A Brief History of Religion

Introduction: During the last few hundred thousand years, humans started talking. Before speech, we probably didn’t have a lot of articulated thoughts in our heads or any precise ideas of Gods. However, as time went on prophet-like, priest-like people suggested that there were immaterial forces behind material events like lightning, child-birth, death, rain, crop growth, and inside ourselves, inside animals, inside plants perhaps as well. Regardless, a multitude of Gods did exist and many people from all parts of the world still believe in a multitude of Gods, often choosing one of them as the most important one or as the only true God, sometimes in combination with any of the major religious movements mentioned below. Let’s assume that about 5,000 years ago, there were sky gods, fertility gods, battle gods et cetera; Most people were nomadic, but some were farmers, some were city-folk, some were monarchs and some were slaves.

Amendment: The evolution of mythology is very psychosocial. The Goddess usually represents the Earth, the universe, life, while the God represents the spirit, action and change. The male Marduk killed the Goddess and replaced her. Marduk was the favourite local God and to become top dog he had to destroy the old universe (the Goddess) and remake it. Yahweh was a thunder god, very manly. Then the apostles brought back the Goddess. They borrowed the virgin birth from the Greek tradition and it represents the spirit birth, because Jesus was more than a physical man and therefore not conceived through physical sex and penetration and sperms and eggs and DNA and moaning and physical pleasures and animal drives. Oden, the God of wisdom and death (calm reason, sex and death is today part of the Swedish stereotype), replaced Tyr, the sky God. Tyr represents the male courage of the spirit as he sacrifices his bodily hand to bind the Fenrir Wolf, who was so strong they had to bind him with a rope made by the dwarves out of the roots of the mountains, the rumble of the cats, the tendons of the bear, the breath of the fish, the beard of the women and the spit of the birds. In the old Testament the Messiah is not related to God, but in the New testament, the son replaces the father as the protagonist. The Greek mythology contains Gods that behave very human-like, they’re envious, greedy, foolish, loving. All religions are based on metaphors for psychological tides driving different societies, like the hunter-gatherers, the farmers and the city folks all emphasize very different aspects of existence. The evolution of mythology is also why you can see many different versions of creation myths within the same religion. And when you have a lot of different groups of people you get a mix of stories that might often contradict each other and leads to a huge pantheon and lots of demigods.

2nd amendment: Constantine continued a belief in the Sun, which in Swedish is still called sol. The Egyptians worshiped the Sun in the form of Ra, which was humanized as Amun-Ra, a God-head, a humanesque God at the top of a hierarchy, with the earthly ruler as second in command. Constantine was like the sun, unmovable from supremacy. This goes from the pharaohs to the Pope to George Bush and a long list of people in between.  Sol was replaced by Jesus and YHWH. This was part of a history of patriarchy that was more concerned with inter-human relations than Mother Earth. During the Axial Age Buddha and Socrates, brothers in pacifism, rebelled against the structure of society. Buddha deconstructing the Hindu pantheon and Socrates deconstructing the Greek pantheon. Buddhism created a more altruistic society in the East, but Socrates was sentenced to death. 2000 years after Socrates, Giordano Bruno was martyred for criticizing the Church and suggesting each star was a sun, an anarchic idea to the sun kings who have reigned from the Scorpion King 5000 years ago till this very day. 2500 years after Buddha, the Church still defends the Inquisition. These three people (and other of course) questioned society, not for their own gain or to create a new structure in which they were at the top, but to allow enlightenment to combat the structural errors that were produced by these top-down-led trial-and-error-evolving societies. The consequences of the suppression of this enlightenment in the West created the banking system, the inflation and the stock market, to name but a few evils of modern western life created by the top-down trial-and-error. It will take a huge amount of enlightenment to mend the problems this has created. There are a lot of positive things in society, but societal phenomenon like capitalism and official laws and hierarchies are wormly appendixes that need be removed for they have poisoned or killed too many innocent minds and given no real benefits to the metaphorical world soul.

Timeline:

80,000 years ago, Cave paintings in Africa. “The use of abstract symbolism on the engraved pieces of ochre and the presence of a complex tool kit suggests Middle Stone Age people were behaving in a cognitively modern way and had the advantages of syntactical language at least 80,000 years ago.”

32,000 years ago, Cave paintings in Europe and “‘the Lion Man’ found in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave of Germany’s Swabian Alb and dated at 32,000 years old, is associated with the Aurignacian culture and is the oldest known anthropomorphic animal figurine in the world.”

12,000 years ago, Someone built the temple of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

4,000 years ago, The Gilgamesh epic tells the story of Gilgamesh who might have been the king of Uruk (present-day Iraq) about 700 years earlier. In the text Marduk is the highest God.

3,300 years ago. Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten believes Aton, the sun/an aspect of Ra, is the one true God. The priests of Egypt undid his works when he died and told the new pharaoh, Akhenaten’s son, that he was not the image of Aten, Tutankhaten, but the image of Amun, Tutankhamun, because they thought Amun was the true God-king. Amun-Ra was long the highest God, depicted now as a human unlike all the other animal gods.

3,200 years ago, a priest in Mesopotamia named Sin-liqe-unninni adds stories like the flood myth (Noah’s Ark) to the Gilgamesh portfolio.

3,000 years ago, in or near where Iran is, a man named Zarathustra said that Ahura Mazda was the one true God and all other Gods were false Gods and zoroastrianism spread.

2,600 years ago, the worship of Amun-Ra in Egypt was replaced by the cult of Isis and Osiris.

2,600 years ago, somewhere in the middle-east, after the Babylonian captivity, King Josiah’s head priest “found” the laws of Moses and said that Jahve was the only true God and judaism spread. As a child-king he grew up in Judah, which had been controlled by the Assyrian Empire. His father had been named Amon, after the Egyptian sun god but after the collapse of the Empire, his father and grandfather were deemed heretics and the monotheistic belief in YHWH spread under his reign (the reign of his advisors).

2,600 year ago, in India, Prince Siddhatta Gautama said he didn’t care for the Hindu gods and became an enlightened agnostic ascetic and buddhism spread.

2,300 years ago, Aristotle in Greece combines science and Plato’s idealism in his magnum opus Metaphysics.

2,000 years ago, Jesus in Israel said the jewish priests were wrong and the Romans killed him.

1,700 years ago, in China, Guo Xiang embraced spontaneity and Daoism spread.

1,700 years ago, Constantine the Great in Constantinople said that Jesus was the son of God and Christianity spread.

1,700 years ago, King Ezana of Ethiopia also became a Christian and Christianity spread.

1,500 years ago, or something like that, Tyr is replaced by Odin as the God-head among Germanic peoples.

1,400 years ago, Mohammad was kicked out of Mecka, said both the jews and the christians were wrong and that Allah, the moon God, was actually the only God, retook Mecka and Islam spread.

1,350 years ago, Muhammad’s followers disagreed about the legitimacy of his heir to the earthly and heavenly throne and Islam split into Shia and Sunni, which eventually led to the beheading of Saddam Hussein a few years later.

1,300 years ago, Indian nobleman Parshvanatha “pulled a Buddha” and Jainism spread.

1,200 years ago, Adi Shankara in India told people that Brahman was the one true God and that everyone is God and Hindu monotheism spread.

500 years ago, Martin Luther in Germany said the catholic church was wrong to say you could pay money to be absolved of your sins, the pope banned him and protestantism spread.

500 years ago, King Henry VIII of England with neighbours, took 6 wives, beheaded 2 of them and created the Church of England when the pope disapproved.

200 years ago, U.S. American Joseph Smith said Jesus, after his death, went from Israel, across Asia, over the Bering strait, across North America, to New York, whence he ascended to Heaven. His followers, The Church of Latter Day Saints (mormons), is but one of several thousands of Christian denominations.

70 years ago, during the so called second world war, Japan and the US built landing strips on islands in the Pacific and cargo cults centered around the wish for the spirits to bring them more stuff from heaven arose. Wikipedia: “Cargo cults typically were created by individual leaders, or strong men in the Melanesian culture, and it is not at all clear if these leaders were genuine, or were simply running scams on gullible populations.” Sounds like a spot-on description of religion to me.

60 years ago, the 2,000 year old Dead Sea Scrolls are found, the oldest version of the Old Testament. The texts tell of wondrous things.*

50 years ago, Hindu monotheism spreads to the west in the form of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. (Krishna consciousness, pure consciousnss, Christ consciousness, Buddha, these are all metaphors for the immaterial God our souls are/are made of/belongs to/comes from. P.S. It would be infinitely cool if my mind was Vishnu)

0 years ago, the Roman Pope is still there today after 1,700 years of turmoil; a shining example of the patriarchy in the history of religion/humanity.

*”I saw many stars descend and cast themselves down from heaven… and behold they all let out their privy members, like horses, and began to cover the cows of the oxen, and they all became pregnant and bare elephants, camels, and asses…18. And I saw till the Lord came unto them and took in His hand the staff of His wrath, and smote the earth, and the earth clave asunder, and all the beasts and all the birds of the heaven fell from among those sheep, and were swallowed up in the earth and it covered them. 19. And I saw till a great sword was given to the sheep, and the sheep proceeded against all the beasts of the field to slay them, and all the beasts and the birds of the heaven fled before their face.” – Book of Enoch

From http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/african-mythology.php:

“African Creator Gods seem to follow a distinctive pattern – they are all extremely dissatisfied with their creations. There is much shaking of heads, turning away in sorrow and avoidance of contact. The humans are left to fend for themselves. Attempts to regain contact with their God by building a heavenly ladder are the subject of many an unhappy legend. On the whole, African Gods don’t like to be pestered, and humans have to learn to be content with their lot.”

Also, I left out the entirety of  Oceanian and American religion, but you can see the pattern already I hope. For more insight, look up Quetzalcoatl, I’itoi and Dreamtime. It should be noted that the beliefs of most people in general are quite practical – Gods are often irrelevant in day-to-day matters or they are physically very real – while a comparatively few have formed very theoretical/philosophical/surreal ideas about the nature of everything. This is true for all peoples and places of the Earth, today as well as in history, and most likely in the future as well.

Think what you will of the accuracy of that clip, but videos are always fun.

Landmark Event in Fusion Power and Bloodshed in India this Summer

The National Ignition Facility in California today concentrated a group of lasers onto a tiny bit of hydrogen to a level of 1 Megajoule over a few billionths of a second. Breaking the Megajoule barrier is a historic event and as all landmarks it has the potential to popularize the estimates in the scientific community, in this case working fusion power plants before 2050. The laser heats the hydrogen to copy the conditions in a star and just like in fission power plants (standard nuclear plants) the reactions will produce energy enough to feed the continuation of the process and give off excess energy to be used as eletricity by humans. Just like fission and the stars, fusion gives off radiation, but it leaves no other radioactive products. If the oil companies wouldn’t have been so rich, maybe technologies to improve batteries and replace the oil burning machines with battery-driven machines wouldn’t seem like such a utopia today. We might also have spent more time trying to harvest the energy of the sun instead of making replicas of it on Earth. Maybe a ceiling that absorbs sunlight, produces artificial light and protects us from radiation is a bit futuristic, but you never know.

Also in the news today, India is predicted a bloody summer. According to dnaindia.com Pakistan is trying to push India to break the ceasefire between the two countries by trying “to push more trained terrorists into Kashmir and other parts of the country” and they will be geared up and ready to terrorize by summer. If this is not just anti-Pakistani propaganda, or even if it is, people with insight say Pakistan is using this as a diversion from internal problem, just like Orwell’s 1984: There must always be a “them” to unite “us”. Pakistan and India both have nuclear weapons, which since the bombing of Japan 1945 has been a political toy for select regims to make use of, like the whole cold war to name but one example. The US, with their 10,000 nuclear war heads, are complaining about Iran’s nuclear program and demonizing North Korea for possibly having 1 war head that might not work too well. Oh monkeys, monkeys, monkeys, playing with the world as always. Reality is not a toy, although it is a toy in many narrow-minded people’s brains. Surely politicians at a state level rarely look in the mirror and say: “Whoa, I got hair growing out of the skin of my body just like all other mammals, and I eat plants and shit out dead body parts, maybe I should be a bit more humble”. Very tantric self-observation perhaps.

Why is air invisible?

Conclusion at the bottom. Link to wavelengths.

Why is glass transparent? Answer at the very bottom.

Quotes from answers.yahoo and blurtit:

“Air is a mixture of various gases contributing to the earth’s atmosphere. In general, air consists of molecular Nitrogen (N2) with a volume count of 78%, molecular oxygen (O2) with a volume count of 20%. There are also small amounts of Argon (Ar) with a volume of 1.9%, Neon (Ne), Helium (He), Methane (CH4), Krypton (Kr), Hydrogen (H), Nitrous Oxide (N2O) and Xenon (Xe). Other gases and elements like water vapour (H2O), Ozone (O3), Carbon-dioxide (CO2), Sulphur dioxide (SO2) and Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) are found in variable concentration. The ammonia and hydrogen sulphide are also common constituent of air. Water vapour is the source of all forms of precipitation of water and it acts as an absorber as well as emitter of infrared radiation. Carbon dioxide (in general air concentration level is 20%) is a necessary component for photo-synthesis. Ozone is primarily located in the Stratosphere and is an effective absorber and emitter of infrared radiation.”

“TELL ME THE COLOR OF AIR?”

“Pure air is a mixture of invisible and odorless gases, mainly nitrogen and oxygen with small amounts of water vapor, argon, carbon dioxide, neon, helium and hydrogen.”

“none its just clear unless you go to a polluted area in which the air is grey.”

“The air is colourless.The tint of colour is due to the impurities present in it”

“Can you tell the color of love? Air is similar to love.Both can only be felt.”

“AIR is colorless when its clear n pure as love..
Black when polluted
White in the winter morning whene there is lots of fog….
Blue n Yellow when the candle burns……
Hey all this is just crap……..”

“Lightest white in such a way that it is almost invisible.”

“Why is air invisible?”

“There are two reasons:

1 Air molecules are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. If a molecule or even a small particle is smaller than the the wavelngth of light, that object is “invisible”. Light cannot interact with things that are smaller than the light’s wavelength.

2. The air molecules can absorb some colors from white light, but not enough to create an effect. What I mean is, molecules of oxygen do absorb some specific wavelengths as the electrons in oxygen jump up and down, but these missing wavelegths are too narrow to make an effect. This is called the “absorption spectrum”

Another example: Even though Neon gives off and absorbs red light, the pure gas is clear because the aborption of red is too specific to matter.”

“cuz it is………”

“Air is invisible (at the atmospheric pressure) since the molecules of gases do very weakly interact with visible light)
This means that air does not stop the visible light
If air would be visble, the atmposphere would stop the light from the sun”

“Hi. Air, like water and glass, is visible but nearly transparent in thin layers. Thicker layer become easily visible.”

At the atmospheric pressure, air is not compact enough to be visible. If it were visible it would be white because the particles in the air absorb light from all of the wavelengths of visible light, all the colours human eyes can see, and so all colours are equally absorbed and as in an inverted rainbow all colours will penetrate the atmosphere all the way down to us on the surface as the all-in-one-colour white.

Birds, who are dinosaurs,  generally have 4 types of cones, whereas humans generally have 3. They can see ultraviolet.

This is Saturn in infrared

To clarify:

Most of the molecules in air are too small, less than 400 nm, to reflect visible light, 400-700 nm. Air is only invisible to observers like humans who have this narrow spectrum of vision. Objectively, all molecules are visible to the right observer because light comes in all sizes; photons with infinitely short wavelengths. It’s not an inherent property of air to be transparent, it’s just that humans are not able to detect it through the sense of vision. Oxygen reflects (absorbs and emits) some light and neon reflects red light, which has the shortest wavelength, but in total the effect is so little that we can still see through it, i.e. the more powerful reflection of objects behind the air is what we perceive instead. Water vapour, in the form of mist and clouds, show what happens when the concentration thickens.

So, glass is transparent because photons with wavelengths within the range of visible light have too little energy to excite the electrons of glass molecules. Colour is caused by excited electrons releasing photons of certain wavelengths and they release that energy to get back to their resting state. I don’t know what the answer for air is, but whatever it is it is because of the relationship between electrons and photons and nothing else and to be honest there is little else in the world except nuclei, and of course the structures that are made of these things and the sub-things that make of the things’ own structures .

Once You Go Obama, You Never Go Back

Obama called a cop stupid and bang, everybody ignores well-fare. In Sweden most people know that it is desirable to be able to offer all humans the health-care they need, even though we fall short of this goal in practice. In the States, it’s not even obvious that this should be the goal. Instead this idea is questioned.

“What?! The rich have to pay for the poor?”

We’re all monkeys and yet some monkeys think they are different from other monkeys. How can we rationalize inequality; national, global, or personal?

The President of the United States of America is a black male named Barack Hussein Obama. Before him, there were 44 white males. Assuming the term of service stays 4 years and Americans keep voting for black people as president consistently for the next 170 years, a racial equilibrium will finally be reached. Of course, then another 170 years of Indian rule would be needed, followed by 170 years of Asian ruling, then Aborigines and so on.

Once the racial equilibrium has been reached and white supremacy is only an item for the history books, it would only take another 1000 years to balance out the patriarchy of the States with 250 female presidents in a row. And then another 2000 years of presidents who are either bi, gay or any other sexual orientation apart from heterosexual. Then of course we’d have to have a few millenia of Muslim rule, Buddhists, then Hindus and so on. We can look forward to a wonderful world of open-mindedness and acceptance in the year 16074 A.D, when the United States of America will have ceased to exist a long time ago.

Or, we could put the past behind us and realize that all these attributes – religion, sexuality, skin-colour, gender, height, language, bra size or any mutation or opinion – are irrelevant to all things indirectly related to them. A person who is Christian is not for or against abortion. A person who is 140 centimeters tall might be the president of the Philippines. A person who wears a hat is not necessarily a philanthropist. A Muslim is not necessarily a fantasy novel publisher. An Eskimo is not necessarily your mother. A two-year-old boy is not necessarily in love with a toy tractor. One monkey once ate a banana.

Whatever the topic, job, situation, event or action, the mutant attributes of a human being that makes them unique in comparison to other human beings exist equally in all human beings. Everybody has a skin-colour, even albinos, everybody has sexuality, even asexuals, everybody has a belief, even atheists, everybody has height, everybody has weight, everybody is a bunch of atoms; more specifically a multicellular composition of DNA made from 4 nucleic acids; guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine – just like plants.

And just like a plant, every individual, unique DNA-cell complex lives for a short while and then dies.

Today We Celebrate Midsummer’s Eve

Now it’s not Eve in Eden, it’s a pagan festival. We’re celebrating the arrival of the sun. The sun, being the original God in all mythology, is worshipped and to it we sacrifice (eat) herring, unborn chicken and alcohol. Tomorrow is one of the top death days in Swedish traffic, drunk single men aged 18-24 probably being the most common among victims.

Maypole, actually a Midsummer pole, but these two celebrations got mixed up along history.

The pole is a penis, with balls to each side, penetrating mother earth.

“It is arguably the most important holiday of the year, and one of the most uniquely Swedish in the way it is celebrated, even if it has been influenced by other countries long ago. The main celebrations take place on the Friday, and the traditional events include raising and dancing around a huge maypole. One typical dance is the frog dance. Before the maypole is raised, greens and flowers are collected and used to cover the entire pole….The year’s first potatoes, pickled herring, sour cream, and possibly the first strawberries of the season are on the menu. Drinking songs are also important at this feast, and many drink heavily.” -wikipedia

Strawberries are coincidentally called jordgubbar, “earth-men” in Swedish. No connection to the male pole in the ground though.

Some argue that the pole “was a phallic fertility symbol, meant to impregnate the earth, but as there were no records from those times it cannot be proven, and this idea might just be a modern interpretation of the poles form.” -wiki

Don’t believe everything that is written…

“The Edicts of Ashoka are a collection of 33 inscriptions on the Pillars of Ashoka, as well as boulders and cave walls, made by the Emperor Ashoka of the Mauryan dynasty during his reign from 272 to 231 BC. These inscriptions are dispersed throughout the areas of modern-day Pakistan and India, and represent the first tangible evidence of Buddhism.

Although Buddhism and the Buddha are mentioned, the edicts of Ashoka tend to focus on social and moral precepts rather than religious practices. No mention is made of the philosophical dimension of Buddhism, such as the Four Noble Truths or the Eightfold Path. This could possibly be because Ashoka wanted to remain simple in his message to the public, because these notions may have been formalized at a later date, or some combination of the two.

The inscriptions revolve around a few repetitive themes: Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism, the description of his efforts to spread Buddhism, his moral and religious precepts, and his social and animal welfare program.” -wiki

Edict quotes:

“Happiness in this world and the next is difficult to obtain without much love for the Dhamma, much self-examination, much respect, much fear (of evil), and much enthusiasm.”

“One benefits in this world and gains great merit in the next by giving the gift of the Dhamma.”

Dharma is the law of Buddhism, and it’s the ultimate reality, das Ding an Sich, at the same time. The idea that there are universal rules, maybe an intelligent design, at least a reason behind it, a free will or force, an original cause is common to at least all religions and probably most philosophies as well.

Descartes’ worn-out “I think, therefore I am” is a statement of cause and effect. Kant almost trips himself up dwindling through the definitions of categories, concepts, objects in relation to pure, or general, or intuited understanding and the syntheses whose foundations rest on themselves and their relation to the other constructs of the mind.

Sorry about that sentence, I only meant to say that Kant, too, finds reason behind everything.

The people who are against Intelligent Design say that the universe does not need a consciousness to will it into being, while people who are positive to the Big Bang-theory believe that even unconscious, there has to be an ultimate cause behind everything. I would say that no, there doesn’t have to be anything behind everything, “everything” is quite enough without the add-on of a Derridian urtrace, an Urkraft, an ultimate cause.

In our perceived reality everything has a cause, within the constraints of the conception of  time, so if we search the material world for the cause behind every cause we will eventually stagger into, well, nothing, there is no wall, we will continue endlessly, because every cause has it’s cause, there is no ultimate cause.

The idea of a wall is the idea that every object has to have an end, in space, the other basic fundament of the mind Kant mentions together with time. We split things into groups and unique entities by relativity. Either we categorize it according to a similarity and group it, make it an object in a subset, or according to it’s dissimilarities, which is the basic principle of the mind according to Kant; namely unifying the manifold that is everything.

We draw an arbitrary line in the sand and we call everything within soul and everything without the world. But the line is in-discrete and flows in a continuous spectrum. If you cut a finger off, are you still you? If you = your body, then at the loss of a finger, you have diminished. The mind is flexible and adapts to this new circumstance putting the limit along a different line.

Basically, what we do is split the universe into two, an ego and the rest. Buddhists finding Nirvana say they strip themselves of all preconceived layers of the material world, let go of all definitions and let the world unfold as a mono-complex, in which first they see themselves as the one unit, then they turn their gaze around and see instead the rest as a unit. They see the universe as if it was all one whole, which must be a pretty nice sight, much like this artificial image of Kilimanjaro:

Kilimanjaro is an inactive stratovolcano in north-eastern Tanzania, the highest peak in Africa at 5,891.8 metres.

My idea is that everything is one thing, but then the mind separates it into two, I imagine a blue line around the body, or around a 1-dimensional (not possible) dot in the brain; this blue halo looks like what I imagine a soul would look like. The rest of the universe is also encircled in a blue shiny band. The blue light is imaginary though, it’s a monkey that has defined itself this way. Otherwise we couldn’t separate chairs from haircuts and dogs from giraffes and would be completely useless to bring home dinner. So we draw lines, defining things, starting with separating 1 –> 2, which is logically important and mathematically hilarious.

For practical purposes we can reflect upon our own thoughts, but only memories as self-reflection only studies the past actions and decisions of the body.  We can’t think of future thoughts, because they haven’t happened in time yet. Therefore we define ourselves according to the stable part of our universe, the self, which appear to remain the same despite the world constantly revolving and reshaping before its eyes.

We need a solid basis from which to comprehend reality so that we can walk around and do things in it. We don’t will this though, our self-reflection is involuntary, it starts without us having to will it and it decides our future brain patterns and future actions, based on our previous ones. An ultimate cause, an original force or will of the mind is superfluous, is not needed.

If the universe is random, it must be the way it is among an infinite amount of possibilities, which makes it unique. But just because it is a certain unique way does not require that it was intelligent design. The random nature of the universe would be enough to explain that it is the way it is, because it had to be one way if it must be any way of all ways.

Similarly, everything just is the way it is, without an ultimate cause or reason or will, which means that the world-view in each individual is a result of the fact that if it has to be some way it became this way, which is just as likely as any other way among infinite possibilities. There is no necessity in explaining why life, experience, consciousness, being or whatever we call it, feels the way it does, because there is no ultimate reason behind everything (which is kinda obvious already in the word everything *chuckles*).

The idea that 1=1 is an assumption, and on this assumption we base all of mathematics and physics. The idea of oneness is however a consequence of the mind having separated the world into two 1’s, despite calling it universe (uni means one) and not two-verse (again the hint is in the word, hoho..)

Yeah, so the question begs, what is “the rest”. Well, everything that is part of a person’s world-view forms that ego, so the rest must be everything that has not come into contact with the person, i.e. the unknown. The nature of God is all that which is not in our mind, the blackness without the soul, which we identify ourselves with because God, just like the ego, is a unit of a complex manifold, only God is the other end of the spectrum in which we drew the arbitrary line in the sand of space-time, not because of any particular reason, but because we had to draw it somewhere, or at least, when considering this analogy, one must define reality as a place where you draw imaginary lines, while in actuality it’s just another metaphor for everything, just like the idea of a metaphor is just a metaphor for an in-discrete part of reality. Part, here, being understood as a Ding encircled in a shiny blue coat.

Something funny:

Something not so funny:

Epidurals blocking the transmission of signals through nerves in or near the spinal cord.

There’s a monkey giving birth on the telly.

– When I had my first child I was suprised how painful labour was and that it was only gonna get worse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidural

Superhuman strength is needed to push out the baby. In our species the female has narrow hips, because they walk upright and so the baby’s skull is not whole until a long time after birth because it has to be soft, otherwise it can’t come out, which is why many people have a twirl in their haircut on top of the head, back and to the side. Go ahead, you can feel it if you like.

Or you can do yoga. Crouch down and place your palms on the floor and you’ll notice that you are in fact a monkey and a frog. Why else would we swim like frogs?

I was watching a lecture on Kundalini Yoga by Joseph Campbell. From wikipedia again:

The old idea of a universal myth theory, derided by Voltaire, is in modern times most famously represented by Joseph Campbell. There were many books written in the seventeenth century purporting to explain all myths. But Voltaire was deriding [mocking] a Christian myth theory, while Campbell proposes a psychological one.

Either way, he was talking about Eastern philosophy and that they too have a dualist view of the world; a metaphysical plane which flows into the material world. The material world comes from the metaphysical plane. The alternative is that the metaphysical plane is instead a function/derivative/result/effect of the material world. The problem I have with the metaphysical plane, like Descartes or Plato’s idea/stereotype, is that it’s lacking a detailed description of the connection between the supernatural metaphor and the natural matter.

The idea that the subtle matter (the mind) connects to the gross matter (the body) via 7 chakras is a fairytale, just like the Son isn’t both the Father and separate from the Father at the same time, which is true for multicellular monkeys such as ourselves too, not forgetting to see the patriarchy inherent in our story. My conclusion is that a sensible linking between the two worlds is lacking.

A program on the telly right now, talking about norms and stuff. A guy talks about having two women for parents and if it made a difference, and of course there was no difference really. All humans are individuals, so there’s the in-built difference – we are all different, all people involved in this guy’s life are individuals so any two given women might be no different from any two given men, except which aspects of each individual we ourselves define as the differences between the female and the male monkeys in any given case.

Or did God use his perfect forms and put some quantum randomness in the dough, or maybe in the heat in the otherwise perfect oven, to shape the differences between creatures, things et cetera and even the randomness is made perfectly random by the flawless Creator. Or not! Maybe the average temperature in the bread (the universe) is not the temperature at which water can exist in all three states, gas, liquid and ice.

The Pirate Bay situation has become a legal matter, despite it’s potential to become a debate about the right to property and anarcho-communism. Maybe in a few centuries it will be debated seriously. For now, it’s handled as a minor legal issue sorted out by the state as just another snag in the system needing corrective surgery.

This is what France is doing about it:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/05/12/france-copyright-three-strikes-internet-piracy.html

The Red Army is back?

Russia beat Canada at the 2009 World Ice  Hockey Championships.

2-1

May 11th is also the day Russia celebrates victory over the Nazis in WW2. Last year, more than half a million people crowded together on the Red Square in Moscow after Russia won the World Championships in Canada. They won the finals against Canada that time too and were treated as national heroes.

Russian hockey-players have been national icons since the time of the Soviet Union, when Russia could not be beaten, until the Miracle happened; the US winning over Russia, winning over communism, winning the space race, winning the cold war.

The cold war may be over, but international relations remain strained as always. Russia has quite a list of past enemies, historically having warred most of the European nations at one point or another.

Sports have been stirring emotions for millennia. Just compare the fighters in the UFC to the Roman gladiators. The fans were no different than now. Sports, of course, don’t always lead to nationalism. Just ask a Barca-fan about his relationship with Spain. And yes, I said his, expect a majority of men in this clip:

That was one month ago, pretty much on my door step. Soccer fans were creating havoc in Gothenburg. All soccer fans are not hooligans and all the people fighting might not be taking cocaine and just going to the game to find an opponent to wage war against.

Because, that’s what it is. Sports is war. It’s civilized war, but it’s still war. The Olympics is a way to vent nationalist emotions, an outlet for xenophobics. Nationalism is a phenomenon a few hundred years old by now – it’s not very modern. Liberalism still hasn’t penetrated the Olympics.

Comparing it to UFC once again, the fighters fight for themselves and for their fans and not necessarily for their cities, like the NHL or European soccer leagues.

Right this minute people are debating at the People and Defense Conference in Sälen in Sweden. Russia has been a long-standing enemy of Sweden and the fear of Russia is probably a part of most of the West, in Europe as well as the US. And of course the eastern part of Eurasia  as well, a part we normally know very little of on this side.

And the monkeys dressed in suits stand there on television debating the Russian threat and how it compares to other threats, and how differently Russia was treated during the invasion of Georgia compared to how US-invasions are treated. Russia is described as a dictatorship, which grandness relies on being a military threat to it’s neighbouring countries. At the same time the US thought of as different, because of it’s claim to democracy, despite ignoring UN just like Russia did.

They also talk of the importance of a nation with a tiny population of 9 millions to argue internationally for the right of nations not to be invaded. Yet, we have soldiers in Afghanistan; and we export an ungodly amount of arms without people raising an eyebrow.

-The big bad Russians feel humiliated, they have phantom pains, hey have lost economical and political influence, power, democracy, territory.

How dangerous are the Russians, is asked.

– They won’t attack us, BUT we are part of an international arena, part of the EU, and can’t rule out that a conflict can arise. The Baltic is a major concern of course. The cold war is over, but Russia is suffering from post-imperial stress.

Really? Maybe so; nationalism is not a new thing in Russia, it has led to a lot of ethnic discrimination. Maybe that’s natural, maybe it will calm down, like the Roman emperors who cooled down, at least in terms of territorial wars, after just a few thousand years of papacy. Like how the British lost their empire and had to give it all back to the people it belonged to. Except the Falkland Islands, which they needed for strategic sheep purposes, to quote British comedian and less-transvestite-lately-for-some-reason-or-maybe-I’m-imagining Eddie Izzard:

The Mediterranean is to the old empires what the Baltic sea was to the Swedish empire and now Russia will have a legitimate reason for keeping troops in the Baltic sea, because of the gas pipeline they’re leading through the sea to mid-Europe. According to Swedish law it can be considered illegal to publish our military concerns. Will I be executed for high treason? Probably not, but the point is that it’s not up to me to decide. I am subject to the state and it’s laws and it’s law enforcement.

Do we need to have an army big enough to be able to defend the Swedish territory? My answer is no. Territory is just numbers on a paper that emperors can brag about at parties, for the individual, territory is the planet they stand on and it’s not like we’re gonna be standing on some other planet anytime soon. This is why pacifism works, because you can never make a person do as you say by shooting him/her/it. Terrorism only works if people are afraid of it.

I have drifted off topic because the debate went technical, politically petty and stale. The difference between nationalism and individualism or liberalism is that we group individuals with nationalism. Any form of grouping, like being Swedish, being a journalist, being dark-haired, being right-handed et cetera, creates an ‘other’ group like Foucault perhaps would say. Individualism, ideally, strives to dealing with reality as if each individual was a unique person, not necessarily groupable together with any specific grouping.

I’m Swedish, you’re Russian. No, we’re individuals. You were born by monkeys i clothes just like me, you were loved and hated, you have loved and hated, you like to indulge in spare time activities just like me, you eat what can be found where you live, just like me, you have a heart pumping blood round and round and round and round within your body, as long as we both shall live. Which is a very Christian reference to make (the holy union), but of course, I have a lot of experience of Christian culture because I am not responsible for where I was born and for what my ancestors did. wouldn’t have mattered if I was Macedonian, I am still not Alexander the Great, and can take no credit for his greatness as I had no influence what so ever on him, regardless of how Macedonian I might be. Or Greek, according to the Greeks of course. Nationalism you know…

Taking pride for others’ achievements. That’s what we do when we gather in front of the television and watch our national team go at it at whichever sport our nation is best at. We crave this pride and go so far as to thinking curling is a fun sport, just because we’re good at it. Since nobody else cares for it. Of course, curling is no different from soccer, all sports follow the same principles, but soccer is a lot more popular globally.

This has been a test broadcast. Hope you have enjoyed it. Watch for an updated About-page lining out the aim, audience and nische of this piece of international media.