Words kill too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBT_youth

Embodied experience (especially sexual pleasure) is at war with church dogma (pleasure taints the soul; pain purifies the soul), and God is losing badly here in the USA.

Prepare your mind for surprise.

Incorrect.

Superstition and scientific skepticism are mutually exclusive patterns of thought. Our primate brains are imperfect pattern-recognition machines, which all too often finds nonexistent signals in the background noise of life. It's a classic signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. This capability is association learning--associating the causal connections between A and B--as when our ancestors associated the seasons with the migration of game animals. We are skilled enough at it to have survived and passed on the genes for the capacity of association learning.

Unfortunately, the system has flaws. Superstitions are false associations--A appears to be connected to B, but it is not (the baseball player who doesn't shave and hits a home run). Las Vegas was built on false association learning.

Consider a few cases of false pattern recognition (Google key words for visuals): the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich; the face of Jesus on an oyster shell (resembles Charles Manson, I think); the hit NBC television series Medium, in which Patricia Arquette plays psychic Allison Dubois, whose occasional thoughts and dreams seem connected to real-world crimes; the film White Noise, in which Michael Keaton's character believes he is receiving messages from his dead wife through tape recorders and other electronic devices in what is called EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is another version of what I call TMODMP, the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.

Anecdotes fuel pattern-seeking thought. Aunt Mildred's cancer went into remission after she imbibed extract of seaweed--maybe it works--maybe it doesn't. Either way, there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science. Only when a group of cancer patients taking seaweed extract is compared with a control group can we draw a valid conclusion. We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated the exchange of such association anecdotes.

The problem is that although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the overall phenomenon of superstition has endured the winnowing process of natural selection. The Darwin Awards (honoring those who remove themselves from the gene pool) will never want for examples. Because anecdotal thinking comes naturally, while science requires training and discipline.

Please refer to the edit I added to the post above, reposted here for your convenience:

EDIT:
I consider the liberation of your mind from the lies of superstition to be among my ethical duties as a person possessing exceptional intellectual acuity who is also a compassionate citizen of this hivemind we call the internet.

EDIT:
I consider the liberation of your mind from the lies of superstition to be among my ethical duties as a person possessing exceptional intellectual acuity who is also a compassionate citizen of this hivemind we call the internet.

Dismissing a superstitious belief system for which there is no supporting evidence is not "odd", it's science.

Let me tell you a story about poor pattern recognition en masse. In September 1969, a rumor circulated that the Beatles' Paul McCartney was dead, killed in a 1966 automobile accident and replaced by a look-alike. The clues were there in the albums, if you knew where to look.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band's "A Day in the Life," for one, recounts the accident: "He blew his mind out in a car / He didn't notice that the lights had changed / A crowd of people stood and stared / They'd seen his face before / Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords". The cover of the Abbey Road album shows the Fab Four walking across a street in what looks like a funeral procession, with John in white as the preacher, Ringo in black as the pallbearer, a barefoot and out-of-step Paul as the corpse, and George in work clothes as the gravedigger. In the background is a Volkswagen Beetle (!) whose license plate reads "28IF"--Paul's supposed age "if" he had not died.

Spookiest of all were the clues embedded in songs played backward. On a cheap turntable, if one moved the speed switch midway between 331/3 and 45 to disengage the motor drive, then manually turned the record backward and listened in wide-eared wonder. The eeriest is "Revolution 9" from the White Album, in which an ominously deep voice endlessly repeats: number nine ... number nine ... number nine.... Played backward you hear: turn me on, dead man ... turn me on, dead man ... turn me on, dead man....

In time, thousands of clues emerged as the rumor mill cranked up (type "Paul is dead" into Google for examples), despite John Lennon's 1970 statement to Rolling Stone that "the whole thing was made up." But made up by whom? Not the Beatles. Instead this was a fine example of the brain as a pattern-recognition machine that all too often finds nonexistent signals in the background noise of life.

What we have here is a signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. This capability is association learning--associating the causal connections between A and B--as when our ancestors associated the seasons with the migration of game animals. We are skilled enough at it to have survived and passed on the genes for the capacity of association learning.

Unfortunately, the system has flaws. Superstitions are false associations--A appears to be connected to B, but it is not (the baseball player who doesn't shave and hits a home run). Las Vegas was built on false association learning.

Consider a few cases of false pattern recognition (Google key words for visuals): the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich; the face of Jesus on an oyster shell (resembles Charles Manson, I think); the hit NBC television series Medium, in which Patricia Arquette plays psychic Allison Dubois, whose occasional thoughts and dreams seem connected to real-world crimes; the film White Noise, in which Michael Keaton's character believes he is receiving messages from his dead wife through tape recorders and other electronic devices in what is called EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is another version of what I call TMODMP, the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.

Anecdotes fuel pattern-seeking thought. Aunt Mildred's cancer went into remission after she imbibed extract of seaweed--maybe it works--maybe it doesn't. Either way, there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science. Only when a group of cancer patients taking seaweed extract is compared with a control group can we draw a valid conclusion. We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated the exchange of such association anecdotes.

The problem is that although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the overall phenomenon of superstition has endured the winnowing process of natural selection. The Darwin Awards (honoring those who remove themselves from the gene pool) will never want for examples. Because anecdotal thinking comes naturally, while science requires training and discipline.

That's not what the word censorship means. Censorship is the practice of officially examining literature/media/art and suppressing unacceptable parts. You ignoring me only affects what information you're exposed to - no one else is affected whatsoever.

If my writing here truly bothers you that much, why not simply ignore me and be done with it?

Because knocking on people's doors, bothering them in their home is the same thing as writing openly on the internet, where readers must navigate here themselves to read it. Do Jehovah's witnesses carry with them a magic "ignore" button you can press to silence them forever? Because I do, it's right there beneath my name.

I would agree, but as I see it bitcoin is a "small wave" revolution, and coming in right on its heels will be the far larger and more powerful wave of anti-capitalism revolution.

In the a twenty-first century ethics civilization, currency may turn out to be nowhere near as important as it is today. Consider the possibility that decent food, shelter, healthcare, and education may be provided to all human beings as a birthright. In such a world, money will not be anywhere near as central to our lives as it is today.



Yours in compassion and solidarity,

World Citizen Beliathon

Trezor is legit. The hardware is open-source so if you don't trust their manufacturing process, you can build one yourself or have someone you trust build one for you.

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
-George Bernard Shaw

"With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another."
-G. C. Lichtenberg

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
-Mark Twain

"The security provided by a long-held belief system, even when poorly founded, is a strong impediment to progress. General acceptance of a practice becomes the proof of its validity, though it lacks all other merit."
-Dr. B. Lown (invented defibrillator)

"A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe."
- H. D. Thoreau

"When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself."
-Mark Twain

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
-Herbert Spencer

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible."
-Bertrand Russell

"It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity, filled to overbrimming as we are with questions, and naturally talented as we are for the asking of clear questions, and then for us to do nothing about, or worse, to try to suppress the questions..."
-Lewis Thomas

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-Isaac Asimov

I find your criticisms wholly uncompelling, OP.

said to Robert Fulton, upon hearing of his plans for a steam-powered engine.

Arthur Clarke's Three Laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Seriously though guys, I'm right. Although I do suspect some form of quasi-religion will survive into the next century, perhaps something along the lines of a Zen-Gnostic Church of the Sacred Orgasm. This organization would embrace everything that traditional religions reject, above all the eternal self-evident truth of embodied experience.

“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

For those just tuning in to the thread who may have missed it:

As this discussion is about you, and not bitcoin, it belongs in the offtopic section, not in the Bitcoin discussion section.

Warm regards

Neitze was wrong, god was very much alive in 1870. But he's dying now.

The long slow death of god began in the 1980s, the formative years of the internet.

This person doesn't understand bitcoin. Bitcoin is open-source transparent mathematics. There is no obfuscation, because the source is irrelevant. That's one of the most fundamental differences between Bitcoin and fiat! This is basic whitepaper shit - Bitcoin 101 - how the fuck could you be a legendary member and not know this? Did you buy that account? What a disgrace. That tears it man, you're going back on the ignore list for awhile.



Newtonian physics would have gotten us to the moon whether or not we knew who Newton was. Just as Bitcoin will get us to the moon whether or not we ever find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is/was.

Beliathon works in mysterious ways, homeslice. Adapt.

Correct. A scientific view is always asymptotically approaching perfect objective universal truth. Science is a kind of organism, an evolving reasoned consensus by living peers. The truth is always there, waiting. Modern science is a bunch of clever folks sniffing it out together.

By contrast, religion/superstition isn't even attempting to understand the world accurately. Just as science is a living organism, religion is death - the death of reason. It's not about finding truth, because they make it up. Religion is fiction / myth / make-believe / denial of self-evident bodily experience (pleasure) / fantasy / falsehood / lies.

And every scientist knows this. You are tragically intellectually stunted adults, dear theists. Because I'm a compassionate human being, I'm here selflessly and valiantly fighting to liberate your mind from the unethical brainwashed bastards who vandalized it with superstition when you were an innocent child. That's reality.

Claim:Evidence?