnic nation was no longer the axis of culture and society, but a new Cosmopolitan basin communicated with fast ships and Roman vias, and the alphabet.

Globalization made possible global religions and identities. A Thousand years later, Spanish queen Elizabeth decreed that all "Indian" peoples of any colour, culture or language discovered would be Spanish subjects, with the same rights that Spaniards enjoyed. Spain did NOT have colonies, but provinces, with representatives that had the same voice and vote in Spain affairs as people from Madrid or Barcelona. This revolutionary understanding was based on the strong Catholic (Catholic means universal) foundation of the new Spain "we are all God´s Children", and inspired philosophers in Spain that tried to defend these equalitarian ideas when Spain was the most influential cultural power in both Europe and America. Also Jews expelled from Spain helped to spread these ideas across Europe with the help of freemason logias, particularly in England and France. Roman philosophers such as Cicero and Seneca, were considered "divinely inspired" and their ideas about Civitas and Law continued inspiring Europe.
So the point is, yes, Judaism, Christianism played a huge role in developing Democracy as we understand it, as they served as vessels of ideas of citizenship and universal human dignity that were unknown to Plato or Socrates, but became widespread during the cultural revolutions of the first centuries of the Age of Piscis in the Mediterranean and the Near East.

he should be mentioned every single time we hear "feminist science" or "post-colonial science", or "gender studies."

curiously enough, one of Lysenko´s pals, A.I. Oparin, gave us in 1936 the Coacervate Theory that is very important I believe to understand the transition between mineral and biological evolution, and possibly to help Carl Sagan´s ex-wife explain how first eukariotic cells came to be. So even in the darkest places sometimes there is light...

but what of its all important message that goodness is great and evil is condemnable? -It can be argued that´s one the worst parts about religion: the reification of good and evil as objective realities, and not context-related subjective appraisals of given actions and processes, in relation to the current state of the values of a person or collective.

Hitchens is right in many things he said about religion; however, the definition of religion he applied was very restrictive, and only accounts for what I personally call book cults in the Age of Piscis, from the Bible to Puranas and all literal literary idolatries in between. Many of these books are good readings; but none of them deserves a cult and much less, to see Reality through their strange lenses.

However, the phenomenon of Religion is much larger and complex. So much so, that Religion is not really optional for human beings: it´s inherent to Man* and to have a soul. Social groups that don´t follow literary or superstitious religions, still need religion; they just don´t call it so. All the rituals, symbols, foundational myths, special days, family meals, parades and walks in the park with the dog are religious in nature and required for the functioning of social bonds, social institutions and personal balance. But Hitchens apparently preferred to call "religion" just to literary cults; and among them, pseudo-monotheistic religions such as Christianism or Judaism and personality cults such as Islamism. Might it be he was really unaware of basic understandings of religion in Sociology and Anthropology?

*Contrary to what feminists say due to their ignorance, the use of "Man" to refer to human kind is not "sexist" or "discriminatory". Man was used to refer to humanity in the English language before it was used to refer to males of the species; and it comes from an Ancient root that also gave us Manu, the first man (the first people) in Hindu stories. Man is therefore a proper way to refer to both men and women when you only want to speak of "all people belonging to the hu-man species".

Indeed. Unless you can detect anomalies with Kepler´s orbits, that might be the case; I know nothing about astronomy but surely there are people here who do.
By the way, Newton perhaps has been given more credit than he really deserved. The laws were already discussed in his circle; all he did was to undertake the task of giving them a mathematical framework, as a holiday project. Newton was the real Sheldon Cooper; and his colleagues let him take the credit in return for doing all that boring math.

"Elaborating the concept in The Antichrist, Nietzsche asserts that Christianity, not merely as a religion but also as the predominant moral system of the Western world, inverts nature, and is "hostile to life". As "the religion of pity", it elevates the weak over the strong, exalting that which is "ill-constituted and weak" at the expense of that which is full of life and vitality."

Is this a Nietzschean influence on Hitler, or is it an influence of the ideology of the time, in part determined by freemasons in London, through Darwin´s books, on both Nietzsche and Hitler (who read Darwin, like millions of European did)?

Freemason ideas, as they are related to Gnostic and Luciferian concepts, consider that the real purpose of History (including Natural History) is to create humans and turn humans into god-like beings. In the Victorian Era, they were able to impose these occultic dogmas on Natural Sciences, particularly Biology, that still suffers a lot from this historical diversion from proper science.

Erasmus Darwin, C.Darwin´s grandad, who belonged to the Lodge of Cannongate Kilwinning of Scotland; was very acquainted with the development of a new science in its time in France, called "Evolution" (A word that Charles Darwin was later adviced to include in the fourth edition of "The Origin of Species").

French naturalists discovered that geology and fossilized shells and bones allowed us to experimentally study the changes of Life through time, that in Aristotle´s time could only be considered speculatively and the occasional fossil. The idea that all living beings are part of a single process, in which what we now call complexity and memory is passed on from previous forms to more advanced forms through natural mechanisms, resonated in this mason as something he could reconcile with his Luciferian mindset, by which matter is awakened, freed and allowed to become divine. Erasmus wrote about all this in prose and poetry, and linked it with this mason teachings of the arrival of a "god-like" man. For example, in Zoonomia: “The world has been evolved, not created: it has arisen little by little from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity of the elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than come into being at an almighty word.”

Oh my God! Our deist forefathers must be turning over in their graves because education for technology leaves moral training to the church and we no longer have a clue what moral judgment has to do with science and logic. Athena

It is true that Education for Citizenship is paramount. We can not be just biological parts of machinery and bureaucracy. The problem to have education for citizenship proper, is that first we need to have common values and the idea of citizenship very clear. I agree that reading the Classics would help; it might feel that Latin and Greek authors are too far from our Modern societies, but they are the authors the people who shaped our world read and study carefully, both secular and spiritual leaders; and not so long ago, they´d do it in the original Latin and Greek, something I was lucky enough to experience myself in our state high school. Citizenship for example, is the Roman concept of Civitas as Cicero explained it. Plus, you have the advantage of checking in history books if their political and philosophical ideas really worked or were fiascoes.

Science and Religion can not be separated. That was a historical mistake! Science has no soul and Religion has no brain. We have a Faustean, fascist Science and religions that are simply crazy. Schizophrenia. XX and XXI centuries.

the movie was not too bad. I propose to follow the course on Magic, Religion and Science that UCLA uploaded to youtube some years ago. The lecturer is amazing; apparently she left teaching to do comedy; but she´s very intelligent and knowledgeable and explains the concepts very well. She wears different hats so that we can find the lessons more easily. There is a bibliography to follow the course more in depth. I propose to watch the episodes and comment on the selected texts she mentions in them. Really interesting!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Zx-qcNZf4

(without embracing the Right) DiegoT
Lol! You're kidding yourself if you believe that. Your right wing views stand out like a sore thumb. And you seem much more like the UKIP type than the Tory type. More radical, outspoken, knee-jerk views, than moderate, tactful, considered.
It might seem the case for you, but it isn´t actually. It so happens that I have a very personal trait that saves me from what you fear might be happening to my political standpoint; let´s leave it at that. I do concede that I´m too outspoken and speak like a jerk sometimes.

not just probably...The president of Podemos is a presenter in the Spanish version of Iran Tv, Hispan Tv. In theory it is illegal; but Spain is not strong enough anymore to enforce law on political parties, as we were twenty years ago when terrorist party HB, that told ETA what politicians were to be killed, was made illegal. Spain is in the most difficult situation since 1975. Not as bad as France, but the U.S. seems like a peaceful haven politically (in comparison).

I´m not sure about your background hypothesis. People arrive to the same idea or candidate from very different origins, sometimes with motives that are very personal or local, and the media representations of voters are very stereotypical and simple and only good for easy comedy. This said, what we all suffer are the infamous filter bubbles where different people end up thinking the same and recognizing the same (fictional) reality. A.I. and social media have multiplied this trend until make us all prisoners of our own minds. I do not have social media anymore; not even a messenger. Only emails and forums like this where you can still confront different views, and little by little I´m trying to make my own representation of the real world and cut the strings.

Please do not care about "my background"; only care about my arguments that are sometimes more right than wrong, other times more wrong than right.

Science is the Lying Game. A good lie must mix facts with the lie; and it must really hard to expose. In Sweden they give annually the prizes to the best lies of the year. Isaac Newton invented a lie that was only exposed four centuries later, that is why we consider him one of the greatest scientists in History. When you expose a great lie, you get to try to say another whopper; and Einstein took advantage of this rule to tell his own lies. They were so damn good they gave him the Swedish trophy as the best fabrication in Chemistry. Many physicists today dream of exposing Einstein´s relativistic lie; but it´s hard because Einstein was so good a concocting falsehood. Karl Popper helped to improve the Lying Game by introducing new rules.

The Earth is only approximately spherical, and it isn´t spherical at all if upper or lower dimensions are considered. Popper´s new rules help to make clear that there is always a greater lie, one that involves ever greater chunks of Reality; and the new horizons force us to see the old facts under new light. For example, some liars in Physics are telling us now that dimensions are not fundamental; at least not the third and upper dimensions. This would imply that the Earth is only round in our sensory experience, but not really.

— BBC News (The top provider of fake news in the U.K.) is a good source of irrational slogans to be exposed. We are all to blame, right and left, for the separation of economy from reality and its construction as a metaphysical discourse. Philosophers in particular should try harder to explain society why Economics as it is understood in the last centuries is not a real science, and belongs with Astrology, Homeopathy and Oscars nominations.

For example: you can not assume that all people coming to a country are a homogeneous group, where everybody contributes equally and in the same direction to society. Precisely the point of defending borders and expelling illegal immigrants, is to discriminate which people will have a positive impact and are worth taking in, from those that will be a burden or even a factor of instability and will increase crime, that we need to keep out at all costs. You can not put together a legal applicant from Spain who dreams of giving the U.S. another Nobel Prize like astrophysicist Ignacio Ugarte-Urra with, say, a man who comes illegally, doesn´t speak English and who has ten children and two wives and three goats in his country that he hopes to bring to the U.S when he´s legalized. Not discriminating and not selecting among the very different people who wants to come is unjust, unwise, and suicidal in the long term.
I

Sartre befriended and helped to bring international support to Cuban revolutionaries while they were torturing and killing homosexuals and non-communists in detention camps, and spent happy times with a terrorist leader called Ché Guevara, the man who said "I confess I like to kill". They also approved of Soviet regime in Russia. Ugly frog Sartre took virginity from teen girls that her feminist wife brought to him from her school, until she was banned from teaching. Sartre was a fraud, a hypocrite, and a pederast. What can we learn from this terrible man? I´d rather read Homer Simpson´s quotes. Also, his philosophical ideas are just bullshit; they are poor interpretations of Hegel, and generalizations about human nature derived from thinking about her cold-gazed psychopath soul-mate Simone and their life together.

Isaac Asimov, the XXth century Jules Verne that wrote about issues like energy crisis, robots taking our lives, the fall of democracy...before it was cool, had this famous interview in 1964 in which he was asked what he thought the world fifty years later would be like. Some quotes:

. "The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders."

"All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology, will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary 'Fortran.'"

"Mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!'

If we change ordinary boredom for lack of purpose and healthy ways to build a meaningful vital project, the quote makes a lot of sense to us I think. Especially for males, as men were the ones bringing the bread home and taking pride in their tough professions and capacity as economic providers. Three out of four suicides are male, both in the U.S. and Europe (that is why feminists never talk about suicide, the first cause of death in people under 35, as a social problem) and the suicides peak at the teen age and with men beyond their fifties (that is, when professional prospects are the worst for job seekers).

I´m not the one to claim the validity of laws from the Iron Age in our XXI century. They are all barbaric, and only Muslims nowadays accept them and that is why they bring with them child marriage, acceptables ways of disciplining disobedient wives, killing or imprisoning apostates, and so on. Many of these norms were already crazy in Roman citizen´s eyes, and Romans crucified people.

I agree with you that there was a level of arbitrariness and above all, lack of proportion in the penalties: this is in part resulting from adapting Mesopotamian Law and the Purity norms of priesthood, making them eternal offences to God that no punishment can really expiate, and not just human affairs with proportional penalties.

This said, consider how the Bible is really a good collection of books from different periods of History, from late Bronze Age to Late Hellenistic and Roman times. The "you should not suffer a witch to live" quote, might have to do (I really don´t know, we´d need to check with an expert) with editions done during Josiah´s reforms, that gave us Deutero-nomy or "Second Law", where even the Ten Commandments were changed. In this legal reformation I believe, human sacrifice was for the first time prohibited, even sacrifices made for Yahweh. It might be that witchcraft was suspicious of maintaining this tradition, that were also being expurgated from other regions of the Mediterranean in the time. Also, consider how hexes were considered real; if you believe in supernatural entities, why not believe in supernatural spells and hexes? and therefore the practice of witchcraft was consider dangerous for people and a threat to the monarchy.

In the bible it says "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"

I don't know how you can interpret a bald statement like that, or a commandment and it is clearly an incitement to kill which I cannot offer the principle of charity to.
— Andrew4Handel

Bold interpretation challenge accepted: In Ancient times the prison system, like many other institutions of the State as we know it, was not developed. If you don´t have prisons, what do you do with serious offenders? There were some options, none of them ideal, and killing the offender was the most sensible when the crimes were terrible. You can take as slave a thieve or a fraudster; but who wants to have a serial murderer taking care of your home?

Witches DO EXIST. And they are the worst type of criminals. These are people, mainly women but also men, that lie, steal, poison, kill, perform black magic to control people (like poor Nigerian prostitutes sent to Europe) and use real body parts of babies and adults in their human sacrifice rituals. These are the witches that Ancient legal codes did not want to spare, and not Sabrina or The Wicked Witch of the West. Nor Wiccans or New Age tarotists. Notice how witchcraft legislation in Rome or Egypt or the Levant, has nothing to do with the Maleus Maleficarum and the "witch" hunts in Protestant Europe throughout the early Modern Age.

In India, Central and South America, and very especially in Africa witches are still terrorising villages and buying albino bodies, genitals from adult men, and the like. Sometimes is the family that sells their own offspring to these witches, before they have given a name to the newborn, as the money is good. South African witches are supposed to be the ones that pay more for human bodies. We are civilized and we would be content with imprisoning these evil human beings for life; but in the Iron Age there were no prisons. What would you do?

"What you're saying is that there are those who have the sole authority in determining what and how the scriptures should be understood." Nope, that´s not really what I´m saying, man. I´m saying no book and no interpretation can be a communication from God. That we need to give up book idolatry for good. Gods do not write books; the book-related deities aren´t deities, but egregores. An egregor (or interpersonal entity, as I prefer to call them) is a thought structure, an metaphysical animal if you like, that is made of thought processes and emerges naturally out of systematic social interaction: "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." They don´t feel or think but they can direct our lives for their own survival and growth. All gods that appear in books are egregores, not physical entities.

Don´t you realize? We are back in the Modern Age; with walled cities that are now whole countries, and ideologically motivated demographic surges in some regions to be used to invade the still wealthy areas and erase social diversity and cultural heritage globally. A well defended border is actually the most humanitarian option, because it creates a differentiated inside where some civilization, plurality of ideas and kindness are still possible.

It does not matter who you vote; your next president´s declared mission will be to defend the country and enforce law and order at any cost. It is important that this process gathers a great national consensus and it is done to protect individual rights of the citizens inside. Inside the wall there must be a haven, an oasis for individual consciousness amid the global chaos, and not a prison camp. That is what´s really at stake in North America, Europe, Australia, Japan...

LOL!!! Ask her what she thinks Frankincense and Myrrh is. I never knew when I was a kid

Hitler had so many influences, that were also shared by millions of other Europeans, that I find unfair to make too much of Nietzsche as a Nazi inspirer. Nietzsche has influenced so many movements, and not all of them bad. In its turn, Nietzsche was himself determined by what was going on in Europe and Germany in the XIX. By the way, Henry Ford was the most influential American for Hitler (and viceversa). Ford and IBM with their industrial vision, were as strong an inspiration (through direct colaboration) for the death camps as the Turkish (Turkey was allied with Germany) systematic mass genocide of millions of Non Muslims two decades before. All these events, plus the visit of the Father of the Arab Palestinian movement to Berlin a month before "the Final Solution" to urge Hitler to prevent the escape of Jews to Palestine, all contributed greatly to motivate the implementation of concentration camps; called gulags in the Soviet Union, Laogai in China, y campos de detención in Cuba. All of these camps killed millions of people and all had a "Labour therapy" propaganda. Was Nietzsche in the inspiration of all of them?

Totalitarism or the idea that the individual is the problem (nazism, fascism, socialism, separatism) is something that happened and it´s still happening (under the new guises of islamism and multiculturalism) to the Civilized soul, and to reduce its spiritual causes to what was going on in individual minds living in the period and their private readings is misleading. it´s a "History of great philosophers" approach that is not realistic and misses the broader picture.