Study Design and Population:
We undertook a historical prospective study of mortality in secular and religious kibbutzim over a 16-year period (January 1, 1970, through December 31, 1985). Eleven religious kibbutzim established before 1965 were pair matched with 11 secular kibbutzim from the labor movement according to the following criteria: same geographic locale, use of the same regional hospital, similar numbers of members 40 years of age and older, and dates of establishment as close as possible.

Results:
There was a distinctly lower mortality rate in religious kibbutzim than in secular kibbutzim that was evident in both sexes, evident at all ages, and consistent throughout the 16-year period of observation. The lower mortality persisted, with remarkable overall consistency, across the major categories of underlying cause of death. The magnitude of the protective effect associated with membership in a religious kibbutz is exemplified by ablation of the usual female mortality advantage: secular women did not live longer than religious men.

Conclusions:
The breadth of the protective effect, encompassing all major causes of death, and its strength, reflected in the elimination of the sex difference in mortality between religious men and secular women, are remarkable.

Our study suggests that even when the increasingly recognized and powerful effects of socioeconomic differences on the health of populations are removed and a high level of health is attained profound influences of the social environment on health may remain. Understanding how this embracing protective effect of religious observance is actually mediated could provide valuable etiologic insights.

Life expectancy in the U.S. is at an all-time high, according to a report released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And while the news that we’re living, on average, to the ripe old age of 78 years and 9 ½ months isn’t that surprising, there is one stat that is: A girl born in 2012 can expect to live to 81.2 years—almost 5 years longer than a boy baby born the same year, who's likely live to age 76.4.

Define your use of strong in this context. Do you mean physical, willpower, influence, or something else?

For that matter, define religion as well. An hierarchical power structure, simply belief in God, etc?


This is what I thought, but is not at all what I've found.

From my experience there are many individuals claiming to be Christians who do not practice what is preached, apparently caused by conceptual misunderstanding or an attraction to the lifestyle in a form over function situation.

On the other side, those genuinely following have effectively scraped away layers of cultural and social toxicity to see that their own principled actions encourage and incentivize others to do the same. This highlights the strength of the individual as an integral part of a whole.

Along with that comes the strength to acknowledge and admit that one is learning and can make mistakes, to not fear looking foolish while discovering the optimal path. Likewise, to be just in supporting others in the process of learning as well as chastising those doing wrong. There is a clear distinction in Christianity between giving a helping hand and turning hostile individuals away, just as can be seen with the current immigration differences between Europe and the US where the former has no boundaries and the latter drew a line.

What I have seen:

• Failure is forgiven, not excused
• Strength is rewarded when used to build and support
• Respect is for both men and women because we are different, always learning and improving

Before claiming to be Christian I also misunderstood deeply. It's the kind of thing where you need to experience the change to truly understand, similar to your illness.

This universe, existence, what-have-you is to me a playpen of sorts. I see it as a safe place both to protect us while we collectively grow as spiritual beings, as well as to protect whatever is beyond this universe from us. Yes, from us - we have the potential for immense power, both creative and destructive. We probably don't realize anywhere near the extent of what we can do as gods - Psalm 82:6

My perspective is that humanity collectively forms a unified organism that transcends what we understand individually. Whether what we arrive at is due to an emergent property or remains external is something I don't know, but all of the changes throughout history leave subtle clues in the same direction. The primary point of import is that we have to progress through the stages of growth together and at differing rates.

We can learn everything to know about the here and now, which is all well and good - but we still don't know what lies beyond death, and it doesn't seem we will in the immediate future. In that context, unless we can provably know all there is to know, it makes more sense for me to believe than to hold fast to the notion that we might figure everything out here.

As for the Horus-Jesus link and other comparative mythology, I've spent some time studying them and simply haven't found anything truly convincing. The whole sun god concept falls apart in light of Deuteronomy 4:19, among other verses, which explicitly prohibits worshiping of the sun, moon, stars or any other celestial object.

I have not studied all religions extensively, but I have seen that Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam and others all echo each other in some way. I find that to be a greater indication that they hint at an absolute truth than anything else.


Agreed, although I use different terms. We create and destroy with words, perhaps more so than we do with our hands - Ephesians 4:29

I think the trouble may lie more in the push to "educate" than in being educated and quotas pushing for more minorities/women in STEM - the strong-willed may not necessarily need to get a degree in higher education, whereas those with an inclination to be led might follow paths that are not always beneficial. Exposure to opportunities is one thing, but if a person does not act on it then forcing won't help. On top of that, how many can fathom the implications of their choices in a non-linear reality?

Everyone in this life has a different path; some women may indeed go on to be prominent leaders, although that is certainly not their most common purpose or strength. What's most important is a sense of respect and understanding that we all have stages in our lives where we misunderstood or were misguided and may have caused harm somehow. It's also critical to remind ourselves that there may still remain areas where we are mistaken, which can indeed be humbling. That humility garners more respect in the long run than any amount of blustering.

Reading through some of your posts on Github and ESR's site, there is evident emphasis and enthusiasm very similar to how I used to write. Your reasoning and technical acumen is commendable, so the frustration during explanation is understandable. It can be a major challenge to remain civil and I only learned how to be judicious with my replies due to lack of time, but its made a world of difference in how my words are received. The years you've spent on these forums and in discussion have undoubtedly made an impact, but they've also taken a great deal of time; that constant pressure will have a profound result at some point, especially as you refine your approach.

As you've stated before, doing will have much greater impact than talking. Patience is the hard part in that.

Of course I didn't read all of your post, nor read any of it with a fine tooth comb. I told you I don't have enough energy. I responded to few small portions that I read. I may become energized for some moments I am not (as I am now) by being provoked, but the vast majority of the time I am not in good condition right now. I did have some burst of mild energy a few days ago and perhaps I get a few hours every other day or so, where I feel mostly awake.
...
I am lacking an appropriate word to use in your case, and besides I don't want to be judging or analyzing you at all. I'd rather we just talk about facts.

Where in the prior post did I state I thought you are liar?

I dislike personal anecdotes but I will use one here to demonstrate a point. I know for a fact your theses is wrong. I know it is wrong because I am married to a virtuous, beautiful, smart, faithful female. She is highly educated and has willingly chosen not to work and sacrifice her career goals to raise our four young children.

I don't think you have reached 3 - 4 children yet either, but anyway...

CoinCube, I propose we take a step back and depersonalize our discussion
...
how about we step back from the ledge of personalization and try to see if we can debate with more rationality and objectivity.
...
I don't think you have reached 3 - 4 children yet either, but anyway I proposed to depersonalize this discussion.

P.S. I am on very strong 4-drugs anti-tuberculosis meds and I am basically so exhausted that I can only sleep continuously (about 20 hours a day) and eat. So I am in sort of state of near delirium, so apologies but the quality of my cognitive state (and thus prose) is highly diminished at the moment. I am posting on this topic because I think it is perhaps the most important thing I can possibly do with the limited moments I have awake. And because I don't have enough energy to do any real work (such as programming).

The work of Menelaos Apostolou, a young Assistant Professor from Nicosia University in Cyprus - collected and explored in this recent book, turns-out to be the most significant 'paradigm shift' in the evolutionary psychology of sex since the modern field began in 1979 with Don Symons The evolution of human sexuality.

Apostolou's work means that this whole area of work - many thousands of papers and scores of best-selling books (not to mention the theoretical basis of the online Manosphere and PUA movement) - now need to be reframed within a new explanatory context.

In a nutshell, and with exhaustive documentation and rigorous argument, Apostolou establishes that parental choice is primary in human evolutionary history: for many hundreds of generations of our ancestors it was primarily parents who chose and controlled who their children would marry and reproduce-with; and the individual sexual preferences of both men and women were relegated to a secondary role.

This means that it was mainly parent choice that shaped human mating preferences - and personal choice would have been relegated to a subordinate role within and after marriage (e.g. infidelity choices; and the choice to end marriage - e.g. when to divorce).

Most of this book is taken up by the collection and discussion of a mass of empirical data - hundreds of references, and the detailed working-through of the implications; but the take home message is relatively simple and clear.

Apostolou shows that in most societies in human history, and continuing in most modern societies outside of The West, individual men and women had very little choice of their mates - and that this choice was nearly always made by their parents. In other words, marriages were arranged by the parents of the husband and wife - especially the daughter's marriage, and usually by their fathers more than their mothers.

Parents preferences for a marriage partner differ from those of their offspring. In general, parents (relatively to their children, especially daughter) prefer delaying sexual relationships until an early marriage with early onset of child-bearing and little or no extra-marital sex. And parents have been generally hostile to divorce.

The characteristics parents prefer (compared with individual preferences) include good character, ability to provide resources (especially men), coming from a 'good family' - with high status and wealth, and pre-marital chastity (especially in women).

The characteristics individuals prefer (compared with their parents) include beauty and good looks (hair, face, figure etc. in a woman; muscular physique in a man), a charming and entertaining personality, the ability to provide sexual excitement and so on.

The system of parental sexual choice seems to be unique to humans - which makes it a matter of exceptional biological interest: we may be the only species that has not evolved to choose our own mates.

More exactly, the ancestral system was probably (to simplify) that two sets of parents controlled who thier children married - the individual preferences of the prospective husband and wife may or may not have been consulted. Individual choice was probably important mostly after marriage - since there was the possibility of extra-marital liaisons (although Apostolou documents that these were extremely risky, and generally very harshly punished, up to and including death - especially for women).

But all the ancestral societies permitted divorce (while strongly discouraging it - since this undermined parental decisions) - although mainly in a context where one of the spouses turned out to be unsatisfactory from the point of view of providing grandchildren (eg. men who did not provide sufficient resources - due to their behaviour or from illness or injury, or women who were barren). Probably since women are more controlled in arranging marriage, it is mainly women who initiate divorces.

Apostolou summarizes this as: Parents decide who gets married, children decide whether they stay married.

Another way of describing this is that parents screen or filter prospective spouses - and individual preferences only work within this pre-screened and filtered population. Consequently, modern men and women are not adapted to select a partner from an unscreened population - and not equipped with the proper instincts to assist their choice; so they are vulnerable to deception and exploitation.

Therefore human evolutionary history has left modern individuals, in a world where parental choice and control has been all-but eliminated from mainstream life, woefully ill-equipped to manage their sexual lives.

This affects both men and women adversely - but in partly different ways. men and women share a common problem of not being worried-enoughabout the problem of finding suitable long-term mates, marrying and having children - precisely because this whole business was managed for them by parents through hundreds of preceding human generations.

Women delay and delay marriage and child-bearing, and seem unconcerned about their genetic extinction - because their deep inbuilt expectation is that these matters will be arranged for-them. men worry too much about attaining high status among men, and becoming a good provider - when these were selected for in a world where prospective in-laws wanted these attributes from men; but in the modern world they are an ineffectual strategy for getting a mate.
In sum (and in terms of their biological fitness) modern men are too worried about working hard, and not worried enough about meeting and impressing individual women.

So men and women who are apparently, in biological and historical terms, extremely well-qualified as potential husbands and wives, remain unmarried and childless in large and increasing numbers.

Modern single people therefore are much too happy about their living in a state of unattached childlessness, than is good for their reproductive success. And this (biologically) foolish happiness is at least partly a consequence of evolutionary history: people are behaving as if mating and marriage will be sorted-out by parents - but it isn't.

However, as is usual in works of evolutionary psychology - in a subject where the professionals are almost 100 percent atheists (and militant atheists at that!), in this book there is a too brief and conceptually inadequate consideration of the role of religion.

The subject gets about three pages, and religion is treated as merely a trumped-up rationalization for enforcing biological imperatives. However, it is not mentioned that in modern societies it is only among the religious that we can find biologically viable patterns of mating, marriage and family - and indeed only among some particular religions that are traditionalist in ethics and patriarchal in structure: which fits exactly with the evolutionary predictions.

My point is that religion needs to be regarded as a cause, not merely a consequence, of sexual behaviour and selection pressure; in sum, religion (more exactly, some specific religions) is the only known antidote to the pattern of maladaptive modern sexuality which is trending towards extinction.

Another omission is the role of intoxication by alcohol and drugs. Much of modern sexual behaviour is initiated in parties, bars and nightclubs; and occurs more-or-less under the influence of intoxicants - and this in itself deranges delicate brain functioning and destroys the benefits of behavioural adaptations that may have taken centuries or millennia to evolve.

An intoxicated person is maladaptive.

So, from a biological perspective, I would contend that there is no reason to suppose we can solve the biological problems of modernity outwith religion (especially since the social system of religion has in practice been replaced by... the mass media - see my book Addicted to Distraction). Biological knowledge can diagnose the problem - but science cannot provide a solution nor the motivation to implement it; since humans are not evolved to structure their sexuality according to biological principles.

We are 'set-up' to seek our own gratification and try to avoid suffering with reproductive success as a by-product - we do not seek directly to achieve optimal personal/ or tribal/ or national/ or species-level reproductive fitness.

Such omissions and other imperfections do not detract from the exceptional originality and importance of this book and the empirical research and theoretical discussion which it summarizes.

In a world where actual scientific achievement was the primary determinant of professional success; Menelaos Apostolou would be among the most prestigious, most cited, and most intellectually influential people in evolutionary psychology.

I hope that this deserved outcome will, sooner or later, come to pass.

The work of Menelaos Apostolou, a young Assistant Professor from Nicosia University in Cyprus - collected and explored in this recent book, turns-out to be the most significant 'paradigm shift' in the evolutionary psychology of sex since the modern field began in 1979 with Don Symons The evolution of human sexuality.

Apostolou's work means that this whole area of work - many thousands of papers and scores of best-selling books (not to mention the theoretical basis of the online Manosphere and PUA movement) - now need to be reframed within a new explanatory context.

In a nutshell, and with exhaustive documentation and rigorous argument, Apostolou establishes that parental choice is primary in human evolutionary history: for many hundreds of generations of our ancestors it was primarily parents who chose and controlled who their children would marry and reproduce-with; and the individual sexual preferences of both men and women were relegated to a secondary role.

This means that it was mainly parent choice that shaped human mating preferences - and personal choice would have been relegated to a subordinate role within and after marriage (e.g. infidelity choices; and the choice to end marriage - e.g. when to divorce).

Most of this book is taken up by the collection and discussion of a mass of empirical data - hundreds of references, and the detailed working-through of the implications; but the take home message is relatively simple and clear.

Apostolou shows that in most societies in human history, and continuing in most modern societies outside of The West, individual men and women had very little choice of their mates - and that this choice was nearly always made by their parents. In other words, marriages were arranged by the parents of the husband and wife - especially the daughter's marriage, and usually by their fathers more than their mothers.

Parents preferences for a marriage partner differ from those of their offspring. In general, parents (relatively to their children, especially daughter) prefer delaying sexual relationships until an early marriage with early onset of child-bearing and little or no extra-marital sex. And parents have been generally hostile to divorce.

The characteristics parents prefer (compared with individual preferences) include good character, ability to provide resources (especially men), coming from a 'good family' - with high status and wealth, and pre-marital chastity (especially in women).

The characteristics individuals prefer (compared with their parents) include beauty and good looks (hair, face, figure etc. in a woman; muscular physique in a man), a charming and entertaining personality, the ability to provide sexual excitement and so on.

The system of parental sexual choice seems to be unique to humans - which makes it a matter of exceptional biological interest: we may be the only species that has not evolved to choose our own mates.

More exactly, the ancestral system was probably (to simplify) that two sets of parents controlled who thier children married - the individual preferences of the prospective husband and wife may or may not have been consulted. Individual choice was probably important mostly after marriage - since there was the possibility of extra-marital liaisons (although Apostolou documents that these were extremely risky, and generally very harshly punished, up to and including death - especially for women).

But all the ancestral societies permitted divorce (while strongly discouraging it - since this undermined parental decisions) - although mainly in a context where one of the spouses turned out to be unsatisfactory from the point of view of providing grandchildren (eg. men who did not provide sufficient resources - due to their behaviour or from illness or injury, or women who were barren). Probably since women are more controlled in arranging marriage, it is mainly women who initiate divorces.

Apostolou summarizes this as: Parents decide who gets married, children decide whether they stay married.

Another way of describing this is that parents screen or filter prospective spouses - and individual preferences only work within this pre-screened and filtered population. Consequently, modern men and women are not adapted to select a partner from an unscreened population - and not equipped with the proper instincts to assist their choice; so they are vulnerable to deception and exploitation.

Therefore human evolutionary history has left modern individuals, in a world where parental choice and control has been all-but eliminated from mainstream life, woefully ill-equipped to manage their sexual lives.

This affects both men and women adversely - but in partly different ways. men and women share a common problem of not being worried-enoughabout the problem of finding suitable long-term mates, marrying and having children - precisely because this whole business was managed for them by parents through hundreds of preceding human generations.

Women delay and delay marriage and child-bearing, and seem unconcerned about their genetic extinction - because their deep inbuilt expectation is that these matters will be arranged for-them. men worry too much about attaining high status among men, and becoming a good provider - when these were selected for in a world where prospective in-laws wanted these attributes from men; but in the modern world they are an ineffectual strategy for getting a mate.
In sum (and in terms of their biological fitness) modern men are too worried about working hard, and not worried enough about meeting and impressing individual women.

So men and women who are apparently, in biological and historical terms, extremely well-qualified as potential husbands and wives, remain unmarried and childless in large and increasing numbers.

Modern single people therefore are much too happy about their living in a state of unattached childlessness, than is good for their reproductive success. And this (biologically) foolish happiness is at least partly a consequence of evolutionary history: people are behaving as if mating and marriage will be sorted-out by parents - but it isn't.

However, as is usual in works of evolutionary psychology - in a subject where the professionals are almost 100 percent atheists (and militant atheists at that!), in this book there is a too brief and conceptually inadequate consideration of the role of religion.

The subject gets about three pages, and religion is treated as merely a trumped-up rationalization for enforcing biological imperatives. However, it is not mentioned that in modern societies it is only among the religious that we can find biologically viable patterns of mating, marriage and family - and indeed only among some particular religions that are traditionalist in ethics and patriarchal in structure: which fits exactly with the evolutionary predictions.

My point is that religion needs to be regarded as a cause, not merely a consequence, of sexual behaviour and selection pressure; in sum, religion (more exactly, some specific religions) is the only known antidote to the pattern of maladaptive modern sexuality which is trending towards extinction.

Another omission is the role of intoxication by alcohol and drugs. Much of modern sexual behaviour is initiated in parties, bars and nightclubs; and occurs more-or-less under the influence of intoxicants - and this in itself deranges delicate brain functioning and destroys the benefits of behavioural adaptations that may have taken centuries or millennia to evolve.

An intoxicated person is maladaptive.

So, from a biological perspective, I would contend that there is no reason to suppose we can solve the biological problems of modernity outwith religion (especially since the social system of religion has in practice been replaced by... the mass media - see my book Addicted to Distraction). Biological knowledge can diagnose the problem - but science cannot provide a solution nor the motivation to implement it; since humans are not evolved to structure their sexuality according to biological principles.

We are 'set-up' to seek our own gratification and try to avoid suffering with reproductive success as a by-product - we do not seek directly to achieve optimal personal/ or tribal/ or national/ or species-level reproductive fitness.

Such omissions and other imperfections do not detract from the exceptional originality and importance of this book and the empirical research and theoretical discussion which it summarizes.

In a world where actual scientific achievement was the primary determinant of professional success; Menelaos Apostolou would be among the most prestigious, most cited, and most intellectually influential people in evolutionary psychology.

I hope that this deserved outcome will, sooner or later, come to pass.

So we are having a debate here, and I want to try to be respectful, because really I don't want to be angry or offensive to my brother. It is the ideology he is professing that I hate.

Our only hope as men is take control and lead. Period. Until CoinCube gets this, I am afraid I will conclude his intellectual capacity has been filled up with insanity.

Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.

It seems reasonable to regard religion as the proximate method of group selection in humans - in other words, when humans groups compete and evolve group adaptations, these are instantiated by means of religions. Individual humans have adapted to live in a context of religion; and when religion is absent, human behaviour becomes maladaptive - because human instincts are 'designed' to function in a religious environment.

It has long been a consensus among (secular) social theorists that the main (secular) function of religion is social cohesion - that is, religion can enable larger and more complex forms of social functioning; including the stimulation and enforcement of motivation, altruism, long-termism.

Since all humans - until recently in The West - have evolved in the context of religion; therefore religion must, over multiple generations, have had gene-selective consequences that shaped individual instincts and behaviours.

Group selection entails that group behaviour be referenced to something outside the group. This is what groups cohere-around, organize around, cooperate to promote. Throughout history this 'something' has been religion - variously the spirits, the gods, or One God.

Since this has apparently been the case throughout all known history and stretching back into pre-history, individual humans have evolved to be coordinated by religion: religion is a built-in, innate expectation for each individual human; and if religion is absent, then individual behaviour lacks a necessary adaptive context.

Having been under group selection for so long, where each individual functioned as a 'component' part of a religious society; then individual level instincts will relatively have atrophied. So, remove the religion from an individual human being, and the behavioural rules and patterns lack context, and are maladaptive.

Individual humans absent religion are un-equipped to pursue their own reproductive success.

Religion is therefore the medium for, and regulation of, altruism - which is the propensity of individuals to sacrifice their own short-term comfort and pleasure, health, survival, and ultimately their reproductive success, to that of the group.

In sum: Humans just are adapted to serve the group via religious structures which reference individual behaviour to some-thing outside the group.

Clearly, 'the group' in group selection will be bounded - and cannot be scaled up or down, made larger or smaller, indefinitely; since there must be mechanisms for rewarding group-helpful, and suppressing group-harmful, behaviours - and such mechanisms (like status or material rewards, shaming or physically-coercive sanctions) differ between religions, and these do not scale indefinitely in either direction.

Group selection is strong: it must be stronger, in significant respects, than individual selection: group selection must be strong enough to overcome individual preferences.

This means that group selection operates to affect the nature and strength of individual preferences - individual preferences have until recently always operates in the context of religiously-mediated group imperatives; because, over many generations, selection will (overall) tend-to mould individual preferences significantly to serve the needs of the group.

While group selection has been significant on all humans everywhere and at all times; European populations (also probably East Asian populations, perhaps to an even greater extent?) have been strongly group selected for large-scale cohesion over many dozens of generations; so that the effects of group selection are more significant in those of European descent than in most other populations.

This implies that the selection effects of religion on individual behaviour has been more significant in those of European descent than in most other populations.  

European populations had Christianity as the proximate mechanism of group selection for hundreds of years; shaping the instinctual basis of the individuals. And Christianity must have been an extremely powerful mechanism of group selection, because it enabled what are, by world historical standards, very large cooperating groups persisting over multiple generations.

(By contrast, simple animistic religions are able to enforce cooperation of some scores of people; more complex totemistic religions can enable the cohesion of thousands; and the complex and literate Temple religion of Ancient Egypt enabled some millions of people to cohere for three thousand years! Christianity seems to have been similarly powerful to the ancient Egyptian religion, sustaining complex cooperation among millions of people.)

It may therefore be assumed that the people of Western nations inhabited by those of European descent evolved to become extremely dependent on Christianity in order to be adaptive.

These same people, with the same instincts that operated within a strongly Christian context for so many generations, now find themselves in a society from which Christianity has been (all but) deleted.

Individual behaviours now have a very different environment in which to operation - indeed, the environment is in multiple respects and increasingly anti-Christian. Little wonder that grossly maladaptive behaviour is currently rife - indeed mainstream.  

Sans religion, Western populations lack the instinctual basis for individual level survival and reproduction, since these instincts long since atrophied - and atrophied to a more extreme degree than in most populations.

Now basic instincts such as reproduction, group survival, defence, long-termism for group goals, self-sacrifice for the group are defective or absent. The interaction between individual instincts and the non-religious environment is producing multiple, population-lethal pathologies. Voluntary subfertility is nearly universal; native population-replacement is advocated and celebrated; maladaptive forms of sexuality are common and actively-promoted; self-mutilation is escalating, normal and admired; the clamour for on-demand, comfortable, 'assisted' suicide grows greater with each year...

Living without religion, but with a genetic makeup that had evolved to assume religion, to expect religion, and to live-within religion; the instinctual basis of Europeans, including their powers of evaluation and judgement, are revealed as both ineffective and inappropriate.

Of course, under current conditions and continuing present trends; eventually and after many generations individual level selection may lead to the evolution of new effective and appropriate instincts that aimed-at individual survival and reproduction - then, presumably, large scale societies would break down into much smaller competing units, since such individuals would have evolved to be resistant to the social cohesion mechanism of religion.

Alternatively, the adaptiveness of European populations may be strengthened by the restoration of Christianity.

You contradict yourself. Those who believe in God refuse many blessings in your life in order to live forever in a mythical Paradise. If a person does not believe in the existence of life after death, why would he believe in God?

Yes, there is me.  A sane person who sees the world the way it is.

Trust me, I understand plenty.  

You have built yourself a delusion because you are afraid of death.  
You cannot accept the fact that your life did not have a 'meaningful' purpose.  So you created a delusion to
'continue' your life after death and to have a 'meaningful' purpose in this life.  To validate your existence,
you have created an imaginary friend to help you cope with death and give you a reason to live.  Very pathetic.  

It is real to you because it helps you deal with the struggles in your life.

Religions were created around the same time when humans developed skills of storytelling.

Religions were are vital to the survival of our species.  It united unites strangers with common beliefs, hopes and dreams.

CoinCube,

Monotheism (or Polytheism) is lagging our social progress.  Progress happens because people use reason and logic to learn more about the nature not because of monotheism.  
Most religions change BECAUSE of social and technological progress; religions change to avoid losing their membership.  

Religions HINDER progress. Always did, always will be.  
Do not forget Giordano Bruno and many other progressive thinkers!!!!

Richard Fenyman puts it nicely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajV2h6bZB3Y

Progress happens because we learn more about the world around us (without ANY perceived notions of how it all happened and why we are here).

World we see might be here for no reason, or for reasons unrelated to 1000s of religious explanations.  

Assuming the answer is known is not getting you any closer to the truth.  Such position stops you from investigating further.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard Feynman

Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.

The Sadducees were a sect or group of Jews that was active in Judea during the Second Temple period, starting from the second century BCE through the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The sect was identified by Josephus with the upper social and economic echelon of Judean society.

The Sadducees rejected the Oral Law as proposed by the Pharisees. Rather, they saw the Torah as the sole source of divine authority.
...
According to Josephus, the Sadducees believed that:

There is no fate
God does not commit evil
Man has free will; “man has the free choice of good or evil”
The soul is not immortal; there is no afterlife, and
There are no rewards or penalties after death

Interesting...  I assume each orchard made a profit of $5 from the apples for the year.  It is interesting why the external orchard chose to take out the loan owing more interest per year than yearly profits.  Any ideas?  There may be something I am not getting.

When interest rates are artificially low, entrepreneurs are led to believe the income they will receive in the future is sufficient to cover their near term investment costs. In an environment where the money supply is continually expanding via debt, entrepreneurs mistakenly conclude that investments are really available for long term projects when in fact the pool of available funds has come solely from artificial credit creation that can and will be contracted at will by the banking sector. Entrepreneurs see spending in the economy and assume consumer demand exists for their projects when in fact consumer demand is artificially and unsustainably elevated.

As bank credit percolates through the economy it moves downward from business borrowers to landowners and capital owners who sold assets to the newly indebted entrepreneurs, and finally onto other factors of production like wages, rent, and interest.
...
Some investments made during the artificial monetary boom were inappropriate and "wrong" from the perspective of the long-term financial sustainability. Others should be sound but nevertheless fail due to the economic distortion and contraction triggered by sudden credit tightening.

The boom is revealed for what it is, a period of wasteful malinvestment, a "false boom" where the investments undertaken during the period of fiat money expansion are revealed to lead nowhere but to insolvency and unsustainability. Seizure of collateral and general price deflation or reduction in inflation ensues. The longer the false monetary boom goes on, the bigger and more speculative the borrowing, the more wasteful the errors committed and the longer and more severe will be the necessary bankruptcies, foreclosures and depression.

As we have seen, an increase in the supply of money benefits the early receivers, that is, the government, the banks, and their favored debtors or contractors, at no point is this more true than at the bottom of the business cycle when asset prices are artificially depressed and only favored borrowers are allowed to borrow. It is at the bottom that favored insiders can still borrow allowing assets to be purchased at depressed prices.

Money in whatever form it takes gold, dollars, or bitcoin is ultimately a signaling system a channel for information to travel through.

Knowledge and Power by George Gilder
https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Power-Information-Capitalism-Revolutionizing/dp/1621570274

The problem with fractional reserve is that it allows multiple simultaneous claims that are expected to be honored but in reality cannot be. Thus it allows fraudulent claims or noise into the channel. The ultimate consequence of this is an increasing distortion of the underlying signaling mechanisms in the economy.

Yes of course depositors also benefit some to from the scheme. It is everyone else in the economy who suffers. Fractional reserve banking is different than central banking. However, fractional reserve is ultimately a process that increases economic distortion or noise. This is why it was recurrently associated with economic crises and bank runs. Historically this distortion directly paved the way to our current central banking (an even greater distortion) and there is no reason to think the same processes would not immediately recur if we could somehow reset the system back to a gold or silver standard.
 

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I think it's all nonsense. I don't believe in God... This tale which allow to keep in slavery duped people.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

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I think the arguments against "SAVIORS" in the Phoenix Journals are more convincing than your repetitive demand that I seek out the Bible as the SOLE SOURCE OF WISDOM (?).
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Had this Bible been accurately copied over generations then I suppose you would have a decent argument about historical preservation of cultural and theological information via this Bible
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IN FACT; HOWEVER, THERE ARE MORE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE VERSIONS OF THE NT THAN THERE ARE WORDS IN THE NT! How is that for "accuracy"?! This book has been re-written to suit an agenda and provably it happened thousands of times! It is little wonder that the phrase "I am not your master" was left out of the Bible! How can I trust your true facts about the Bible, BADecker? Your "good book" has been re-written by MAN!

The doctrine of inerrancy, as commonly understood, states: “Inerrancy is the view that when all the facts become known, they will demonstrate that the Bible in its original autographs and correctly interpreted is entirely true and never false in all it affirms, whether that relates to doctrines or ethics or to the social, physical, or life sciences.” This statement was articulated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy 1974.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are universally proclaimed as the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century. The first scrolls were discovered quite by accident by a young Bedouin shepherd in the Qumran area near the Dead Sea in 1947. When tossing a rock into an open cave in the cliffs just above the Dead Sea, he heard the sound of a breaking pot.

Upon investigation, he and his fellow Bedouins discovered several clay jars that contained rolled-up scrolls. They took four of these scrolls to Bethlehem for testing. An antiquities dealer by the name of Kando confirmed their authenticity and purchased the original four scrolls for $150. He then sold them to Archbishop Samuel, head of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem.

The Bedouins did not fully realize the value of their discovery and subsequently sold three additional scrolls to another antiquities dealer for an equivalent amount. This all took place in 1947.

Such a historic find could not be kept quiet for very long. When in 1948 Hebrew University Professor Eliezer Lipa Sukenik heard through an Armenian antiquities dealer of the scrolls’ discovery, he promptly looked into it.

He met secretly with the antiquities dealer in the British military zone near the Jerusalem border. The dealer provided a fragment for the professor to examine. Professor Sukenik realized that he was viewing an authentic ancient writing.

He wrote in his diary: “My hands shook as I started to unwrap one of them. I read a few sentences. It was written in beautiful biblical Hebrew. The language was like that of the Psalms, but the text was unknown to me. I looked and looked, and I suddenly had the feeling that I was privileged by destiny to gaze upon a Hebrew Scroll which had not been read for more than 2,000 years.”
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The treasure trove, now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, includes a small number of near-complete scrolls and tens of thousands of fragments, representing more than 900 texts in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.

The scrolls consist of two general types: the biblical text (including partial or complete copies of all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures with the exception of the book of Esther) and nonbiblical texts (including letters, hymns, prayers, calendrical texts and legal documents).
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What is so special about these scrolls, and how do they help us prove the Bible is true? Until the discovery of the scrolls, the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures dated from the 10th century, about 2,500 years after the time of Moses. How can we be assured of the integrity of a document after so much time?

Considering the carefulness of the copyists is one way to be assured of the accuracy of the preservation
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The Dead Sea Scrolls are generally dated from around 200 B.C. to A.D. 68. This is more than 1,000 years older than any manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament that we had before their discovery. Because of their age and close similarity with the Masoretic Text, we now have an objective basis for determining that the biblical text used in our modern copies of the Old Testament is accurate.

Norman Geisler is the author of several books on the subject of inerrancy: Inerrancy, 1978; General Introduction to the Bible, 1986; and From God to Us, 2012. Dr. Geisler says the Dead Sea Scrolls provide the best external evidence showing the validity of the Masoretic Text, proving that this text type was in fact accurately preserved over a period of about 1,000 years from the first century to the 900s A.D.

He concludes that we can be confident that the texts used to copy the Dead Sea Scrolls were of the same tradition or family as used in the Masoretic Text. He provides evidence from comparative studies of the Isaiah scroll revealing that a word-for-word identity exists in 95 percent of the text. That is a very high rate of similarity for documents that were copied 1,000 years apart.

Other scholars have commented on the similarities between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text. Hebrew scholar Millar Burrows writes, “It is a matter of wonder that through something like one thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition’” (The Dead Sea Scrolls, 1955).

The Dead Sea Scrolls provide an objective confirmation of the authenticity of the Masoretic Text, which is the basis for our modern copies of the Old Testament. Although we live in 2015, we can go back in time 2,000 years and read from the scroll of Isaiah discovered by a shepherd boy in a cave above the Dead Sea.

The rise of a secular religion called Leftism or Liberalism was inevitable. It was inevitable because a vacuum of opinion on metaphysical matters is as impossible as erecting a mathematics without axioms. Without Christian metaphysics, first assumptions of secular metaphysics govern society.

Hence, in the modern period, the first assumptions of secularism entered into all the areas, hospitals, universities, family law, and public charities, which once had been controlled by canon law, and administered by the Church.

Those assumptions are that truth is subjective, that logic is a mere word game unrelated to reality, that virtue is relative, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that the mind exists as a side effect of matter in motion; that God is dead and therefore the impersonal forces of history are God; that Christ is but one wise man among many; and that man is but one animal among many, and like them, lacks dignity and lacks free will, and therefore liberty and equality are myths, and the brotherhood of man is a joke.

One form of secularism says that since men are unequal, the elite should rule the benighted; another says that since men are unequal, the master race should rule the inferior races.

The idea that all men deserve equal treatment under the law, and equal dignity despite their differences in talent, virtue, wealth and social position, and that all men are brothers under the skin, is an idea unique to Western Civilization. It has its roots in Jewish theology and Athenian philosophy, which are the two wellsprings from which Christendom flows, but it is an uniquely Christian artifact.

Perhaps in India, a member of the Brahmin caste can claim to be morally superior by birth to an Untouchable, on the grounds that Karma, in reward or penalty for deeds done in past lives, has raised or lowered the caste into which the soul is reborn in his life. That is not the Christian notion.

Perhaps in the ancient world, the patricians of Rome, counting their descent from Aeneas, and hence from divine Venus, knew themselves to be more beloved of the gods than barbarians and lesser races. Elysium was reserved for heroes and demigods.

The Christian notion is that a saved peasant goes to heaven and a damned rich man goes to hell. Each man is judged by his own deed, and taken naked before the Judgement Seat, without any worldly trappings, robes, crowns, or coins to be seen. The prince who did not repent is thrown on the lake of fire; the pauper who confessed his sins and confessed Christ as Lord is brought to the bosom of Abraham. Rank hath no privileges on Doomsday.

The concept has been abused by secularists claiming that true equality or social justice equality can only be achieved by the rule of the elite over the benighted or the master race over their inferiors, but no one should be foolish enough to mistake this false notion of equality, egalitarianism, for the reality.

The idea of equality is not the idea that difference of talent, virtue, wealth and social position do not exist. It is not the idea that these differences are undesirable and should expunged by a redistribution of wealth and a suppression of talent.

The idea of equality is the mystical Christian idea that DESPITE the obvious differences of talent, virtue, wealth and social position, all men are and should be judged each man on his own merit, and all men are equal in the sight of God, hence equal in the sight of the law.

That is all the word means and all it has ever meant.

The antichristian idea is precisely the opposite: it is the idea since men are not equal in rank and wealth, intelligence and talent THEREFORE they are not equal in dignity, not to be judged each man on his own merit, but to be judged collectively. By this logic, a man of the elite or of the master race has rights and privileges protected at law which those whom birth or matters outside human control place at a lower rank in their social hierarchy do not and can never enjoy.

“Is there any way to make white nationalism defensible?”

No. A Jewish ethnostate is possible and desirable because Judaism is both a race and a religion.

A religion is what actually governs a man’s basic virtues and worldview.

Persons in a nation state must share basic virtues and worldview to be able to maintain civility and cohesion.

“Whiteness” is not a philosophy, not a worldview, not a thing that produces a certain outlook or demands a certain loyalty.

What everyone thinks is “the White race” is nothing more or less than the ghost of an increasingly decayed and secular Protestantism trying to find a secular replacement for the spirit of the Catholic Church, which, before the Reformation, was the sole animating spirit of Western Europe.


Before the Great Schism in the Tenth Century, the Church was the sole animating spirit of Eastern Europe as well, not to mention, before the Seventh Century, the Middle Eastern and North African lands as well.

The things modern race science claims are the virtues and strengths of the White Man are merely Christian virtues which come from being Christianized, including the environmental factors that lead to a divergence of IQ test scores, and the other junk science on which the modern racists place so much emphasis.

America is the only nation that returned to the humility of the kings of the Middle Ages, who did not establish themselves as their own national popes, heads of their own national churches, because America’s genius was the First Amendment, which, it is to be remembered, undid the Protestant innovation of using secular power to govern spiritual matters.

Now, America did not return to the bosom of the universal Church, she was, after all, overwhelmingly Protestant. But she did try to leave a vacuum in the place in society normally occupied by an international and universal Church. She built a pyramid with no capstone.

Of course, nature abhors a vacuum, and so the Left moved into that capstone, and became the moral and spiritual leadership of the nation, as a Church should be, and had their sacraments (abortion) and their priesthood (the news) and their false prophets (Obama, who could slow the rise of the oceans).

Now we are seeking to overturn that evil church, and you are seeking in an abortive and unscientific racial idea what cannot possibly be found there.

Spiritual guidance and an answer to the questions of life can only be found where the spirit is, and in the hand of the Lord who grants life.

But the measure you use you will be measured by. If Black Pride is virtuous, so is White Pride. If White Price is not virtuous, then neither is Black Pride.

In any case, let us not ask about a White Nation. Let us talk about a Christian nation. A white socialist nation would no less a hellhole than a yellow socialist nation. Stalinist Russia was not freer than Maoist China.

America, the first nation in history where all men were free to worship each man as his conscience saw fit, was the most Christian nation in history, despite having not a single pro-Christian law on any lawbooks. It was a Christian nation by custom and by culture, not by laws.

But the culture did not hold the line. In the 1970s the Christians surrendered to a more seductive and persuasive worldview, that of Leftism, which seemed to them better to fit the world described by Darwin, Freud, and Marx.

I perceive that JAD is smarter than you. Why not try to debate him on his blog? I'd love to read the exchange.

Throughout history there have been people who attempted to justify slavery. Many of them did so purely out of self-interest, in order to continue a barbaric trade, but some historical philosophers sought to justify slavery from the best intentions.

Aristotle

The great Greek philosopher, Aristotle, was one of the first. He thought that slavery was a natural thing and that human beings came in two types - slaves and non-slaves.

"For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule..."

Some people, he said, were born natural slaves and ought to be slaves under any circumstances. Other people were born to rule these slaves, could use these slaves as they pleased and could treat them as property.

Natural slaves were slaves because their souls weren't complete - they lacked certain qualities, such as the ability to think properly, and so they needed to have masters to tell them what to do.

It's clear that Aristotle thinks that slavery was good for those who were born natural slaves, as without masters they wouldn't have known how to run their lives.

In fact Aristotle seems to have thought that slaves were 'living tools' rather like domestic animals, fit only for physical labour.

"And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life."


Homer

Homer seems to have thought that even if a person wasn’t inferior before they became a slave, enslaving them changed them in such a way as to make them a natural slave:

"Jove takes half the goodness out of a man when he makes a slave of him."