Favorite Quotes

Cree Indian Proverb
Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.

Friedrich Nietzsche
One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid.

Friedrich Schiller
Against stupidity, even the Gods struggle in vain.

Albert Einstein
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

Bertrand Russell
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The time will come when our successors will wonder how we could have been ignorant of things so obvious.

Joseph Stalin
The people who cast the votes don't decide an election; the people who count the votes do.

Adolf Hitler
What good fortune for governments that the people do not think.

A reply, never written

On another blog, there was a very passionate comment against torture, based on the religious belief with the usual “self-evidences”.

But “self-evidence” doesn’t exist.

Since she came to the same conclusion as I do – no torture (remember the Stanford Prison Experiments)! – i decided, not to reply. Mainly because i didn’t want to offend her, but also, because i fear, my comments kill conversations and...

because i fear, religious people didn’t want to hear it.

Nevertheless, to remain silent is to let you think I approve or support your actions. I do not. - Joseph W. DuRocher

So here my reply as part of the neverending (already lost?) fight for reason and against the “self-evidences”, which seem to prove God or the need for religion, inevitably leading to the next “proofs”: that my God is better than yours, that i have to defend him against your wrong beliefs and so on and on...

She said:
All religions begin with a loving God, a Father, a Creator

that's only the end of the sacral drift - particularly the Abrahamic religions know a human-like Father-Creator.

The ancient "religions" began as educational systems to teach "new" skills like medicine. To be able to teach you have to be able to understand and to present, so the ancient people had to invent symbols/writing - e.g. the lions represented the color "yellow", representing fire/warmth/home/health, but also fire/heat/destruction (therefore the seemingly inconsistent "responsibilities" of ancient lion goddesses: medicine and war) - symbols were created to store information to be able to teach it, but also for the persons teaching and using the skills, who presumably were highly respected: That was the beginning of the sacral drift.

She said:
We know the difference between right and wrong, that IS religion

"right or wrong" is mostly used regarding human interactions, you do "right", when you act as "good guy"

Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees:
"Here we show that human children as young as 18 months of age (prelinguistic or just-linguistic) quite readily help others to achieve their goals in a variety of different situations. This requires both an understanding of others' goals and an altruistic motivation to help. In addition, we demonstrate similar though less robust skills and motivations in three young chimpanzees."

Seems to me more an evolutionary process.

So many people think like that – think, that humans need God to be good, to be able to be a moral based entity. But that’s simply not true.

You just have to be a highly intelligent autonomous “object”, than you will develop an “Ego” – you will recognize yourself in the mirror.

And it means, that you must develop better communication – since high intelligence destroys information like a black hole. If you are not able to dense communication, your race/intelligence will not be able to evolve.

Do you see what that means?

That means, that “altruism” is a necessary part of our progression – because only communication prevents the destruction of information, but communication needs a listener. Look around yourself – when the others don’t want to discuss with you, you can talk, talk, talk without effect, isn’t it?

So you need to make them listen – and don’t be stupid: in a group with other “autonomous objects”, brute force don’t work. You have to respect them, to be “moral”, “decent” and “just”.

No gods needed.

So ask yourself: Cui Bono?

Stop thinking positive, stop limiting your thoughts!

There’s a time for everything.

Thinking positive you need in hard times to survive.

Thinking negative you need in good times – because more mistakes are made in good times than in bad times.

Why?

Because good times make you ignorant – you get used to wealth and comfort.

Because goot times make you lazy – you forget how much effort it took us to get where we are today.

Because goot times make you egotistic – you forget how deeply you depend on others.

Because goot times make you megalomanic – you overestimate your own abilities and power.

Because good times make you stupid – you disregard the simplest cause-effect-chains.

We live in good times (at least most people of the western world) – we live in wealth and comfort and a favorable climate.

And all what we do, is to risk what we have – risk our wealth by wasting money for useless things, risk our comfort by greedy selfishness and envy, so destroying the industries of our own countries, risk our environment by wasting energy and ressources without caring about the consequences.

To protect what we have, to keep aware of the risks, to beware of pampered blindness – stop thinking positive!

We thought positive the whole 1990s – the result?

An explosion of growth of fundamentalistics of any religion: Christianity, Islam, Free Market, Privatization, Alphaleadership, winners and losers. An explosion of debts, of war, of joblessness, of poverty, of destruction and poisoning while losing real power to change things.

And we will have to change things. Soon.

"We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can." (Prof. Lovelack)

So stop thinking positive! As long as we can enjoy a wonderful world, never forget how easy it is to lose everything! Start thinking negative, start thinking the worst! Understand the worst scenarios to avoid them! And then – start thinking positive again, that you are able to overcome the problems – with a little help of your friends.

Only then we may be able to protect our children, when we stop thinking positive, as if we wouldn’t depend on our body or our social group, as if we could decide independently what we do and what we can, what we are able to do, as if “faith moves mountains” had ever moved real mountains without strong arms endowed by nature.

To believe positively and strongly in bullshit doesn’t mean to “move mountains”, to make bullshit real, it simply means to run with the first lemming towards the bursting of the bubble of wishful thinking.

Thinking has to consider each and everything, the best, the good, the bad, the worst. You can’t beat evil by the “peril sensitive” sunglasses of Zaphod Beeblebrox, by just ignoring it and wishing it away.

To change your world into a better place to live for everybody – start using your brain! Allow the simple fact that you can fail, that you can’t be strong enough...

and stop whining about that fact like a baby! Superman is just a myth, a comic book character, not a living person and even if you watch Faux News you should be able to realize that the Supermen on TV are just that...

on TV.

If you don’t allow the simple fact that you can fail, if you don’t allow the fear – you’ll not able to mobilize all your skills and forces to avoid failure...

to find a workaround.

So stop thinking limited – stop thinking positive!

IKI – Infinity Kills Information

Why?

Because information is repeatable and identifiable process – and to identify you need to measure and compare attributes. And it means, that you need to differ one entity from the other to detect its uniqueness.

But in an infinity you’ll never able to decide, if an item is unique, because you’ll never able to compare it with all the other items – the necessary precondition for ensuring the uniqueness.

And since information is action, information processing is work – inevitably both need time. So you can’t consider information without considering time. Put this together with an infinite set of items or simply a huge mass of items, needing more time to compare than your information processing system has...

and you see, that your system lost the information, which may be there.

IKI – infinity kills information.