DavidC

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• Commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  There are two, er, threads running through this argument. One is the resurrection of the dead, the other is the simulation of the living. If we are living in a simulation, then we have either been resurrected (in the Buddhist...
• Commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  Actually (104) Generalplanost wasn't quite that. (See Mark Mazower's "Hitler's Empire".) The basic idea was to take over the whole of the area as far as the Urals, and either work the population progressively to death or simply exterminate them...
• Commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  Well, let's not debate Hindu cosmology for too long, but my copy of the Bhagavad Gita falls open conveniently where Krishna is saying things like "there never was a time when I was not ... nor will there ever be...
• Commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  @Ludwig 81, Well, I'm no theologian either, and eternity, like infinity which it greatly resembles, is one of those concepts it's hard to get your head round, which is why Buddhists insist that you need to be enlightened before you...
• Commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  No serious theologian in any tradition ever described eternity as just "a very long time." Eternity doesn't last forever, it's outside time, because time itself is an illusion. The same is true of the Buddhist Nirvana. In a real afterlife...
• Commented on A brief, bitter quiz
  Historical analogies are like nuclear weapons - powerful and illuminating, but needing to be handled with care. The bomb-throwers of the 1880s and 90s were anarchists rather than Leninists (Lenin was only 20 in 1890, so probably had relatively few...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  Yup, we're back to my earlier comments about different understandings of what a hero is. The problem is that the traditional view of the hero as defender of the people (that you find in Homer for example) has to coexist...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  To a large extent, yes, but I think it was Robert Graves who said that the best modern equivalent to the Greek Myths would be the adventures of cartoon characters. If you actually look at the subject-matter of almost all...
• Commented on The myth of heroism
  The confusion comers from the fact that "hero" is used in at least three different ways in English (and some other languages). First, it is often just used to mean "protagonist" - i.e. Hamlet is the hero of "Hamlet", or...