This is a place where I put items to which I may want to react, whether to counter or to learn, but hopefully both.
Pieces moved to the Rants section:
Response to "Time To Come Down From Their Ivory Towers
One man's thoughts on how to get serious about so-called Homeland Security. The reason I react to this is that he seems to differentiate between national security and global security. Without global security there is no national security, and this author's Suggestion Number One is elimination of nuclear energy. I think he's being myopic regarding nuclear power, but he's got some good points otherwise.
Religious Violence in Nigeria - Just one more example of human limitation. Why does religion so often lead to violence, especially among children of the one (and the same) God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam? I think it's all about memetics. Maybe I'll write about this a bit. It's a fascinating subject, though somewhat threatening to some (not all) people of faith.
In no particular order or form for now:
Dr. Susan Blackmore is the author of The Meme Machine, one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. Check it out.
So, why does religion so often lead to violence? In a nutshell, it's because of the competition that exists among the various major religious memeplexes. These memeplexes include the dominant monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), Buddhism, Hinduism and so on. Competition among memeplexes is analogous to competition in physical nature, where organisms compete for space, want to procreate and protect themselves, etc.
There is a good case to be made (Susan Blackmore does a great job of making it) that the meme (the fundamental unit of memetics, a concept or idea that is transmissible and reproducible almost like genes among physical organisms) is a second human evolutionary driver. Unless humanity can evolve to an era of memetic enlightenment it seems most unlikely that religious strife will ever end. But these religious memeplexes will resist and defend themselves, and some interesting times are in store.
How did humanity evolve to become the medium for memetic competition? It has to do with the capacity for spirituality, which conveyed upon the genes a selective advantage because spirituality conveyed the capacity to subjugate the individual in favor of the group.
Sure, other species from termites to apes also subjugate the individual into servitude to the larger organism (super-organisms like the hive, pod, tribe, herd, or whatever), but the capacity of these species to replicate ideas or concepts is non-existent (save for limited cases such as apes learing to use sticks as termite-fishing tools, crows learning to peck the caps off milk bottles for a drink, honeybees conveying to others in the hive where the nectar is, and the like).
In contrast with other species, humans seem to have developed a capacity to imitate with sufficient fertility as to give rise to this phenomenon we study under the name "memetics." This capacity is what differentiates human conflict from, say, ant or termite colonies invading others, and has nothing to do with the territorial squabbles of apes and other non-human animals.
Only humans can catch the meme meme. Only humans exercise religious violence. To the best of my knowledge anyway.