Red, theory; black, fact
[Quotes indicate metaphor.]
- Organized religion may have arisen as a counter-adaptation to the anti-invasion adaptations of a neighbouring, powerful country that included sorties. For the Abrahamic religions, that powerful but geographically vulnerable country would be ancient Egypt. For the Eastern religions, the powerful but vulnerable neighbor would be ancient China.
- People are "amphibians": each of us has a collectivist part existing in genetic superposition with an individualistic part. In systems that officially celebrate the former, the latter cannot be owned and must be pushed into the Jungian Shadow. And vice versa. In Freudian terms, the unacceptable wishes emerge in disguised form: religion in individual-celebrating systems, and hero worship in collective-celebrating systems.
- The longstanding debate in philosophy between rationalism and empiricism is a false dichotomy resulting from a narrow focus on one or the other of the two legs by which scientific knowledge advances: theory and experiment.
- If religion is the last protoscience, then the corresponding science that is to come could be called security science.
- The incredible disunity of Protestantism could mean that Protestantism is the laboratory of Christianity.
- The crucial step in going from a protoscience to a science appears not to have been experimentation, but quantification. Examples of early quantifiers were Tycho Brae (astronomy) and Antoine Lavoisier (chemistry). If religion is a protoscience, what would its quantification look like? “Reminder: It’s time to bring up your prayer checklist, tick the boxes that apply under each heading (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication), and upload it to the diocesan office. The results of statistical analysis will be announced at Vestry, at which time parishioners may suggest further research questions. This activity parallels and does not replace traditional prayer. All submissions are protected by best-practice data security.”
- The first step in graduating to security science may be compiling a glossary of religious terms and their non-supernatural, parallel interpretations. For example, the Jewish ban on eating pork can be interpreted in this spirit as a measure to prevent trichinosis (a disease transmitted by eating under-cooked pork or wild game). As another example, the four prayer headings enumerated above could be identified in terms of a longitudinal study as control, exposure, favourable outcomes at followup, and adverse outcomes at followup. As a third example, the three persons of the Trinity could map onto the three sources of security science: study of the individual, the society, and the evolutionary history of both (Son, Holy spirit, and Father, respectively).
- Science has to be for everyone.
- We don't have free will in the big things; we have free will in the little things. However, one of the little things can be "planting a seed" that may one day grow into one of those big things and be more to our liking than the big things we see now.
- Should security science take on the task of predicting the unintended consequences of innovations, or is that task so large as to require another new science?
- On the answers to the big questions, the sources of authority are the size of the database and the degree of regulation of the original inquiry. Writing things down would be one rule of inquiry; using a set process would be another; making well defined measurements would be another; the experiment form would be yet another. The degree-of-regulation parameter takes us smoothly from protoscience to hard science via the qualitative study, which has legitimacy today.
