The railroad connected one side of the country to the other, and was built and controlled by those who were labeled robber barons by the people of their time.
The term “robber baron” was coined to describe medieval German nobles who extracted tolls, tariffs, and tithes from passing traffic on the river Rhine. You can still see their castles, built close to the banks, looming over the river. It was later used to describe rapacious industrialists who lined their pockets without adding much value to the detriment of the common good. We have them today, too.
http://theglitteringeye.com/the-21st-century-robber-barons/
We have made attempts to remove robber barons from America, but they have a habit of materializing and refusing to go away quietly. We already have the basis of a law that works to protect the public, but the combined power of the American Telecommunications Industry has been chipping away at it’s power since it’s inception in 1887.
"Give me snuff, whiskey and Swedes, and I will build a railroad to hell. ”
—Attributed to James J. Hill (Robber Baron)
I did something between signing and closing that Steve thought was a little crazy. I said, “Let’s go visit the set of 30 Rock just to say, ‘Hey, here we are, and we love the show!’ ” We did that, the two of us. And he was right. I’ve been paying for it ever since.
—Brian L. Roberts (CEO, Comcast)
Science is not a religion, but atheism is. Well maybe not a religion, but it is a belief system. Well maybe not a belief system, but it is an abelief system. Atheists don’t like to be lumped in to the religion category, and profess that if one were a theist they may or may not have the same religion as another theist, as there exist many religions that have instances of God, so to say that theism is a religion in itself is quite ludicrous. There is no common church or temple of the theist, and that is equally true of the atheist. You cannot determine an atheist’s beliefs anymore then you could a theist, unless of course you actually asked them and listened to what they had to say, but baring that interaction, there is no way to determine a person’s set of core values simply by assessing whether or not they are a theist or an atheist. It is important to note at this point that polytheism is only a label used to define an individual that believes in many gods, and while there are many different sets of beliefs that fall under the category of polytheistic, many of them don’t necessarily intersect with each other at all, and so those who are polytheistic share a common trait with both theistic and atheistic individuals. That trait being that the only way to find out what such a person believes in is to ask them specific questions, and listen to the answers they give you. One could also say that one could observe such an individual in order to assess what they believe, and maybe you might determine that one is Christian because they wear a cross, but could not that person also be atheist? Someone else may have a pentagram or the numbers 666 tattooed or somehow otherwise displayed on their person, but what can you determine from that? Is that person a theist or a polytheist? Do they believe in God or the Devil? Is the Devil a god? What about the Holy Trinity? Is that polytheistic? Why wouldn’t an atheist display such symbols? Why would they?
As you can see, the attempt to categorize a person by such labels alone is not enough, but neither is observation on it’s own. You may watch someone cross the street a hundred times, but the reason why they cross still remains a mystery. It is an unknown. Now consider that you could go up and ask them why they crossed the road, what is to stop them from lying to you? How would you know if they were telling the truth? The impulse to believe them on their word is a human reaction, but so is the impulse to not. We don’t want to have to believe them. We want to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why they crossed, and in order to explicitly determine that motivation we must first tell ourselves a kind of story. We don’t really know if the story is real, but in it is contained the framework we need to construct a simple set of conditions. After all the conditions are set, and our version of the story is ready to tell, either the person will cross the street, or they won’t, and our story will either end up true or false. But we should not get too excited about a true story, because there could be many different variables that we may have missed. And a false story may indeed rule out one possibility, but if there existed anything that fell out of the range of our control, the false negative could have resulted from contamination.
In the end, a lot of what we believe is because of the stories we tell ourselves. The internal motivations of a person crossing a road, may not be within our power to discern. Even the person themselves may not know why, and when asked they might come up with a story that they think true, but is actually a fabrication designed by their own brain in order to explain an action that they were not completely aware of. The human brain is capable of quite a considerable amount of deception to the self, and one of the theories as to why, is because it keeps you sane.
It is in this way that I will explain atheism. The story that an atheist tells themselves does not desire or require a God or gods. The beliefs that they have do not include a God or gods. Whether or not that is a deception, is not the issue. The point is that being atheistic does not mean that you believe there is no God or gods, it means that you don’t believe that said God or gods exist. It is much different to say that you believe that God or gods don’t exist. I hope you can see the difference. It is similar to say, “I don’t believe the tooth fairy exists,” as opposed to, “I believe the tooth fairy doesn’t exist.” One of these statements is a belief, the other is the absence of belief. Atheism is a term that describes the absence of a belief, hence an abelief system.
Science attempts to circumvent the idea of belief altogether by depending on a system that isn’t based on belief at all, but instead a consistent and predictable set of progressive rules, that when used correctly, create the basis for everything we know about the observable universe, and in some instances, the unobservable universe. It is called the Scientific Method.
Here are the six steps of the Scientific Method:
1. Ask a Question
2. Do Background Research
3. Construct a Hypothesis
4. Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
5. Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
6. Communicate Your Results
You might have noticed that we tried to use the scientific method above in order to figure out why our person might have crossed the street. It didn’t quite give us satisfactory results, but that is mostly because it was a fictional person set in a theoretical model. Without a particular subject(s), and actual data, the scientific method fails us, because we need those aspects in order to anchor ourselves to reality. Reality is a term I use to describe the observable world, or in other words, our shared existence. If I see an apple and you see an apple, then perhaps we can agree it is an apple, but if there is a discrepancy between what both you and I see, then we will have to determine some sort of system to describe such an object that we both agree on, or else we must abandon the hopes of co-existing within our shared reality. This is rather easy with objects such as apples and oranges, but become more difficult when you’re trying to describe something like radio waves or light. Visible light exists as a wave on the electromagnetic spectrum as well as radio and microwaves. These waves effect our physical world consisting of apples and oranges in many different ways. Light bounces off and is absorbed by objects such as these. Radio would pass through them without much resistance. Microwaves could explode an orange if focused correctly. Yet all of these are still considered electro-magnetic waveforms. There is only a differentiation between them based on their frequency and wavelength, but they all travel at the same speed, the speed of light, and they can all be observed and act in a reasonably (visible light sometimes acts like a particle instead of a wave) predictable manner.
Science is good with stuff like this, because it can be measured and quantified, but science can’t say anything about God. Yay or nay is quite impossible to determine, because much like our person who crossed the street above, we have no evidence to experiment with. All we have is a bunch of stories about apples and oranges, stories that are sometimes confusing, portraying the apples as oranges and vice-versa. There is no way for science to work with such evidence, because there is no way to test the hypothesis, so science ignores it altogether. You could say that science doesn’t care whether there is a God or gods, because while you could ask the question, “Does God exist?” There is no way to test the hypothesis without inherently contaminating the results. An omnipotent, omniscient being would have the ability to control any experiment you could design. Even if you thought that the data was infallibly pointing to one answer or the other, the potential for contamination is always approaching infinity. So science ignores the question, and atheism shyly answers it ~ “not in my experience.”
If you repeatedly do a singular action, every day, for a considerable length of time, you will find your attitude adjusted around that action.
If you consider your faults, and balance your pride, with a healthy respect for the universe, your prospects will increase accordingly.
The only real strength is the power of will, and will is the one force in the universe, not directly associated with physics.
X: “You are smart enough to not be dumb.”
Y: “Don’t be dumb.”
Z: “I will try to be smart in the future, oh and also a good person.”
*** Intelligence is Godliness, and Heaven is Love ***
Ok. This is an easy one. I think you all know what I’m talking about, but give me a second to break it all down to you all simple like.
1. We are bred to consume.
Everything that lives consumes. Plants consume sunlight, (which is pretty cool if you think about it) and animals consume plants, (as well as other animals) CRAZY RIGHT!?!
2. We are expected to consume.
Today we are in a “break it, you bought it” society. Before the industrial revolution we were probably closer to “If you can’t make it, you can’t have it,” meaning that you could get the good stuff if you had the money, but if you didn’t, you had better be good with your hands. Over time, the industrial machine has allowed things to be made cheaply, and now there is IKEA… The people that own the machines, that make the things, expect you to pay for them, and you do, because that is the society we live in.
It is the same society that has crept up around us and specialized us away from traditional craftsmanship. It is this society that has left a void; a void, which modern consumerism has yet to completely fill. This void can’t be filled with such ideology, because the desire to consume within a population increases in direct relation to the number of different items (or choices) available to the population at any one given time. Add the internet to this system, and both the seller and the consumer are able to increase their sample data. They not only know that you are going to consume, they probably have a pretty good idea of what it is, and the funniest part is that, you are most likely the one who told them.
3. “So what do I do?”
The easy answer doesn’t exist, but things have become quite interesting. The world is full of voices, and people are talking to one another. My one friend likes Coke, and my other friend likes Pepsi. Things are kind of weird now, but that’s basically how it works. Traditional advertising hasn’t completely disappeared, but people are becoming more aware of some of the greater evils.
Just try to be aware, because your friends are watching your every move, and they want to be just like you. Don’t let them down!
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