Random Thought of the Day

Facebook meme from We F**** Love Atheism I found today:

"If you don't sin, then Jesus died for nothing."

Believe it or not, this ranks among their milder criticism/satire of religion.

I liked the Republicans better before they latched on to marriage equality as a means of projecting their fetishes.

This is a notion I'm developing: people do not live a religious, philosophical, political or ideological theory, they are living their lives.

Quote: Nareed

This is a notion I'm developing: people do not live a religious, philosophical, political or ideological theory, they are living their lives.

You can use someone's ideas and/or actions as an example in/of your theory. But you cannot claim this person thinks or acts because of your theory. They may not even know it exists, and your theory might be wrong (if religious or theological in origin, it is very likely very wrong anyway).

Regarding the immigration debate in the US:

Nativism and xenophobia are not policies, they're prejudices.

Here's an interesting Alternate History Point of Departure: Suppose at least one Ancient Egyptian script were deciphered in, oh, the 1500s.

The means to do so were available, in the form of the Rosetta stone and the native Coptic language.

Why does this matter?

Well, all through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Greek and Roman thought dominated further intellectual development in the West. This had particular influence in the revolutions which began in the XVIII century and which continued until the mid-XIX century. The major reason Egypt's culture made no impact at the time, was that no one knew much about it, seeing as all the many writings in tombs, temple walls and papyri were completely unintelligible in any of the three scripts (Hieroglyphic, Hieratic and Demotic).

The other reason was that Egypt never developed systematized philosophy. There was a lot of implicit philosophy in many documents, from literature to the sacred texts on the temples, but none of it was explicit. it wasn't until the Macedonian takeover of Egypt by Alexander and the Ptolemies that this changed. even then no major philosophers came from Egypt, Ptolemaic libraries of Alexandria notwithstanding.

But what if all of Egyptian culture had been available at the time of the Renaissance? How would that have changed the world?

The Waze app has a way of making me realize how stupid two people can be for a very, very, very long time.

See, there are three reasonable routes from the office to my home neighborhood. A co-worker lives near me and takes the same routes. When traffic gets really bad, all three routes are equally bad. Now, there's a fourth street that is usually free of traffic, but it does not connect to the freeway we need to cross.

What neither of us realized until yesterday, is that it connects near the crossing to a street that does cross the freeway!

Yesterday, despite traffic being near a standstill, I made it home in under 40 minutes. usually when things are this bad, it takes me that long merely to get past the freeway.

Quote:

When old people complain that there are too many old people, then you really know there are too many old people.

http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2015/08/06/awkward-truth-about-nude-cruises/?intcmp=ob_article_footer_text&intcmp=obnetwork

"Alphabet it " just isn't the same. And "Alphabet Maps" sounds completely ridiculous.

If you push someone into a bottomless well, have you committed a crime? If so, which?