= new reply since forum marked as read
Fuck, lets start now.
Art has two basic parts - form and content. Form is anything you can point at like line, shape, color, value, edge, surface or texture. Content is what it means or why it was made.
Religion is an expression of cultural content. While Christianity has perpetrated its share of moral outrages it also supported some of the greatest cultural advances in human history. I'm not an anthropologist, but I suspect that the creation of a monotheistic deity created a personal connection to the divine which represented a great leap forward in our ability to understand why we and those around us do the things we do.
Art made in oppressive, totalitarian cultures in invariably stilted and lifeless. A culture that cannot produce good art is a culture in decline.
When art is confined to the service of some utilitarian ideal rather than an exploration of what might experienced beyond the utilitarian needs of a person or regime it wilts into banality. I am often asked for a definition of art. The simplest definition I have come up with so far is that art is cultural R&D.
The vast majority of images people in the United States see are of the same utilitarian nature and are equally lifeless expressions of a culture in decline.
Art, like a scientific hypothesis, is intended to explore possibilities. It is a tool used for "another way of knowing" ourselves.
And without that black strip, we would have gotten here a whole lot quicker:
Religion is just a tool like a gun. It can be used to bring out the best and worst in people. Not only do I think there is no way to avoid having people create and practice some sort of religion, without it we would not be able to cooperate for the survival of the species. We have had some sort of religious practice for our entire history so it must have some sort of evolutionary utility. The secret is to use it for the purpose for which it is intended which, in too small a nutshell, is to foster a sense of understanding and empathy for those around us. Without that, the degradations of technological advance would have, and will, continue to accelerate to the ruin of the entire human race.
Nobody has ever confused me with Shakespeare.
Moved it where we couldn't see it might be more accurate.
Amazon rainforest
http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/
“In 3 years, the Obama administration has built a vast drone/killing operation”; it describes the complete secrecy behind which this is all being carried out and notes: “no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.” Here is the first beautifully revealing passage:
Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.
Drone attack casualty (there are surprisingly few images of them)
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Technology/story?id=1479506#.Tv4yMYG5-BM
The average computer monitor contains more than five pounds of lead. Computers can also contain mercury and cadmium. When you multiply that by the millions of outdated computers and monitors, you've got lots of toxins that you don't want to put back into the earth.
"Eighty percent of all the scrap electronics in the United States end up offshore and usually in Third World countries," said Bob Glavin of Chicago, who runs one of the biggest recycling plants in the country.
nobody could know that. And your prognostication regarding the stars is also an understandable appeal to emotion. I don't think religion would have kept us from exploiting oil as an energy resource. But since we're just imagining here, as it stands now it's a fact that there is no replacement for oil and it's running out fast. Without that gap, we would have hit peak oil much sooner and at this point we would most likely be struggling to emerge from another dark age. And it would be a dark age caused by the exploitation of natural resources to drive technology, which depends on science. It could well be argued that the twentieth century was the most barbaric in human history. Those wars were fought for natural resources, as was almost every imperial conquest in history. Most of the time religion was just along for the ride as an excuse.
If purely rational thinking were the panacea that would lift the human race to the stars we would all be speaking Greek right now. If rational social organization and efficient government were the best solution for the vagaries of the human spirit I would be writing this in Latin. The devastation in the images above was not caused by religion. There was no religious crusade destroying rain forests, shipping tons of garbage to the third world, or burning children's faces. That devastation is caused by the need for natural resources to fuel science based technology. Religion is contributing to it because it uses technology. But religion didn't build all this shit, it just uses it just like everybody else believer and atheist alike. If atheists were as purely rational as we would like to think we are we'd be the biggest Luddites around.
It seems to me that both religion and science are working the same scam. Religion says, "Don't worry, heaven is your reward." and science says, "Don't worry, we'll get it figured out." All the while both of them are getting rich and anybody who isn't lucky enough to get with the program gets the shit kicked out of them.
I personally don't have a problem with religion or science. I think they are both vital to our survival as a species. It seems to me that the problem with religion begins when god gets property and the problem with science begins when ideas become property. When that happens people begin to identify more with their systems of thinking than with each other. And that's when the fighting begins because you have to dehumanize someone to brutalize them.
After the fall of the Roman empire religion did exactly what it was supposed to do. It reestablished relationships with people in proximity with each other. It was a difficult and ugly process and after a while god got property and everyone else got human barbeques. The twentieth century was a century of "isms". Capitalism, communism, and fascism fought it out across the entire planet, and in the end all we got out of it were more human barbeques.
technology as religion, control over nature (lat. supra natura). Technocracy and theocracy, same'o same'o...
Please, Something Else... 
I agree that much of what is happening in this thread is not productive.
in this movement?
If your goal is to shoot down anything that is submitted (which has been established as a pattern in this group), then why would anyone offer anything up?
