Quote of the Day: Syd Barrett

Lyrics to his last song, Jugband Blues, with Pink Floyd, his only song on their second album A Saucerful of Secrets.

It’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here
And I’m much obliged to you for making it clear
That I’m not here.
And I never knew the moon could be so big
And I never knew the moon could be so blue
And I’m grateful that you threw away my old shoes
And brought me here instead dressed in red
And I’m wondering who could be writing this song.
I don’t care if the sun don’t shine
And I don’t care if nothing is mine
And I don’t care if I’m nervous with you
I’ll do my loving in the winter.
And the sea isn’t green
And I love the queen
And what exactly is a dream
And what exactly is a joke.

Quote of the Day: Plato

From the Republic:

“Are dogs divided into hes and shes, or do they both share equally in hunting and in keeping watch and in the other duties of dogs? or do we entrust to the males the entire and exclusive care of the flocks, while we leave the females at home, under the idea that the bearing and suckling their puppies is labour enough for them?

No, he said, they share alike; the only difference between them is that the males are stronger and the females weaker.

The Raelians Debunked

Just found out about them and watched some stuff, then decided it was just too easy to debunk it to even bother with a proper blog post. Evolution is a fact that works fantasticly well with the idea that life is billions of years old and the solar system, including the earth, is 4.5 billion years old. There’s no reason to think life was designed in the last few years rather than evolved during this time and how do you explain all the fossils in hundred million year old rocks then or even all the comparatively recent neanderthal fossils. And there’s no proof of an explosion forming the oceans. Anecdotal evidence of aliens are just that, anecdotal evidence. Aliens if they exist are very far from here and therefore unlikely visitors. If they was as evolved as us 25,000 years ago they’d have to be really close to be able to travel here in that short time. Why would they create humans and monkeys and all other life exactly as if they were all parts of a continuous scale of evolutionary progress over time instead of make them all independent of other creatures DNA?

Lastly, if you think aliens created the pyramids you’re a very uneducated person. Considering that humans have been as intelligent as we are today for 100,000-200,000 years, you should be able to expect that humans 3,000 years ago would be able to pile a bunch of stones on top of each other. We’d had writing, trading, religion, military, cities, agriculture for thousands of years already. A pile of stones is not fucking rocket science.

There was a Sound – as if of a Monkey

and it told its child it was the tree of life and knowledge

and it told it that the child was its seedling

and it told it that the child would too become the tree of life and knowledge to its seedling child

and it said ask and you shall receive and the child asked

why do I have wings

because you are an angel, I added the code for bird wings in your DNA in the same spot that insects have their code for wings

why do you have hair

because I have the old code, you don’t have hair because I removed that part from your DNA

what is that thing

it is a penis, it was used to discharge waste and as a pipette for inserting a part of DNA into a corresponding hole of another human to fuse the DNA parts into a new human

why am I green

because the sunlight produces green energy from photosynthesis in your skin so you don’t need to consume plants and animals in a digestive system

why are you so small, no wait, I know the answer

humans will think you are an angel and an alien

a messenger from a supernatural dimension

a visitor from a strange world

they will think of you as different from them because you are so much like them

(they can’t even think of a supernatural or otherworldly being without it looking like a human)

and their fear will make you suffer

why did you do this to me

I did it for them

Genesis Revised

Genesis 1

1 This is the true story of how God created the sky, the water and the land, which is proved since it is the word of God as written in Gen 1:1.

2 In the beginning the earth was without form and void and dark.

3 And God’s seed flew over the void in the darkness.

4 And created light and made the sun out of it.

5 And cleverly separated light from darkness on the surface by spinning the earth.

6 And God tilted the earth and sent it in a circle around the sun… for variation presumably.

7 Light God called day. Darkness God called night, unsure if names of things were needed for an omniscient mind; unsure if an omnipresent mind didn’t mean God was actually the universe or if it was possible to think something and be separate from it at the same time. Anyway…

8 God divided the spinning void into the ocean and the atmosphere.

9 And God placed the land in between to separate them.

10 And God gathered the water in one place to let the dry land reveal itself. And the atmosphere above.

11 And he gave all matter weight and the earth formed into a ball with all three parts in their respective places.

12 And God’s seed spread in the water, the sky and on land.

13 And there was life in the form of a supercomplex molecule. Things that grew from the earth; things that grew from those things; and things that grew from those things; and so on.

14 And God made the moon and the planets and the rest of the solar system. He then made  billions of billions of our star systems.

15 And God said to life, “Multiply.”

16 God created men and women that looked like God.

17 And God said to the humans, “Multiply and subdue the earth and have dominion over all other life,”

18 “And govern it wisely, including yourself, according to your own wisdom and not according to some old text.”

First Contact

Most of the time when we see aliens in fiction they’re either an invading, technologically superior force or part of an interstellar organisation. In Star Trek all aliens look like humans. In Aliens the aliens are quite animalistic. In Star Wars aliens are all kinds of things, but notably they are all pretty similar in terms of intelligence, around 50-200 IQ probably, and they all have feet and arms, two eyes and in many other respect share the same key feature with the human body, such as mouth, stomach, hearing and so on. In Avatar the aliens are just humans, except they’re blue and a bit taller than most humans. But that’s fiction. What about reality?

The first time we meet aliens might be single-cell life on a moon in our solar system. Life on Earth remained unevolved as single-cell organisms for more than 2 billion years, making it likely that most places with life are still at that stage of evolution. However, if life is rare, there might not be any other than Earth life in our solar system. The nearest solar system is 4 light years away, meaning it takes 4 years to go there at the speed of light, which is physically impossible according to Einstein. And since life is so small, we can’t see it without sending instruments there and it would have to be very intelligent equipment to search space on its own. It’s not impossible, just impractical and therefore not likely to happen for hundreds of years.

The first time we meet intelligent life is likely to be an intentional signal from aliens received by a human-built scouting beacon somewhere in space. Since intelligent life will be far apart in the galaxy, life forms won’t travel very much, but waves can be sent for communication. They can’t see that there is life on Earth because it’s too small, but they can send out a probing signal towards our solar system. Outside the solar system, away from the Sun’s shielding magnetosphere, the signal can be more easily picked up.

The first time we see the aliens with our own eyes will be after a period of distant communication and will take place near or on some outpost of human space colonization or the corresponding alien space colonization outpost. As physical expansion is a lot slower than communication waves, both us and the aliens might have had time to colonize quite a few planets, moons and solar systems. Also, we ought to assume they might not be technologically superior, but surely technologically different. They will have made very different advances in certain fields of research compared to us, by fluke, culture or because of their physical demands and requirements. You can expect them to be very different from the arms, legs, eyes, ears, penis, lungs, skin et cetera that we have. Lastly, expect them to be exponentially more intelligent than us, with an IQ of maybe 100,000. Then again, the artificial humans of the future that will meet them might be even smarter.

In conclusion, it’s not gonna be Rapa Nui and the Dutchmen, it’s certainly not gonna be the Incas and the Spanish. It’ll be more like two children watching each other at a distance in a dark forest, both having wandered off into the unknown without really knowing what they’re doing, where they’re going or why they even exist.

Here’s some distances to illustrate why interstellar meetings will occur, yet intergalactic meeting (or at least “inter-local group” meetings) are only possible through worm holes, which might not really exist. There are at least 100,000,000,000 stars our galaxy, making it likely there’s life somewhere else in the galaxy, although, it might be quite far away. If they’re at the other end of our home galaxy, we might meet them in 100,000 years if we build a space ship and leave tomorrow.

Click the small image.

The Metaphor and the Quality of Truth

Let’s compare religion and science epistemologically. Not because of the issue of religion and science, but because of the issue of epistemology and truth.

Religion: “God created the heavens.”

Science: “The atmosphere is

Overconfidence

I just watched the QI show on Intelligence wherein was mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect. The effect is that someone who isn’t very good at something will assume to be quite good at it because they know so little about it they can’t estimate properly how little they know about it.

This applies to anyone who believes in God!

The 1 thing they all seem to have in common is that they take their information from very few sources. Like, if they want to know about geology, they don’t look to geologists, but to their holy book or their church’s home page. If they want to know about astronomy they look to their holy book or their pastors instead of in a telescope. If they want to know about the soul they don’t read a bunch of different philosophers, they look in their holy book. I could go on forever here. A creationist reading a creationist’s opinion on the theory of evolution will erroneously think he/she knows what the theory of evolution is, strengthening the false sense of confidence in knowing what it is all about and adding to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Intentional biased misinformation is strengthening the Dunning-Kruger effect as the biased misinformers will intentionally make it appear as if they are experts and make it appear as if their information is comprehensive. Not only will you think you’ve gotten a comprehensive understanding of the subject, but also the idea that the other side is deluded, which triples the strength of the effect.

The way to avoid this is to in general accept that you need to look for the one side’s best argumentation (best argument and best presentation of that argument) like a fair journalist should aim to do and weigh it against the other side’s best argumentation and compare them before making a judgement, as opposed to taking both sides’ arguments from a single, biased source (all sources are more or less biased).

On Permanence

Physics tells us that everything in the universe might be a wave. But if you look around you don’t see any waves. The walls, the trees, the body all look solid. Stars are made of hydrogen fusing into helium, smaller objects in space are made of stone, iron, ice et cetera. There’s a lot of waves, infrared, radio waves, maybe even gravity is a wave (not a scientific proposition), but the rest of the tangible universe is made of atoms. Matter is colloquially atoms. 1% is supposed to be matter, 30% dark matter, 70% dark energy, whatever that means. Either way, we perceive these objects, stars, planets et cetera, as fixed objects. Each day we wake up assuming the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the stars are still there. We assume that the bed has remained in the same spot as when we fell asleep, that the trees next to the path we walk everyday are still there and that our bodies remain the same. We assume that the North American continental plate has not split in half. Isn’t this a bit strange?

One Battery for Each World Citizen

So, I was watching UR on Swedish State Television, about a monastery built 537 or something, with a burning bush in the monastery. Then followed a program of how to fix the climate problem/kick the green revolution into rolling. They talked a lot about the sun, carbon, nuclear power, reducing energy usage. I think we should only focus on the sun, it is big enough to satisfy our energy usage even if the poor countries use the same amount of energy as the rich countries do today and a lot more which is where we’re heading. In the future a lot more electronic devices will be used; in fact, the more electricity we have, the more new technical advances we’ll make. So, stop reducing energy usage, make the energy abundant instead.

Authority versus Multiculturalism

I watched a seminar on politics and religion on Swedish State Television today. Among other things, it was explained how the Bible was used to justify the transition from monarchy to republic in Europe in the 17th century. Then the question was raised “Where do we get our authority from in a multicultural society”. Everybody has their own ideals but where is the common ground? We can’t get it from God anymore since we don’t agree in theological matters. The values of a single culture aren’t a stable enough basis either with many cultures involved. So, how do we answer the question?

A lot of people feel democracy is threatened by multiculturalism. I’d say there are two problems with that sentence. Firstly, multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a culture in itself. It’s very new to many people and therefore scary, but it’s basically not a new thing at all. People of different opinions have lived harmoniously in many different societies throughout history, we do it everyday in our families at home and in democracies with more than one party or even coalition governments it is already happening. It’s just a matter accepting multiculturalism, which requires accepting other people’s rights to have their own culture and making that acceptance part of the culture or (metaculture) of multiculturalism, making it one of basic principles of that new culture. This new culture is inevitable, the alternative is war and hopefully we’re approaching a point where we stop physically threatening and killing them for not agreeing with us, a point where we talk to each other instead of hitting each other.

Secondly, democracy. We have representative democracy. This is not the ideal form of government. Nobody should feel worried about this system being threatened. All change is scary, but we can’t not look at better alternatives and when the current system is challenged by new cultural movements we should welcome the criticism that helps us think outside the box and try to create a new system. I’m an anarchist, so the fear of not knowing whence to derive authority doesn’t apply to me. There are too many good examples from decentralizing power and the history of individualism to fundamentally fear the slow crumbling of current power structures.

How to Defeat a Racist in 1 Minute?

Tell the racist:

To create some of the atoms a human being is made of a star has to explode as a supernova.

The human body consists of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

All life (bacteria, plants, animals) of Earth are built with only 1 molecule, DNA.

Earth life is unique in the Universe, which is 1,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km wide.

When you Wound a Finger, How Does the Body Know what Shape to Rebuild?

Let’s assume you cut your fingers with a bread knife and there’s a gaping wound. You can just see the skin layers cross-sectioned and maybe even the whiteness of the bone before the red liquid floods it all. What’s amazing is that a few weeks later, your finger will look just like it did before you cut it.

How is this possible you ask, how does the body know? Surely, this is proof that there is some external intelligence, something beyond matter that knows or stores information about matter or at least about the material body and that can steer matter or the body.

Similarly, one might ask: How is the world possible, why is it the way it is, how come everything happens just the way they happen? Surely, this is proof that there is some external intelligence, something beyond matter et cetera et cetera.

The problem with Intelligent Design is that there’s no reason to assume an external intelligence behind a process when the process is self-explanatory. Instead of trying to find a top-down, simplified reason behind everything, we should look at all the details of the complexity that form the whole of the process  bottoms-up.

In the case of the finger, and indeed the growth of a child, we look at all the biochemical processes that form a whole human body.

When a blood vessel is damaged, the endothelium, a layer of cells on the inside of the blood vessel wall, releases a protein that binds collagen. Then blood “platelets bind to collagen with surface collagen-specific glycoprotein Ia/IIa receptors. This adhesion is strengthened further by additional circulating proteins vWF, which forms additional links between the platelets glycoprotein Ib/IX/V and the collagen fibrils,” and the chain reaction started this way leads to clotting. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coagulation

“Numbers of monocytes in the wound peak one to one and a half days after the injury occurs.^[18] Once they are in the wound site, monocytes mature into macrophages. The spleen contains half the body’s monocytes in reserve ready to be deployed to injured tissue… Stem cells of endothelial cells, originating from parts of uninjured blood vessels, develop pseudopodia and push through the ECM into the wound site to establish new blood vessels.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_healing

To answer the question, no body knows anything here, the cells just do their jobs. There’s no command centre with a large map of the body on display whence individual cells get their orders and then using compasses they orient themselves to a specific place. Instead the body structure is maintained by having the remaining cells on the edges of the damage build the body back up from the edges inwards. When they  (and by them I mean the copies of them) bump into each other they stop growing, sometimes the process is less than perfect and we end up with scars that all look differently.

The Parable of the Bow

An archer bends the bow infinitely close to the breaking point to get infinite maximization. Bending it is 0 until the moment it breaks and the breaking exists empirically as an event, 1. Bending is 0 and therefore all, infinitely, other events of different amounts of bending that were before the breaking point, 1; Assuming you can divide a distance bent infinitely many times into infinitely tiny lengths. How come so tiny differences can have so different results? However, we don’t need to use only 0 and 1 when defining the world; that’s just one part of the mind, there are many other thoughts as well.

2100 – Repair, Replace or Recycle?

A Swedish electronics repair company fired half its staff yesterday because people don’t want their stuff repaired anymore. This is a miniature example of a big trend.

Looking back in history, people repaired their stuff more often than buying new things. If you wanted a house, you didn’t build one from scratch, you tore down an old house. If you wanted a new shoe, you took two old halves and put them together. If you wanted a new axe, you took an old blade and fitted it to a new shaft. Of course, I’m generalizing, but there was a lot of repairing going on before.

Today, we’re in the replace phase. You can no longer fix your own car, you need to have someone build a new chip or reboot the software to get it to work, you can’t just weld it. If your food isn’t used in the first dish, you throw it away and buy new food instead of putting the food in a second dish. You can’t get a new battery for your electronic devices because it costs the same to throw away your old device and buy a new one that’s better. Today’s products don’t last as long as before and they’re designed not to last as it increases turn-over and turn-over is all that matters to coorporations.

In the future, we might recycle instead. You will throw away all the stuff you don’t need and it will be disassembled down to perhaps a molecular level and then reassembled as something new. It’s sort of a middle-way between repairing and replacing that needs efficient waste management systems but allows for a very fast redirection of society, meaning we can focus all our efforts on combating AIDS one day and cure it once and for all, and the next day we can reuse all the same resources for a new purpose.

Post Scriptum.

We can also switch to durability, but that doesn’t begin with re. Reuse and Durability. Sounds good.

Sveriges första coffee shop öppnade idag

I byn Gnalöv på landsbygden på Österlen finns femton hus. I ett av dem ligger caféet Gröna Äpplen som från och med idag har tillstånd att servera marijuana – därmed först i Sverige.

- Vi är så spända på det här. Det känns fantastiskt, det har aldrig hänt något liknande i Sverige, säger Emma Ljung som äger caféet.

Hon möter mig på uteserveringen. Vi sitter intill en vägkorsning, några bilar glider förbi men annars är det tyst över de soldränkta fälten. Emma Ljung berättar att köpte huset för fyra år sen med en dröm om ett eget bed&breakfast. Drömmen blev istället till ett sommaröppet café, men när hon hörde talas om att marijuana skulle legaliseras bestämde hon att hennes café skulle vara med från början.

- Naturligtvis ville jag vara bland de första. Det är ju självklart, även om andra inte ser det så. Ibland har man skrattat åt hela grejen. När regeringen  snackade om legalisering då kändes det som att det var på riktigt ändå. Det finns så många vansinniga fördomar och det trodde jag aldrig skulle hända så stelbent allting är – och så tröga människor är.

Det är knappast rusning på öpningsdagen, men bredvid oss sitter två killar och lyssnar på diskussionen. De har ätit två chokladmuffins och det ligger en fimpad joint i deras askkopp.

- Det känns lite surrealistiskt att sitta här och röka på. Även om det är lagligt så har hjärnan inte hajat det än så det känns fortfarande olagligt. Det är skillnad mot alla gånger man gömt sig bakom gardiner och inte kunde ha fönstret öppet om grannen skulle lukta nånting.

Han heter Fredric Persson och kallar sig själv stoner. Att vara en stoner är att vara del av en kultur som finns över hela världen, säger han. Det finns mycket musik inom vissa genrer och en del film som handlar om marijuana, men för att vara en stoner krävs bara att man gillar marijuana. Haschet som fanns i deras muffins och gräset i jointen de delade har börjat verka och jag frågar hur det känns. Fredric Persson ler stort.

- Det är grymt just nu. Fåglarna sjunger, solen värmer, tiden saktar ner och man hinner ändå inte smaka på alla sinnesintrycken så man kan bara luta sig tillbaka och le.

Emma Ljung visar menyn inne på bardisken. Det finns alla möjliga exotiska grässorter, antingen rullade i joints eller att använda i bong. Det finns en hel del magiska bakverk också. Det vanliga cafésortimentet finns också att tillgå. Själv tar hon aldrig en joint, hon säger att hon mår dåligt av det, men det “förändrar inte det faktum att det borde vara en självklarhet” att andra gör det.

- Jag antar att systembolaget kommer få sälja gräs, men just nu är det bara vi som har tillstånd att odla och sälja mot visat leg. Men det är klart att det kommer bli mer allmänt accepterat även om det precis som med alkohol finns många som inte är intresserade. Det bådar i alla fall gott att vi tagit det här steget och inte lever kvar med gamla, korkade idéer längre. Det kanske finns hopp för nytänkande även inom andra områden i samhället.

Henrik Månsson

Fakta – Marijuana

• Åldersgränsen i Sverige är numera 20 år.
• Har använts i åtminstone 5000 år enligt ett fynd i Rumänien. (1)
• Det mest kända psykoaktiva ämnet i växten är tetrahydrocannabiol (THC)
• Även känt som cannabis, hasch, gräs, maja, holk, Mary Jane, spliff, reefer, bowl och så vidare.
• Kändisar som använt marijuana inkluderar Beatles, Bob Dylan, Stephen King, Barack Obama, Carl Sagan och Shakespeare.

(1) Källa: Richard Rudgley “Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age”.

Today we Celebrate Pentecost

Until 2004, Swedes had a day off on Pentecost Monday (Annandag Pingst). Since Pentecost Sunday (Pingstdagen) and Saturday (Pingstafton) is always on the weekend, we are still free during this holiday. However, I’ve never heard of anyone doing anything special this holiday (except getting married), it seems like nobody really knows why it’s there. And to be frank, the majority of Swedes not believing in Christianity, why should we? Either way, here’s why.

Some days after Jesus had been crucified, disappeared from his grave, been witnessed as resurrected and finally ascended to heaven, the holy spirit came down to Earth. It came down looking as cloven tongues made of fire and possessed the apostles and  thus they could speak any language and everyone could understand every language. The descending of the holy spirit is what we celebrate on Pentecost. However, Pentecost means the “50th day”, referring to the Jewish tradition of Shavuot which occurred 50 days after Passover, the celebration of the Jews escaping to Israel  from Egyptian slavery. Christianity is a Jewish religion since Jesus was a Jew, but disregarding this, what the smoke is the holy spirit?

The holy spirit is God’s sperm. It contains half a DNA-strand of the Supreme Being. The God-half of DNA and the human half of DNA  joined to a complete DNA-molecule inside Mary’s egg cell in the womb. The demi-God cell duplicated itself until it became what looked like a human, but was also divine; a creature called Jesus, the Anointed Lamb. The purpose of the lamb was to be sacrificed, because God would only be pleased by a human sacrifice. I don’t know why this is, maybe God was in some kind of occult club and thought flesh sacrifice was the proper way of confirming contracts. Also, I wonder if the holy spirit came into Mary’s vagina as a cloven tongue of fire, because that’s an icon I’ve never seen.

Anyway, there’s a story behind this sacrifice. God created Adam (which means Earth*) and Eve (life**) and told them not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Everything. They did eat of it of course, and God, who knew this would happen, punished them with Original Sin. Original Sin means all humans forever are inherently evil, punished to live on Earth for a while and must believe in God to be brought back to Paradise. Then God changed his mind and arranged the killing of the lamb to undo the punishment of Original Sin. Although, I’m not sure how that helped, since you still need to live on Earth and ask forgiveness for your sins anyway to be brought to Paradise. (By the way, and this is off-topic, but why the hell did God create Hell? He’s omniscient and knows what everyone is gonna do and he’s benevolent, yet he knowingly and purposefully creates humans and situations that lead to them being tortured forever. Tortured forever for crimes like “not worshiping him” or thinking your neighbour is sexy or working on a Sunday. Committed by people whom he intentionally created to not know any better and created a world in which every piece of evidence points towards him not existing and therefore only a fool would worship him and consequently go to heaven. He’s the most evil being I’ve ever heard of. Scratch that, he’s mental!)

Of course, what really happened was different. A bunch of people invented a typical creation myth and a typical doomsday prophecy involving a guy called the Messiah. Then a preacher, named Jesus, performed the typical healing trick and was killed. Typically Elvis-style, people saw Jesus after his death and said he was special. Being special made them connect him to the Messiah and being the Messiah, they thought of his death as the counter to the banishment from Eden. Then power-greedy kings spread the religion all the way to Sweden.

*The generic usage in Genesis meaning “mankind” reflects the view that Adam was the ancestor of all men. Etymologically it is the masculine form of the word adamah meaning ground or earth and related to the words adom (red), admoni (ruddy) and dam (blood) -wikipedia

**Genesis 3:20: “And Adam called his wife’s name Ḥawwāh; because she was the mother of all living” (a title previously held by the Babylonian creatrix Tiamat). The name may actually be derived from that of the Hurrian Goddess “Kheba“, who was shown in the Amarna Letters to be worshipped in Jerusalem during the Late Bronze Age. -wikipedia

I think Joseph Campbell talks about creation myths like Tiamat’s, not sure if I’ve written about it before. Tiamat is “Mother Earth”, the symbol of being, of living, of reproduction, of stability, the circle of life. Then the male God, the symbol of action, change, motion, energy, power, leadership, initiation, creation, kills Tiamat and forms the world with her body and becomes the ruler. (Very patriarchal story.)  In Norse mythology there’s a parallel, slightly different though. There was nothing but fire, ice and a yawning gap between. Fire and ice created life, a cow and a giant. The female cow licked a salt stone and produced milk for the giant Ymer. His sweat became new giants. The stone became a god. The god Buri somehow became grandfather to three Gods, Odin, Vile and Ve, and they killed Ymer and formed the world from his body and Odin becomes the ruler. (Though Tyr was the god king in earlier versions of this religion.)

The Gospel of Jesus

[This is based on the Gospel of Mark and non-biblical historical sources.]

Jesus grew up in Nazareth in Judea under the reign of Emperor Augustus. He was brought up to be a carpenter like his father, but his passion lay elsewhere. During Roman rule, Judea was in a state of turmoil; The old ways were challenged by the foreign masters and the Jews were in need of a new hope. Growing up, Jesus was one among many who looked to the rabbis for solutions, he studied the scripture and learned from the rabbis. When Jesus was about 20, a man named John had gathered a following outside Jerusalem. He preached that this life was temporary and that the righteous would earn a life in paradise. Jesus joined his group, asked forgiveness for his sins and was baptized in the river Jordan as a confirmation of his new faith. John the baptist taught him that this life was just a path to paradise, that you had to suffer the struggles of the earthly life to receive God’s awards and that everyone was free to choose their own paths.

Jesus went out into the desert, to live as an asket like John. He deprived himself of earthly riches and luxuries in search for a higher truth. In the desert he meditated on the scriptures and the teachings of John and the rabbis and reached enlightenment. He came to the conclusion that life was a trial, but if you had faith in God, it would always end good and he imagined paradise as a metaphysical existence, removed from everything material and mundane of everyday life and that the greedy in this live would not be rewarded in the next, the sufferers today who put their faith in God would be rewarded tomorrow. When John was arrested and killed by the Romans, Jesus decided to spread his word and gathered people at the synagogues. He preached that if you had faith in God, whether you be king or slave, God would one day come to collect you for heaven. He preached that the Messianic age would not be a paradise on earth like the scriptures and the rabbis taught, but a life in a higher plane of existence, beyond all human comprehension. He said that if you only had faith, God would save you from all worldly pains. He laid his hands on the sick and wicked and through the strength of his faith, he gave them faith and they appeared to be healed. This made people think he was a vessel of God’s power.

The enlightened and powerful message he proclaimed appealed to those suffering under Roman rule. Jesus preached in many places in Judea and gained a large following, some of which had followed John before. They continued to destabilize the situation by amassing the poor and targeting those who collaborated with the Romans, be they priests or tradesmen, accusing them of living only for personal earthly gains and not according to the wishes of the all-loving and rewarding God. Now the Romans and the collaborators intervened and executed Jesus. Rumours started that Jesus had been seen after his death, like an ancient day Elvis. James and Simon took over the leadership and decided that Jesus had gone to heaven like he himself had taught. They also said that Jesus’ mother had been impregnated by God and that Jesus was the son of God and that this was proven by the “facts” that Jesus had healed the sick, expelled demons from the wicked and been resurrected after his death. Jesus never claimed to be divine, he was born of man and woman, he even had brothers and sisters. He was not born during the reign of Herod and not of the House of David and not born in Bethlehem. His death was not a cure for original sin, he was not the Jewish Messiah. Mary Magdalene, the prostitute crazy woman?, was the only one to have claimed to have seen Jesus resurrected. Read the Book of Mark if you don’t believe me and don’t trust the other books written long after Jesus had died.

The struggle continued, both James and Simon were executed like John and Jesus, but the movement grew and after 300 years, Roman Emperor Constantine the Great converted to Christianity. Through the Pope in the Western part, Constantine in the Eastern part and the King of Ethiopia, Christianity eventually spread world-wide and today there are two billion Christians.

A Brief History of Societal Ruling

Often when people debate politics they often have a pre-set limit for how much societal change they can envision. Some people have a hard time with small policy matters while others accept larger, more complex things like capitalism to be their limit for what is unchangeable. I think of humans as homogeneous clumps of bacteria so my limits are usually not where others have theirs. This is a short text about one aspect of society which might broaden your perspective on societal change.

“The School Should be Used for Indoctrination”

According to the Swedish Minister of Integration.