WHat’s interesting to ponder is that this was done deliberately, consciously and openly - “no one among them was considered spiritual until he had devised something new.” Gnosticism was itself an open source religion, thus the syncretism and the bewildering array of scriptures, gods, rituals, etc.

what about P2?

“…the question is whether you are paranoid enough.”
-Strange Days

“the meek ain’t gonna inherit shit!”
-Urban Dance Squad

I like to think of conspiracy theory as a discipline that attempts to build cultural predictive models. Many of your standard (unembellished) conspiracy theories tend to predict the behaviors of politicians much better than the narrative fed to us by corporate media. Many theories, however, are too weighed down by the unnecessary bestiary of shape-shifting reptile aliens and the like. Some of these flourishes are useful for their shock value: they draw people in, and such magnetism has value. But, as Tim suggests, many of these alternative narratives are so crazy that they’re distracting.

The construction of cultural predictive models is a scientific endeavor. As such, it should be liable to the same collective vetting processes. Peer review — “scholars” commenting on the work of their peers — can help wield Occam’s Razor to shave down alternative narratives to models that are predictive, reasonably supported by the evidence, and no more complex than absolutely necessary. There are always those who would never submit themselves to criticism by competing “theorists”, but those individuals expose themselves for what they are: charlatans who are less interested in exposing the truth than in calling attention to themselves and developing a cult following.

I respect the work that Tim here, Jeff at Rigorous Intution, and others do in this regard. Keep doing what you’re doing.

A new idealism can be spread and I think at this early stage, the best way to
emulate this is through the example of the GNU model and Linux in its “all
too important” business sense. As in the George Lakoff school of political
framing, perhaps we must perform the duty of introducing the masses to the
idea that they are programmed and therefore would want to be programmed with
something more featureful and much more secure from outside attacks than what
they currently are programmed by.

If we follow the “linux model” to the T, it will necessitate that all
developers be equal. Think of this:

As separated as we are class, race, gender and culturewise, there is one
system that remains constant. That is the system in which we operate our
computers. As linux makes inroads, so then, so do we.

Again, I am a long way off yet. But if we can decentralize the meaning of
what is to be human in some way, perhaps in the way computer instructions are
coded, and follow the TRIED AND TRUE brand spankin’ new business model of the
“Linux revolution”, the support for progressivism will multiply as equally as
progressivism itself will finally come of age to defeat this goddamn scourge
of incurious unenlightenment.

For every anything the mass, corporate trough overseers produce, we will emit
a smell that will waft past the nose of every bored stiff snout that knows no
cuisine better than the gruel it endlessly feeds upon. They can never
compete with decentralization. This is why they are trying to shut
decentralized communication down. This is why they may succeed or they may
fail.

I believe the system is too wieldy and slow to ever notice a threat without
destroying everything else in order for it to get to it.

The system is springing a trillion leaks. The rationality of the corporate
Linux model is our only raft to safety. And paradoxically, our safety
depends on the more people that get on.

Strange but fucking true. . .

First of all: well fuckin’ said brother Tim. Well said.

I’ve gotta say that I bristle at anti Carl Sagan commentary. I do. The man remains to this day my hero, who through his careerlong creative output, helped coaxe me out of nihilistic despair and into the stars all my life. My obsession with Sagan as the voice of the skeptical, has always begun and ended with the excitement skepticism afforded me in the olden days. Therefore, I am simultaneously in awe of finding Sagan’s humanistic direction wanting of explanatory power and also, in a much more mild sense, distraught that his “baloney kit” doesn’t scale to the world we find ourselves nine years after his death. But yet it does still apply, only not in the “down to the wire” sense in which we all find ourselves spiritually and culturally today.

But in the same spirit of supreme, condescending CSISCOP propaganda, I find myself drunk in the considerations of other realms and modes of human thought. Perhaps none of the other qualifying methods are for me — I still maintain my atheism, so to speak. I will never drink the Kool-Aid unless this Kool-Aid is some fucking Kool-Aid. But I’ve been sippin’ some mean explanatory whiskey by reading you fellas that I can’t help but expand in the same. The imagination is a supremely beautiful thing. And this I’m beginning to realize is what transcendence means. I’ve taken nothing seriously along the way and yet invest every store I have for emotion in each. It’s fucking phenomenal.

I’ve begun to look at my other paranoia attacks when I was younger through two seperate lenses now. First the image passes through the hyper-skeptical, “no way, no how” lens and then into my newly claimed lens of fantasy and creativity. I can’t tell you what a wonderful thing it is to see things from many different perspectives at all times. To look back on what I wanted to run from, I see wasted cycles of creativity now. I see ten years spent in denial of what I have always sensed.

And that is, the world of mind control is alive and fucking well. There is no telling what will come next.