A morning with the Jehova's

[Elliot]

To be fair, the etymology of the latin word religio is uncertain.  There is nothing in the direct etymology of the word religio that gives the sense of reverence to the Gods: the prefix means re- '[to do] again'  The dispute is whether the -lig derives, as most Christian Fathers such as Augustine thought, from 'ligare' as in ligament - a binding or, as Cicero thought  'legere' to read - hence 'relegere' - to read again and again (the connected idea is the reading of the ancient texts in the temple, i.e. a pious following of ritual) .  

The OED (which Wikipedia uses as its source) stresses the Ciceronian interpretation of relegare.  But Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary (which is the big one on Latin) states that the majority of golden age Latin sources prefers the 'religare' interpretation.

Which all goes to show that even basic knowledge of anything is an impossibility  :D  

[Elliot]

As to the Hunter/Gather thing - it was the Earth declaring war on us in the form of the Ice Age that set most of northern hemisphere humanity on the path to cutting its nose off to spite its face.  Hunter gathering requires a largish area of fertile land for humans to travel through, strip and move on until the cycle of growth begins again and the humans can return.  Post ice age most of that was gone in the northern hemisphere and humans had to adapt by farming the land and raising their own food.

[nfe]

Collins is the Latin dictionary that's on the reading list for all the Scottish ancient unis, dunno about elsewhere. It gives religio as religious scruple, reverance, awe, object of veneration etc I'm not writing the whole lot out. I was going by memory earlier but am home with my bookcase now!

Yes though, any ancient language (and indeed modern) is open to quite some interpretation!

The last ice age finished what, 12,500 years ago (my geography is rudimentary)? Farming really originated two and a half millennia after that in the fertile crescent of mesopotamia.

[Elliot]

OK, your right on the ice age thing - I was getting confused with something I read on farming and population change in Europe  :? : Here it is, if it is any interest:

...Humans arrived in Europe 45,000 years ago and replaced the Neandertals. From that period on, European hunter-gatherers experienced lots of climatic changes, including the last Ice Age. After the end of the Ice Age, some 11,000 years ago, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle survived for a couple of thousand years but was then gradually replaced by agriculture. The question was whether this change in lifestyle from hunter-gatherer to farmer was brought to Europe by new people, or whether only the idea of farming spread. The new results from the Mainz-led team seems to solve much of this long standing debate.

"Our analysis shows that there is no direct continuity between hunter-gatherers and farmers in Central Europe," says Prof Joachim Burger. "As the hunter-gatherers were there first, the farmers must have immigrated into the area."

As to dictionaries - Collins is a pretty small dictionary, I have one at home too from when I was an undergrad and whilst its ok for undergraduates to use it is not (like the OED (for English) or Lewis and Short (for Latin)) a dictionary based on historical principles.  You wouldn't put the OED or L&S on reading lists as they cost more than most student grants (state, parental or otherwise) and I don't know any classics scholars who would rely on Collins for etymology (and, yes, I do know lots of classics scholars).  :lol:

Anyway, sorry, this has drifted away from JWs!

[MDV]

Oxford online defines theism as the belief in an interventionist creator and deism as the belief in a non-interventionist creator. It makes a point of contrasting them.

All the literature I've ever read on the matter refers to theism as a belief in a god that intervenes in some way in reality and/or has personal interest in people, and deists as people that think that god made the universe, or making it with intelligent beings as being part of the plan, but never as having interest in how people live.

They're both a kind of belief in god, but they're very different. A deist is by definition not religious as they dont think that god is a moral or behavioural authority, and its part of the normal defintion of deism to reject any assertion that there are any texts written or inspired by god; the cornerstone of theistic religions being that god/s wrote or ghost wrote a book or fifty telling us what to do. This shouldnt be hard to verify or contradict with a quick search or cracking open any books that discuss the ideas in any detail (top links in google and bertrand russel 'history of western philosophy' to my right tell me this is right).

On the wrecking the planet thing: Highly doubtfull. I'm quite interested to see just how much of the inevitable devastation this chap blames on "technology" and how much (more sensibly) on market forces driving its use and shortsightedness and poor decisions that go hand in hand with them, and exactly what level of doomsaying we're talking about here before making any sort of proclamation on how wrong he is, but, yeah, highly doubtfull. Its a tough planet, and we as a species have been through worse when we were far less advanced. Its gonna be hard to get rid of us, harder still for us to make a lasting impact on the planet as a whole.

[nfe]

I shouldn't have stuck "theistic" in my working definition, perhaps. And simply said belief in a supernatural creator. Even "a supernatural belief concerning man's relation to the universe" would work for me, which I would certainly consider deism to fall into. Any belief concerning a creation of the universe by an intelligent designer is a religious belief in my book, whether it has dogma, ritual and rules or not.

All in, I still assert that religion is not "All about control and is a nice little earner", which was the main point. I consider it no less than a laughable statement. Whether it is regularly (even almost without exception) usurped for those ends is quite besides the point, you chuck that "all" in there, and it's immediately false.

It's not about technology per say, but about our use of it to dominate the planet, not in a fear of us damaging the planet itself to any great degree, just the species upon it.

He makes a basic distinction between what he call takers and leavers - agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers. Those who think they've a "right" to upset the natural order and those who don't. Basically, the thrust of it is that our efforts to control the planet to suit our civilisation is destined for catastrophic failure sooner or later, as our eternally growing population must eventually outstrip our ability to feed it, but we'll likely have wiped out virtually everything we can't eat and everything that competes with us for food by then.

EDIT: I don't retell it well, it's a complex line of thinking that gets built in fragments and I'm poorly condensing it. Wirth a read.

[MDV]

Finite planet, growing population = problems...Well thats just intuitively obvious, but catastophic failure is equally inuitively obviously impossible. Its supply and demand, basically, and the changes that (will inevitably) take place will be gradual (and likely, indeed certainly, asymmetrical, as they already are). Its not like we're going to wake up one day and go '$%&#, all the foods gone'

Ingoring for a moment technological adaptations to increasing demand on the yield of any given acre of farm land (like GM, for example), which will inevitably improve (as a magic bullet its somewhere between a post-dated cheque and wishfull thinking at the moment), limited food supply will force stabilisation of the population at a maximum sustainable level that corresponds to rate at which food can be grown.

Quality of life at that point is entirely another matter, but you start saying things like 'state enforced planned parenthood' and every retard with functioning gonads throws up their arms in horror at the threatened retraction of their right to have 5 kids. Its not hard to see that the problems arent just agricultural, or technological, but social. Indeed it could easily be argued that they're social in their entirety and that the social problems are as a result of adaptation to hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Hunter gatherers (modern ones) live in a perpetual state of scarcity, and we still have the same vestigial instincts to gather and eat as much as we damned well can while we can, because we havent really evolved since then.

There wont be any 'wiped out anything we can eat though': I dont see cows being an endandgered species any time soon. Its not a matter of consuming a finite amount of resources; its a matter of matching rates of consumption to rates of production.

[MDV]

Oh, yeah, today is me be argumentative git day. Dunno why. Happens occasionally. Direction of the wind, alignment of planets. It'll pass soon I imagine :lol:

[nfe]

Wiped out anything we CAN'T eat.

Population will continue to grow, at faster and faster rates as long as we increase food supply. Eventually we will hit a limit, and famine will kill masses of people. Technological advances in terms of food production only increase the problem. More food grown = more people born. Forever. The problem is social, and that's his argument towards the end of the book, that we're obviously never going to return to hunter gatherer life, but the plains Indians were agriculturalists for centuries before returning to a nomadic life, and they never upset the environment in doing it, so it has to be possible. But the global population needs to realise that they belong to the world, not that the world belongs to them.

Of course, and related to the theme of this thread, religion wont allow that to happen, as it usually states that the world was a gift to us.

Hunter gatherers do not gather and eat as much as they can. They do little saving of food either. They find food as and when they need it, indeed it was the start of food storage techniques that created civilisation and turned hunter-gatherers into agriculturalists in the first place. And no we haven't evolved since then, and never will. Which is a bit sad really, we've removed ourselves from natural selection, so chances are we'll never get to see what comes after homo sapiens.

[Dmoney]

straight up truth injection

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqbeo5A6ujE

[MDV]

Sounds like, as with most doomsaying predictions for the grand sweeping fate of mankind, hes rather oversimplified things

but

argumentativeness.....fading....caring........less...........

[Johnny Mac]

The world population according to some things I've read will peak around 9.3 Billion and things get really nasty. How long will we go on for? I did have a good talk in a pub about this a few years back and we all thought around another 200 years. Who knows.

[MDV]

Nah. 200,000 more like.

In one form or another.

Not getting rid of us that easily, as a species.

Our civilisational infrastructure might not be that robust, and our current level of comfort (in the 'developed' world at least) might not be sustainable indefinitely, nor our high population, but even the worst conceivable events that could befall us probably couldnt wipe us out. We've been through some of them already. Climate change? We may end up tilling fields in antarctica with the rest of the world a desert, but there'll be a billion or so of us left to do it, and we survived an ice age with nothing but stone tools, mud huts and camp fires. Disease? Been there and done that quite recently (plague); could kill lots of us, nearly impossible that it will get us all. Nuclear war/winter? If we're dumb enough, but large pockets of humanity would survive and have to go through a couple of centuries of rebuilding and being weened off human flesh. No biggie in a >100,000 year history. Asteroid? Similar story but worse; there would be enough of us to carry on. etc etc etc.

When people talk about the survival of 'the planet' or 'the human race' usually what they really mean is modern civilisation. One way or another, by being replaced, changing into something else gradually, or being destroyed, thats gonna go, quite probably in a couple of centuries, but its my guess that we as a species are likely a little bit behind bacteria in succeptibility to outright extinction.

I mean shite, if crocodiles can make it for 50 million years surely we cant do that badly. Even the dumbest of us can make a simple house, start a fire and grow/trap/hunt some food.

Alright, maybe not the dumbest, but most of us could handle that, after the apocolypse, while pining for our guitars and amps

Basically, so long as there are some rocks and trees, until all the worlds lighters run out, we're good :lol:

[nfe]

Yeah, the general meaning of anybody talking about "saving the human race" is really "save the cars and computers and tv and microwaves". Simply because they think ANY way of life having gone before must have been utterly miserable, for no good reason.

[MDV]

I dont even think they think it through that far.

I dont really know what goes through the heads of people that bang on about saving the human race, or saving the planet. Niether need it.

It is indeed saving our comfort level at best, and at worst saving a large number of people from dying (of something other than old age) at more or less the same time from the same thing and, while that would be tragic, no one wants to see (or experience, if hit in whatever cataclysm) the suffering it would no doubt come with, it would in the grand scheme just weave itself into history after we pick ourselves up again and carry on eating and breeding and making clever things like soap and houses and iphones that help us stay alive (and comfortable and amused once alives dealt with)

Lack of perspective. Thats what it is.