<p>It clearly states in the Bible no eye-babies! Unfortunately, I have strayed from the path of righteousness, commiting eye fornication several times recently. In order to properly serve my lord i will be wearing eye patches to cover my eyes, in order to prevent any optic copulation</p>
<p>I Had A Staring Contest Today Forgive Me Father For I Have Sinned</p>
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<p>You realize both of those points are constitutional, right? The fourth amendment states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” If the guy was treated excessively harshly in prison, “cruel and unusual punishments” were inflicted. Therefore, the government had broken its own law and in order to protect the man, his sentence was diminished. Do I agree with it? Nope. I think prisoners should be locked in a dank, dark room for a couple of years. We could feed them occasionally. But the law is the law, and the law says that the man is free of cruel and unusual punishment. Similarly, have you ever heard of “eminent domain”? Eminent domain is a clause in the fifth amendment. This part of the fifth amendment reads “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”. This implies that private property CAN be seized for public use if the owner is justly compensated (if you negate the clause, it makes a positive). Do I think the man’s land should have been taken to create space for a Walmart? Heck no. Walmart, I’m sure, could find another suitable location. But it is in the Constitution. (The only thing that doesn’t make sense in this case is that Walmart is a private company, not a government body. Now THAT I do disagree with.) These two judges were legislating based on the Bill of Rights, not “from the bench”.</p>
<p>I know I’m de-railing the thread. But one thing that bothers me is ignorance. A lot of things happen in America that I don’t agree with. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them unconstitutional.</p>
<p>On page number 6 someone posted a link about Tranquility Bay. That was truly a terrifying read, and I read a book once that is basically exactly like the circumstances in that article, down to the months of lying facedown, to the nonstop brainwashing from constant radios blaring during meals. </p>
<p>Thankfully that institution has now been shut down.</p>
<p>In Tranquility Bay, apparently one of the student’s complaints was, “we got fish with the skin still on it for breakfast…”</p>
<p>What the hell is wrong with fish with the skin still on it? It’s crispy. It’s tasty. It’s perfectly fine with many cultures around the world. It’s like complaining you’re getting rice and not spaghetti when you’re sent to a reform school in China. Spoiled white Americans…</p>
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<p>And what in the world is wrong with that?</p>
<p>Religion and religious people perpetuate ignorance, fear of science, logical fallacies, irrationality, bad social and public policy, directly or indirectly, intentionally or non-intentionally.</p>
<p>For those who study evolutionary biology and evolutionary theory, even those who are “moderate” still serve as Dawkinsian viral meme vectors for what is essentially a self-propagating virus that replicate via anti-intellectual ideas. Religion encourages people to accept assertions without evidence. Religion paves the way for the SUPPRESSION OF LIBERTY under the guise of salvation from some supernatural force (be it Buddhism, New Age, Aztec human sacrifice, or Christianity), asking individuals to do counter-productive things for things that have no basis in reality. Aaccept to be the Sacrifice! Bbe it your sacrifice of your life (e.g. death), or your life! </p>
<p>In the 14th century, girls in the Inca Empire could have genuinely believed in the Sun God and have been proud to be “selected” for ritual sacrifice. Oops, you screamed in pain and agony and gave up all your life potential at the age of 15 for the belief that you would prevent a big giant ball of gas undergoing gravity-mediated nuclear fusion from being mad with your people. What is it today? No less crazy: forcing young mothers to keep their babies even after getting raped, encouraging the frightening intellectual imprisonment of young people by encouraging them to believe in some tale made up by a charismatic cult leader 2000 years ago (or what is essentially a Babylonian-derived religion with a key memetic mutation: monotheism) rather than the fascinating and complex story of biological life with all its variable-length tandem repeats and the evolutionary development of protocells and the cytochrome complexes in proton gradients across cell membranes.</p>
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<p>one. of. the. worst. logical. fallacies. ever. Have you ever heard of the selfish gene? Or its counterpart, the selfish meme? Or did you fail your evolutionary bio class? Or were you intellectually bankrupt because of your religiousness and never took it?</p>
<p>Every human culture also developed crime. Clearly crime is a necessary part of human society. </p>
<p>If you did pass your bio class, surely you would know about kin selection and free-rider principles: a bad (in the evolutionary sense: anti-reproductive) trait can be selected for by piggy-backing on a good trait. Hence homosexuality (an anti-reproductive trait, though I pass no moral judgment on it) could piggyback on increased intelligence, if say a gene altered the growth of neural circuitry between two areas, but also changed sexuality at the same time (through signaling or otherwise). It’s a rather good working hypothesis, seeing how disproportionately common gays are found among the college-educated and professional class, compared to the population average. It also explains a higher correlation between Jewishness and homosexuality, if those of Jewish ethnicity are more likely on average to carry genetic factors leading to both increased intelligence and homosexuality incidence (because of harsher natural selection over the centuries). </p>
<p>One model is that this trait could be polygenic and approximately normally-distributed, hence people who were “99% straight and 1% gay” genotypically (or whatever an appropriate binomial distribution result is) would perpetuate such alleles into the gene pool, waiting to be combined with other homosexuality-causing alleles in later generations.</p>
<p>It’s the same thing with religion: it’s simply a natural consequence of other hereditary factors (genetic or cultural) that were selected for. The need to teach children quickly without children questioning the wisdom of their parents may have been more strongly selected for than the need to improve the defence of the mind against viral memes (e.g. religion) that rely on susceptibility and gullibility during youth. Hopefully you know something about memetic replication – according to Dawkins’ hypothesis, religion as a meme was simply selected for as a byproduct, piggybacking other more desirable human traits. </p>
<p>It’s funny how evolutionary biology can offer such an in-depth insight explaining religion and its fallacies, but religion cannot do likewise? Religion is limited to: “it’s wrong because some holy text made up thousands of years ago says so!” And when you attempt to “study it”, you are studying what is essentially a dead field: your body of evidence will never grow. (Because it’s made-up and has no grounding in reality, for one.) </p>
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<p>Why the premature rejection of the null hypothesis?</p>
<p>Even babies have intuitive hypothesis-making sense. That’s like, how they learn about the world about them. Unless they’re told otherwise. (Seeing as obeying your parents dogmatically at the age of 2 is <em>generally</em> a good trait encouraging your flourishing, encouraging the reproduction of your future offspring.)</p>
<p>Also, cultures could have commonly developed religion simply because as a viral meme, religion was an idea that was likely to be perpetuated. After all look at the traits of an idea that will ensure its own reproduction: </p>
<ol>
<li>People who receive the idea instantly want to tell other people about it.</li>
</ol>
<p>Thus the idea, or at least its consideration, reproduces.
[e.g. the magicalness of “receiving salvation”, an effect which may be piggybacking on human psychology … or receiving an extremely-catchy flash video.] </p>
<p>1a. People who receive the idea want to tell their children about it. This binds the idea’s reproductive success to their biological reproductive success. Hmm…
b. The idea encourages those “infected” to reproduce. Do God’s duty. Don’t use contraception. Abortion is a sin. Sex only for reproduction. Hmm, hmm, hmm…</p>
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<li><p>People already infected with the idea treat and reproduce with those who also carry the memes of the idea favourably. aka the Green-beard effect. This accelerates reproduction of the meme, especially if the phenotypical trait of religion requires or is preferred by homozygousity: a person of religion A is more likely to infect others or strengthen infection [e.g. children, or friends “straying from the faith”] by being friends with (or reproducing with) someone of the same religion.</p></li>
<li><p>The idea causes infected vectors to pre-reject competing ideas, thus ensuring the infected vector will not reproduce or be susceptible to competing ideas too.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Inherently part of many religions (don’t abandon the faith! or you’ll go somewhere really horrible! or get reincarnated to a worse position! or cause the gods to be angry!). A self-strengthening trait essentially. Don’t explore evolutionary theory, because it will cause you to abandon your faith! [Thus perpetuating the idea…] Those infected with religious ideas are discouraged from exploring ideas that will cause cure them of their infection (“see no evil … hear no evil … speak no evil …”). Because an infected vector will prefer to be with other vectors similarly-affected, vectors can affirm and perpetuate each other’s infections (aka groupthink) and reject competing memes. </p>
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<li>**The idea has some sort of accompanying (beneficial) payload, or is linked to a beneficial payload. **</li>
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<p>If religion is a meme piggybacking on other beneficial memes (e.g. kindness, forgiveness, giving to the less fortunate), then religion will reproduce more successfully in societies that made more religion more receivable to its members because of those beneficial memes. This should start to make you rethink why religion was found among flourishing civilisations (likely to have beneficial cultural memes). Not because there wasn’t necessarily any inherent truth to religion. This also explains why religion is often internally self-contradictory: other memes that select for religious memes may be distributed normally, and they don’t have to make logical sense with each other to cooperatively aid in the reproductive success of religious ideas. </p>
<p>**5. The idea doesn’t narrow its own range of infectable vectors. **</p>
<p>A salvation religion that seeks to convert (i.e. infect) everyone in the world is more likely to propagate among more people than religions that target only a select race, nation civilisation. This is because the salvation religion ideas will continue to reproduce even when the original civilisation that originated falls, because the reproductive success of the salvation religion is no longer not dependent on the success of the civilisation. </p>
<h1>3 and #5 should give you insight to why Christianity and Islam became such popular religions and became so successful reproductively: not because they have any logical basis in reality, but as a simple consequence of their traits of monotheism and independence of ethnicity and nationality, that could have arisen by mutation from other religious memes. Making people believe they are a select few and on “straight and narrow” helps a religious meme piggyback on a successful trait (genetic or otherwise) – i.e. pride, while allowing the meme to infect as many people as possible, without prejudice on race or nationality. These characteristics don’t have to be logically self-consistent to aid the spread of the meme.</h1>
<p>amazing posts galoisien!</p>
<p>Very interesting!</p>
<p>there was once a thread somewhere on CC where a kid was admitted to a top school with 100% tuition pade and his parents made him attend PCC because otherwise he would be succumbing to satan as his parents said.</p>
<p>“or what is essentially a Babylonian-derived religion with a key memetic mutation: monotheism”</p>
<p>i stopped reading after this, reading snow crash does not make you an expert on religion.</p>
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<p>What the hell. I’ve never read that book? I’m using AP Economics and AP Biology to analyse religion. (Okay, some Dawkins, and some university coursework.) That’s all. Hard science. I’m not really into nerd fiction.</p>
<p>Religion is but a self-replicating idea. But a particularly vicious one. And everyone knows where Abraham came from (this “fact” of the Bible at least has some archaelogical basis in terms of the cultural similarities of some of the aspects of the early Abrahamic faiths to other religions in his homeland). Geez. It’s not hard to apply some phylogenetic ideas to the origin of Bible stories – some scholars have already done it for me. In <em>peer-reviewed</em> research papers.</p>
<p>LOL “LogicWarrior”.</p>
<p>I haven’t read Dawkins either, so my bad, I guess.</p>
<p>Do you know if the person from Tranquility Bay was white? Quit being so judgmental. I bet it was raw fish with skin on it.</p>
<p>Dude this college sounds horrible</p>
<p>how do we even have that in our modern day world?</p>
<p>freedom of speech or something i guess.</p>
<p>Still think that Tranquility Bay and places like that are just places for spoiled white Americans? And that they complain over nothing? Well their sister operation, High Impact (in Mexico), was shut down because the kids were kept in dog cages and some were covered in fire ants for days and told they would be beaten if they scratched.</p>
<p>The following is a quote from a girl on the survivor site.</p>
<p>Hello,
My name is Caroline Elise Burns. I am 23 years old and live in Plantation Florida outside Ft. Lauderdale. When I was 15 I was kidnapped in Lakeway Texas by my parents hiring two people to come into my room on a Friday afternoon, hand cuff me, and hog tie me in the back of a rental car. We drove from Lakeway Texas around Austin to Mexico to High Impact Boot Camp. I recently told a friend the story and wanted to see if they had anything online about the camp. I found that they have been closed down due to reports of child abuse and I read all the stories of others survivors that went though the same thing. I then found a link to your web site saying that you are investigating other potential claims. I was put in cages for days at a time in what they referred to as R.R. position, treated like an animal, force do run all day long and I actually escaped from this boot camp. After all these years I can believe this happened to me. When I got out I was so destructive and scared. I was deprived of water on a daily basis and because I am one of the only people to escape I was placed in a cage for 17 hours a day in this R.R. position. I had to dig holes for a bathroom and was not given toilet paper. Papa Miguel, one of the men that ran the camp when I was there sat on my back after laying in the cage all day and ripped all the blisters off my foot telling me that my parents had signed their rights to them and that they would shoot me if I ever thought of that again. Also because I ran away he made the girls run on rocks and sand all day without flip flops like we were usually allowed to wear. I had such huge blisters on the backs of my legs from the cages that when we had new girls come in the would come show them what they could do to them too. I was never given medical treatment, medicine or any help at all. We could not burp, roll up our selves, speak or look anywhere other than the ground or we were punished. They would bend this very over weight girl in the cage next to me and I would hear her scream at night. My mom told me because I escaped they had to fire the woman who had fallen asleep so they put dirt in my rice and made me eat in my dirt cage with my hands. Looking back I guess I was lucky they fed me at all. I don’t really know why I am writing this email, I was just overwhelmed with emotion when I found this information. Its been many years I guess its because I have been telling people for years and no one believed me and now I have pictures</p>
<p>holy *<strong><em>ing *</em></strong></p>
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<p>Jail would be better. You have rights in prison.</p>
<p>I’d think that PCC would be rejected in Saudi Arabia for being too nutty. And the only thing where nutty would be considered a good thing is parmesan cheese.</p>