If you start with the premise that all value derives from government-mandated, central bank-issued money, you squint really hard, and you abuse hallucinogenic substances, then—maybe it begins to look like that.

I am just trying to guess what Brandt means.


WTF?  How is Brandt right?  And how is regulation good for “cryptos”, as of which he spoke?

As a practical matter, the hardest part isn’t technical.  As usual, the biggest problem is human.  A very rough sketch:

How astute are you at judging character?  Could you choose N people in your life, such that it is very unlikely that M of them would conspire against you?  —And also very unlikely that (N - M) + 1 of them would inopportunely die, disappear, lose stuff, or just flake out?

(Remember that with M/N Secret Sharing, M - 1 shares together reveal zero information about the secret; on a technical level, it is information-theoretically secure.)

Any potential traitors face the problem that to betray, they need to risk potentially suggesting betrayal to somebody who may be loyal—somebody who would promptly inform you.  (Though if your threat model may include a risk of coercion of your fiduciaries, this calculation could be turned upside-down.)

Just for a contrived off-the-cuff example:  Maybe you don’t (and shouldn’t) trust your lawyer.  But how likely is it that he, a member of your family, and your best friend would all form a conspiratorial meeting of the minds for the purpose of stabbing you in the back and ripping you off?  —Especially if none of them is aware of what he has?  Whom do you know who would safeguard for you a sealed envelope, with instructions to open it if and only if you are dead or permanently incapacitated?  (Or return it to you if you ask for it in person—as your last-resort catastrophe-plan backup.)

If you can figure out the human problem, then the technical part is easy!

Of course, all that human stuff is what is usually forgotten by technology people.

That seems to be moving in the wrong direction.  Perhaps try instead expanding 3/4 to (e.g.) 3/7, with fiduciaries distributed in different jurisdictions and geographic regions such that it is unlikely that collusion could result in theft, but also unlikely that too many keyholders could be lost at once due to government action, earthquake, war, cataclysmic asteroid strike, etc.

Good point.

I suppose that now, we get to see how many traders on Bitmex and other exchanges are just in it to stack more dollars, and don’t give a hoot about Bitcoin.  Those will probably be the ones who panic-sell on the news—regardless of whether or not their own coins are even at risk.


Personal Wallet?  Keys?  What’s that?


Wow.  It seems somebody forgot the engineering balance between security and availability.  Whereas availability is a security issue.  Locking 193k BTC of Other People’s Money into a wallet that can be lost with the loss of 2 individuals—that sounds like a vulnerability to DOS a fortune!

Do any two keyholders ever travel together?  Perhaps on an airplane?  Are any two keyholders ever in the same room?

Security and availability is another one of those issues that I intended to write about, on the subject of using seed phrases with ostensibly strong passphrases.  Re AlcoHoDL, et al.  Have not yet gotten to it.  In a nutshell:  If you care about your heirs, don’t use passphrases!  Use Shamir’s Secret Sharing to back up secret pieces in some way that mitigates risk of compromise while you are alive, but also has a high probability of surviving your death or otherwise incapacitation.

(etc...)

Smooth move.

I have noticed that many sites nowadays ban Americans together with the slaves “citizens” of other notoriously “free” countries, such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

I always get a laugh when I see the United States on one of those “rogue state people, go away” TOS lists.  Too bad—it must pretty much suck for any sane individual Americans and/or North Koreans.

You can’t prove that Bitcoin isn’t an emergent divine consciousness arising from the nexus of (0) mathematically ordered pseudorandom processes, and (1) the collective psychic energy of anarchic market competition for a limited supply.

It behaves as if it has a mind of its own.  It bends mere mortals to its will.  It exists on an intangible plane; and yet, it can influence physical reality.  (Proof:  Buy physical goods with Bitcoin, and behold in awe the remote psychic power that makes people ship stuff to you as surely as if it operated by psychokinesis.)

It demands the sacrifice of electric libations poured out by votaries known as “miners”; and it rewards the mining faithful much more than most gods reward sacrifices.  It operates on a revealed truth, the Divine Law of Consensus, which it enforces much more reliably than most gods enforce their commandments.

When you watch the Bitcoin market, do you not pray deep in your heart for glorious Bitcoin to smash the wickedness of fractional-reserve funny-money?

Prayer, Exhibit 0, with the twist of a doubter?

Bitcoin is invoked through cryptic arcana which, per Clarke, are indistinguishable from magic.  Forsooth!  How could it not be the act of a god that, by invoking such things as hereby displayed, you can send me intangible spirit-wealth from anywhere in the world?

---

Scholars of culture know that this is how religions form.

Of course, I don’t really believe the foregoing.  Or do I?  Is there any rational reason not to believe it?

Unlike most preachers and prophets, I have not actually contradicted any known or scientifically ascertainable facts.

No time now to review and untangle yet another one of these, but that’s flatly implausible.

By a verbal trick, Christians converted the generic term for a class of deities to a proper noun naming a singular deity, in multiple languages:  First the Latin deus (cognate of Sanskrit devá), then eventually the English god—in Old English, so generic a word that it was originally a neuter noun distinguishable from masculine goda and feminine gyden!  Whereas if you want to know the origins of the word, it is not sensible to analyze it as a name for a singular entity.

As a precaution, I must mention that attempts to relate Hebrew to Indo-European languages are mere hokum, usually peddled by Christian evangelists—often, but not always by those of the type who claim to be descended from the mythical Lost Tribes of Israel.  Hebrew is from a completely different language family; and there is no evidence that the different language families share any common ancestor.

The word god, like German Gott, descends from Proto-Germanic, ultimately Proto-Indo-European roots antedating the Bible, and certainly from a time long before the polytheistic speakers of such languages ever read the Book of Exodus.  It seems the current theory amongst actual etymologists is that it descends from a PIE root meaning ‘to invoke’ (as by ritual), although the history of the word is obscure and somewhat vexed; a competing theory is that it descends from the root ‘to pour’ (in reference to a sacrificial libation).

N.b. that the Ten Commandments include a decree that “thou shalt have no other gods before me”, apparently a vestige from the Jewish change from polytheism to henotheism (i.e., a belief in one superior deity, above and against other existing deities; observe the god-invoking magic competition of Moses with the Egyptian priests, or the similar challenge of Elijah to the priests of Ba’al, or the Bible’s multiple prohibitions against “Asherah poles” in reference to the worship of a Semitic goddess).  That antedates the further change to monotheism (i.e., a belief that only one deity exists).

Contemporary Judaism has a cultural sensitivity (not quite a law, at least not according to most Jewish authorities) about writing the word “God”, often rendered as “G-d” or in various other forms, as a secondary effect of the Jewish law against writing the Tetragrammaton anywhere that it may potentially be defaced.  Compare and contrast the kosher law against eating meat with milk, a protection against potentially coming too close to violating the negative mitzvah against boiling a kid in its mother’s milk.

The Christian deity is not actually monotheistic in the Jewish sense.  In concept, it copies the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda (a good god embattled by an evil god/devil) mashed together with the Hindu concept of a trinity, the concept of a divine son (here probably from Mithraism), the mortal incarnation of a god (various sources), plus a few other things.  The Jewish monotheism is closer to the Stoics’ animus mundi, and probably therefrom derived.  The notion that an angel could rebel against an absolute supreme being is, of course, illogical; accordingly, the Jewish Satan is also quite different than the Christian Satan.  The only real linkages between Judaism and Christianity are that (a) Christianity started as a religion of heretical Jews in the Second Century’s equivalent of New Age cults, and (b) Christianity takes the Jewish Bible as its Old Testament.  In particular, the Christian concept of a messiah (one-third of a three-in-one deity) is totally foreign to the Jewish concept of a messiah (a Jewish king, perforce only human, bearing an ancient title that was held by historical Jewish kings—and even granted by the Jews to one Gentile, Cyrus the Great), and is not therefrom derived.

(Side note:  The word “christ” (χριστός) is a calque of Hebrew “messiah” (משיח).  It is a title, not a name, wherefore educated Christians typically refer to “Jesus, the Christ”, not “Jesus Christ”.)

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The foregoing fact-check is dashed out almost wholly off the top of my head, and with the objective detachment of a quite irreligious observer of human affairs.  I have no faith to sell you, except for the One True Revelation of the god of Bitcoin.

Anyone have GIMP/Photoshop skills to make Butt-head white-haired, and give Beavis’ mop an orange hue?


If I am annoyed by incessant chatter about a stupid TV show, then I may as well respond accordingly.

Your such statement says more about your standards for “acting responsibly” than anything else.

I don’t know you; and regardless of how personal you want to make this, one particular case says little either way about a general rule.  I do know that millions of others are not behaving in a manner that could be sanely described as “responsible”.  Vide the results:  A degenerate culture that worsens with every generation.

Oh, don’t evade responsibility by blaming the schools and the mass media as you continue believing the unexamined assumptions that they taught you.  Somebody is buying what they are selling.  That somebody is you, most of your peer group, and millions of others.

As for yourself, remember that the basic standard of reproductive success is not having children:  It is having grandchildren, and having them live in a sane and responsible manner just as, I have no doubt, you continue to uphold standards at least as high as those of your grandparents.  Having children is easy; anybody can do it, even (or especially) when drunk.

Remember this in thirty years.  Have a nice trip!


Your use of that nonsensical cliché to evade a coherently stated argument, and wholly to evade the primary point thereof, says more about your level of literacy than anything else.

Protip:  The only thing that can be sensibly dismissed as a “wall of text” is a disorganized, rambling mess lacking in proper punctuation and paragraph breaks.  If mere length is your criterion for a “wall of text”, then it will be a sad day if you should ever encounter a book.

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Well, there you go saying something sensible.

If you were to try reading what I have said, rather than just jerking your knee at my exclusionary suggestion and then trying to Win The Debate!, then perhaps you may make that a trend.

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The silver lining for the Tourist!

FTFY.

Seriously, who cares?  It’s just entertainment.  Meaningless.  Lowbrow vulgar entertainment, at that.

D’oh!  Another American cultural export.

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Only stupid, ill-informed, apathetic people vote in these rigged systems.  Mass-propaganda tells you the opposite, so as to keep you engaged like a hamster running on a wheel.  If you were to snap out of the illusion and see the system for what it is, then maybe you could find a real way to change it.  —But then, you would actually need to care.  It is too much trouble.  Watching a debate and then ticking a box in a voting booth grants you the pretense of caring, with no risk and no real expenditure of effort!  You apathetic, lazy, passive little slave.

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More better edit:  My irony meter was so numb that I failed to note the appropriateness of combining mind-killing drugs with a circus designed to fool you and keep you under control.  Televised democracy is the opium hallucinogen of the masses—and yes, why yes, I am very pointedly cribbing Marx there.

That sounds like you want Njalla (onion—when v3!?).  It is about twice to tenfold the price; but they are Tor/VPN friendly (no evil-IP account lockout horror stories), and they do not ask any IRL identifying information whatsoever.  No need to make up fake info—no risk of having domains cancelled for fake info.  If you really want, you can even avoid giving a throwaway e-mail address by instead using a throwaway Jabber/OTR address.  They don’t want to know who you are.

The way that works is that legally, they own “your” domain, such that real identifying info of a corporate entity in an exotic jurisdiction satisfies the ICANN doxing requirements that apply regardless of WHOIS-hiding.  The way I see it, that is strictly better than using fake info!  Anonymous parties with fake registrant data have no effective recourse against a bad registrar, anyway; if you are not clearly identifiable and prepared potentially to sue in court, nominal legalities present a distinction without a difference.  You must repose trust in the registrar.  I would prefer to trust a registrar who respects my privacy.

But if you really want, you can enter your real name, snailmail address, and telephone number for the registrant.  This will result in your name being exposed in the public WHOIS, which some people actually want (especially “domainers”).  The form for that is buried somewhere on the domain management page, after you have already registered the domain anonymously.  It is strictly opt-in.

Obviously, they do Bitcoin, including Lightning—also Monero and fully-shielded Zcash, and some oddball WTF shitcoins such as Paypal.  They never used Shitpay.

I have no affiliation with Njalla, other than as a customer.  I am always looking for more options for this class of service; but everything else in my current awareness for fully anonymous domain registration is either even more expensive than Njalla, or of unknown reputation.  For my part, I welcome suggestions.


LOL.  It is fun to try to figure out who actually “owns” this thing.

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Is “KYC” so normalized nowadays, in the sense of “the new normal”, that this is now a normal question?

“Know Your Customer” is a banking-specific propaganda euphemism based in idiocy about so-called “money laundering”.

Ssh.  Elwar was trying to be discreet, asking on your behalf.


Your personal site?

why u so cruell

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New world domination plan:  I will create a communications platform that restricts people to extremely short bursts of thought, and hooks the masses on perpetual dopamine bursts that reward attention deficit.

After a few years of this, everybody will be too stupid to resist total, global enslavement!  Muahahaha!

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The object of Welsh alt desire?



It is not as good as the Irish coin that I bought while drunk.

Edit 2020-11-12:  Added anchor tag.  No substantive changes.

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The narrative connecting the top photo to the bottom photo is a delusional fantasy of the modern democratic-capitalist-egalitarian worldview.

Money does not buy happiness, much less marital harmony—much less manhood!  It does not change who you are—what you are.  Life is not a formula in which you are equal to the happy people, except for the external factor of liquid capital.

If you are the lachrymose anthropoid in the top photo, then if you get rich, her reaction will probably be to take the money, and leave you broken and bleeding at the kerb.  As well she should.  You worthless wretch.  She does not have a man—and she needs you like a fish needs a bicycle!  Please do womankind a favour, and consider the health benefits of homosexuality.


What the fuck kind of dick-wielding doormat lets a woman stomp on him that way?  Or lets anyone?

Seriously, if that were normal, expected, or acceptable relationship behaviour for me, then I would go queer.  Because I would have much more self-respect pulling a train with a cock in my mouth and another up my arse.  Why be an effeminate bitch for someone who can’t actually fuck you?  For mental health:  That weepy creature in the photo needs a good hard one, as a cure for hysteria!

Of course, if you are and accept being an irresponsible schoolboy who needs domme-mommy to spank you to keep you on the straight and narrow, then the woman will treat you accordingly.  As well she should!  You don’t deserve her respect.  Respect is earned.  Have merit—get respect.  Be a disgusting exemplar of arrested development—no respect.  Throughout all of history until the Nineteenth Century, women were irresistibly impressed by men.  That changed when weakling modern males invented modern democracy, capitalism, communism, egalitarianism, and feminism—and because men were no longer impressive, women just needed to go where they were led.


By the way, just who the fuck voted for feminist politicians who gave women votes, when women could not vote and were not holders of political offices?  That was the women’s fault, right?  Can men do logic?  No wonder I oftentimes prefer the social company of women:  When they behave like stereotypical females, it is cute and endearing!

Anyway...  Ahem, where was I with that insult-comic routine.  Hah, hah—only serious.

I feel sorry for the vicious raging harridan in that photo.  Men are so hard to find nowadays!  She has a difficult life, with no man in the house, and it is all that twerp’s fault.  My condolences, honey.  If you need to calm down, relax, get some release of all that tension which is clearly driving you insane, then you know where to find me.  I don’t kiss and tell.  Get the easy-to-use Protonmail app, and nobody will ever even know that we were in contact.  (Crypto protip, speaking from experience:  Women love having ways to keep secrets.)

I have zero sympathy for her pet mental-eunuch-with-attached-flesh-dildo.  I hope that he serves her well.  If he’s a good boy, maybe she will even let him wank thinking about what sex was like—way back when she deigned to allow him to penetrate her, oh goddammit, what a mistake...  She could get pregnant that way; and with such a superannuated crying baby in the house, her every natural instinct is repulsed by the prospect of growing the spawn thereof inside her body!  Ick.  I need a bath, on her behalf.

No heirs for him!

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Irony Day, Part II:  Now more more ironical!

Quote from: strawbs on September 23, 2020, 11:30:39 AM

Quote from: nullius on September 23, 2020, 02:02:55 AM

This is not some kind of an anti-woman “eww, girls, go away” rant; I dislike those.  Rather, it is an observation that I again find myself in the wrong century.

For a nutshell historical illustration of what I mean, consider that the American Prohibition of alcohol was in large part an attack by women’s clubs on de facto men’s clubs.

Whereas if married women (and today we must consider, single mothers) are ordinarily present in pubs, then you cannot reasonably expect to disallow children.  Children come with the women.  It is a part of a package deal; anyone who doesn’t understand that, does not know the first thing about women.  Have cake—no eat, too.  And if non-professional single, childless women go to pubs, then you cannot reasonably expect for them to suddenly stop doing that when they get married and/or have kids.  Life doesn’t work that way.  Eat cake—no have, too.

It seems that what you really want is an exclusive men’s space.

I'm not sure what caused you to go off on a feminist tangent - I love the company of women, especially in pubs after a few drinks. The children in pubs here are usually accompanied by both parents. If fathers or mothers want to go and drink alcohol in a pub,

I must pause to contemplate the confusion of a man whose whole worldview is so deeply premised on unexamined feminist assumptions, that he just accidentally used feminist arguments to accuse me of feminism for my having made what is probably one of the strongest antifeminist statements that this forum has ever seen.  Triggered much by my “exclusionary” suggestion?

Your basic premise is that men and women are equal.  In this particular context (which is distinct from others), I don’t mean that in a sense of value-judgment:  Of course, males and females have equal value for any species that does not desire prompt extinction.  I mean that on a very deep level, you see men and women as basically equivalent, fungible, and interchangeable units.

Women do anything that men do, such as go to pubs.  Men do anything that women do, such as primary childcare—and bringing children to pubs—no doubt together with their equal partners in parenting.  See?  Equal—and you bristle at the suggestion that they aren’t.

Quote from: strawbs on September 23, 2020, 11:30:39 AM

You most certainly can (and should) expect people (men and women) who have kids to change their behaviour. They're meant to have grown up and become responsible, not continue to get drunk in bars, but now with a child in tow.

No, people do not suddenly “change their behaviour” and “become responsible” when they have children.  That is the type of modern fantasy indulged by people who want to rationalize irresponsible behaviour—as indeed you are doing right here.  And it is childish thinking on the level of, “Now that I have reached my X birthday (or other milestone), I am ‘grown up’!”

If a woman habitually engages in behaviour incompatible with wise motherhood before she has kids, that will not change when she has kids.  She is still the same person.  She still wants the same things, which she is accustomed to enjoy.  It is unreasonable to expect otherwise.

Contra your implication that I advocate irresponsibility, I argue rather the opposite:  Women who behave in a manner consistent with responsible motherhood before they have kids will make responsible mothers.  Those who don’t—won’t.  Have cake, no eat too—eat cake, no have too.

Really.  Whyever would you expect for a woman who habitually gets drunk in bars to become a responsible mother?

(And whyever would I expect for someone who thinks this way to be sufficiently responsible to... oh, never mind.  Something about heirs, no doubt.)

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The third logical part of this post was cut for length.  Yes.  Eh, sometime...

Oh my!!!!  I may have been away too long, and let you guys get carried away....

Who let the dogs out...


Seems a bit much to take my earlier remark on the massive falsification of history, most of which has been done over the millennia and in modern times to promote political agendas and/or sell superstitions, as an opening to pivot into a discussion of space aliens and Atlantis—the latter of which, with the theocrasy (not a typo), is basically a New Age endless rehash of unity-of-all-religions/Ascended Masters stuff from Blavatsky—who in turn basically just ripped off the Kabbalah, and mashed it together with bits and pieces of pretty much everything else that she had ever heard of. 

Although some pieces of history do get suppressed, especially in the histories of wars, the history of religions presents the opposite problem:  It is amazing how much utter nonsense can be manufactured by somebody who wants believers.

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The Suppressed Secret History of Bitcoin

Bitcoin was originally invented in Atlantis.  The name “Satoshi Nakamoto” is a cryptogram formed from the name of its Atlantean inventor, which is from a language so sophisticated that it cannot otherwise be transliterated in modern letters.  The Bitcoin 0.0.1-alpha source code and whitepaper were recovered from the gold plates on which they had been inscribed by the original “Satoshi”, an Ascended Master who returned in a new avatar to translate them respectively to C++ and English, and release them on the Internet to help lead all humankind to the Singularity.

To learn more better secret revelations, send Bitcoin here:  bc1qwk8quu9jvx97ajma45wu3pfr9v496mtt4nytmn

HTH.

Very well.  As you so insist, I will straight out honestly tell you who I am working for.  But I must warn you that you will never believe it.  You can’t handle the truth!

Ready?

I work for myself.  Exclusively.  I am a loose cannon.  And I do indeed have an agenda:  My own agenda.  Dictated by me, and no other.

Literally nobody pays me to be here.  Damn, I wish that somebody paid me to be here.

—Well, I told you that you wouldn’t believe it.  It is actually easier for you to believe that I am a secret agent.  I suppose that shows how your mind works.

Now, what if I were to ask you to “just straight out [tell] us like an honest human being who you are working for, instead of skulking around fishing with an agenda”?  LOL.

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Sound advice.  Including this part:

So, which agency?  Mossad?  It is true:  Real Mossad agents in deep cover have the chutzpah to deadpan joke about the idiots who have accused them of being Mossad agents, just to play with your head and make you believe that they must not be Mossad agents.  Victory by deception, etc.  Or maybe Chinese intelligence?  Surely, the Chinese have sent a spook to make you suck a yellow dick.  I am more cunning than Sun Tzu.  And I also deadpanned about being a Chinese Nazi!  Same evidence as for Mossad!  Hey—what if I’m a Jewish Chinese Nazi?



Just please don’t insult me by suggesting that I be from the CIA.  American apes, they couldn’t spy their way out of a wet paper bag.

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CT, you may call me σκληρός Ὀδῠσσεύς.

http://bitcult.faith/


I ought to work more on this channelling of inerrant divine inspiration:


The principal reason why I dropped it was my realization that too many dollar-worshippers seriously accuse Bitcoiners of a “cult mentality”.

Oh, of course they do!


FTFY.

If all that is required to scare you into submission and deter you from perfectly legal behaviour is the risk that potentially you may get onto a little list of people-who-doing-something-perfectly-legal, then you should not use crypto at all!  Not encrypted communications—certainly not Bitcoin, which is actually more dangerous to the system and, I note, invokes many potential complications in some jurisdictions where encrypting your communications is unequivocally legal.  Why are you not worried about the potentially much worse list of Bitcoiners—which you probably KYCed yourself into, as I myself have avoided?

Also, if the mere prospect of that little list has such an impact on you, then you are so very easy to control.  Trivial.  It’s like you’re asking for it.  Enjoy slavery.

For my part, I think that it’s a little bit too late to worry about simply being on little lists.  I have probably been getting onto more and more of them ever since I was a teenager.  If I could go back in time, perhaps I may teach myself a cloak-and-dagger routine so that I could live a total double life like a deep-cover spy—well, I do live in enemy-ruled territory, i.e. anywhere in the modern world...  Anyway, as it stands, if I could be on only the list of people-who-encrypt-everything, that would probably be an improvement!

Are you so meek that in an age of tyranny, you have not even been sufficiently annoying to ever get yourself onto a little list somewhere?

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N.b. that I have never been arrested.  I have no criminal record (and no reason for one).  My perspective is not one of some anarchist jailbird who has nothing to lose.  To the contrary!

Why, oh why, do I feel it’s wise to note that?  Because you are acting like encrypting your communications is quasi-illegal!  This is Nineteen Eighty-Four stuff:  Obey the unwritten laws.

P.S., not sure how I glanced by this point before:


Your allegation that Shaivism be the “world’s oldest religion”, and by implication that it was the original Hindu orthodoxy, rather prove my point that nothing is “intact” about any of these religions.

Way back when, the only Hindu “supreme being” was the impersonal Brahma (neuter noun), whence sprang the Trimūrti (a trinity):  Brahman (masculine noun; the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver), and Siva (the Destroyer).  In the beginning was only Brahma; all existence may be said to be no more than an illusion imagined by Brahma; and all things shall return to Brahma, only to re-emerge in an eternal cycle.  The closest Western concepts to Brahma are in various aspects such things as Chaos, whence sprang the universe, and Fate, which controls the destinies even of the gods.

The syncretisms and variations that developed as Hindu orthodoxies over the centuries and millennia form an astounding tangle.  They all share the same Vedic roots, of course—somewhat in a manner analogous to how Sanskrit shares linguistic roots with Greek.  That is what distinguishes them from such outrageous heresies as Buddhism, or the skeptical philosophy of Lokāyaka (a highly intelligent rational atheism which rejects all mysticism, denies the existence of all gods, and holds that human consciousness is a material bodily process that ceases at the death of the individual), etc.

The same processes operate on all religions.  Judaism was originally polytheistic (as seen at Elephantine).  The Christian denominations of the Fifteenth Century would all have been condemned as heresies by each of the many different Christian sects of the Second or Third Century—and vice versa.  Zoroastrianism later had Mithraism as a direct descendant, so to speak.  The Greek religious beliefs of later Hellenistic times were of a different Zeitgeist from the beliefs of Homeric heroes (although here, the difference seems less significant due to the implicitly pluralistic nature of Greek polytheism).  Etc., etc.

The bottom line is that men create gods in their own images; and as societies change, so do their concepts of divinity.