The problem I have with lecturers like Rabbi Mark Spiro is that I have always believed they use modern thought processes to intellectualize historical mythology. There have always been charismatic believable individuals at the heart of every religious movement (see Jim Jones). These charismatic preachers may even have convinced themselves they are being honest, truthful and really helping people. In fact, they might actually help some societal misfits or weak willed people survive a difficult life path. They have the intellectual capacity to twist the meanings of ancient writings to suit the contemporary situation of man. But, when the direct word of a given god must be interpreted to suit the times or justified to create followers then that's a god not worth listening to. Any real gods words should be timeless.

I have also have a problem when half or more of the rules (commandments) to live by are about "worship me because I'm so wonderful and if you don't I'm going to torture you forever". No charismatic orator is going to be capable of justifying that for me.

Any gods word must be taken at face value. If that word is heinous at its core then I can't justify listening to or believing it is anything more than the ramblings of sadistic ancient men on papyrus. No silvered tongued orator of magnificent intellect will be capable of making me believe otherwise.

My god would be a kind and gentile caretaker for her people instead of a lunatic hell-bent on the destruction of the earth. When they drift astray from her teachings she would caress them and help them back toward the path of enlightenment. She wouldn't allow bad things to happen to her people. She would end suffering, deformity, hunger, strife and misery for her people. She would be a caretaker god that refuses to throw her people to the wolves only to tell them they are at fault for being inferior and bragging constantly in all of her teachings about how superior she is over her creations. In other words, my god would be a god of love. I'll have to create that one myself because she doesn't exist in any of the religions of the world today.

I am asking myself the question how does this thing of sustained wealth permeates to more rather than less human beings if The 85 Richest People In The World Have As Much Wealth As The 3.5 Billion Poorest...

Please link, because I'm very doubtful about your Mormon studies.

For our Mormon sample, then, we find virtually no evidence to support the hypothesis that education has a secularizing influence. For Mormon men, the higher the level of education, the higher one’s level of religious observance. A critical point in our findings is that this holds for several measures of religiosity

Your interpretation is wrong. Sustained wealth is based on good economics and education which leads to new scientific achievements - a positive feedback.

...
When did we stop with capitalism? I think I didn't got the memo

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Benjamin Franklin

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men; so that we do not depend upon their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.” - James Madison

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” - George Washington

#1
The correlation is lower IQ equals to less thinking equals to more superstition and religiosity which I think is very logical.

#2
...
More religiosity means less avg. Iq of the population equals to less economic wealth.

#3
...
So as long as we hold on to capitalism the end of religion is designed  to happen.

...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_religion
https://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1375
…
 

Paradoxically enough, the release of initiative and enterprise made possible by popular self-government ultimately generates disintegrating forces from within. Again and again after freedom has brought opportunity and some degree of plenty, the competent become selfish, luxury-loving and complacent, the incompetent and the unfortunate grow envious and covetous, and all three groups turn aside from the hard road of freedom to worship the Golden Calf of economic security. The historical cycle seems to be: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more."

Yep

''The Persecution of the Christian Churches,'' summarizes the Nazi plan to subvert and destroy German Christianity, which it calls ''an integral part of the National Socialist scheme of world conquest.''

In the 1920's, as they battled for power, the Nazis realized that the churches in overwhelmingly Christian Germany needed to be neutralized before they would get anywhere. Two-thirds of German Christians were Protestants, belonging to one of 28 regional factions of the German Evangelical Church. Most of the rest were Roman Catholics. On one level, the Nazis saw an advantage. In tumultuous post-World War I Germany, the Christian churches ''had long been associated with conservative ways of thought, which meant that they tended to agree with the National Socialists in their authoritarianism, their attacks on Socialism and Communism, and in their campaign against the Versailles treaty'' that had ended World War I with a bitterly resentful Germany.

But there was a dilemma for Hitler. While conservatives, the Christian churches ''could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.'' Given that these were the fundamental underpinnings of the Nazi regime, ''conflict was inevitable,'' the summary states. It came, as Nazi power surged in the late 1920's toward national domination in the early 30's.

According to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi leader of the German youth corps that would later be known as the Hitler Youth, ''the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement'' from the beginning, though ''considerations of expedience made it impossible'' for the movement to adopt this radical stance officially until it had consolidated power, the outline says.

Attracted by the strategic value inherent in the churches' ''historic mission of conservative social discipline,'' the Nazis simply lied and made deals with the churches while planning a ''slow and cautious policy of gradual encroachment'' to eliminate Christianity.

The prosecution investigators describe this as a criminal conspiracy. ''This general plan had been established even before the rise of the Nazis to power,'' the outline says. ''It apparently came out of discussions among an inner circle'' comprised of Hitler himself, other top Nazi leaders including the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and a collection of party enforcers and veteran beer-hall agitators.

Of course, the churches stayed in Hitler's good graces for only as long as the Nazis considered their cooperation expedient. Soon after Hitler assumed dictatorial powers, ''relations between the Nazi state and the church became progressively worse,'' the outline says. The Nazis ''took advantage of their subsequently increasing strength to violate every one of the Concordat's provisions.''

In 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced Nazi treachery in an encyclical that accused Hitler of ''a war of extermination'' against the church. The battle had been joined on some fronts. Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches where clergymen were seen as lax in their support of the regime.

Still, in a society where the entire Jewish population was being automatically condemned without public protest, care was taken to manipulate public perceptions about clergymen who fell into Nazi disfavor. ''The Catholic Church need not imagine that we are going to create martyrs,'' Robert Wagner, the Nazi Gauleiter of Baden, said in a speech, according to the O.S.S. study. ''We shall not give the church that satisfaction. She shall have not martyrs, but criminals.''

But once they had total power and set off to launch a world war, the Nazis made no secret of what lay in store for Christian clergymen who expressed dissent.

In Munich, Nazi street gangs and a Gestapo squad attacked the residence of the Roman Catholic cardinal. ''A hail of stones was directed against the windows, while the men shouted, 'Take the rotten traitor to Dachau!' '' the outline says, adding: ''After 1937, German Catholic bishops gave up all attempts to print'' their pastoral letters publicly and instead ''had them merely read from the pulpits.''

Then the letters themselves were confiscated. 'In many churches, the confiscation took place during Mass by the police snatching the letter out of the hands of the priests as they were in the act of reading it.''

Later the same year, dissident Protestant churches joined in a manifesto protesting Nazi tactics. In response, the Nazis arrested 700 Protestant pastors.

Objectionable statements made by the clergy would no longer be prosecuted in the courts, the Nazis said. Statements ''injurious to the State would be ruthlessly punished by 'protective custody,' that is, the concentration camp,'' the outline says.

If man spent half the time throughout history embracing real knowledge and science that was spent quivering in fear created by ancient mythology and killing in the name of God we would already be colonizing other planets, have cured cancer and ended world hunger.

Ethical monotheism is probably the single greatest contributor to human progress from any source since human culture emerged from the stone ages. This force which emerged first in Judaism and and spread throughout the world via the mediums of Christianity and Islam continues to shape human destiny even in a time when much of the world foolishly rejects it as irrelevant.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/mono.html


http://old.explorefaith.org/neighbors/beliefs/nature_j.html

I wanted to share with anyone who is interested what I am reading at the moment. I have recently started reading the Way of God: Derech Hashem by Moshe Chaim Luzzatto.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/087306769X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_1/159-3751462-6767111?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_r=NM9R7T16A9G2147WGMJX&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=1944687722&pf_rd_i=1598264672

It is an older classic 18th century philosophical book. It is very logical and is set out in parts that are divided into a few chapters. The parts are:
1. Fundamentals, covering The Creator, Man, Human Responsibility.
2. Providence, covering Providence in General, Individual Providence, How Providence Works.
3. The Soul, Inspiration and Prophecy, with The Soul and Its Influence, Theurgy, The Prophetic Experience.
4. Serving God, Love and Fear of God, Prayer, Seasonal Commandments.

There is a free class in Seattle that is currently going through this book chapter by chapter taught by Mark Spiro.
Geography unfortunately prevents me from attending his class but audio recordings of it and discussions of each chapter are available for free here.

http://www.livingjudaism.com/the-way-of-god.html



Both Moshe Chaim Luzzatto and Mark Spiro approach the issue from the Jewish tradition but I think anyone interested in God or religion will find it worthwhile. I do and I am not Jewish.

Any society that tolerates this systemic exploitation and corruption as "business as usual" is not just sick--it's hopeless.

In noting that our society is sick, our economy exploitive and our politics corrupt, I'm not saying anything you didn't already know. Everyone who isn't being paid to deny the obvious in public (while fuming helplessly about the phony cheerleading in private) knows that our society is a layer-cake of pathologies, our economy little more than institutionalized racketeering and our politics a corrupt auction-house of pay-for-play, influence-peddling, money-grubbing and brazen pandering for votes.

The fantasy promoted by do-gooders and PR hacks alike is that this corrupt system can be reformed with a few minor policy tweaks. If you want a brief but thorough explanation of Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, please take a look at my book (link above).

If you want an example of how the status quo has failed and is beyond reform, it's instructive to examine the pharmaceutical industry, which includes biotech corporations, specialty pharmaceutical firms and the global corporate giants known as Big Pharma.

It was one of our founding fathers (USA) that said words to the effect of that our country could only remain free if we were a "moral people".

Modern Americans have long since forgotten the heated and sometimes violent debates which took place in the thirteen colonies between 1775 and 1776 over the issue of morality. For many thousands of Americans the big question of independence hung precariously on the single, slender thread of whether or not the people were sufficiently “virtuous and moral” to govern themselves. Self-government was generally referred to as “republicanism,” and it was universally acknowledged that a corrupt and selfish people could never make the principles of republicanism operate successfully.

http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/tozer/5j00.0010/5j00.0010.11.htm

"I am among those who believe that our Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has many commendable qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian ethic, but it lacks the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence. Future historians will record that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.

...

Sin is always an act of wrong judgment. To commit a sin a man must for the moment believe that things are different from what they really are; he must confound values; he must see the moral universe out of focus; he must accept a lie as truth and see truth as a lie; he must ignore the signs on the highway and drive with his eyes shut; he must act as if he had no soul and was not accountable for his moral choices.

Sin is never a thing to be proud of. No act is wise that ignores remote consequences, and sin always does. Sin sees only today, or at most tomorrow; never the day after tomorrow, next month or next year. Death and judgment are pushed aside as if they did not exist."

-A.W. Tozer 1897-1963

You are wrong. ALL laws and things are determined and fixed. There is no such thing as chance. There is only ignorance of the operations of the universe because of our extremely limited abilities.

For example. When a leaf on a tree is swaying and turning in the breeze, why is it moving as it is? There are billions of molecules of air bumping against the leaf (and each other) in ways that make the leaf move. There are billions of tiny heat energy waves playing on the molecules of air and on the leaf in billions of patterns. How many of these molecules and heat waves can we track to determine how they are working on the leaf and why they are working like they are? Exactly zero! Yet they all work perfectly, according to fixed laws of the universe. Everything in the universe works the same - cause and effect. Yet we understand and track such a small amount of it that we really don't understand the whys and wherefores of anything.

The closest we come to chance is when God goes back to the beginning, and tweaks some of the way He set up cause and effect laws in creation. And He does this to match the faith that people have in Him (or against Him), all according to the purposes He has for making the universe in the first place.

I have provided metaphysics that define what is necessary for free will Kant's noumenal self outside of time. Such a self is free because it is causally undetermined.

I have provided information on emperic and reproducable scientific experiments. Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments show that quantum phenomona can operate outside of what we traditionally think of as time and causal sequence.

I have provided robust scientific theory (Orch objective reduction) that argues consciousness is grounded in these same quantum phenomona that have been shown to operate outside of traditional time and causality.

Obviously from my stated conclusion I believe the Orch OR theory to be true. However this is not a question of metaphysics but one of science.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188

From this one can conclude that current emperic scientific theory supports the existance of Kant's noumenal self which is required for free will. Free will is thus entirely consistent with modern science and undeniably possible. If Orch OR theory holds up under further and in depth emperic testing I would argue that free will becomes overwhelmingly probable.

Delayed choice quantum eraser experiments tell us that certain quantum phenomena operate outside of what we traditionally think of as time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser


• Orch OR theory posits that conscious arises from quantum computations in brain microtubules.
• As noted by Kant in his model of a noumenal self free will requires a true self that is independent of time.
• Grounding consciousness in quantum mechanics provides this independence.
 

Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory
By Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188

Highlights
• The Orch OR theory proposes quantum computations in brain microtubules account for consciousness.
• Microtubule ‘quantum channels’ in which anesthetics erase consciousness are identified.
• Evidence for warm quantum vibrations in brain microtubules is cited.
• Interference of microtubule vibrations are ‘beat frequencies’ seen as EEG.
• Orch OR links consciousness to processes in fundamental space–time geometry.

Abstract
The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown. We proposed in the mid 1990's that consciousness depends on biologically ‘orchestrated’ coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity, and that the continuous Schrödinger evolution of each such process terminates in accordance with the specific Diósi–Penrose (DP) scheme of ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) of the quantum state. This orchestrated OR activity (‘Orch OR’) is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. The DP form of OR is related to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and space–time geometry, so Orch OR suggests that there is a connection between the brain's biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. Here we review Orch OR in light of criticisms and developments in quantum biology, neuroscience, physics and cosmology. We also introduce a novel suggestion of ‘beat frequencies’ of faster microtubule vibrations as a possible source of the observed electro-encephalographic (‘EEG’) correlates of consciousness. We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe.

When swimmer Joseph Schooling edged out Michael Phelps and a tight field in the 100-meter butterfly event on Friday night, he became the first athlete from Singapore to win a gold medal -- and he will be the first to earn the country’s $753,000 gold-medal bonus. That’s nearly 30 times more money than Michael Phelps or any other U.S. athlete would take home for winning gold.

Well that's Zerohedge. Nothing new under the sun. I have to warn you, though: reading too much Zerohedge might end up with you building a nuclear fallout shelter in your garden.

So you conclude "there may be value depending on the context"; if this is so, then only one who has educated oneself about the entire diversity of contexts and the whole of history can say that he has the correct "finite process" for valuation. So this path to knowledge obviously involves learning about the other worlds and those rational beings of a different and higher kind. You also would eventually have to realize that the world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived, and that there are contexts presently unknown to you. This very line of reasoning denies humanism, and it is a problem for the nihilist because according to secular scholars, "all rational atheists are humanists" (unless you are some oddball French philosopher from the 20th century). The nihilist needs a wide diversity of contexts in order to have a complete glimpse into the valuation problem, therefore any educated discussion of these contexts will turn to the subject of extraterrestrials, etheric beings, and the like.

I think that your version of nihilism is nothing new;

The assumption that is required in your argument is that human knowledge of value can progress, but this is dependent on humanism, the idea that man is the sole judge of all things.

How can you say that man's knowledge of value can progress unless man himself is the judge of that progress?

In another context, man may find himself giving up those values that were (somehow) discerned ex-nihilo and instead return his free will to GOD and live by faith according to the rules given unto mankind for the total transformation of the species (true progress).

The full context of man's existence provides a solid case for rejecting humanism, and I have made it quite a bit stronger by providing you these two valuable links above. Both the educated thinker and the mystic would say that it is MAN who has no unity within himself, and not the world.

It is good that you bring up the rational basis of values in the context of objectivity; one philosopher has said:


Since values have a rational basis, it is sensible to ground our highest virtue in thinking, and the highest evil would be to refuse to know about other contexts of knowledge and values; therefore, only a sufficiently diverse education can allow the potential for the progress of values.

You can laminate your paper wallets, this way it can last longer and only theft or a fire is a issue. The trezor comes with paper sheet where you write your 24 words seed to recover your trezor wallet anytime if your trezor become damaged or lost. If you have spare 1/8 BTC for the trezor, buy it. If not, laminated paper wallets is good option as well.

Archivists have discovered the hard way that using ordinary lamination plastic for old documents, newspapers, photos, etc., does not preserve them.  The best way to preserve them is to store them in a dark place after placing in acid-free Mylar film (not laminated).  Ordinary lamination material still permits light rays to pass through it and to cause a chemical reaction to the acid that most modern paper and modern dyes contain, and that ALL old documents photos contain.  This causes deterioration of paper and fading of the paper and print.  The heat and pressure of most lamination processes also damages documents.

Of course, keeping original documents is important, but one should always copy (scan) newspapers and other documents and then print them on acid free paper, which can be found at just about all stores selling printer paper and/or computer supplies.  Too, one should save the graphics files from scanned documents and put the files on CDs for permanent safekeeping.  Life expectancy for data on CDs is 80-100 years for premium quality CDs.