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____no5 said:
Eventually everything fades away and gives its way to new things. This is particular true for religions. In Europe all ancient religions turned to mythology and stories for kids. There were systems of worship, power & politics based on those and sometimes, just like Christ, there were actual people in flesh, behind some of religions' birth & sacred saint or prophet-like people during religions' lifetimes. Jesus, for one, wasn't the first to be killed or even resurrected, the concept is quite old.
Take Delphi site: it has been the cradle for 3 distinguished religions, with centuries separating each other: Gaia, Dionysus, Apollo. With that order. Gaia signifies matriarch peoples & quite ancient, while Apollonian religion signifies a rather a patriarch society and brought by Dorians.
Religions, just like people, kingdoms, countries even like mountain ranges are born, mature and go. Nothing is to stay forever and all does.
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Religions and traditions die when they lose their meaning and/or when people forget what they are about. The truth remains, however ...
 
Brigantium said:
Even when I was at school (a secular, state school) we had Christianity drilled into us. School assemblies with hymns, prayers, and Bible readings in the morning, religious education lessons, observance of religious festivals as part of school life.
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They had to - it was the law (not sure if it still is but it might be) - all schools were required to put on, every day, "an act of worship" for all the pupils to attend, which was supposed to be "broadly Christian in character". Parents from other religions or non would sometimes request to have their children excluded, but not often. My school was actually in breach of the law because we only got assemblies two days a week (the school hall being too small to accomodate the entire school at once).
 
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Black Abyss Babe said:
They had to - it was the law (not sure if it still is but it might be) - all schools were required to put on, every day, "an act of worship" for all the pupils to attend, which was supposed to be "broadly Christian in character". Parents from other religions or non would sometimes request to have their children excluded, but not often. My school was actually in breach of the law because we only got assemblies two days a week (the school hall being too small to accomodate the entire school at once).
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I remember quite a few who sat out of assembly. Jehovah's Witnesses and Hindus or Muslims, but I don't think atheists were allowed to sit out, although lots requested it. It was heavily C of E, so assorted denominations would have no truck with it.
 
For all you '70s rock fans on here:


This is from 1989, before they released their debut album. They're slowly becoming one of my favourite bands.
 
...and they improved their performance over time, too.

This is from 2001:

and this is from 2019:

The 2019 video even has subtitles! The lyrics are a lot darker than you'd expect.
 
Black Abyss Babe said:
Nope. Had a quick look just now and it's not something I feel any need to delve into further. I'm sure Bruce is a big fan though ...
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You should absolutely trust your feeling.
Though I thought that you were referring to something like this when you said that the truth remains when something like a religion, dies. How it remains then?
 
____no5 said:
How it remains then?
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Well I suppose to an extent I'm using "truth" and "fact" interchangeably a bit here (which I shouldn't really do) but to give a simple example: when the cleverest minds out there believed that the Earth was flat that didn't keep the Earth from actually being spherical. And when the current thinking was that the planets were held in their orbits because they were stuck to solid sphere that didn't keep them from actually being held there by gravity.

All a religion really is is a system for doing things a particular way - living your life, trying to get closer to God/Zeus/Blind Io/The Universal Mind (or trying to avoid pissing them off) or whatever. And in the process any religion may hit on a few or even several things that are actually real. But when people lose interest in subscribing to whatever "system" that wouldn't stop the real stuff from still being real. And conversely if we all fail to accurately identify the truth that wouldn't keep the truth from existing, as yet undiscovered ...
 
Brigantium said:
I remember quite a few who sat out of assembly. Jehovah's Witnesses and Hindus or Muslims, but I don't think atheists were allowed to sit out, although lots requested it. It was heavily C of E, so assorted denominations would have no truck with it.
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We rarely got anyone sitting out but then Gainsborough wasn't exactly multicultural in the '80s. But our assemblies were only "broadly Christian" in the sense of being heavily moralising (lying, stealing and bullying are bad bad bad etc). We'd sing a really old hymn then one or more of the teachers (usually the senior mistress) would tell us off about something and then the headmaster would tell some anvilicious tale about something he or one of his relatives did over the weekend or on holiday. I don't remember any Bible readings. It was all over in about 20 minutes.

That was secondary school though; primary school was a different kettle of fish entirely. For a start they had songbooks that qualified as modern for the time (Come and Praise), also the hymn singing was singing lessons as much as anything else - if the headmistress didn't think we'd sung it well enough we had to do it again! I don't remember Bible readings from there either, but the teaching we got in assemblies tended to run along the lines of "we all had a responsibility to ourselves to be a good as we could be". (And occasionally we all got told off about something).

I guess not everyone hated it though, because my Dad's old church puts on an occasional event called "The Old School Assembly" where people turn up to sing songs from Come and Praise for purely nostalgic reasons. There are, in truth, some banging tunes in Come and Praise ...
 
Black Abyss Babe said:
Well I suppose to an extent I'm using "truth" and "fact" interchangeably a bit here (which I shouldn't really do) but to give a simple example: when the cleverest minds out there believed that the Earth was flat that didn't keep the Earth from actually being spherical. And when the current thinking was that the planets were held in their orbits because they were stuck to solid sphere that didn't keep them from actually being held there by gravity.

All a religion really is is a system for doing things a particular way - living your life, trying to get closer to God/Zeus/Blind Io/The Universal Mind (or trying to avoid pissing them off) or whatever. And in the process any religion may hit on a few or even several things that are actually real. But when people lose interest in subscribing to whatever "system" that wouldn't stop the real stuff from still being real. And conversely if we all fail to accurately identify the truth that wouldn't keep the truth from existing, as yet undiscovered ...
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Very clear & satisfactory explanation.
For the bolded text above I would add one beloved William Blake quote: What is now proved, was once only imagined.
 
I'm genuinely starting to think that Elon Musk is aiming for world domination.
 
So, aside from enabling "free speech" (which will make Twitter even more of a cesspool than it already is), what exactly is Elon Musk planning to do?
 
Beats me. But Twitter is a communication infrastructure that has proven to be politically significant in the past, and I'm not only talking about Trump, but also about its role in the 2009 Iran uprisings and the Arab Spring. It's now in the same hands as Starlink, a service that provides military information to Ukraine, SpaceX, which very likely will become the major player of space exploration and A Boring Company, which nobody talks about but which is aiming at essential infrastructure services around the world.
I'm just saying, this guy takes the claim to define free speech and has the power to decide whether a country gets vital military aid, and it really is all up to him. He concentrates a lot of very, very real power. I'm not saying he really is aiming for world domination, but I'm saying a 60's Bond movie would have considered a villain like Musk a bit too over-the-top. I wouldn't blame anyone for getting nervous thinking about him.
 
Musk is a weird techbro too, like he's make a career on making odd boasts and then having the force of personality to make them real.
 
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