Random linkage

Analysis of the famous UFO trip of Betty and Barney Hill. Conclusion: an aircraft warning light combined with deprivation of sleep and sensation, and an already-stopped watch.

Kowloon Walled City, an organically developed micro-arcology. Wow. Probably a good setting for a pulp game, too.

Parody of reviews of The God Delusion.

Anthony Flew: converted ex-atheist or confused old man?

Non-theist billboards

L. Ron Hubbard wikiquotes.

* "There is no more ethical group on this planet than ourselves."

o L. Ron Hubbard, KEEPING SCIENTOLOGY WORKING. 7 February 1965, reissued 27 August 1980

* "If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace."

o L. Ron Hubbard, Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter, 15 August 1960, Dept. of Govt. Affairs

Greta Christina takes on Lewis's Lord, Liar, or Lunatic? trilemma. A commenter rejoins with the Riddle of Epicurus: "God:weak, wicked, or non-existent?"

Democratic religion?

Pantheons seem to imitate their societies, from the brawling barbarian gods of the Norse and Greeks to the Celestial Bureaucracy of China, with household gods filing reports on their families to the Jade Emperor. I was wondering what religion a democratic society might develop after a couple thousand years, say if Athens had avoided being crushed by the Macedonians, Romans, or Christians. Data points I can think of are the relative egalitarianism of forager societies, coupled with animism, and, in a way more "exotic", my mother's favorite set of plays, the Oresteia, which culminate in Apollo and Athena defending Orestes against the Erinyes in a court of law. You also have a few hundred years of small-scale democracy in Switzerland and New England, but in a much larger Christian matrix. I don't know if the 400 years of the Roman Republic have anything interesting to contribute here.

I miss my parents; they'd have found this pretty interesting.

de Camp's memetics

I'm still reading Ancient Engineers, and de Camp's raised the question in chapter 7 of why science came to a halt in the Roman Empire. He refuses to blame slavery, tyrannical emperors, or Christianity per se, as the timings are wrong, or the lack of instrumentation, since they actually had a lot of techniques, and even observation of magnification effects, though not application thereof. Instead he blames the rise of supernaturalism in general, not for being openly hostile to science but for taking energy away from it.

( quotation )

Regardless of whether he got all the historical details exactly right, the general story, published in 1960, is very similar to post-Selfish Gene memetic analyses of Western religion. One difference is that de Camp, writing as an engineer, seems to assume conscious invention and intelligent design of the new religions. A memeticist could relax that constraint, remaining agnostic as to what anyone thought they were doing, but noting that 'mutations', changes, in the directions he describes would have the adaptive effects he describes, whether such changes were planned for that purpose or not.

It also reminds me that a friend of mine said once that -- if I understood and remember her correctly -- she thought the remarkable success of Christianity indicated that something special and weird must have happened back then. de Camp expresses the rejoinder I didn't make at the time, which was that I thought the special circumstances were that of a remarkable period of vigorous religious experimentation, with Christianity emerging as the religion most suited to sweeping a population and stomping out its rivals -- plus some element of luck in that the Emperors took it up, and not some other cult, to unify their domains.