demagogue

Ubercool doesn't even begin to describe how that looks. Very impressive.

Jeez, you people and your taking things to their logical conclusions. Orb and Odd, both of your positions smell of dogmatism. There are situations when the government has a reasonable interest in watching over, or at least better informing, the choices of people so they don't make stupid, rash decisions they'll inevitably regret later on; and situations when it should just keep its hands off and let people have what they want, even to their own detriment. There may be problems with who draws the line between the two -- political representatives (possibly too friendly with the industry they want to regulate), technocrat scientists (possibly too focused on the technical trees to see the real-world forest), activist consumer groups (possibly too anal for their own good) ... but those are problems to handle, rather than just throwing out the whole idea that there really is a line. And by the way, smoking and drugs aren't the great test-cases for this idea. Both have their makers actively enhancing their addictive powers to manipulate the self-control abilities of users, which manipulations (and the addictive effects) are not common knowledge to those "choosing" to get started, not knowing entirely what they are choosing. Prostitution and gambling aren't much better (are the girls *really* choosing this freely? should casinos really allow local people to cash their pay-checks in for chips?). I might be more comfortable with these if I were convinced people really understood what they were doing (in the long run) before they did it, and even better if there were a good way to check it (it's not good punishing self-controlled people because of a few uncontrollable addicts need special attention.) On the other hand, I think it's ok to allow people to eat fatty junk food, but it depresses me to see how porky the US has become because people apparently can't even control stuffing their faces with food.

Either that or he was mistaking Komag for the Keeper of Metal and Quartz.

oDDity, nobody has to justify drinking tea when they're European. Although I don't think it's as healthy as they let on, no one can deny it's relaxing. When I was growing up, all tea was iced (and Lipton), and all coffee hot (and black/American). It's a sign of how much the world has "progressed" since then that, after spending significant time living in Japan, Europe, and NYC, all tea is now hot (and everything from Earl Grey to Oolong), and coffee is iced more often than not (and either something with an Italian name or from some third world country). Globalization has turned the world upside down, I guess.

You'll be interested to know (from what I've read, anyway) that diet drinks, non-brews, etc, are actually engineered to taste somewhat bad/watery ... something to do with marketing and dieter's/non-drinker's guilt-psychology. I drink pretty rarely and in moderation. But I enjoy it when I do. I feel like I can really trust a person when they'll go drinking with me ... It tells me they aren't afraid something will slip out about their feelings that they are trying to hide. (And I can tell they have self-control when they know not to go overboard.) Also, I worked for a vineyard for a winery (actually on a kibbutz commune; that ought to make Maximius happy) and my father has recently obtained a wine vineyard ... so of course we have to like wine. I've always liked when a particular drink has a history in a region, like wine or microbrew beers, so there's more to it than "just a buzz". It's a kind of connection to the place that goes back generations, that is sorely lacking in most aspects of life these days.

Happy Birthday, K.O.M.A.G.

(Joke) Yes, he's found the one way to make Deadly Shadows sound even more gay ... put it in French. (/joke) Seriously, though, I always thought it sounded pretty cool, and I love the avatar.

yeah, skybox animated art can look seriously cool. I'd love to see some steampunk elements for some TDM skyboxes ... trailing smoke, maybe a massive dirigible floating by in the distance. Edit: No kidding. Happy Birthday, Komag! Have a good one.

For some reason, after reading a few of your posts, I figured you to be the kind of person who might regularly visit www.deusex3.com just to "check on things" (maybe it was the avatar). Well, I guess it's paid off. It does look like something's up, but don't get your hopes too high. As for my opinion on DX3, as long as they've learned their lesson, I would welcome another addition to the series.

Yeah, that's the naturalist's position. But don't miss the other point there I was trying to make (but maybe didn't fully express well). The basic position from Sherrington (1840s) until Marr (1980) was that if decisionmaking was a brain process, it couldn't be "real" freedom, because it was "merely conduction" between stimulus and response, sense organs to muscles. There was no room for an "agent" between the two making meaningful decisions. IMO, for over 150 years they were throwing the baby (real, meaningful freedom/agency) out with the bathwater (anti-naturalism). Those religionists that kept arguing that human freedom really means something were corrent to be fighting for it the whole time IMO (although they did so for different reasons). The great thing about the modern trend is that they've managed to give us back "real", meaningful human freedom and agency, but still safely consistent with naturalism. I just didn't want that point to get missed. I believe that agency and freedom are absolutely central ideas in grounding human social relations and making meaningful decisions for one's own life, and that the scientific perspective really was way off track for many years in a very counterproductive direction (in dismissing real, meaningful human agency because of their over-zealous commitment to a naive naturalism), with all sorts of pernicious implications in authoritarian and nihilist directions. Naturalism is maybe the first step, but the road doesn't end there.

Well, as I studied cognitive science and philosophy of mind at university, how could I *not* jump in here. It's long, though, I'm sorry. Read at your own discretion. Ok, it looks like there are two issues here, (1) is consciousness amenable to scientific inquiry (and what kind of "science" would it be); OR, if it isn't, what kind of inquiry is it amenable to? And (2) what is the nature/reality of "free will", in (a) the actual operation of human decisionmaking and (B ) our experience of that operation (which may be two different things). If I could recommend one very accessible book that deals with both of these questions, it would be Glimcher's Neuroeconomics, which argues strongly that the growing trend of modern neuroscience, which now encompasses the majority of working neuroscientists, is both that that (1) cns is amenable to scientific inquiry, (2) and that humans are "free" in the sense the brain has real agency, that is, that the Sherrington/Pavlov/Skinner dictum that "neurology is nothing more than the study of conduction (from source to response)", that is, *everything* is a "trained reflex" to stimulus in the end, is wrong. The brain is NOT a conduction machine in that the same stimulus will always lead to the same response. It is more like an "optimizing" computer that optimizes the agents position through behavior in whatever "game" it finds itself playing and based on whatever "considerations" are important to it. This includes the simulation of random behavior when it is optimal to do so (e.g., to reach the Nash equilibrium), something that is quite possible in conventional physical systems (e.g., computers do it all the time with sensitivity to the internalclock or something; no need for weirdo quantum effects). Ok, I'm sort of going to combind these two questions at first, since they are related: Here's some of the background. Before the 1980s, William James (184?-1910) was the last major naturalist thinker that took the subject of consciousness as a serious topic of scientific inquiry, and even he was pretty alone for his time. After 1910, you got the rise of positivism in science, which for psycholgy lasted for 80 years, where the only thing that was "real" was what you could mathmatically or logically "model" ... analytic philosophy (Frege, Carnap, et al) pushing the way in theory, and the weirdness of quantum physics (you have the math, but what's the reality??) pushing the way in the practice. In psycology, you had Pavlov and then Skinner, who thought that cns could and should be written out of the scientific study of the mind. We only need to look at stimulus and behavior, and only need to crack open the head at most to find the pathway connections between afferent (stimulus carrying) neuron paths from the sense organs to efferent (behavior carrying) neuron paths to the muscles. They just assumed there was basically a one-to-one connection (sort of like the Laffer curve for tax) that they must just meet somewhere in the middle and trade information. So they felt they could just focus on behavior -- and after the 1960s (when technology got better) they felt they could focus on just the pathway connections between afferent and efferent paths -- because all this time their theory of the mind was Sherrington's theory of conduction (an 1850s psychologist who first mapped reflexes by tracing the paths of neurons). That theory just says, for every type of stimulus there is a unique, final path to a behavioral reaction, and the job is just to find how those paths are categorized by stimulus type. The only thing that neurons do is carry the message from the stimulus to the behavior pattern, along paths that were either hardwired (reflexes) or learned (Pavlov and his bells and dogs). Neurons are good for nothing but "conduction", and all of the "experience" part just obfuscates that (you can probably see the political implications as well). So this theory finally started getting blasted in the late 1970s, early 80s, largely spearheaded by one real visionary named David Marr (who had a very unfortunate early death in 1980, although his work was carried on by his lab). He introduced the competing idea that pathways are not *merely* conducting signals, but the signals are actually getting functionally processed towards a teleological end for the individual. So in his landmark study of the eye; he didn't just look at the parts and ask, how does this mechanically carry a signal to reach a final efferent path (like every neuroscientist for the last 200 years had)? He asked, what does this part functionally do for the organism; what's its purpose? It really smacked against the face of psychological positivism, who probably thought purposes were too religious sounding. But today it is by far the dominant position in neuroscience. The reason Marr could get away with talking about "purpose", and why it could transform the whole field so quickly was not only because of the computer revolution helped them model mental processes (computer science is inherently functional), but more importantly because it wasn't until then that they really started connecting neuroscience to its biological roots, and taking evolution and natural selection seriously. Before, the brain was just *there* to study, and they got uncomfortable thinking about origins. But today, neuroscientists will want to know how such a process might have evolved through natural selection, which is a question of functionality. Ok, what does this have to do with "freedom". Economists and ecological biologists had long noticed that animals and humans normally act with agency to optimize their strategic position in whatever situation they are in. (They were uncomfortable with saying it was the "brain" that was manifesting that agency, they just looked at the behavior, but they couldn't deny it.) One great study that exemplifies this work is animal and human behavior in the hawk/dove game. The game is that there is one piece of food, two birds want it; each one has a choice, do they play "hawk" and fight for it (risking serious injury if the other picks hawk, free food if the other picks dove) or "dove" and flee if the other fights (risking hunger) (if both are "dove" then the first one on arrival gets it, which translates as a 50% chance). So they added up all the pay-offs for each (food minus injury, times the likelihood) of the four options and computed the Nash equilibrium (the %-likelihood a bird *should* choose hawk versus dove strategy every time it sees food if it wanted to maximize its health over many games. The equilibrium %s are the optimal strategy to get the most food with the lowest chance of injury over time. The punchline is that they observed birds hitting the Nash equilibrium perfectly time after time; and the same is true across many species in many different types of games (sometimes they are off a little, which leads them to think they are missing a variable, and then later they will discover the new variable). One important thing about these games is that the equilibrium doesn't work unless the behavior is totally unpredictable to the opponant, so the mechanism which computes the Nash equilibrium for the animal is geared to be almost perfectly random for each individual choice, but hitting the equilibrium % on the whole. And the observations match this. So now they had a model which confirmed our intuitions that even the *exact same stimulus* can lead not only to very different responses, but even *random* responses by the agent (e.g., to trick its strategic opponant, or according to some internal consideration important to that agent at that time, but not at other times). The point is, all of these studies suggest that agency, innate randomness (on the level of individual acts, but not patterns of action), and optimization are key features to animal and human decisionmaking. The theory of conduction is now seen as an incorrect model that is misleading and gets in the way of all these features. The clencher for the theory came with Glimcher's lab which "solved" (depending on if you agree with their conclusion) an old problem for the conductionists. They had managed to track the afferent signals from the retna (vision signals) and the efferent pathway to the eye-muscles to the exact place that the two signals met, an place called the LIP area (lateral intra-parietal). The question they couldn't figure out was whether LIP was afferent (signal carrying) or efferent (muscle-command carrying), because it was acting like both and neither at the same time! Glimcher came up with the perfect resolution, building off of Marr's work, that actually LIP was neither afferent or efferent. He changed his experiments not to look for the "signals" or "behavior" which matched its activity, but (on a hunch) based on economic variables such as what is the payoff for the monkey if he pushes the button when he sees the signal. The data brilliantly (IMO) tracked the payoff amounts almost exactly, so that the behavior-potential activity was greater the more the payoff went up. The point is, the data was literally computing the relative expected utility for each kind of behavior based on the layout of the stimulus, and was sensitive to various "reasons" to do X as opposed to Y ... with the behavior with the optimal solution "winning" the REU contest and capturing the right to command behavior. I know I just wrote a lot; I'm sorry about that. But *that* right there was IMO our first glimpse of what "freedom" really is at the lowest level of brain function. Freedom is the agency of the system to choose among a set of options the one option that is best for it (without other, external forces outside of it making that decision for it). (NB, this is different from what people might "say" their freedom is; that has to do with later brain processes of reflecting on one's experience of decisionmaking and crafting a narrative, which may actually differ from how the brain is actually taking on the decision in another brain area. Right now I am focusing only on the decisionmaking itself) This kind of freedom allows the agent to add as many relevant "considerations" to the decision as it "wants" which can make the decisionmaking very nuanced and sensitive to just what is important to the agent (and not things outside the agent). Humans are "more free" than animals IMO only in the sense that humans are able to add higher levels of considerations to their decisionmaking through semantic understanding; they are sensitive to narratives that feedback into decisionmaking in a way animals aren't, although the basic decisionmaking mechanism (the "gut feeling" that this is the "right" thing to do) is about the same IMO ... only the variables to which it is sensitive to vary. An important footnote is that agency does not necessarily mean total autonomy; agency and autonomy are different concepts. (Agency is the "self power" to make a decision; "autonomy" is the means to make a decision without sensitivity to outside interests.) Agency certainly doesn't mean autonomy in the "external" or practical sense, because a person can easily be coerced through physical means (a gun to the head, locked up in prison), so that they aren't practically free to do what they want, although they can make the internal decision, they don't have the practical means to accomplish it. There is a question about whether agency is limited in its "internal autonomy". Sartre famously didn't think so. I think they might be. While an individual may make a decision under their own "power" in just the way I described, they may filter that decision through the filter of narratives (e.g., culture) that shape the way a decisional issue is posed, e.g., in understanding what game the agent even finds itself playing. That is, decisions often use language to frame themselves, but language (and the culture that often goes along with it) is something given from the outside and can embed interests that aren't necessarily in the best interest of the agent, or even the society; powerful interests may just be keeping themselves in power through culture, etc. But as for how central this kind of possibility is to a person's "inner freedom" is a big debate, so I won't try to answer it here. I know this was long. Was it helpful to the discussion, though? (I realize I didn't answer the "is cns amenable to science" question. That will have to await another post.)

Are you going to handle swimming similarly to T2 style? E.g., with the movement, a decreasing bubble bar, no weapon use, the sound and vision filters, etc. I agree with that -- for a game where sensitivity to the environment is so important and water is something to be used, not just looked at.

Speaking of Call of Cthulhu (well, months ago now, but anyway...), I have a darkmod related story to go with it. One of the first ideas I had for an FM in DarkMod was to convert an excellent interactive fiction called Anchorhead (link, which very often gets ranked best IFA ever in those kinds of lists, e.g., here). For all practical purposes it copies Lovecraft's book Call of Cthulhu, changing details here and there. I thought the atmosphere was so great. So when the game CoC came out, I was so deflated. Nobody is going to believe me that I had the idea earlier to make this conversion; they'll all think I copied CoC! But I still wish the conversion would be made because the IF version is more story/puzzle oriented. I just have less motivation to do all that work now because of CoC. (by the way, you can play Anchorhead online if anyone is interested in seeing it: http://www.ifiction.org/games/play.phpz?ca...&mode=html)

If I were in the Thief universe, I'd be a prosecutor ... putting all you pesky thieves away for life, the amatuers that get caught anyway.

Well, then that sounds like an easy debate. If I had to pick just one undead, would I be alone in picking a haunt every day of the week and twice on Sunday? Those guys are just too loved.

That reminds me of one of the ancient Greek's argument for why the earth doesn't fall: Since it's in the middle, there isn't any preferred direction for it to fall to. It just hovers there, not being able to fall one direction or another. I get the same image from your idea.

Well, I guess it depends on whether we're talking about crypt zombies or pirate zombies here, doesn't it? (not sure that anyone can say that sentence entirely seriously...) ANYWAY, sort of a silly debate. I don't have a dog in the race. The traditional zombies were fine with me.

I think Freud is telling you that you spend too much time thinking about video games.

Interestingly enough, Yandros just put out a new zombie set with weapons for T2. So I guess Odd's not the only one that thought they could use a little more muscle.

Well, to be fair, every country's situation is a little different, so it's not good to generalize too much. First, I didn't mean to suggest that it was a such a stark choice between coal versus something else. Solar panels, so far as I know, aren't really a viable option. Things like natural gas, ethanol, and clean coal are becoming competitive because the price of oil is so high, and are also cleaner. And as Macsen just said, there is technology to burn coal relatively cleanly. So there are lots of options opening up as petroleum stays expensive (perhaps a great irony of the Iraq War that it's indirectly greasing the wheels of climate change reform by keeping oil prices high). As for the different situations of different States... If we are talking about Eastern European countries and other "transition economies", the big issue is diffusion of technology to refurbish their soviet era power plants, which are really dirty, and as an added bonus they'll be more effecient power supplies as well. (Of course, an open secret is that Western Europe got off easy in the Kyoto Protocol by counting the whole EU as one unit. They are going to get under their mark just by giving the former East Germany new power plants that they were going to build anyway. If each country had to cut individually they'd have been a lot less receptive to Kyoto probably). If we are talking about developing countries, though, well, first of all they aren't even in the Kyoto protocol as relevant States because they just aren't emitting enough (China and India being the only two real problem states). So we don't need to be too worried what they are doing for the time being. Let them burn away and it's still just a drop in the bucket as far as climate change goes, given their tiny economies (although there are serious quality of life issues as they industrialize that we should pay attention to, but that's a different thing). The only semi-relevant question as far as their relationship to climate change is concerned (aside from the fact that they will be hit hardest by its impact) is one of infrastructure investment. It's not just whether we let them burn coal, but whether we should invest in helping them build them cleaner plants to burn it. Anyway, the Kyoto Protocol has a section that allows Western donars to get emission credits for investing in these sorts of projects. I think it's a good provision ideally, just as long as they have a good system for computing the amount of credit the investing State should get so it can't cheat (not as easy as it may sound). Actually, the by far biggest issue with developing countries (aside from China and India), much bigger than their miniscule power plants and industry, is deforestation to make farm land. Burning forests is a double whammy because it not only releases all the carbon in the trees into the air, but it also lessens the number of trees that are taking carbon back out of the atmosphere. (This is on top of the problems with lost biodiversity, future cures for cancer, etc). But it's also a problem for farming in the long run because the soil is so poor; it leads to inefficient agriculture. Everybody would be better off (them included) if ways were found to make the soil more productive, rather than just cutting down more trees.

It may be inconclusive about the primacy in a natural cycle. But it seems pretty suggestive that there's a mutual relationship between the two either way, so that if you increase one you can very well expect the other to co-determinately rise with it. In a sense, it doesn't matter so much which comes first. We mooted it by pumping up one side of the equation. Where you are right that the press is misrepresenting things, even from an avowed global warming advocate's p.o.v., is that the effect is a statistical one. It would be a mistake to attribute specific climate events to global warming. So they are wrong when they say *this* specific storm, or *this* specific record high year is directly attributable to global warming. The most you can say is that the chance for that event is increased across a timeframe. But it doesn't mean much unless it's in the context of a reasonable period of time. To give an obvious analogy, if you're rolling a dice and suddenly you change it so that two sides have the number four; it would be the same kind of mistake to say that the next time you specifically hit four was *because* the extra four was added. (Or if you want an even more neutral argument, if you haven't rolled four in the last 50 rolls, it would be the same kind of mistake to say the next specific time you roll the four was *because* you didn't roll it for 50 times.) The statistics aren't changing according to the rolls; you'll have just the same likelihood to roll a four before and after the last four you rolled or 100 rolls since the last four you rolled. But the rolls do evolve according to the statistics if the dice is being stacked. What is significant is the pattern over a span of roles, which converges to a number over time; any one specific event doesn't tell you much (although its more politically charged, of course). So in that respect, the popular press often misrepresents global warming my focusing too much on specific events as the tale-tell signal, especially in the context of the recent natural disasters. While it may be good press, a real problem with it is that it deflects attention from the fact that the real bite of global warming is in its gross economic effects, and those effects will hit developing countries the hardest. It's their agricultural economies that have the most to lose, and here we are (in rich countries) worrying about a few severe weather events, and maybe nostolgia for lost glaciers we might have seen on our Alaskan cruises. Economically, rich countries will be able to adapt much more ably than poor countries, even though of course, rich countries contributed more to the problem*. So there is an unfairness element to how global warming is being (incorrectly) characterized by the press, IMO, which leads to misplaced attention. The press is focusing on the wrong problems to be really worried about. But even if you don't care about poor countries, even for rich countries, saying that they will adapt better, it is still important that people focus on the bigger scale gross economic effects and not this or that hurricane or record high. Otherwise they are going to make poor decisions on how best to respond. * although that doesn't let some developing countries like India and China off the hook because they'll be large contributers in the near future. By the way, on the "it's unfair that we don't let poor countries use their coal like we did" argument, like the other guys said, burning coal is dirty and ultimately unproductive (costing more money, e.g., in ineffecient energy production and pollution externalities, for fewer widgets). We have good reasons to upgrade them to more effecient, cleaner burning plants even without global warming.

My professor (Michael Oppenheimer, about as authoritative as you get in the field) said the real smoking gun was from ice core studies ('Evidence of Global Warming' page with graph). It's far from the only evidence, but it makes the point in maybe the clearest fashion. You can tell from the compactification pattern what the mean temperature is at each level, and from the chemical composition (trapped C02 bubbles) what the C02 levels is, and with that the researchers found practically a one-to-one pattern between the two variables at each layer, consistently the whole way down. This is a simplification, C02 and Mean Temperature have an interrelationship; they move in tandem. When C02 rises, you get warming from a greenhouse effect. The warming does things like melt ice and cause more fires, releasing more C02, increasing the warming effect, and so on ... until it reaches an equilibrium. If the temperature begins to cool, things like more ice and less fires means more of the C02 is getting sequestured, which takes even more C02 out of the atmosphere, leading to more cooling ... and you get a down-cycle until you reach an equilbrium. Normally, there is a grand cycle to the periodic release and sequestration of C02 along with temperature change (there's a finite amount of C02 on the earth, well a little addition over time by things like volcanic activity, but not so much now as earlier in geologic time -- as someone else said, I think. But with that consistent amount, it's just a matter of if it's in the atmosphere or sequestered); but that's been clearly knocked out of balance by anthropomorphic influence. Anyway, the point is the fact that the causal primacy is ambiguous isn't as important as the fact that they are co-determinate. You increase one, the other one goes up in tandem, and vice versa. (here's a short article explaining it). As for the 800 year jump-start that temperature rise has on C02 release, as far as I know that stat is being cherry picked to make the point, because I recall from the core studies, on the whole, sometimes temperature rise is before C02 release, sometimes the C02 is before tempature rise, and the chances were pretty even which took primacy. More generally, though, the argument doesn't much affect the critical point that they are co-determinate variables; they always come together and mutually accellerate the effect of the other until an equilibrium is reached. As for the 1940-70 statistic you gave, I mean, look at the top graph on that "evidence of global warming" page I linked and you can clearly see that you are cherry-picking a period to make a point that dissipates from a broader perspective; it's not nearly as statistically important as you think it is; e.g., notice that it is a wobble in the context of a larger than expected spike from 1930-1990, which maintains the statistical pattern you'd expect with global warming on the larger scale.

Sorry, this is a total aside and I guess we've left the original topic behind. But when I was doing the ranking in my last post, I wasn't going to just put Thief just because of this site. I justified my top five as the ones I spent the most time and affection on playing them. Looking back, I realize they are the games I mapped (except for civilization for obvious reasons, and not really Deus Ex ... it gets in on story alone). Then it suddenly occured to me just now that after the C64 days, the only game I've ever really had to map was Thief, because it was the only game that ever had even the potential for me to get lost. It was suddenly a very telling moment, so I thought I'd share. Ok, I'll leave you guys back to your M.O./existential debate now. I don't need a reason to be here.

I don't always trust myself trying to rank stuff like this, but five games that have meant a lot to me are (the numbers to be taken with a grain of salt): 1. Thief Dark Project 2. Deus Ex 3. Civilization II 4. The Pawn (an old IF game that really captured my imagination) 5. Bard's Tale II Honorable Mentions: System Shock 2 Tomb Raider 2 Metal of Honor Space Quest (and Police Quest ... and Quest for Glory for that matter) Another World Grand Theft Auto 2 (and much later, 3) 1080 (snowboarding) VirtuaFighter (actually at the arcade in Austin) Auto Duel and a lot of the old C64 games for good measure (Tai Pan, California Games, Ultima, Project Firestart, Guild of Thieves, Hilsfar, Fist, Shogun, Wizball, Mercenary, Paradroid ... damn, as simple as all these games were, they tended to capture my affection better than games today can.)

Au contrair, that's the beauty of the term in that context. Anyway, I know more gay republicans than democrats, to be honest ... it may be a contradiction in terms in the South, but in NYC it's quite common (with the wall street crowd). The point is that I have opinions that can be consistent with both the left and right (depending on the issue), and for me it's not a scitzophrenic position at all but quite cohearent in my mind, although I realize that orthodox types from either side might not be comfortable with it or understand what I'm on about. So the analogy made sense to me. As for off-topic, I don't know. Lots of people have considered communism more like a religion -- with its stretched, epic metaphysical claims -- than a political theory ... so it's not so out of place. But I guess I could just start a new thread on it. As for all this jibbing and jabbing at religion in this thread. I was going to post in the "religious debate" thread a reply, and I could here but don't have much time to spend on it now. I think I could sum it up in four words from a book title I saw recently: Religion isn't about God. More specifically, it isn't about unsupportable metaphysical claims ... heaven, God, the soul, the rapture ... Religious people surely use these terms, but from my perspective they are actually talking about something in their own experience about themselves, the universe, and other people ... not something literally "out there" in the universe (which anyway would *still* have to have access to people's experience or it could never be God or any thing else "spiritual"; the buck will always stop with experience, so why not focus all the attention on that?). The only really necessary metaphysical condition IMO for most religious ideas at their core is that the mind have a transcendental relationship to the world and other people, and that's a pretty easy sell... It just means the mind doesn't have immediate, unfiltered access to information about the world; any information has to be filtered through a system that invariably imposes some meaning or value on it. The fact that the core of religion isn't really about wacky metaphysical claims render most of the whining about religion ITT irrelevant. The real challenge is to focus on the core experiences that religious people are really referring to in religious talk (whether they themselves realize it or not), and on that count I think this and the other thread is getting low marks. But I realize I'll need to give some examples to show what I'm talking about. I'll have to do that in another post. I also realize that there's plenty to say by focusing on the metaphysical claims of religious people confused about what they are actually talking about (IMO), for entertainment or cultural-education purposes or whatever. But from my perspective it's sort of missing the point about what religion is really about, what experiences are really grounding it, which is the interesting question for me.