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More Food For Thought

In about 100 years—2123—we will all be buried with our relatives and friends.

Strangers will live in the homes we fought so hard to build, and they will own everything we have today. All our possessions will be unknown and probably in a land fill, including the car we spent a fortune on. Some of our things may survive to end up in the loving hands of collectors.

Our descendants will hardly know who we were, and won’t directly remember us. How many of us today know our grandfather’s father or what he did?

After we die, we will be remembered for a few more years, then we are just a portrait on someone’s bookshelf, and a few years later our history, photos and deeds disappear in history’s oblivion. We won’t even be memories.

If we paused one day to analyze these questions, perhaps we would understand how ignorant and weak the dream to achieve it all was.

If we could only think about this, surely our approaches, our thoughts would change, we would be different people.

Always having more, with no time for what’s really valuable in this life. I’d change all this to live and enjoy the walks I’ve never taken, those hugs I didn’t give, those kisses for our children and our loved ones, those jokes we didn’t have time for. Those would certainly be the most beautiful moments to remember, after all they would fill our lives with joy. And yet most of us waste it day after day with greed and intolerance.

~Anonymous

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Clown Show

I didn’t watch this clown show (I’m strong, but not that strong!), but I understand that the crowd booed every time Christie spoke

I don’t think he’s getting any Repugnant votes.

And Pence still says he will vote for Trump AFTER Trump unleashed a crowd who wanted to hang him.

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Words of Encouragement

“Piglet?” said Pooh.
“Yes?” said Piglet.

“I’m scared,” said Pooh.
For a moment, there was silence.

“Would you like to talk about it?” asked Piglet, when Pooh didn’t appear to be saying anything further.

“I’m just so scared,” blurted out Pooh.

“So anxious. Because I don’t feel like things are getting any better. If anything, I feel like they might be getting worse. People are angry, because they’re so scared, and they’re turning on one another, and there seems to be no clear plan out of here, and I worry about my friends and the people I love, and I wish SO much that I could give them all a hug, and oh, Piglet! I am so scared, and I cannot tell you how much I wish it wasn’t so.”

Piglet was thoughtful, as he looked out at the blue of the skies, peeping between the branches of the trees in the Hundred Acre Wood, and listened to his friend.

“I’m here,” he said, simply. “I hear you, Pooh. And I’m here.”

For a moment, Pooh was perplexed.

“But… aren’t you going to tell me not to be so silly? That I should stop getting myself into a state and pull myself together? That it’s hard for everyone right now?”

“No,” said Piglet, quite decisively. “No, I am very much not going to do any of those things.”

“But-” said Pooh.

“I can’t change the world right now,” continued Piglet. “And I am not going to patronise you with platitudes about how everything will be okay, because I don’t know that.

“What I can do, though, Pooh, is that I can make sure that you know that I am here. And that I will always be here, to listen; and to support you; and for you to know that you are heard.

“I can’t make those Anxious Feelings go away, not really.

“But I can promise you that, all the time I have breath left in my body…you won’t ever need to feel those Anxious Feelings alone.”

And it was a strange thing, because even as Piglet said that, Pooh could feel some of those Anxious Feelings start to loosen their grip on him; could feel one or two of them start to slither away into the forest, cowed by his friend, who sat there stolidly next to him.

Pooh thought he had never been more grateful to have Piglet in his life.

[source]

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Viruses Of The Mind

From Infidel753:

Viruses are the simplest of all living things. Indeed, it’s questionable whether they should be considered “living” at all. A virus does not eat, breathe, digest, or perform any other of the organic functions of such true organisms as animals, plants, or bacteria. It consists of a string of DNA (or, in the case of retroviruses, RNA) within a protein shell. It cannot even reproduce without a host cell to parasitically exploit. Once inside the host cell, the virus DNA insinuates itself into the cell’s own DNA, and diverts the functioning of the cell’s internal machinery to produce copies of the virus. A virus is not so much a living thing as a packet of pure information—including instructions for replicating itself, and for modifying the behavior of the host organism in ways which will spread the virus (coughing, sneezing, etc).

Computer “viruses” work in much the same way and are thus aptly named. A computer virus is not even a material object but a series of electronic codes—again, it is a packet of pure information, usually including instructions which force the host computer to create new copies of the virus and spread them to other computers, just as a conventional virus uses a living host cell.

DNA and the systems which transcribe it, and electronic computers, are both information-processing systems. Viruses are parasites, entities composed of information rather than flesh and blood, which exploit such systems. As with conventional parasitism, this process usually inflicts substantial harmful effects upon the host cell or host computer, whose internal systems are perverted away from their normal functions to serve the aim of virus replication and spread.

The human mind is also an information-processing system. And it too has its viruses.

Consider religion, especially proselytizing religion. When this virus infects a human mind, it perverts the workings of that mind away from its normal function as part of that human’s system for maintaining a happy, satisfying life. Healthy sexual feelings are re-interpreted as “sin”. Irrational beliefs and bizarre, self-sacrificing behavior develop as the instructions from the invading ideological virus override natural mental processes. Like a cell which ruins itself by creating countless copies of the virus that infected it, and spreading them to other cells, the human whose mind is “infected” with a proselytizing religion often becomes fanatically dedicated to spreading the infection to others, even at the expense of his own safety and well-being. He becomes a host, a toolfor the information parasite, serving the purpose of its spread rather than the advancement of his own natural desires.

Several such mind-viruses—Christianity, Islam, fascism, Marxism—have evolved and spread successfully. Some human minds afflicted with these information parasites develop only mild cases (natural immunity due to better education or higher intelligence, perhaps), while others soon progress to the full-blown “fanatic” stage in which the virus is most effectively spread.

A broad education, including knowledge of science and critical thinking and exposure to a wide range of ideas, is the best “vaccine” we have against such mental viruses. Another defense is social environments hostile to their spread — the equivalent of public sanitation, which discourages the spread of conventional diseases. In this case, the protective social environment is one of cultural pluralism. Exposure to a wide range of cultures and ideas tends to render a human mind less susceptible to being completely taken over by any single idea (even if the variegated idea systems are all religious ones, the effect can still work). This does not mean that multiple cultures must be physically present. Japan is very mono-cultural by Western standards, but its people are constantly exposed to other cultures via the media, film and TV, the internet, etc.

Over the last couple of centuries, improved hygiene, vaccines, and other medical innovations have massively reduced the threat posed by infectious disease — to the point where diseases like AIDS or covid, which probably would have passed literally unnoticed any time before 1800, now register to us as major threats because the epidemic diseases that once routinely killed 10% to 20% of whole populations at a time are mostly under control or even effectively extinct. Rising levels of religious non-belief in Europe, the US, Latin America, and even the Middle East show that we’re making similar progress against mind-viruses. It is still hard to imagine a world without religion, but a few generations ago it would have been hard to imagine a world without smallpox. We can do this.

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