Should we tick 'No Religion' on the census?

Penelope · Fri Apr 01, 2011 12:00 pm

'Life is far from Random' says Robert. Just purely for entertainment purposes - I would like to post this quote from Terry Pratchett:

Because the universe was full of ignorance all around and the scientist panned through it like a prospector crouched over a mountain stream, looking for the gold of knowledge among the gravel of unreason, the sand of uncertainty and the little whiskery eight-legged swimming things of superstition.

Occasionally he would straighten up and say things like "Hurrah, I've discovered Boyle's Third Law." And everyone knew where they stood. But the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos itself-partly because it was a lot easier to be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt.

And instead of getting on with proper science scientists suddenly went around saying how impossible it was to know anything, and that there wasn't really anything you could call reality to know anything about, and how all this was tremendously exciting, and incidentally did you know there were possibly all these little universes all over the place but no one can see them because they are all curved in on themselves? Incidentally, don't you think this is a rather good t-shirt?

"Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized."
— Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times)

"If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!"
— Terry Pratchett (The Color of Magic)

patrickt · Fri Apr 01, 2011 12:35 pm

Shallot: "Patrick, I fail to see how an individual (and if one, why not all?) lying to the government improves things for anyone, including the liar."

Balance. Telling the truth doesn't always improve things for anyone, either, including the one telling the truth. Out of curiosity, do you think the government ever intentionally tells the truth?

DWill · Fri Apr 01, 2011 4:30 pm

Robert Tulip wrote:


	DWill wrote: who our parents are ... provides our only destiny, and it's a weak one.

There is far more to destiny than genetics. Destiny is the operation of causality in human affairs. Cultural memes have a causal structure that shapes fate.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said "ethos anthropoi daimon", which translates as 'our cultural environment determines human spiritual evolution', or 'a man's character is his guardian angel', or 'character is fate', or 'karma is real' or even 'history evolves by an internal logic'.

Character is the composition of all the causal processes of identity. The complexity of character is the force of destiny.

This is not to say all is determined without chance, but that the forces of determination exhibit definite strong patterns. Men of destiny understand these patterns and make their own luck.

I mean in terms of your own life--where you happen to be, what's happened to you--isn't this the result of one accident after another? I don't take the word random to mean uncaused; there can be no such thing as an uncaused event. 'Random' has this sense of accidental occurrence, something that was not 'meant' to happen but just did. 'Destiny' has the sense of meant to happen, and I think it's merely an effect of our consciousness of self, our own myth about ourselves, if you will. Retrospect gives events a destined quality in our minds, but it's only in our minds that destiny exists.

Robert Tulip · Fri Apr 01, 2011 6:18 pm


	DWill wrote: Retrospect gives events a destined quality in our minds, but it's only in our minds that destiny exists.

Take the example of the European conquest of America. The technological lead that existed at time of first contact after Columbus, and the existence of swelling European populations, made the destruction of the native American cultures inevitable. So we can say that at the time of Columbus Europe was destined to conquer America.

You can apply this form of analysis at steadily smaller scales, for example to say that a city was destined by its geography to have a certain fate.

Applying to individuals is much harder. Was Alexander the Great destined to conquer Asia? Were Churchill, Hitler and Napoleon destined for their world historic roles?

Of course things get in the way of destiny. An earthquake will change the path of history. But there is a bigger sense in which even earthquakes are destined by the remorseless grinding of tectonic process. Places that live on major fault lines are destined to have earthquakes.

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