Xeny: Wild Wilderness of Wales

Xeny : Wild Wilderness of Wales

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It works without a written law and without a strong, centralized political authority. It's just as much about healing the community as it is about the individuals involved—victim and perpetrator. Thus it may have been the default system of justice in communities smaller than Dunbar's Number. Oh hell, yes -- but I knew that if I started out by talking about restorative justice it would just muddy the waters completely. I mean, the punitive aspect of western judicial systems seems to be to some extent an attempt at abstracting revenge mechanisms so that a state can clamp down on blood feuds or related revenge cycles presumably to reduce the damage they do to a society.

Adding the idea of healing damage rather than punishing offenders or taking revenge risks tipping the whole discussion into a spiral of tail-chasing over what the goals of justice are, rather than where justice comes from. Problem with this is that there's good evidence that justice precedes religious cults, although primitive tribal or clan-based justice can be incredibly crude: Such justice is still practiced, for example in Somali Xe'er, which some libertarians love to point to as an example of homebrewed law NOT shari'a, although they're Muslim without a state to enforce it.

Without a state, legal rulings are enforced by the male members of a tribe or clan, all of whom are expected to be armed and ready to fight to enforce the rulings of their judges. Justice as a religious cult. Depends on how you define cult, but I tend to believe that justice is ultimately a basic expression of the desire not to be cheated, which can be traced further down to Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation from the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Since even bacteria play games analogous to the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and punish cheaters, I'd suggest that a desire for justice, the ability to punish cheaters, in interactions is very primitive in life. Xe'er is a great counter-example of a body of law that's anything but sacred. Laws tend to be what works to settle disputes. As Jared Diamond points out in The World Until Yesterday , the problem with primitive justice is that the alternative to primitive compensatory justice tends to be warfare of the eye-for-and-eye variety. It can easily lead to generations of feuding over things like arguments about pig ownership.

One of the nice things about state-based law is that they suppress these kinds of feuds: If the state kills or imprisons a murderer, the victim's family doesn't have to risk their lives performing the deed. According to Diamond, the death toll under primitive justice is five-ten times higher than it is under even the nastiest legal systems, due to deaths from feuding. The term priest comes from the Greek Presbyter elder , which is why the executive body in a Presbyterian Church is a group of elders selected from among the congregation, not the minister.

In most cases, justices are elders in the community, valued for their experience. If we're thinking of priests as trained religious practitioners, that doesn't fit judges at all. In the US, for example, they're elected or selected, and they don't get sent to judge school or serve terms as acolyte justices. One could argue that, if the alternative to the death penalty is multigenerational feuding that kill innocents and bystanders cf: That's the context of powerful state law vs. In a state that truly monopolizes violence a place where vendettas are rare or unknown, we don't need the death penalty, only imprisonment.

In the US, a grim irony is that the death penalty may be necessary in some states, due to the weakness of the judicial system in preventing feuds. In other states, the death penalty is unnecessary, because the injustices inherent in the way it's implemented mean that the most fair thing is to outlaw it. I've started distinguishing between slavishly following the law, and justice as an actual ideal to be aimed for. It is very easy to use the law as a stick to beat people with, because they are walking whilst black or because they made a bad joke on twitter.

Usually in such cases many people see that the law is in fact unjust. Related is the concept of fairness, and I've been asking why, if life is naturally unfair, we don't try to make it fair, but then that leads to some tail chasing and confuses some kinds of people. Anarchism is variable enough that I'm not sure I would want to bring it into this debate. But there are forms of anarchism which seem able to handle big problems. Perhaps the key distinction is that power develops from the bottom up, and modern democracies are an attempt to maintain big-man power structures in the face of "power to the people".

I wouldn't say that an anarchist system couldn't have judges. A quasi-religious status might be part of how they can fend off protests at their decisions. I've thought, a few times, that in the USA, an election is seen as something magical. Sometimes the difference between religion and magic seems a bit fine. Law is impersonal - it frees individuals family, friends from having to personally invest in a dispute, take sides. Law also limits society's responsibility toward the victim including anyone touched by the victim. So - law is convenient easy and quick and cheap.

The death penalty is a convenient way for a society to 'fix' a problem that it's unable to address or doesn't want to admit it has. Therefore calling law a magic system of government does not imply that it's religious, merely that it's "like a religion" in certain ways. If you think of animism as a religion, then you could make the argument work, but each rock would end up with it's own god, and possibly each electron. This could reasonably be called a religious view, but it's not much like any modern religious view. Look up, and consider the implications of, the term "genius locus" more commonly "genii loci".

And remember that the Romans were FAR from a primitive religion. You might want to look into the case history of a Chimpanzee called Paradise. A multiple serial murderess, who essentially killed off her troupe of Chimpanzees. I'll grant that it's a small percentage. OTOH, fear of the stranger is clearly a good survival strategy.

But that doesn't mean you always either run or fight. Religion is a human invention. Justice is a human invention. Laws are human inventions. The idea of doing justice through laws is a human invention. Moreover, shoes are a human invention, and the idea of wearing shoes out of doors is a human invention.

Therefore all criminal justice systems are in the business of providing a specialised variety of shoes, and all governments are cobblers. Chris - have you got a ref for that bit of Beccaria? If deterrence were perfect - if you were certain that action X would bring about consequence Y and guided your behaviour accordingly - there would be or have been no morally-informed choice to make: Deterrence, in other words, is more like taxation or situational crime prevention than it is like the criminal law.

Bit of Benjamin goes here. For one thing, "cult" is almost as inflammatory as the other 4-letter word that begins with c. For another it's almost always applied to small groups of people. I think it's a bit strange to label most of the population of the world as a cult. What I would say is that every religion has a faith component. Some necessary thing that must be believed to be true without sufficient evidence. The Justice concept certainly fits. One must believe--against all rational evidence--that if one does what is right, others will do the same. And we will magically live in a "just" world.

It's not necessary to have a universally defined concept in order to subscribe to this concept. And, indeed, the fact that there are multiple concepts of justice tends to lead one down the faith path. Not only do you have to believe that people will do what is "right", but you must also believe that they will do your version of "right.

The leap I think I see here is that Stross is suggesting that any system with a faith component is, by definition, a religion. If you are willing to accept that leap, then all the other points follow easily. If you do not accept a faith component as both necessary and sufficient conditions of a religion, then you obviously disagree. The disagreement from some posters seems to come from the attitude that x isn't a religion because I don't call it a religion.

I think that's a lazy way of thinking about the topic. Just so people understand where I'm coming from I'm new to this blog and its comments I think that all faiths are tantamount to insanity. Faith in something--by definition--is believing something to be true without sufficient evidence. That is, in many circumstances, the definition of insanity. If one had sufficient evidence, it wouldn't be called faith. It would be called knowledge. Also, you probably want to reconsider talking about me in the third person when we're having a conversation.

Seems the discussion is focused on origins, how about where law and justice are heading, and what forces are likely to shape them in the future? These sciences are already being used to evaluate individuals brought up on charges, potential jury members up to a point in the Western world. How well is it working? How does use of such sciences change how law is practiced? Seeing as you're going for "Justice as a religion", I'm surprised that no-one has gone for "Political ideology as a religion", or do we all just agree that as a given?

After all, if you were a Communist Party member in the USSR, you had an advantage in job selection, education, promotion ; the ideologists were the priests; and heretics suffered. True believers receive their reward, no need for an afterlife. Not meaning in any way to conflate US domestic politics with the above two examples, but it's got two religions, not one. When one gets the upper hand, there are reappointments across Government see: Ambassadors and Judges as political appointees.

It becomes difficult to operate at local government without the support of one of the two parties see: There is an impressive level of vitriol between them see: Fox News , and statements are made on the basis of faith not fact see: Britain hasn't got the same vehemence, unless you count "minority politicians desperately seeking votes" - is this the result of having three major parties in England four in Scotland and Wales that have thin and orthogonal relationships with the "actual" religions?

Looking at countries with more fractured politics, and a history of coalition, do they have a less religious view of voting habits? This is just the specific case of a more general rule, that any judicial punishment offered as solely a "deterrent" to stop crime is a sacrifice in the same way that burning goat carcase on an altar is a sacrifice to bring the rains. For the communities that I'm thinking of the answer to the question where justice comes from seems quite clear: The perpetrator is part of the community and remains part of it , thus it's their effort as well. Thus I'm proposing that justice at its core is a community-self-repair-mechanism.

I'm sticking to the term 'community' rather than 'society' because I want to keep it clear that I'm having rather small groups in mind. No recourse to religion needed. The Tanzanian constitution for instance explicitly recognizes the traditional tribal and clan-based justice system. Equating two ill-defined concepts like "justice" and "religion" seems to be an effective troll bait. Especially since English speakers are handicapped by having one word "justice" for several things: I'm thinking more about the 12th through 14th centuries, where I have the strong impression that the English crown maimed and executed less people for more serious offenses than its 18th century counterpart did.

But that period is not my specialty. It still seems to be axiomatic that people want to achieve justice because justice is the way things ought to be, but in 45 Charlie seems to say that he wants to talk about what makes a situation just. That's a good question, but a bit too big for me right now. Another reason why 3 is wrong: But modern governments don't get their legitimization from providing justice or from any other religion ; they are legitimized by elections.

In my view it's more the classical three-step fallacy of human politics: Something must be done - Executing people is doing something - So we must execute people. I meant no disrespect. I don't know you. I was trying to be polite by not assuming a first-name basis. Well, my opinion is that calling anything a religion is bad enough. For reasons I explained in my second post. I guess my point is that if you want people to buy into your ideas, you need to perhaps not antagonize them so much.

One of the problems I have with this is the lack of a definition of "religion". You already mentioned it's somewhat debateable "religions" need a god. As for the examples, "classical" Buddhism is not exactly atheist, it's just being a deva means still being subject to the circle of life, death and rebirth. They are subject to the law of dharma, where this law might have some similarities to "Tao" or "Logos". In Scientology, which might include freezoners, we all are actually "gods" or thetans, we have just been brainwashed by Xenu to forget it Hm, might make for a nice KULT campaign.

As for Confucianism, Taoism, and Stoicism, i'm not that much into Chinese belief systems, but first of, at least Taoism somewhat blends into Chinese folk religion, which has some "gods" or powerful spirits:. Second of, even if you want the pure unadulterated "tao" in Taoism or "logos" in Stoicism, there might be a certain tendency to apply personal attributed, or "godhood" to it.

In Stoicism, some Greek Stoics of course identified the "logos" with Zeus, there is a famous hymn about this:. And of course, there is also a Christian tradition of equating the "logos" with Jesus, building on earlier ideas in Hellenistic Judaism:. Epicureanism, OTOH, is quite a funny case; like Buddhism, it's not atheist, Epicur makes it quite plainl gods exists, but they don't care for us lesser humans and don't interact with us.

Opinions why he did so differ somewhat, one school of thought says he wanted to evade the fate of Socrates, another indicates he kept them for aesthetic reasons. As for us humans, we dissolve into our atoms as we die, which includes the special "soul atoms". If so, they would have had little time for scientific uncertainties. So, let's assume there are three factors to religions, first of "things happening are subject to a reason, sometimes hidden", second of "things around us have a personality just like us", and third of "there is a certain way things are meant to happen".

For the first two, there might be some dynamics, e. Sorry for the excursion, it seems clear that justice is somewhat close to the third aspect, especially with the "natural law" guys. In our case, the second aspect doesn't fit in, but as seen with some religions, it might. But most defenders of justice would be quite fast to cite the first aspect for things which might happen if justice is violated. Again, I see some overlap with the idea of "natural law".

Though we could argue "Law" is more like exegetical literature that can be changed. Though the boundary is somewhat complicated, as can be seen with the Talmud. AFAIK there is one school of thought in ethnology capital punishment WAS originally a human sacrifice, the crime has disturbed the "way things are meant to happen", so we need a sacrifice to pull it right. Of course, there are other reasons like revenge etc. Might be an explanation for capital punishment for victimless "crimes", of course, hanging for practised male homosexuality, for example.

Actually, when I explained religion with three factos, I forgot a fourth one; there is a tendency to unite the reasons and personalities in question. Might mean monotheism and TOE are somewhat related. So, no, I don't think this means the has to be ONE seat of absolute authority, it might happen later on, with one rulebook, but ther is nothing against playing be multiple ones. Having something of a soft spot for Kropotkin, I think that depends somewhat on the definition of "anarchism". There are quite some libertarian socialists who seem to be ardent followers of the Cult of Justice.

Just ask Noam Chomsky. Most libertarian socialists would be strong believers in the latter, but be somewhat sceptical of the former. Even if it's just sanctity of of property. OTOH, most gouvernments are quite tied in with "there is a certain way things are meant to happen", so I don't think that one really that shocking.

As to 2 , the policy of following precedent makes law not only scripture, but also continuously growing scripture. To be able to make a decision, a judge must follow the scriptures, research all the new decisions that the barristers have put before him, and engage in amazing feats of pilpul to make a decision that fits the individual case.

This then becomes precedent other judges must follow, thus new scripture. This argues that the justice system, at least, is a unusual kind of theocracy, one in which the God is present and adding to the scriptures. With the judges as her avatars, perhaps: With regard to the idea that fairness at the heart of this, it might be interesting to note that fairness is a strongly cultured concept.

I can't find the paper at the moment, bit there was quite a fuss a few months ago when some standard economics experiments were repeated outside of North America. In other cultures resource splits deemed optimal were much less likely to be even - if for instance taking from someone exposed you to an obligation.

The fact that certain elements of the structure and culture of the legal system bear a superficial resemblance to religious organizations shouldn't be considered evidence that they have the same or even a similar metaphysical foundation. It could just as easily be said that corporations are religions as well, that the CEO is the prophet, the executives his disciples, the managers his acolytes, the other employees the laity, and that their product line are relics being sold as indulgences to people with a promise of salvation which in this context is material comfort and psychological validation.

Besides which, the essential element of all religions that sets them apart from other ideologies is the promise of life after death. Without that, it's not a religion. Greek and Roman religion were originally quite uninterested in it, Saducee Judaism didn't believe into life after death, Buddhism thinks something stays after death, the dharma, but they stress it's no soul People organize their ideas and values into ideological frameworks, certainly, and work to promulgate them to augment their own affirmation, or in some cases to "defend" them from refutation, to protect themselves from cognitive dissonance.

That can be found in every sphere of human endeavor. Well, as already mentioned, I think there are quite some religions that are either not that interested in life after death or flat out deny it. I agree with the commandments, of course, reglementation of behaviour seem central to all religions, e. If I'd have to pull an explanation out of my ass, many cultures are not that concerned with the individual, thus personal existence after death is not that important, survival of the group is.

Cause and effect; effect and cause: Two persons having committed a Category One crime, two persons will automatically suffer a Category One punishment, and the Essential Equipoise of justice will therefore be painlessly maintained. The two misbegotten harbingers of shame who attacked this hard-striving person will sooner or later meet with a fate that will be both painful and grotesque.

In the meantime the wholesome moral of retribution will be inculcated in wrongdoers by two others doubtless quite as abandoned in their various ways demonstrating that authority does not slumber. A religion is arguably a method for getting people to behave a certain way while investing a low amount of effort in enforcement- you don't have to have a priest following every parishoner around to get them to behave. It does this by convincing the controlled that the system is both powerful omnipotent deities, inescapable karma, etc and moral.

If the perception of either breaks down, people abandon the religion. Legal justice does much the same- by attempting to convince the citizenry it polices that it's both mostly able to enforce the law and that the laws should be followed because they're basically just.

If the public perceive either to be untrue, cue the riots and revolution It's good troll bait, but it doesn't stand up to the atheist's main objection against religion: Justice, for all its flaws, allows that its own laws are indeed mutable and imperfect. In fact, the English common law system as opposed to the continental statutory system starts out with the assumption that every case is treated on its individual merit, and it is up to the judge and jury to use their own judgement and vision of fairness to determine whether a crime has been committed.

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Point 3 feels a little bit like a forced conclusion from the structure of the underlying arguments. I feel like there are more interesting parallels to look at in the idea of self-contained systems. Both our legal and religious structures are essentially societal codes, right? They're a collection of ideas that we've codified into a structure that gives them the authority to carry out their mandates. We accept forms of collective governance that make sense to us. Atheists would disagree, but most believers in a religion would take the position that the moral good from their religiousness outweighs the drawbacks i.

If 'all governments are theocracies' is true, then 'all theocracies are governments' also holds true. The application of theocracy looks a lot like the application of government. I doubt if respect for the awful majesty of the law survives much contact with it. After a recent interview with, God help me, one of my lawyers, I texted a friend, 'In Albania I'd deal with this with a 9 mm. Cannot agree I'm with H Beam Piper in that a theocracy is the absolute worst form of guvmint. See DPRK, for a truly horrible example of this. Even the real religions are falling down all over the place, as information spreads.

Even in the religion of submission, actually. Nothing new at all, there Perhaps the killer to your proposition, is this quote: A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia-man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, forever.

Nearly every single person in "the West", especially in the Anglosphere, has an essentially modern, Protestant-influenced idea of what "religion" is or does. That's why people often say that religion requires a deity, or a belief in life after death, or a faith-based set of premises, et cetera. Quibbling about whether or not Chinese folk religion, this or that form of Buddhism or Hinduism, or whatever else you might care to name qualify as "religion" doesn't really matter much if you're using the common Western idea of what "religion" is, which only includes these very different traditions under its umbrella by misrepresenting or misunderstanding what they're about.

A better question is whether or not Charlie is correct to frame the concept of "justice" as, essentially, a common superstition of society with attendant rituals, functionaries, and other cruft, which seems to be what he basically means by "religion". The answer to that, I think, really depends on whether or not you think either there's a more effective way to achieve the "justice idea" than the institutionalised system we have, or whether or not there's a way to reform the system we have to achieve a more grounded, less mythical goal than "justice".

I tend towards the latter; to my mind, we need some kind of system to deal with those who offend against the common good and the rights of others, but that doesn't mean that we need to mythologise it beyond the practicalities of "how do we minimise this sort of thing from happening? In essence I suspect that the most effective methods of prevention and rehabilitation we can implement will fail to be so implemented because it will look to too many like "they" are "getting away with it".

Now, it wouldn't be just to tar all theocracies over the same brush. Just imagine a theocracy that knows two competing cults: Both would urge their followers to follow their rites only and the one which has the most followers gets to form the government. A barrista government might impose a tax on consuming boring drinks like coke, water or wine or tea ; a tea ceremony government might subsidize the import of tea leaves. Both would of course pass any number of laws which have nothing to do with the consumption of hot beverages at all. Depending on the general happiness of the public the followers would shift from coffee to tea or back, thus allowing a peaceful change of government.

She wriggled back out with an olive-green metal box. She read out the label. Some of those bastards drink Ovaltine. You're taking a particular way of practising justice with written laws, professional and learned judges, and a focus on punishing the perpetrator , and try to stipulate nothing less than "patterns of human behaviour" from it, without asking how representative the way of practising justice that you have chosen is for humanity in the first place.

The way in which the practise of justice is put in scene in our court rooms as we have become accustomed to is certainly borrowing heavily from religious imagery. I don't doubt that. There is a goddess —Justitia—watching over the entrance to many a court house, after all. And the judges are dressed just like protestant ministers in Germany that's because in Prussia they were among the people who got to wear academic gowns in public: And everybody uses an arcane and slightly archaic language.

So yes, this particular way of practising justice bears some similarity to religion or rather to a particular way of practising religion. But that doesn't say anything about either "justice" or "religion" in general.

I mostly agree with your statement at the end: It emerges not as a pre-formed body of rules, but as a predisposition to divide behaviours into "good" and "bad" categories with the caveat that there's no need to put religion into the picture. No transcendence needed, it's about what allows the group to continue functioning as a group.

And in Ancient Rome, religious rites were everywhere, permeating every aspect of lie. And they kept them around a long time. In fact, quite a few of our ceremonies, both religious and secular ones, are continuation of Roman religious practices, e. Funny thing is, I guess at least with Augustus, very few actually believed in the actual Jupiter stick. If we look at the Roman emperors, quite a few were members of fashionable philosopher's religions like stoicism, some were that kind of former atheist that realizes himself to be god, some came from different ethnoreligious groups and tried to get them accepted in Rome, some were into esoteric mystic religions, and of the latter, finally they became Christians, at least in name.

But all of these guys also held the title of "pontifex maximus", the supreme priest of Rome:. And they finally dropped it only with Gratian, about 10 years after Julian, the last non-Christian emperor.

Afterwards, it became somewhat loosely affiliated with the pope. And as you can see with the article, in fact the "pontifex maximus" did quite a few things besides sacrifices and was quite tied in with the administration. IMHO part of the problem is we have still no working definition of religion; we could try "supernatural explanation", but the problem is the very idea of supernatural is somewhat specific to the religions we know, I guess jinns and like are just as natural to some desert dwellers as the gravitational force is to us.

OTOH, in "Rule 34", OGH has one not so neurotypical culprit muse about day-to-day life, with people not behaving in a certain way "because the could be found out", with said culprit pointing out this is highly unlikely. Maybe part of impetus for the idea of an omniscient god and life after death with punishment for sins is a rationalization of these feelings.

Archive for July, 2010

Saying "Err, because the ghost see everything and punish me, and after death I have to suffer for it. Death those who bruise the hallowed leaf to make the heresy that is black tea! We can then get into the arguments over whether a special dispensation is allowed to those who live at high altitude, for the sin that is "infusing the hallowed leaf in water temperatures other than C".

I'm mostly a Darjeeling drinker at home, with occasional forays into Assam and "English Breakfast", but have failed to persuading the wife of the validity of Rooibosch. At work, it's Colombian brown death-march juice. Bear with me while I re-state your argument, because when I broke it down this way there was some really good stuff that falls out. Humans are driven by the need for fairness. All human societies express this in the concept of Justice, the idea that behaviors actually cause rewards and punishment. I'm with you so far, and I think terms like "poetic justice", "karmic retribution" and every kid ever screaming "that's not fair!

This is logically extended to the premise that all human civilizations incorporate the concept of Justice as a key mechanism for balancing self-interest and group-interest. Civilizations use institutions - government, religious, military, economic, academic - to codify and enforce laws that reward and punish behaviors. This results in a second set of laws designed to prevent challenges to the authority of those institutions.

Additionally and inevitably, institutions grant privileges to those with the power to directly sustain that institutional authority. Governments, Corporations, Churches, and Armies do not understand this human need for Justice. The inevitable erosion of fairness in the service of institutional authority and individual privilege is a universal theme across all human civilizations. This raises some great SF themes: What could those look like?

You may jest, but the machine in my kitchen is capable of making either expresso 1 or tea. That's usually my rebuttal to American conservative "rub a brick on it" morality. Nobody ever said we should have clothes or central heating or beer, none of that exists in the natural world, all of it is man-made. Why not have fairness to go along with vaccines and the internet?

Secular Religion is often used in this context. It's often said that a cult is a small, unpopular religion and a religion is a large, popular cult. This I was never quite able to wrap my brain around. So they believe in the existence of a God who creates human life but He also has no interest in preserving us after death? I know the personal God thing is more Christian but it seems strange to me that one could imagine God and not imagine he would preserve us after death.

Modern Justice has to be a religion, because we keep using the same methods even though they are demonstrably ineffective. Some countries do; others learn from their mistakes and appear to have better penal systems and societies in general , if you want to reduce offending that is. If you just want to kill as many people as possible, then the USA is one of the really good places.

Plenty of people believe in a God who creates canine and feline life but doesn't care to give it an existence past the death of the body. More fundamentally, the Bible as opposed to Apocryphal and Christian fanfic all-but-says that the grave is the end of all life, and the Sadducee's fundamental difference to the Pharisees scribes was their insistence that only the Bible were authoritative.

Luther might have liked them A lot of scared, typically ignorant people, think the law means significantly more than it is. Many American's think of law in a religious way: They may not agree with legal decisions, but they are legal in the same way that most of these same people expect religions to be the foundation of all truth. Laws are worth establishing, but they are not the reason we do not kill and maim each other. We do not kill and main each for practical mostly secular reasons, not because the justice system says we should not. I can't agree, but there are some who believe that retributive vengeance is not only a practical idea but a moral imperative.

Haidt's work on the moral foundations of American liberals and conservatives places a much higher importance in Authority and Purity in the conservative camp, though far from exclusively so. To the mind interested in Purity, the presence of the Impure defiles all and every, as ink stains a bottle of milk as an old catechism I found once illustrated.

If we assume 3 to be true, justice is the only religion to construct a reasonable functional facsimile of its own god, consciously -- which is amusing, albeit tangential.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Depends on the institution you have to answer to. If it's the Roman Inquisition, if you speak some Italian and look the part, I guess you have to confess your sins and are subjected to some weeks of arrest, during which you have to learn how to use the machine. Maybe afterwards you are given to the secular powers for further punishment, but we're speaking Rome in Italy[1] here, so I guess you can bribe your way with some luck. As for the Spanish Inquisition, they are subject to the Spanish state, so expect some lectures on EU regulations for making tea or coffee.

Oh, and I guess afterwards they will kill you in some gruesome way, likely with said machine. One Spanish neighbour brewing an especially fiendish concotion, I have some ideas about caffeine overdose, my last experience would indicate something like "totally calm and concentrated, while you want to do some marathon running, dancing all night and cleaning the house, of course all at once". AFAIR about mg of caffeine a day is enough to upregulate adenosine receptors.

Which means after a few days you need the stuff just to stay normal. Mistaking ease of withdrawel symptoms for stimulation, we poor buggers go on and on in our fiendish ways. Well, first of, the God we're speaking about is also the God of the Pentateuch, who is generally known not to be that nice a chap to be around.

Later on, he mellowed up somewhat, but I guess these parts were not that much in favor with the Saducees, interpreting it as becoming too soft. Which brings us to the second point, we have not that much data on the Saducees, but it seems they were a conservative movement of the upper class, while "progressive" movements like the pharisees or what was to become Christianity cartered to the common people and believed into a life after death. So maybe before that they were somewhat undecided on the issue, but later on adopted a strict stance against an afterlife in opposition to those other groups.

Before there was Justice, and single-group domination by hammurabi or the curia or whomsoever, societies broadly shared lore concerning recompense not 'justice' that would dampen smoldering vendettas. I found an icelandic saga quite illuminating about the roots of common law: I was initially inclined to reject the Governments as Theocracy proposition but on closer examination it has a few correlations.

Governments exert a claim on peoples loyalty based on their birth into the nation. I think it is the expectation which most closely associates them with religion. We say this is an 'American' child with every bit of the thoughtlessness with which we label a child a Christian or what have you. On the con side though I cant really see how Governments base their authority on some sort of divine revelation. Even fairly harsh legal codes are more flexible than religious dogmas except where they are the same of course. I prefer the definition that a cult is a tight community with associated belief system joined in adulthood, whereas a religion is something you are born into.

It's generally predictive of behaviour, and doesn't tie you into knots trying to classify juche, liberalism, Buddhism, etc. Two engineering students who join Maoist and Islamist groups have a lot more in common with each other than either has with a Bangladeshi or Tibetan villager. Similarly, an explicit theocracy that has no religious organisation outside the state has little to distinguish it from an atheist regime that successfully destroyed or coopted all such institutions[1].

I mean, you would pretty much have to actually believe in magic to think a belief system being explicitly supernatural could have a causal impact on the properties of the associated community or state. If not magic, what's the proposed mechanism by which the distinction would manifest itself?

It could kill the monks, but it couldn't persuade its generals that carrying on killing the monks was the best available long term plan. Perhaps because they weren't being invaded at the time On 1 I've personally seen non Primate animals, Corvids in particular with something akin to a court and I don't think they have relgious ideation. A crow was surrounded by a half circle of other crows who sqwaked at him. The crow who I assume was the defendent assumed a subsmissive aplogetic posture, the other crows responded and the "defendent" flew away.

Other people have reported crows executing crows for whatever offense merit the Corvid death penalty as well. I've never seen that though. As for the last, as some very conservatove people once sneered in reply to my making point 4, well than incarceration is just ritaulized kidnapping. Well yes it is. It has to be. The ritaul serves the purpose of creating legitimacy. Without that "defusing" mechanism all law would degenerate to fueds.

To make human society much above a tribe work, you need to create legitimacy of some kind, custom, tradition or as our current leaders seem to be doing, trick people into it. As long as the system is percieved to be working as intended to some degree even if people are being shafted, it can stand. However I don't see it exactly as a religion in some cases so much as a faith in a system or social contracts , relgion after all kind of implies divine beings.

DPRK is a classic example. It's a totally theocratic state, ruled by hereditary God-Kings. All competing religions are persecuted, which isn't a suprise, when you look at what all the others do or have done when in absolute power. I know enough about making espresso properly to say that the punishment should be to make you drink the result withotu milk or sugar! More specifically, a thin, bitter flavour with few redeeming features. After effects indicated a fair caffeine concentration.

No plans to do it again. And because even learning-enhanced evolution is slow to adapt it doesn't like to have all it's eggs in the same basket but prefers variety instead. On the other hand, religion is an evolutionary method to explain something that we don't understand and to make things bearable that we can't change, helping us to cope with situations that we couldn't cope with otherwise. And it can help to provide group cohesion against outside threats, another thing that has proven hugely successful in human and ape, wolf, But I wouldn't equate them even though, for some people, they are the same.

The biggest stumbling block for me is when it comes to discriminatory rules. Is this a failure, unwanted side effect of evolution? Are the discriminatory practices just group cohesion enforcing facilites or learning facilities gone wrong? Or is there an evolutionary purpose behind it? I seriously hope not but I wouldn't claim that evolution is nice. From this perspective, law is less dogmatic than religion: Communities are shared narratives. Governments are attempts to fix the narratives and who gets to create them.

Laws are created by authors and administered by editors. A source I stumbled across after I made my post mentioned that there are no primary sources for the Sadducees, at best we have characterizations of their beliefs as given by their detractors. So it might well be like trying to reconstruct Judaism without Torah and Talmud, just a moldering copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another point made is that the afterlife a Sadducee might believe in differed from what others considered the proper afterlife so by not believing in the "correct" version, they don't believe at all, the same way a fundamentalist Christian could think of a devout Muslim as "godless.

Working in politics, without juridical training, I realized after some time that law is not only structurally speaking very similar to religion something I found out in university, both theologians and law students seemingly learning to read voluminous books in the right way , but that indeed, law is code. Or something very similiar to code.

It doesn't look like code, because the language isn't that formalized, but I'd guess looking from the right angle at law, it's not that different from a Turing machine. Or from other, more formalized programming languages. Including definitions, operators like "if" and "case selection", links to different paragraphs, and even here and there complex algorithms.

D'Hondt implemented in law speak, for example. Which brings to mind s SF with big central computers interpreting the law, creating the one and only just society or the one and only dictatorship-by-code. I'm with you about 1. Laws usually aren't narratives except maybe the preamble. Instead they are the antithesis to narratives by abstracting from the context and making the outcome predictable. I'm going to make the assumption that it was a brain fart this time, rather than active prejudice.

I'm going to take a bit of issue with this. Yes, historically law and religion were closely intertwined, which should come as no surprise; in archaic societies there is little to no distinction between religious, legal, and moral obligations. However, the question of why and when we should obey laws is very much a matter of debate, and the validity of law is by no means taken as an absolute, not even by us lawyers. The answer to that question essentially depends on your legal-philosophical viewpoint. Those who subscribe to the concept of natural law believe in ethical and normative axioms which no legitimate legal system may break.

Extreme legal positivists take law as fact and don't really care about any ultimate source of legitimacy of law: The state can create and enforce laws, and the fact that laws exist as fact is enough for them. However, a third major set of theories exists: Discursive theories of justice. To greatly simplify, adherents of those theories generally acknowledge i that we can't function as a society without a legal system to order conflicting interests, ii that Kant pretty much killed the idea of a universally valid natural law, and iii that extreme legal positivism and relativism end in unacceptable consequences and in an intellectual cul-de-sac.

As a result, they try to tease substance out of form, specifying various conditions under which rational solutions taking into account arguments and interests of all affected parties are reached such as Habermas' ideal discourse. Of course, reality doesn't resemble these theories too closely.

But discursive theories do raise an important point: For laws to work, they have to be regarded as legitimate by a critical mass of the population. A dirty little secret which neither politicians nor administrators nor lawyers like to talk about us that it's impossible to enforce laws if people decide to break them the moment they think they can get away with it. The resources required for that would be impossible to acquire and maintain. And since the populace at large does not consider law as religion as it is not a derivative of religion anymore, by and large , law has to take their interests into account to some extent.

If it doesn't, it may well lose its legitimacy and eventually its force. As for why capital punishment remains on the books, in practice laws reflect prejudices and ideologies of the lawmakers and the populace. There is no guarantee that a measure intended to achieve something is empirically able to do so hello, European fiscal pact. After all, ideal discourses are hypothetical optimums, and a lot of the time, political and public "discourse" can barely be called that.

Moreover, capital punishment is in part based on an ethical viewpoint, that evil inflicted on a perpetrator can balanced out the evil that the perpetrator committed. That's an ethical, philosophical, and moral standpoint that's unprovable: You either subscribe to it or not. That is not to say I don't have my prejudices. But then, "homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto". Personally, I thought it somewhat on the same level as "geek", e. If I wanted to offend, I'd have used words like "weirdo" or "creep".

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Actually, it seems like "kink" is used for a slight deviation,. There's case law and statutory law. I think we agree that statutory laws aren't narratives. Do we agree that case law consists of narratives? Then there's the distinction between religion which has holy books and witchcraft which does not. See Boyer's "Religion Explained". Be careful, very careful with anything at Gresham College.

They are very good, I've been to quite a few of their lectures over the years They somehow, always seem to end up telling you that the christian "solution" is the best one. They're very good at it. I agree that case law relies more on narratives in Germany where I live case law is only of minor importance.

Narratives are the oldest and most effective technique of our collective memory. Compare how easy it is to memorize a fairy tale compared to a shopping list. So it's natural that many cultural institutions rely on narratives. When people try to codify narratives, either as law or religion or something else, human intellect fights back and adds narratives back to it eg.

I don't agree about your distinction between religions and witchcraft: I see witchcraft as an aspect of religions, not as a belief system of its own. Exorcism in the catholic church - similar superstitions but totally different belief systems. I think it's another case of completely different use of words. Quite recently possibly on this very page Charlie told us that in Scotland the c-word or the f-word, for that matter are by far not as offensive as in the US. It's basically the same with this case.

As a fellow German I can confirm that in my view "freak" is indeed basically synonymous to "geek". In combination with a preceding noun I'd define it as "someone into ". While these terms would mainly be used while making fun of the person in question so they are mildly derogatory , the main reason for this is that in the speaker's view the person such described is a little overdoing it, to the point of being only defined by being into their thing and having very little life beside it.

So, on an offensiveness-scale from 0 to 10, I'd rate the typical usage of the term by a German speaker at about 1, raisable by extremely pointed exclamation all the way up to 3. And apparently just like Trottelreiner I wasn't aware at all that this would be different for British people well, for Charlie at least. It would be interesting to learn whether it's the same for English speakers from other parts of the world.

Interesting parallell, but remember that it not only says things about the cult of justice, but also of the legal framework of religions. Several years ago I had an epiphany about the religious rite of confession, that the very act of telling someone else served as practical psychology. If one read a lot of early religious laws, they similarly serve practical purposes: In the same way, I think you can claim a lot of modern bureaucracies which are indespensible for a functioning large-scale bureaucracy goes back to the churches - one can probably make a case that the Catholic church was the first fully modern bureaucracy.

And the scientific method has similiarities to the early Christian councils but now I'm arguing more for the heck of it. But a lot of these mechanisms and structures are about keeping a functioning society, and what matters then for human beings is more the confidence in justice, fairness, and a hard-boiled egg; not the actual presence of such. Thus, religion can be viewed as an emergent trait of the human need to make sense of the world in general, not simply of natural phenomena.

Oh, and another thing that can provide food for thought: The latest development is from a book published this autumn which partially is a biography over the psychologist Margit Norell, who served as therapist and mentor for a lot of the people involved in the therapy, prosecution, and investigation of Bergwall's "confessions". A lot of the dynamics within that group is described as being similar to a sect, and the term is used explicitly as well.

BTW, in the field of hedonism, there is also the term "fiend", like in "drug fiend" or "sex fiend", optionally alien. No idea how this is thought about. But then, there is a whole spectrum of congenital variants, and German pediatricians would use the term "Normvariante" for light congenital variations; incidentally, that would also be the term applied to some syndromes like AD H D and autism. There is also a joke of "anatomische Normvariante" being doctor slang for a person with an attractive body, BTW, so it's not that derogatory.

Which could get us into a long discussion about definitions of "health", both captal and lower h. As for BDSM, having just gotten my confirm for 30c3 payment, if they put up a dting service like last year,. I'm going to put up a sign about searching a Herrin to apply ample punishment for my transgression. Though maybe not being perceived would be better punishment? Speaker of NZ English here: In casual language I would append the word 'freak' to something to refer to a person who was extremely enthusiastic about it, perhaps to the point of mild obsession.

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It can - but does not necessarily - have mildly derogatory connotations indicating excessive interest in the subject. Real people are scooped up by writers all the time. Literature does not respect the boundary between public and private; in fact, it is all about overstepping that mark. The boundary between reality and fiction is porous at best. Also, be sure to check out the ultimate guide to seduction , and what looks like a promising new sitcom.

Cameron does the zero-tolerance posturing so loved by anaemic sheltered politicians. The ultimate rightwing approach would be no publicly funded police force, with the rich hiring private security firms to protect them from the proletarian hordes. Aside from the occasional Orgreave-style deployment against enemies of the state, Thatcher was happy to let the poor kill each other on the edges of town.

Name families treated entire estates as personal fiefdoms. Policy is already going the other way. The housing benefit cap will make entire towns and cities uninhabitable for people on benefits or even on a low income. The head of the National Housing Federation predicts that: Who is going to police these ghettoes? I prayed before I started that this would benefit the Lord. I was at an event [where the speaker was] Sir Paul Stephenson [the Metropolitan police commissioner] last week, and he effectively said that UK Police plc was open for business.

It might be up to us to get a bit more proactive and make the most of the opportunities there. Actual coppers have reservations. This is Peter Davies, assistant chief constable at Lincolnshire police:. The second problem is that commercial enterprises can be tempted to generate high levels of fear, which they can then exploit for commercial gain.

Finally, there is a question about training. These companies may have received some basic training to get a licence, but it is unlikely to prepare them for everything that might be expected of them. Kicking off her shoes, lighting a cigarette, she would read, in her marvelous, throaty, classy voice, harrowing accounts of insanity and love. She was an artist: I knew her from Elizabeth Wurtzel and recently got a recommendation from a very good poet I know.

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In it they argue that, although Sexton is boxed away with Plath as an entirely confessional poet, she thought of herself as primarily a storyteller. Art is full of a false and insinuating universality and related accounts of experiences and emotions that everyone is supposed to have lived and felt often leave me indifferent. Just once I knew what life was for.

In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood; walked there along the Charles River, watched the lights copying themselves, all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening their mouths as wide as opera singers; counted the stars, my little campaigners, my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love on the night green side of it and cried my heart to the eastbound cars and cried my heart to the westbound cars and took my truth across a small humped bridge and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home and hoarded these constants into morning only to find them gone. You took a decision without having all the facts at your disposal.

On Iraq, I voted for it because the leader of the Iraqi Kurds pleaded with MPs to do that at a private meeting here before the war. I asked him outright: And that was the problem with Saddam Hussein — to maintain his grip over his own people, he had to maintain the pretence that he had them. I believe there would have been a civil war, which would have been problematic in a different way. The root cause of all this was the failure to remove him at the end of the first Gulf war.

And I think the world, because of that, was going to have to come back to the Iraq question. The question is now: Does it have hope of a better future than it did? Is there more order in the country than would otherwise have been the case? Does the government have more of a chance of making a success of itself in the medium to long term? The answer to those questions is: And that, for me, justifies the decision, hard as it was. The central question is: So, essentially, what it would be trying to do is develop a framework for intervention.

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