Quote from: BADecker on April 24, 2017, 07:53:46 PM

Quote from: af_newbie on April 24, 2017, 06:41:00 PM

Quote from: BADecker on April 24, 2017, 03:14:45 PM

Quote from: Buffer Overflow on April 24, 2017, 11:32:06 AM

Is Christianity poision? Of course it is. It's not even worth debating, it just simply is. And that's that.

But wait......

Before all the Christians pour on here, red cheeks, chests puffing up, palms sweaty, ready to rip my head off.
Just stop and think of Christianity like alcohol.

Alcohol (ethyl alcohol) is a poison, just like Christianity.

Many many people all over the world enjoy an alcoholic beverage drink, with no harmful effects. Just like Christianity.
Moderate alcohol use has possible health benefits, but it's not risk-free. Just like Christianity.
It can make a social event better, happier and friendlier. Just like Christianity.

But of course take too much and:

Drinking too much alcohol, and your ability to think clearly is in trouble. Just like Christainity.
Drink too much and people tend to act irrational, wanting to punch each others light out. Just like Christianity.

So you see Christianity (in moderation) is a good thing, it all depends on the dosage.
However, take too much (like BADlogic) and it becomes poisionous, you become like the drunk twat at a wedding. Flopping about, telling unfunny jokes how you once shagged the bride, urinating on the dance floor.
Giving Christianity a bad name, like BADlogic.

Christianity is life. Christianity:
1. Describes the source of life, God;
2. Shows how God gave us Life in the beginning;
3. Expresses how we threw life away in the face of God's warning;
4. Documents the them of the Savior, Jesus, Who is life;
5. Presents how Jesus brought life back to us;
6. Maintains our freedom to accept or reject the new life;
7. Expresses what our new life in Heaven will be basically like.

Christianity is the only source and upholding of life. There is nothing else regarding life. The choice is still open to you to accept or reject life. However, because of the depth to which God place Himself into our nature and the universe, rejecting life will be a very agonizing thing.

In the beginning, God gave Adam and Eve life. God warned them about eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He told them they would die if they ate the fruit. Spiritually, they died the day they ate the fruit. Physically they died as well, later. All the pains and troubles of life came into the universe when Adam and Eve disobeyed God.

Heed the warning of God... the warning shown through Christianity. Christianity is the only way to future life. Future life will be fun. But future death will be terrible.

The hope of Christianity is that every one of us will gain the good eternal life. If this is poison for you, then you love death.

Cool

I love life and I agree with Buffer Overflow. Christianity is an addiction. It poisons your mind. Makes you a slave to its ideology.
It blames you and makes feel weak, it belittles people, it subjugates people, it discriminates, it is a mind poison on so many levels.

When (if) you free yourself from the shackles of Christianity (or any other religion for that matter), you are truly free. You can think for yourself and evaluate the world the way it is.

People who believe in Christianity are afraid of everything. They believe in imaginary beings like devil and ghosts. I are afraid to be alone in the dark or go to the cemetery at night. Christianity clouds their judgement, it creates an invisible cloak over their mind.

Everything they do or think is in the context of the Christian ideology. They see God (and/or Devil) in everything and everyone they interact with. They are brainwashed. There is no difference between Scientology and Christianity, IMHO. Fundamentally, they work on the same premise. You are broken and we are here to fix you, if you follow us and pay a small fee.

Slavery exists throughout the universe without Christianity and without anything we do or say. How does slavery exist? Can you literally, using your own two legs, jump to the moon? If you can, you are probably the only one. If you are not a slave to gravity, then you are a slave to something else, even if it is needing your own brain to stabilize a thinking mind within yourself.

So, true freedom amounts to being able to work harmoniously withing the universe, inside the bonds of your slavery, to allow yourself the most freedom and comfort as possible.

This is what Christianity does for you. Christianity asks you to love all people, to show this love, and it uses the laws of the Old Testament as the guide that shows you the actions you will do to express your love.

Will obeying the laws of the O.T. in the love of the N.T. be beneficial in your freedom? Absolutely, YES! Why? Because then peace-loving people around you will treat you well, because of the good you show them, because of following the laws and love suggestions of Christianity.

In addition, Christianity shows you how to be saved to eternal life, thereby freeing you from the deep bondage/slavery of death. And since it warns about rejecting God, warns about the lake of fire torment such rejection will bring, it frees you from the coming torment, as well, if you accept the freedom.

Pure Christianity is by far the best freedom around. The only time it is not freedom, is when the people who view it would rather have slavery. And even then it is freedom. Why? Because it allows all people the freedom to select slavery if they want.

Now, if that is poison to anyone, he/she has been warped by his/her own evil passions. Slavery is never freedom, but is almost always poison. Christianity offers freedom, so it is absolutely NOT slavery, or poison.

Cool

An informative exchange. Very nicely said.

Here are some thoughts on the relationship between decentralization, knowledge, freedom and religion.

Quote from: CoinCube on January 04, 2017, 06:54:18 AM

This post will explore the relationship between freedom and knowledge.

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

Quote

The most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processesgovernments, monopolies, regulators, elite institutions, all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.

Capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information itself is best defined as surprise: by what we cannot predict rather than by what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery. The economy grows not by manipulating greed and fear through bribes and punishments but by accumulating surprising knowledge through the conduct of the falsifiable experiments of free enterprises. Crucial to this learning process is the possibility of failure and bankruptcy. In this model, wealth is defined as knowledge, and growth is defined as learning.

Because the system is based more on ideas than on incentives, it is not a process changeable only over generations of Sisysphean effort. An economy is a noosphere (a mind-based system) and it can revive as fast as minds and policies can change.

That new economicsthe information theory of capitalismis already at work in disguise. Concealed behind an elaborate mathematical apparatus, sequestered by its creators in what is called information technology, the new theory drives the most powerful machines and networks of the era. Information theory treats human creations or communications as transmissions through a channel, whether a wire or the world, in the face of the power of noise, and gauges the outcomes by their news or surprise, defined as entropy and consummated as knowledge. Now it is ready to come out into the open and to transform economics as it has already transformed the world economy itself.

All information is surprise; only surprise qualifies as information. This is the fundamental axiom of information theory. Information is the change between what we knew before the transmission and what we know after it.

Let us imagine the lineaments of an economics of disorder, disequilibrium, and surprise that could explain and measure the contributions of entrepreneurs. Such an economics would begin with the Smithian mold of order and equilibrium. Smith himself spoke of property rights, free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation as crucial elements of an environment for prosperity. Smith was right: An arena of disorder, disequilibrium, chaos, and noise would drown the feats of creation that engender growth. The ultimate physical entropy envisaged as the heat death of the universe, in its total disorder, affords no room for invention or surprise. But entrepreneurial disorder is not chaos or mere noise. Entrepreneurial disorder is some combination of order and upheaval that might be termed informative disorder.

Shannon defined information in terms of digital bits and measured it by the concept of information entropy: unexpected or surprising bits...Shannons entropy is governed by a logarithmic equation nearly identical to the thermodynamic equation of Rudolf Clausius that describes physical entropy. But the parallels between the two entropies conceal several pitfalls that have ensnared many. Physical entropy is maximized when all the molecules in a physical system are at an equal temperature (and thus cannot yield any more energy). Shannon entropy is maximized when all the bits in a message are equally improbable (and thus cannot be further compressed without loss of
information). These two identical equations point to a deeper affinity that MIT physicist Seth Lloyd identifies as the foundation of all material realityat the beginning was the entropic bit.
...
The accomplishment of Information Theory was to create a rigorous mathematical discipline for the definition and measurement of the information in the message sent down the channel. Shannon entropy or surprisal defines and quantifies the information in a message. In close similarity with physical entropy, information entropy is always a positive number measured by minus the base two logarithm of its probability. Information in Shannons scheme is quantified in terms of a probability because Shannon interpreted the message as a selection or choice from a limited alphabet. Entropy is thus a measure of freedom of choice. In the simplest case of maximum entropy of equally probable elements, the uncertainty is merely the inverse of the number of elements or symbols.
...
Linking innovation, surprise, and profit, learning and growth, Shannon entropy stands at the heart of the economics of information theory. Signaling the arrival of an invention or disruptive innovation is first its surprisal, then its yield beyond the interest rateits profit, a further form of Shannon entropy. As a new item is absorbed by the market, however, its entropy declines until its margins converge with prevailing risk adjusted interest rates. The entrepreneur must move on to new surprises. The economics of entropy depict the process by which the entrepreneur translates his idea into a practical form from the realms of imaginative creation. In those visionary realms, entropy is essentially infinite and unconstrained, and thus irrelevant to economic models. But to make the imagined practical, the entrepreneur must make specific choices among existing resources and strategic possibilities. Entropy here signifies his freedom of choice.

As Shannon understood, the creation process itself escapes every logical and mathematical system. It springs not from secure knowledge but from falsifiable tests of commercial hypotheses. It is not an expression of past knowledge but of the fertility of consciousness, will, discipline, imagination, and art.

Knowledge is created by the dynamic interaction of consciousness over time. This process results in surprise (new information) which is the foundation of new knowledge. Entropy in this context is a measure of freedom, it is the freedom of choice. An information system with higher entropy allows for greater dynamic interaction of consciousness and thus greater knowledge formation. Freedom must be subject to the constraint of convergence. Some top-down order must be maintained to prevent destructive chaos aka noise that would otherwise destroy rather than create knowledge.

The amount of top-down control needed increases in the presence of increased noise. A primitive population may require the iron fist of a dictator whereas an educated one may thrive in a republic. However, power always seeks centralization. Thus the tendency of both of the dictatorship and the republic will be towards ever increasing centralization restricting freedom beyond that what is necessary and hobbling knowledge formation.

I posit that that the only model of top-down control that facilitates knowledge formation without inevitable progressive centralization is Ethical Monotheism. Uniformly adopted and voluntary followed it may be the only restraint on freedom that is necessary.