Peterkin

That happened very early on. Christianity was still a very young and largely unrecognized cult when Constantine took control of it, and the first administrative bodies of the Holy Roman church were given great temporal power and opportunities to accumulate wealth. The inclusion in the christian canonical text of the very materialistic, patriarchal, landowner and caste oriented, as well as severely punitive, OT was no accident in the materialistic and hierarchical Roman Empire. In fact, except for a few heretical sects that later cropped up and were eradicated or at least persecuted by the state-established churches, both catholic and later Protestant, the old testament has continued to exert far greater influence on the laws and mores of christian Europe and its offshoots than any sermons from Jesus. They accept the sacrifice and redemption - not the lesson.

You can say, rather that 'time as we know it' started then - the temporal frame and linear units-elapsed in which measure all the events in our universe.

I don't think it was intended as a thoughtful critique of Christianity in all the world, so much as a personal observation from a new [to himself] perspective on US politics.

True: not all examples of God's use and approval of the death penalty were presented in the OP. One would have to be far more conversant with the bible than mistermack appears to be, and spend a great deal more time than we generally have for forum posts, to present all the examples that support the burden of his opening sentence: I volunteered a few of those examples.

No. It's the same as saying "If God tells me to do it, I have to do it." This makes the death penalty, and holy wars, and stoning for blasphemy not merely permissible but mandatory.

Actually, the same god, in the same book, also commands his people to kill one another for various infractions, as well as to kill other nations for simply getting in their way. And the Catholics of medieval Europe seemed just as confident of receiving God's blessing for their wars of aggression as were the Muslims of Allah's approval for theirs. The Book of Leviticus put a lot of responsibility and power on the priestly caste, and that has certainly continued to the present day. If they say a killing is legal and just, it is.

With half the world's present population (3.8 billion people) professing adherence to one of that same god's religions. Which would suggest that the bronze Age didn't end - it just kept growing. That's a late adjunct to the Abrahamic cults. There is no resurrection in the OT - death is very much the end, and not at all to be desired. The New testament was written during the Roman Empire and is based on a quite different, more sophisticated form of emotional manipulation. While the Jehovah of Moses used direct intimidation to enforce his law, the three-cornered god of Christianity employs a carrot/stick/shaming strategy.

Yes, he did an awful lot of fatal smiting individually, as well as on a genocidal scale. What he did to the Egyptian babies was small potatoes compared to that flood. Not to mention foisting original sin on all of us, because a girl who didn't yet have a concept of good an evil or of deception took the advice of a fellow resident of the garden. It hasn't exactly been a secret these past 1600 years. And he shares human billboard space with guns and Trump. That's what makes me a godless socialist.

Thanks! I didn't know that.

Do you mean : Would 'we' do fine without bees? Maybe. Still assuming that 'we' refers to the human species as a whole, Would we do better without vegans? No better, no worse: they have no significant effect. Would we do better without eating and exploiting other species? All other things being equal, yes. Would we do better if we replaced our present insanely wasteful practices with rational, sustainable food production? Of course. I thought the question posed in the thread was are vegans harmful or helpful to species survival. My answer was an continues to be: Neither.

I think Tylers wants to learn elementary baking, rather than advanced food chemistry. Cookies are an excellent choice for a beginner, btw, exactly because the ingredients are few and the proportions don't vary greatly - typically, 3 flour, 2 fat, 1 sugar. Even I can put an edible cookie together! People who know all about it have written detailed recipes, with pictures and measurements and times and everything you need to get started. It's best not to play around with the quantities until one's had a little experience. One caution: limit the size. If it's a rolled-out dough, the cutting form is your guide, but if it's dropped or balled cookies, beginners tend to make them too big. My first ever batch of Nutella chocolate chip drop cookies are very tasty and crisp, but each one is a meal.

Not a very complex science (butter, sugar, flour, heat) but you probably shouldn't expect to achieve "best ever" on your first try.

What if we did? They got along on their own for 80 million years in their present form; I think they'd do just fine, even if we an our poison chemicals disappeared. Besides, you can keep bees without taking their honey and wax and transport the hives to wherever an orchard or field needs pollinating, or you can let them live wild and pollinate whatever they choose. That's been going on for millions of years, too. And they maintained balance in their ecosystem. They will have to again, once the nuclear winter leaves the field open for new dominant species. It isn't. How does any of this affect the devastation of human food production methods?

What does that matter? 20 years, 200 years.... The process is what we'll be aware of, not the duration. I'd call that another kind of bang - possibly followed by a drawn-out whimper.

This is true, but not germane to the topic, since Genady's presence or absence from any particular time period is irrelevant. Unless he's the emperor of a great and powerful global empire, his(?) statistical significance is 0.000,000,007.

Which big issues do you wish to discuss? The time estimate of 256 years [to the end of all civilization - or just Eurocentric western civilization, or what?] is rather loose; it allows for any number of scenarios. The most likely snuffers-out of our civilization (either way) are super-storm, super-bug or super-bomb. That is: climate change, pandemic or nuclear war. That's the optimistic version: with a bang. The pessimistic: with a whimper, looks more like economic collapse, accompanied by continued unchecked population growth, in the presence of climate change, plague and threat of nuclear war, petering out in a protracted series of migrations, wars, floods, fires and famines.

I mean I assume that if we didn't want to eat them we would stop breeding them. Even if the livestock that exists today were to be set free, they wouldn't have anywhere near the environmental impact that the meat producing, processing, packaging, refrigeration and transport industries have. As for the uncaught fish - what stress are they causing? We don't need to: we've already eradicated many of them; many more will soon follow. The hangers-on, plus their feral ex-domestic cousins, would feast for a generation or two on the abandoned livestock and presumably restore the ecological balance that existed before 'we' messed it up.

Vegans are so few and powerless that they have no discernible effect on "our" future - if by 'us' you mean humanity at large. If the majority of people on Earth stopped eating flesh, the stress we put on the environment would be reduced, and possibly our level of aggression toward one another, as well, but I wouldn't count on that. Besides, we have other methods of destroying the planet as well as ourselves, and those decision are made in board- and conference rooms, not in the kitchen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9VI4tNMyJk

Who are these, exactly? Do you have a list? Which "good ideas" are attempting to "take over" which old ideas? What does "take over" mean in this context? Colonize? Appropriate? Develop further? Oddly enough, I am reluctant to do so. Are those those two opposing ideas? Physicists both prod Nature to give up its secrets and take advantage of opportune moments of exposure. All scientists do: they are spies, sleuths, provocateurs and voyeurs. It seems to me, those scientists* who promote technology for gain or patriotism or public honours change all kinds of things. Sometimes - though not usually - for the better, as it affects the polity in general. What, in this sphere, do you mean by "better"? Better than what for whom? To what end? In what system of values.

So, what else is new? The established elite in any field became the established elite in their field by having notable ideas and making notable progress. The next stage in the development of that discipline will come from the brightest and most ambitious of their students, who will then become the established elite of their generation. Part of the role of elders is to keep the exuberance of the young in check; to require new work to pass close scrutiny and meet a standard that had been set by their predecessors. When/if their ideas become obsolete or are proven to be flawed, new ideas will be established as the new norm in that field. Last i heard, evolution didn't have a predetermined "direction" and there is no way physicists could control human evolution. Biologists, maybe....

Too few for a fan club... But maybe they will come.

May I offer two book recommendations? https://www.goodreads.com/book/photo/55981.Consilience https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1185545.The_Earth_Dwellers?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=6ZbHZFkmoq&rank=2 A fascinating and engaging look into the world of ants and the scientists who study them.

ISBN's have only been in use since the 1970's - and not uniformly until the '80's - so the comparisons from then to now could be made across publishers and internationally from about 1980 to today. Before that, they had different kinds of identification in each country, and sometimes each publishing house. Even if you restricted the search to the post ISBN period, you'd still have no way to discover which numbers belong to textbooks. Not very useful. Even if you do have the ISBN, btw, there is no guarantee that any venue will supply all of the information. Amazon is pretty good on shipping dimensions - as are many independent vendors - but hardly anyone gives weights. They'll generally tell you the number of pages, but not the paper stock used, which may be anything from 22 to 84 lb/ream. They'll tell you hard or soft cover, but not the thickness of the boards. I'm not going to attempt the empirical method in my own stacks, since I have only a few recent medical (either humungous or pocket-sized), Science and Environment studies and a handful of high-school math and language texts. Nowhere near a sample size going out to the cold for.

even so ... But you have to admit, the other would have been impressive.