Instructions for Mass Manufacture of Botulinum Toxin Freely Available Online
Properly delivered from a plane, a few grams of botulinum toxin could kill hundreds of thousands, if not more, in a major city.
Silent Death by "Uncle Fester" has the full process instructions, including details on optimal delivery.
The LD-50 of botulinum injected into chimpanzees is 50 nanograms.
Combine it with effective microbots, and you have a situation where anyone can kill anyone without accountability.
This is one of the reasons I want a Friendly AI "god" (really more like a machine) to watch over me is that the dangers will simply multiply beyond human capability to manage.
Here's a bit of an excerpt from my version of Silent Death:
Botulin is the second most powerful poison known, taking the runner up position to a poison made by an exotic strain of South Pacific coral bacteria. The fatal dose of pure botulin is in the neighborhood of 1 microgram, so there are 1 million fatal doses in a gram of pure botulin.
The bacteria that makes botulin, Clostridia botulinum, is found all over the world. A randomly chosen soil sample is likely to contain quite a few spores of this bacteria. Spores are like seeds for bacteria, and can withstand very harsh treatment. This properly will come in very handy in any attempt to grow botulism germs, because other germs can be wiped out by heating in hot water, leaving the spores to germinate and take over once they cool down. Much more on this later.
Another very important property of botulism germs is that they can't survive exposure to air. The oxygen in it kills them, but does not kill their spores. Whatever toxin the germs made before their demise also survives. This needs to exclude air from the environment where the germs are growing is the most difficult engineering challenge to the aspiring cultivator of Clostridia botulinum.
Finally, all botulism germs are not created equal. There are subgroups within the species that make toxins that vary immensely in their potency. They are called types: A, B, C, D, E, F and 84. Type A is by far the most deadly, followed by type B and 84. THe other ones we won't even bother to discuss. Also within a single type, there are individual differences in how much toxin a given strain will produce. Breeding and gene manipulation have a lot to do with this, and our government (and the Russkies as well) have put a lot of effort into picking out strains that make an inordinate amount of toxin. The champion as of about 30 years ago was the Hall strain, but I'm sure that they've come up with something better since then. The Hall strain of type A was able to make 300 human fatal doses of botulin per ml of broth it grew in.
Here we will explore the two major levels of use for botulin as an attack weapon: the individual or small group assassination, and the large scale assault with the poison in a manner similar to nerve gas.
Very informative! As a Russian, I love the "Russkies" anachronism.
99.9% of the population will dismiss the above as not a big deal, due to wishful thinking. It's all just words on the page, until people start dying.
September 3rd, 2010 - 19:39
“This is one of the reasons I want a Friendly AI “god†(really more like a machine) to watch over me is that the dangers will simply multiply beyond human capability to manage.”
It’s a little more plausible to think in terms of distributed Friendliness – Friendly AI throughout the high-tech infrastructure. We don’t have a single God of Correct Spelling that directly watches every keystroke, we have spellcheck programs embedded all over the place. Imagine them talking to each other, testing each other, sharing patches and so on… that’s more how I imagine a civilization with a FAI infrastructure working.
September 3rd, 2010 - 20:09
Distributed infrastructure or not, we have to be honest in that what we are imagining is really a singleton.
I think creating a friendly singleton is a good idea, but I feel very strongly that we have an obligation to declare it to the public: “We are aspiring to create a singleton, please give your input now.”
September 4th, 2010 - 01:02
The “singleness” of the singleton can be very subtle. All technological decision-making today is being performed by members of Homo sapiens, rather than members of Pan paniscus or Pongo pygmaeus. So there is already a neurogenetic homogeneity of cognitive architecture in our technological civilization. It is at least possible that the output of something like CEV is just a constraint on the sort of goal-directed system which can be permitted to acquire a certain level of intelligence. To actually enforce such a constraint implies a commitment to intervention from all intelligent agents above some level of capability and responsibility, but that’s not so different to human ideas of adulthood and leadership.
September 5th, 2010 - 04:53
There’s plenty of material about existing attitudes towards that on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_%28conspiracy_theory%29
September 3rd, 2010 - 20:54
I wonder how accurate it is. Uncle Fester became underground famous in the 90s when he published books on meth and acid manufacture, but other clandestine chemists criticized his syntheses for being inaccurate.
From this small snippet, it sounds like he wants you to go out and find the right Clostridium species and strains in soil and culture them yourself, which sounds as impractical as his suggestion in the acid book to grow acres of ergot-infested rye. :)
September 3rd, 2010 - 22:02
Too bad humanity has developed an override for reason – memes.
The first use of these pathogens (or any WMDs) will be in the hands of memeoids of the One True Merciful Memeplex.
I suspect humanity will have to pay a high price, until we take certain memes seriously, seriously as in smallpox.
Memes don’t kill people but they sort help. If memes do help kill people, people should help kill memes. Right?
September 4th, 2010 - 06:52
To make a short rebuttal:
Don’t you realize that “amemeism” is a meme?
September 4th, 2010 - 07:32
Rebuttal?
September 4th, 2010 - 16:28
I think the problem is that you never defined amemeism in a clear way. Further reading of your posts (e.g. the admission that science is a meme) makes it clear that you are seeking to selectively fight only some memes, not to destroy them all. I had, after all, thought, quite innocently, that amemeism meant you were out to destroy all memes. It is the most logical meaning of the word, given its roots. At this point, I understand that what you are doing is seeking to support some memes over others. But this only makes your vocabulary more unusual. It makes no sense to label memes the enemy when others are your allies. Why not simply say “I want to argue against ideas that lead to destruction, such as fundamentalist religions”? The use of the word meme clarifies nothing in your discourse.
September 5th, 2010 - 05:28
A meme is a piece of information that gets copied because it can. That would mean just about everything is a meme. Perhaps I stretched the term too far by saying that science is a memeplex, albeit a rationality-based one. Science actually has the strongest anti-meme defenses known to man. Things don’t get propagated just because they can.You don’t get very far in science if all you’ve got is nice sounding ideas that are easy to explain and to remember. In fact you could say that science itself is amemeism – memes don’t hold any sway whatsoever over (real) science, except when it is politicized, but that’s no longer science. Yes, memes can be harmless and fun but their existence isn’t really necessary, like entertainment (I recall Tim Tyler expressing some pretty “aentertainmentist” things).
September 5th, 2010 - 10:21
Richard Dawkins talks about how the success of some memes may be augmented by the way they cause their proponents to refuse to be open to other, competing memes. For instance, religions that threaten hell for thinking “dangerous” ideas or that extol irrational faith possess very effective characteristics for blocking competition.
To alter your language:
“[Christianity] actually has the strongest anti-meme defenses known to man. Things don’t get propagated just because they can. You don’t get very far in [Christian theology] if all you’ve got is nice sounding ideas that are easy to explain and to remember. [After all, (to use a historical example) a lot of nice sounding ideas, like the thought that women should not have to suffer pain in childbirth, are just plain heretical.]”
But where you mess up is where you say of memes that “their existence isn’t really necessary”. I’m growing convinced that you have never read Richard Dawkins, who invented the term “meme” and described it in the first place. You should read his chapter on memes in The Selfish Gene.
September 5th, 2010 - 15:13
Sorry, let me add that I don’t mean that to be a criticism. I like your ideas. It’s just the use of the word meme that I object to!
September 3rd, 2010 - 22:11
Amemeism will seem like a really really good and really really obvious idea …right after the first massive strike.
(Atheism is a specific form of amemeism (atheomemeism?))
September 5th, 2010 - 04:56
What is “Amemeism” supposed to mean?
September 4th, 2010 - 01:16
The nanograms lethal dose is for injection, if I understand correctly. It would be hard to kill hundreds of thousands with botulin toxin in real life.
On the other hand, it would probably be easier to kill thousands of millions using smallpox and the Australian trick using interleukin-4. Or some other Virus X slatewiper.
September 4th, 2010 - 07:20
Hey Michael, I have been reading your blog for awhile now due to similar interest in existential risk. My point of view is that traditional religion does not plan for the future nor does it anticipate disaster; but neither do secular folks as many take a random walk into atheism, and atheism implies very little in terms of value, accept what humans in general value, which is very complex.
I realize how different this movement is compared to religions in general, yet that difference primarily relies on your group’s success. I basically agree with many philosophical positions held by your group, but I admit they are not scientific, but rational. So the difference between your group and religion is that you actually update on evidence. However, if the meaning of religion has always been “to preserve or enhance humanity” and that is what your group inspires to do. You simply don’t want the association because your group is going to win? How do you know that?
I am very very skeptical, and rightly so. This doesn’t mean I don’t value your group, I largely identify with it, but I do strongly doubt your success since we do not yet know if your assumptions about AI and functionalism are correct.
Have you even taken the time to imagine other possibilities besides functionalism or other ready-made solutions? I don’t pretend to be that smart, of course, but the point is valid since AI mind design is not an empiricaly based science yet.
September 5th, 2010 - 11:57
No, but if functionalism is false we’ll eventually figure that out. Cognitive science has accepted functionalism since the 60s, this is really old stuff.
September 4th, 2010 - 07:57
Matt, you’ve may have got some subtly wrong data on transhumanism and religion.
Religions never had the “meaning” of “preserving or enhancing humanity”. They are simply evolved memes working together with other memes in a mutually supportive environment called a memeplex (like, Original Sin and Salvation, and you (apparently) need to throw in a sacrificial offer (according to the ancient wisdom of ‘killing something makes things better”), Son (now what on earth does that imply? They apparently weren’t aware of non-sexual procreational strategies, like cloning) of the Universe Maker – all of it not making a whole lot of sense, since memes don’t have to – they only have to get passed on).
Memes like traditions, religions, the way you wave your hands and hips when dancing (which is itself a meme), exist only because certain data is able to get copied and mutated in human brains (without any apparent restraints). That’s it, and that’s all.
Attempting to associate transhumanism or any other rationality-based memeplex, like science (yes they do that too, what don’t they?) – with a non-rationality based one, religion, is ignorant and confused at best, dumb at worst.
September 4th, 2010 - 08:00
And you don’t “take a random walk into atheism” – you’re born into it. Everything else is non-default.
September 4th, 2010 - 08:27
Atheism implies nothing. An absence doesn’t imply something. If you’re ignorant of something, it doesn’t imply you hold an opinion – or don’t hold an opinion – on something. You’re just ignorant. Your mind is empty. There’s *not even a zero* written in that cell. An atheist assumes no position whatsoever on “theism”, just like a bald guy has no preferred hairstyle. In an atheist’s mind there’s no room for religious concepts just like there’s no room for rational concepts in the theist’s mind.
Sam Harris: “Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious.
Do you believe that the universe is donut-shaped because it says so in some book? Of course not. First of all, that kind of belief doesn’t mean anything to you so it’s not included in any book – see, religions really aren’t interested in facts about the universe – oh wait, they’re not interested facts at all. You don’t believe in it because you have no evidence for it. But that doesn’t make you a proponent of a round universe, either. Or a cube-shaped one. You don’t make statements about the shape of the universe until you know, just like you don’t make statements about the universe containing entities like gods, until you know. That’s what a-theism is, nothing more. You’re a-interdimensional-lizard-overlords-disguising-as-politicians-by-shapeshifting, right? What does that imply? It doesn’t imply much more than that you don’t hold an opinion on such entities, that you entirely ignore such things until you witness one, no matter how many books are written about them.
September 4th, 2010 - 11:25
Way off topic, dude.
September 4th, 2010 - 12:34
Off topic leads to off topic. My bad.
September 4th, 2010 - 08:35
I can imagine countless ways to combat this plan without a singleton. Intelligent personal defense systems would be one example. A entity or group could also proactively counter plague spreaders without being a singleton.
September 4th, 2010 - 11:15
It would at least need to be an automated system that could act without human oversight. The thing with botulin toxin is that it already exists in the environment in small amounts, and can be produced when canned sausage rots. Constantly monitoring every city on Earth and every square meter of that city for slightly-more-than-normal concentrations of botulin toxin would be impractical. Without such a monitoring system, how would the “entity or group” react?
Intelligent personal defense systems against boutlin microbots would have to consist of an airtight, body-hugging suit. For practical and cultural reasons, I don’t see people adopting this technology. You can’t have robots floating around in the air zapping botulin toxin because it would be present in such low quantities, and the spores are tiny.
September 4th, 2010 - 19:28
Why wouldn’t an enhanced immune system be able to deal with botulinum poisoning? It kills by paralysis, which gives plenty of time to stop and/or reverse the damage. That’s seriously advanced technology, yes, but so are the measures a superintelligent singleton would have to employ to prevent anyone from trying this nefarious scheme.
It’s of dubious use to argue about the specific technical details, though. The real question centers on threats from fellow sentients and what to do about them. I favor cultivating a peaceful and egalitarian social environment to reduce the risk. I’m suspicious of coercive systems of control. A singleton that limited itself to preventing violence might be just tolerable. I wouldn’t worship it.
September 5th, 2010 - 12:05
I wasn’t planning to worship it either. :) The idea that you or anyone else would think I would shows a fundamental assumption of bad faith.
September 6th, 2010 - 07:51
I included that last sentence as a way of suggesting the danger of calling AIs gods. The term has considerable baggage associated with it. It’s effective for conveying the power these agents will have but particularly troublesome with regards to a protective singleton.
September 4th, 2010 - 12:36
Sure, a lone sociopath with severe mental retardation might wish to use WMDs on large populations, and might even pull it off, but the real root of this WMD scare is that someone might methodically and persistently pursue using them (like someone did with the 9/11) and that someone is someone with memes gone wild.
September 4th, 2010 - 13:01
*sigh* Michael, you summed up what is probably the biggest pet peeve I have with far to many transhumanists with that one statement “this is why I want a friendly AI “god”.
Most of the religions in the world revolve around “Waiting for god” to solve the problems, so that humans don’t have to make the effort themselves.
Keep waiting for god, and the problems never get solved.
Stop waiting for god, and take steps to fix it yourself, problems get solved.
Can’t make it any simpler than that. Humanity can’t keep “waiting for god”, or we ARE doomed.
Our world is very dangerous. And the most effective way to make it more so is to do nothing while we “Wait for a Savior.”
As Churchill said: “All it takes for Evil to triumph is for Good Men to do nothing.”
And guess what Michael? You just gave this guy an endorsement. You showed anyone who might have found this site that it’s not yet another hoax, and shone a bright light on it to anyone who’s a terrorist by going “Hey, LOOK!!! HERE’S INSTRUCTIONS ON MAKING A WMD!!!!”
Good job. Great intention. Poor execution.
September 5th, 2010 - 04:29
Would you like to list the things you are doing, in comparison to which SIAI guys look like they are just waiting around?
(Don’t be so silly as to think that mentioning the word “god” means one is waiting around.)
September 6th, 2010 - 10:12
Did I say SIAI was doing nothing? No. Michael points out correctly in his reply to this same post that he IS doing something.
Which is FAR MORE than many transhumanists I speak too, who are all to ready to say “We’ll have an AI/Superhuman/Whatever fix everything!”
Wrong. Waiting for God is never a solution. I don’t like it when any one makes statements that come out as “Waiting for God”, even from those like Mike are actively engaged in MAKING IT HAPPEN, because too many people will see that wording, and say “Hey, he’s right, why make any effort of my own when I can just sit back and wait, “God” will fix it when he comes.”
Is that a criticism of Mike’s poor choice of words, yes. Is it saying Mike himself is “waiting for god?” Only insofar as he makes the assumption that humanities problems are too big to be solved by humanity themselves, even with the aid of the tools that we create. Does he do that? Most of the time, no. There are those times though his word choices make me wonder.
Will AI aid in solving those problems? Yes. BUT IT WILL DO SO AS A TOOL BEING USED BY HUMANITY, and not by USING humanity as a TOOL.
“Waiting for god” = I refuse to take self responsibility. It means giving up self will and letting something external to yourself control you. It means voluntarily making yourself a slave. I rather strongly oppose the idea of being a slave to a human, why would I wish to be one to an AI? Even a “Beneficial Dictator” one?
As for what do I do? I write articles for H+ magazine, I occasionally blog, and I do a lot of posting to blogs like this and others. And I constantly try to make sure that people get the real information about how we are developing technologically, without pandering to either fearmongering, or religious terminology which is misleading.
Had I the resources I would do far more, but one has to work within the means one has.
September 5th, 2010 - 11:59
You actually think posting this increases the risk more than ignorance of the risk does? Hundreds of thousands of people have already downloaded this pdf, and hundreds more like it. If this scares you, then you would be even more surprised by a lot of other things which are common knowledge in certain circles.
I’ve introduced knowledge related to WMDs to the public before (google “six places to nuke”), and I intend to keep doing it, because not enough people take catastrophic risk seriously.
Making a Friendly AI is fixing it ourselves.
September 6th, 2010 - 10:31
See the above post for my response to “Waiting for God”
But do as you wish in regards to stuff like this, but I will still find it a ridiculous response.
Not because I dismiss these dangers, but because I’m all too aware of them… and so is just about every single intelligence agency in the world.
Which means that the website is probably monitored six million ways from sunday by every alphabet in the soup.
99% of these “HOW TO BUILD A WMD” has just enough “Truth” in it to kill 99% of the idiots who actually try to follow them, and you can bet anyone who “downloads” that PDF file is painting a big pair of cross hairs on themselves. I doubt you need to worry, since you’re probably cleared for all sorts of “classified”.
You see Mike, this, and probably all those others you’ve pointed out over the years are “Bait”. Just like I discovered years and years ago when I had a friend who had a polite visit from the FBI after buying a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook from an army navy surplus store that was too closely associated with a militia group.
But on the off chance that this HAD been a “real” file, yes, when a prominent person like yourself suddenly rants about the dangers this info poses, you really don’t do much to alert people to the dangers, but you do a lot to clue in potential trouble makers that this might finally be the real deal.
Which just makes that threat that much more likely to be realized.
Which in my opinion means you are doing the EXACT opposite of your intention.
September 4th, 2010 - 13:10
Oh, and defense against this? Find out why the Botulin doesn’t kill it’s creator. Then isolate the gene that renders it immune into a gene therapy treatment. Viola, human immunity to botulin.
Yes I know that’s an over simplification of the very complex process, but it’s the solution that eliminates the problem permanently.
September 5th, 2010 - 12:02
Its creator the bacterium or the biochemist?
September 5th, 2010 - 18:48
My heart goes out to the families of the bacterium lost in the production of this noble toxin, not to the biochemists.
September 6th, 2010 - 07:21
Sorry, but your “solution” is silly. The bacteria that create botulinus toxin don’t even have the pathways the toxin attacks in the first place; they have no defense you can copy, because they don’t need a defense.
September 6th, 2010 - 10:38
Interesting. Thank you for that information, I was not aware of that. That does complicate things somewhat.
Still, there is a pathway that the toxin attacks, so it is quite possible that it can be blocked. While it’s not going to be a “solution this decade” development, I do think rendering the human body immune to these sorts of dangers can be accomplished, and is a better pathway than trying to eliminate the dangers themselves. Render the body immune to poisons, virii, and bacteria, regardless of source, and you not only deal with any dangers in our own biosphere, you will likely neutralize any we may encounter in other biospheres in the future.
September 4th, 2010 - 14:41
If you have nanotechnology, you don’t need Botulinum toxin to exhibit the same biochemical effects of the toxin (although knowing the toxin cleaves SNARE proteins would certainly assist in the design of the nanobots biomechanism).
September 4th, 2010 - 22:05
Releasing X lethal doses of a poison into the air does not mean X deaths and might not mean any deaths. For example, the amount of radon naturally present in the air, expressed in terms of lethal doses, is apparently enough to kill everybody on Earth.
I’m reminded of Shaffery’s Syndrome in which a botulism strain that can survive in human intestines killed most of the human race. That problem with it is that there’s already a version of botulism that can live in human large intestines and it does not do large-scale damage.
September 5th, 2010 - 11:56
@Panda: Memeplexes such as religions do indeed have preferential ultra-strong defenses. But they’re not universal like science.
We could advance as a civilization at a greater rate if all of us possessed strong anti-meme defenses, and didn’t pay attention to the memes that endlessly sweep all over the planet in tidal waves, particularly now in the age of the Net. In my experience most (if not actually all) memes are totally useless and a waste of time and loss of focus.
Which memes are *necessary* for a civilization to function and to advance? Does science need memes to function? Can good useful ideas get transmitted without being (labeled as) memes?
September 5th, 2010 - 16:59
If you will bear with me, allow me to talk about peacocks for a moment. From a species perspective, colorful peacock tails might be a waste of resources that could have been used for reproduction, but from the perspective of the individual peacock, a colorful tail helps the individual peacock attract a mate. Since peacocks that mate have more of their genes in the gene pool, there is a tendency towards more colorful tails, even if such tails do not add to species fitness. Why does anyone mate with a colorful tailed peacock? Perhaps initially it is a sign of fitness, but the problem is that once colorful tails become a good way of getting mates, it becomes wise to mate with colorful tailed peacocks, in order to have colorful tailed children. Color can become valuable in itself, and the species might end up with more colorful peacock tails than is really useful from a species perspective.
The point is that there is often a tension between what is good for a species and what is good for an individual. If adopting irrational memes confers more advantage than cost on individuals, then they will want to adopt them, even if it is not overall advantageous for civilization. For example, you may consider religion to be an irrational meme that is deleterious to civilization, but there could be significant advantages in being a member of a community of believers. Put in this perspective, a meme that is an irrational idea may be very rational to adopt. The question, after all, is rational for whom? (I mean “irrational idea” in the sense of “not founded in reason”. But whether something is rational to pursue is a wholly separate matter. Science may be a rational discipline, but it may not be rational for a great artist to become a scientist.)
Whether or not there are some memes that are truly irrational to pursue is a question of decision theory. Decision theory attempts to study whether humans can behave irrationally in making decisions, or whether what appears to be irrationality is just a rational response to incomplete information and limited time. But you aren’t really interested in whether memes are irrational for an individual but whether they are irrational from a social perspective (e.g. they offer no use for the advancement of civilization).
If you think that religion causes civilization to advance more slowly, then I can see why you would fight it. Personally, I think there’s no empirical evidence to support your conclusion. It may be that religion helps civilization advance more, not less, quickly. If people are not able to approach the mysteries and tragedies of life in an emotional way, then they may become less productive. We might find that, without religion, civilization is not better off. In this sense, although religion is an “irrational idea”, it may be very rational to encourage religion…
September 5th, 2010 - 18:41
I don’t know what you’re basing your idea of “religion can be a blessing in disguise.” Consider this:
Being a non-theist you have 100% of your time for useful activities. Billions of man-hours are being wasted on behaviors dictated by irrational memes as we speak. Not to mention the resources (money, transportation, real estate, etc.) that are tied up in religious activities. The resources wasted must be more than several past civilizations’ entire histories combined in terms of man hours and physical resources expended(!).
September 5th, 2010 - 20:35
I am probably not the best defender of religion. I will say that it is an empirical question whether religion is better for human welfare than its absence would be. I am too tired to write more at the moment, but perhaps you can tell me why you find resources invested “wasteful”? Is most music wasteful, too, since music is irrational?
September 5th, 2010 - 21:59
Music, while non-essential (try life without it), consists of complex and rich patterns that evolve and improve over time. Religions aren’t complex but dumb and dangerous patterns that don’t improve and don’t allow their Victims either.
September 6th, 2010 - 11:03
I strongly recommend you read the book: God Want’s You Dead.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2532766/God-Wants-You-Dead
Religion is simply one more example of a “Parasitical Ideological Organism” or a group of “ideas” that have become a self reinforcing framework that subsumes individuals into being unthinking slaves of the superorganism. It thrives precisely because it invades its hosts during childhood, prior to the creation of any memetic defenses, and creates a “Blind spot” in the rational mind that develops that generally refuses to accept the irrationality of the meme complex, and will then create loops of illogic to justify the conflicting and destructive memetic structures.
Did religion have a purpose? As a subset of collective organizational behavior, yes. Has it long since been corrupted with ideological themes intended to subvert the collective into serving the individual ambitions of one “religious leader” or another over the centuries? Yes. Have those accumulated subversions nearly eliminated the positive collective benefits it initially gave? Yes.
Nearly every human behavior is dominated by our instincts to form “Packs” and our instinct to form “Pecking Orders”. Nearly every problem facing humanity is because we let the “Pecking Order” overrun the “Pack”, and let “Status” dictate who has the right to live healthy productive lives. Religion is just one more of the many ideologies that we’ve created to make individuals appear meaningless, to enable those who’s “status” makes them the “leaders” to more easily use the collective to achieve their own personal agendas.
And in a few years, once we’ve become a transparent, and thus accountable society, it will simply be one more obsolete ideology as we eliminate the memes that people have used to enslave their fellow men and for avoiding having to be held accountable for their actions.
September 6th, 2010 - 14:15
Hi Valkyrie Ice,
If I understand your post correctly, you think that while religion has produced a net positive over history, it is currently running deficits. This is certainly an empirical possibility. (See your post: “Have those accumulated subversions /nearly/ eliminated the positive collective benefits it initially gave? Yes.” (emphasis added))
I will read your referenced book to see what it says–particularly to see if it offers any empirical evidence for such a claim.
September 13th, 2010 - 14:35
@Panda
Yes I say nearly, because there are many very positive messages in the various religious beliefs.
However,these messages are not allowed to be separated from the highly negative messages that often accompany them.
For example take the very beneficial meme of “Love thy neighbor”, given with the sense that every human is your neighbor, and that you should care for all of humanity as well as you care for yourself. This is a highly positive meme that badly needed in the modern world.
But bundled up “inseparably” with that meme is a massive set of “Exceptions.” Love thy neighbor, UNLESS he’s gay, belongs to a different religion, has different beliefs than you, etc, in which case you are to burn, stone, crucify, and commit genocide to eliminate him.
So sayeth “the Lord”
Can the good be salvaged from religion? I certainly hope so. But in our current world, the “Mother Theresa’s” are far less common than the “Kill the Infidels/Heathens/Blasphemers/etc”
So yes, religion is currently running a heavy social deficit for the benefits it gives. Why? because it’s become a tool of cynical “leaders” seeking to use religious ideology to accomplish their personal aggrandizement.
Can you really tell me that the idiot “Quran Burning” pastor is after anything but fame and fortune? But he uses religion to deceive the gullible into following his message of hatred and intolerance.
September 6th, 2010 - 15:07
If bioweapons can be manufactured easily this is something to be concerned about, but as far as I’m aware delivering biological or chemical weapons would not be a trivial exercise due to the vagueries of wind directions and weather conditions. According to historical accounts, attempts to use weapons like this were not very successful during the latter part of WW1 and instead were used more as a weapon of terror to instill fear in the enemy rather than as an effective way of causing mass casualties.
September 7th, 2010 - 14:04
“Popularly known by one of its trade names, Botox, botulinum toxin is now commonly used for various cosmetic and medical procedures.”
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulin_toxin
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