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I do understand that faith looks like foolishness to you; however, I do not see why it would depress you. Frustrate, perhaps, since it creates an impass over certain political issues. That is frustrating to me at least. But depressing I don't see. From your perspective, it seems the worst thing is that I believe in a lie that makes me happy

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and if there is no God (or anything else beyond us and this life) then none of what we do ends up being of real consequence anyway

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at most one of them can be true

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The Ancient Engineers

I highly recommend reading this book. It's amazing how far back some of the technology goes. There was a developer from around 2,000 years back that converted houses to central heat for profit.

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A friend of mine had the theory that the Romans were perilously close to having the industrial revolution. For example, they had virtually all of the ingredients necessary to have water-powered machinery: they could move water around through aquaducts, they had wheels and other assorted parts, and they had basic metallurgy (mostly for military applications, I suppose). The question is whether they had (a) the financial and legal framework, much less political stability, for such businesses to come to fruition, and (b) whether there was any need for mechanized labor when they had perfectly functional slave labor, instead.

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A friend of mine had the theory that the Romans were perilously close to having the industrial revolution. For example, they had virtually all of the ingredients necessary to have water-powered machinery: they could move water around through aquaducts, they had wheels and other assorted parts, and they had basic metallurgy (mostly for military applications, I suppose). The question is whether they had (a) the financial and legal framework, much less political stability, for such businesses to come to fruition, and (b) whether there was any need for mechanized labor when they had perfectly functional slave labor, instead.

Marxist political economy would say clearly (b), but I think it's both.

BTW, from purely technoogical and scientific side, Greeks were also close (see, for example, Heron of Alexandria for his steam engine precusors or Antikythera Machanism for an elaborate astronomical analog computer). But again, there was no need for widespread use of any of that in their economy.

BTW, I seem to remember reading an entertainong piece of SF where Romans invented bicycle and discovered America.

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My theory is that the US was the first modern, stable democracy with a free capitalistic economy, and that spurred the industrial revolution. Individuals had a lot to gain by inventing something new and spiffy, so that helped advace technology more rapidly.

Of course technology advanced in Europe at the same time, so who knows.

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the US was being used largely as a source of raw materials.

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My theory is that the US was the first modern, stable democracy with a free capitalistic economy, and that spurred the industrial revolution.

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That's pretty snazzy stuff. That said, the notion that none of those things have seen improvement in 2000 years is untrue. The fact that some of them are still being used and the fact that some things we think of as inventions of the last hundred years are pretty remarkable though.

I never meant to imply that no improvement has happened in 2000 years, just to point out that some of technology goes back quite far.

It surprises me that the Chinese never had an industrial revolution. In Europe's heyday of big sailing ships, China had ships three times bigger than anything out of Europe. All hand made.

To get slightly back on topic...

I notice there's some discussion about the behaviour of "religions" in general. It seems that "religions" here mean Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).

From living in Asia for a few years, I was amazed at the non-exclusivity of the Big Three (Buddhist, Daoist, Confucianism). Each tend to adopt elements of the other. Also, none of them started out as religions, just philosophies. Folks, all of whom seem to need religions, turned them into religions.

I'm happy that FSM came along. Finally, a religion I can sink my teeth into.

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I'm happy that FSM came along. Finally, a religion I can sink my teeth into.

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but I just wanted to post this article. Normally I'd never agree with this guy, but I agree with this article on every point.