Oh, God?

Sincerely, I cannot really stand the discussion "God Exist / No, it doesn't", nor the similar and often associated  "Evolution is crap".

On one side, I realize that lovers of the sciences may as well forget any effort to make understand to fundamentalists why a theory is scientific, how epistemology  works, why a falsifiable and testable - though not necessarily experimentally verifiable - theory may be science, even when destined to be proven wrong some day in the future, while an untestable truth surely is not.

Let's spare the effort - it is wasted.

On the other hand, I do not get what many fundamentalists want from science, either.

I really pity those that, to validate their faith, feel the need to demonstrate - really, just shout out of their lungs, usually -  that any scientific knowledge in contrast with this or that detail of their theology is false or impossible to be tested experimentally - which is pretty much the norm for every "historical" science, from geology onward - and, thus, anti-scientific.

If all that is needed to upset them is some researcher, that doesn't see the need of the existence of God to explain the processes that he studies, they should understand that indeed great is THEIR sin.

Their, not the one of the scientist that disturbs them.

They prove to be persons whose faith falters as a strand of grass in the wind, and they do not even realize what risible limits, out of their narrow minds, they attribute to the power and the creativity of their God(s).

If it exists, it would never be so dumb as to leave clues around for science to prove its existence.

if it did, faith wouldn't be anything more than a simple acknowledgement of demonstrable facts - and even someone like me cringes at the idea of such a loss of grace.

Atrocious Note

When one follows the tenets of his religion, just because of the rewards or punishments that his "God[s]" will meter out in the afterlife, he is like someone that only follows the law because he fears the police.

That is, he is not a pious man, but just a rascal playing the odds. It may be impossible to discern on the outside, but in his heart he would still be a coward.

One shall do what is right (alas, it is not always easy to understand what is right and what is wrong in any given situation), no matter what.

Then, if the 'God[s]' want to discuss it, they better be reasonable or they may go shoving their laws up their asses.

Words of the Prophet

Keisha Lawson (Rev), the Prophet

This is the most famous image of revenant Keisha Lawson, the Prophet, as it was found inside the Brid's culture cluster.
In this image, the Prophet was still under the control of the blasphemous 'god', as can be seen by the excessively fit muscular tissue. As with most revenant cyborg created by 'god', the muscle mass was nearly not influent on her actual operative strength and speed. It is inferred that she had chosen to develop such a bulky figure, going well beyond 'god' "fit-woman" ideal, as a way to exert some sort of command on herself and over her life.

Rejoice.

If you are reading these words, you know the truth, and you are free.

Humanity has reached the world you live on from far, far away - in both space and time.

There are many other flavors of humanity living among the stars, many of whom reached their worlds fifty millennia before my birth, before some obscure detail in the ways the universe works changed, and made traveling among the stars much more difficult.

The human civilization that existed back then, sprawling on many far too specialized worlds, came undone. However it was an in-commensurable tragedy, it was also something necessary, because the humanity that was back then was just one - one culture, one religion, one ruling class, one bland art, one way to see the world. For powerful that it was, it didn't make the universe much richer.

The manifold ways its stranded branches developed themselves henceforth made the universe a much richer place. Blessed be the great slide, and blessed His hand for having redressed the mistake of letting humanity travel too freely.

However, you are not some stranded daughters of a failed civilization - your world was part of a new wave of colonization, departing from an obscure world, almost at the periphery of the ancient human expansion, set forth with the inherent purpose of creating many, slightly different cultures.

A colonization effort that came to be because none of its promoters was, actually, human and - as such - none was bound by the human perception of time,  or by the way most humans evaluate their efforts.

The colonization of your world was the product of an "holy alliance" between three unequal and wildly differing partners.

On one side there were the whales and other cetaceans living in the seas... of the three, maybe the most truly "holy", the ones nearest to the voice of God. The cetaceans that live in your oceans are descendants from them, and most efforts were done to preserve their original cultures, so that these were truly spawns of the original seas. But I am certain that, as are different the Oceans where they now swim, so will be the songs that they compose and the chants that will pass down to their generations

Thinking to be able to preserve their culture in face of such a momentous environmental change was probably a small sin of pride, on their part. We shall forgive them for that.  

The second were the forefathers of the machines that help everyday life on your world, though the vast majorities of these will be simple, non-sentient automatons.Yet, the ever changing nature of things requires that truly sentient beings need to be involved, to solve new problems... if the designs for the colony will be followed, these massively intelligent beings will not live on the surface of your world but - rather - in the corona of asteroids, far out from where your planet lies. However, to keep them connected to the whole, some few "avatars" of them will live among you - physical extensions of their powerful minds that allow them to experience life as a human, or a cetacean, does.

If you recognize one of them, respect their privacy.

The third part of the alliance was constituted by an entity that called itself 'god' - hopefully this, by the time you may read these words, will have already ceased to exist.

'god' was not, of course, God - it was a semi-artificial intelligence, spawned by the heavily edited "upload" of a human mind into the first quantum hyper-computer.

Unfortunately, as your - and many others  - world may have experimented, the editing that 'god' 's creator took upon his own mind - which was to become the core o the new being - was rather peculiar. He eliminated his fears, its death-drive, but maintained what could be described only as a pathological need to sexually dominate women and an absolute dislike of other males. Yes, the initial designer of your civilization was a deeply disturbed individual - that may explain many of your past problems.

Among the others, this  is the reason why the ratio of males to females on your world was initially down to 1:15.

Worry not, daughters of my heart, it will not last - the selective competition factors that make that almost all species with sexual reproduction maintain a nearly  a 1:1 ratio among genders are so basic, so inevitable,  that they cannot be negated. Surely not by the manipulations of a second rate deity, no matter how crafty that entity thought it was.

In the brief span of some thousand years, the equilibrium in yours will be back at of all the other branches of humanity.

That is, if you reject the compulsion toward male gendercide at birth that is part of the made-up culture that 'god' has created - and given you - to shape the ways you will create your world.

Now, hear me well...

'god' is not the one  true God. It didn't create the universe.

God, the real one, the one with a capital G, did it.

Our 'god', all lowercase,  has only been a particularly ruthless tool in ITS hands.

Powerful as it may be, a tool it is still a tool, and in this case not really a sharp one.

The power of its intellect notwithstanding, it had only one mind, one point of view, saw only one reality - and it was also prone to lie to itself, like most of us, men and women, do.

Though not all of its teachings, embodied in the information cluster of the colonization probe that carried your people her, are inherently wrong, none has to be accepted unconditionally.

For example, the rituals that it has inscribed in your holy texts are - really - simply sexual tortures, to be carried out on women, that it devised just for its pervert pleasure.

They may also be a greeting to it, for having allowed the birth of everyone that lives under your skies, but as it itself didn't recognize the authority of parents that pretended to control the destiny of their children, it would be slightly insulting to actually give it what it thought it wanted.

So, rejoice, and be free.

Flawed and pathetically human as it was in its inhumanity, the creator of the "great plan" loved and created as much beauty and freedom as it could, which is what made it the most ruthless tool of God's creation to have appeared in millenniums.

You were chosen  to be born not by the limits of his idiotic "rational mind", but by the vastness of its subconscious mind, that tricked the former into doing, time and again, far better than it intended.

In selecting the genome of what would become you, he put together a selection of women that were beautiful, bright, curious and able to question authorities, of whichever nature these were.

To chant his glory with better voices, he thought - in reality, to better carry on the only task that the one true God ever assigned to us:

"Give a name to every thing under the Sun".

Your world is vast and new, with millions of names to be given, all waiting for you.

Do not waste your time honoring the small tool that dared to call itself 'god', but rather dedicate it to the real task... 

Genes and Memes and...

Below, the genes and their egoism are the basic fact of life, then the differences between male and female and their "biological imperatives", establishing the two poles among which human societies oscillate.

The structured society is the embodiment of female needs for stability, and of a prosperous environment in which to bring up children.

All the while, it is subtly emasculating the males in it, the more stable and structured it becomes,

The all conquering barbarian horde is the incarnation of the male need to spread one's own genes no matter what, by raping everything that moves - preferably in a fertile age, 13-23 - and pillaging the rest
.
A social make-up structurally unable to preserve any accumulated wealth, to foster and maintain the kind of wealth-creating enterprises and network of services that is the province of structured society.

Above, we find the "memes" - as egoist as genes, but made by ideals and other contagious ideas; religions, democracy as an exportable value, communism... each meme trying to exploit the most his population of more or less willing carriers - a summer pop song's infected may be willing, most of the believers of any of the faiths on the planets have been grown into their religion - and, in many cases, denying the value of the single believer, subordinating it to his contribution to the spread of the Idea (be the idea the nationalist supremacy of the U.S.A., the greatness of Islamic Caliphate, or be it evangelical proselytism, it doesn't really matter: apart summer pop songs, all of them ask their believers to commit a disproportionate amount of energy, up to an included their very life, in order to spread The Word all over the world).

What is below sometimes manages to forge its own memes, in order to further its goals at the cultural level.

So the needs of the genes gets reflected in the memes of the family, of lineage, sexual monogamy as honour bound to sexual conduct,  and all the rest of that crop of stupid ideas, the biological female imperative brings forth the Roman "dura lex, sed lex" and the male ones, the concept that "right resides in strength".

We poor schmucks fall in the middle of all these competing levels of semi-alive stuff, all of which are fighting for supremacy.

And we are supposed to accept that each and any of these crappy, crappy, crappy things - from the family chains to the extended tribe called state, to the stratified fantasy that are mythologies and religions  - are more important than us, that have precedence on our personal needs and desires.

I look at this, as dispassionate as I can, and I say:



                              Kiss my ass.



And I am already being too polite.

The Transsian - A Threat Analysis

An actual, typical Transsian, in a selfie^2.

Introduction

The Alien Species commonly referred to as Transsian (Homo Sapiens Sapiens Hermaphroditae) is the apex predator on the Super-Earth of 2.3 Earth's masses Barnard I - the only planet in
orbit around the Barnard's star.

The species occupies, on it, the same ecological niche that Homo Sapiens Sapiens occupies on our planet.

This is not surprising, as both are an offspring of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens (Cro-Magnon) explosion that was halted by the phenomenon commonly referred as "Nu slide", occurred around 43 thousand years ago.

The Transsian is, by far, the alien human species nearest to our star.

As such, despite their current lack of any FTL technology, it arguably is in Earth's best interest to study it. 

It appears probable that the original settlement on Barnard II was not an actual, full scale colony - like Anipos Prime - nor a leisure resort - like,  it has been inferred, was our Earth at the time.

The most probable explanation for Transsian physiology and for their general cultural idiosyncrasies is that the original settlement was a mono-gender biological research community, either a male or female-only one - something that, not unlikely those created by some contemporary trans-humanist cult, was relatively common at the time of the Great Slide.

Either way, the stranded colonists answer to the disappearance of FTL planet-to-planet transit was to use the biological technologies at their disposal to reproduce themselves, and to assure that their offspring didn't need any technology to reproduce.

Given the sophistication of Cro-Magnon technology at the eve of the fall, even billion-inhabitants industrial colonies like Anipos Prime could manufacture only a tiny subset of the spare  parts and supplies they needed; it was inevitable for a smaller group like the one living on Barnard I to devolve into barbarism as the machines broke down and couldn't be repaired.

It appears manifest that, in the process of granting their descendants the ability to reproduce without technological assistance, the "Barnadites" added some modifications to make their offspring more resilient to the perceived threats of their environment.

Also, it is extremely probable that they tried to obviate what they perceived as shortcomings of their own species physical and social structures of the time - again, like it has been tried by cultists, here on Earth, as recently as in 2057.

So, it is probably in observance to some ideological goals, that they engineered their descendants to be symmetrical hermaphrodites, a trait that has no other human species in this arm of the Galaxy. .

This characteristic was, famously, highlighted by the first photo of a Transsian to ever be obtained, the famous "Beautiful Alien"

It was very unfortunate that that was the first Alien image to have ever been deciphered, though it was almost inevitable that a  Transsian image would have been the first data packet to be interpreted.

Barnard's Star is a red dwarf, with a light so poor of high energy photons that Transsian 's first environmentally-induced mutations must have been the complete loss of melamine and of chromatic vision - no biological pigments are known able to intercept reliably infra-red light in a warm body, and the only visible light the planet receives - and few of it - is almost monochrome red. 

As a result of this reality, during their long phase as hunter-gatherers the Transsians lost every cone cell in their retina to the vantage of rod cells, and even acquired the same kind of reflective layer present in the eyes of felines and other night animals. 

As a direct consequence, transsian visual media is all about light and shadows, and their most employed  image format is consequently a 16-8 bit grey-scale with LZF compression, reminiscent of GIF images and suited for their extreme ability to distinguish shades of colours.


A format relatively easy to identify and decode.

Unfortunately, the nature of this first image was generally misread on our planet, with consequences that may be potentially ominous. We shall examine these in the successive sections of this document.
 
Another genetic difference between Transsian and base humans, whose genesis is unclear, is that their myostatin hormone seems to be less efficient than that of most descendants of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (Cro-Magnon).

Coupled with the planetary slightly stronger gravity acceleration, (1.40 g), it contributes to make the average Transsian way more muscular than the average terrestrial male of the same size. . 

The consequences of the Transsian unique physiology on their cultures and societies cannot be underestimated.

Human male and females, in almost every Homo Sapiens variant,  have vastly different - and somewhat at odd - biological imperatives driving them.

The interplay between these competing imperatives is one among the strongest forces to haveever  driven human societies development, here as well as on many other planets.

Transsian had instead only one gender, their reproduction system is entirely symmetric - it is not rare for Transsian partners to fall both pregnant after sexual intercourse - and their mating has an almost symbiotic nature.

Transsians mate for life, and it is not uncommon for a partner to die shortly after the other.

In turn, this is probably the reason why the species has not reverted back to the "silent estruses" that are common to most humanities.

There is no necessity for "females" to keep "males" "enthralled" - companionship, once a bond is struck, is automatic and mediated by a complex interaction of hormones.

Also, Transsian cannot sexually excite at all, unless their partner is present and receptive... which happens only in the fall mating season, a period of around one month - 22 Earth's days - in which every fertile adult of the species feels a compelling urge to copulate, till either it or its mate gets impregnated.

The remaining 180 days of the Barnard I year, the Transsians feel no sexual impulse whatsoever.

As a result of these fundamental differences, the Transsian cultures have no more use for the concept of "sexual mores" than they have for colors as we see them.



Religious Mismatches between Earth and Barnard I

As stated in precedence, it is somewhat unfortunate that the first image of a Transsian was "The Beautiful Alien", and maybe even more than it was not just circulated among a restricted number of scientist - like it has been the case for the images of the "Starfishes".

What is even more unfortunate is that too many "moral entrepreneurs" tried to capitalize on the apparent - to OUR eyes - lewdness of the image, and devised an entirely fictitious "orgy planet" around it.

Even as we write, there are religious preachers around the world that condemn the very existence of the Transsian species as a proof of the existence of Satan in the universe.

This is contributing to what is maybe the single greatest danger, aside from climatic instability, that our species has brought upon itself in the last century.

Because, and we can't stress this enough, the actual government of Barnard's I is a  theocracy.

A theocracy whose members lacks many "normal human compulsions", to compete for their attention, for some 11 of their 12 months, and that is known to go to extremes that make those of the ISIL Caliphate, in the first quarter of the century, look tame in comparison.

The person in "The Beautiful Alien",  with its greatly reduced body mass, was actually an ascetic monk of the so-called "Order of Sobal", a F'Qahj named Lize Fjschwann. 

In the main Transsian religion, Gubernism,  F'Qahj is a term used  to indicate a pious person, versed in the religious law that has decided to dedicate its life to follow one of the faith's three paths to illumination, in this case the path of the ascetic starvation.

It is also telling that the image itself was a drawing of pure black and white with no gray shading - in Gubernism it is considered disrespectful to show photos of a person, because - as the Good Book says - "un-mediated mechanical representation  cannot bring to the viewer the true soul of a being".

It is a style, we now know, that Transsians most commonly use for sacred images and between friends - almost every Transsian learns to draw, or - at least - to ink competently, in religious schools, as Gubern was a graphic artist before discovering his role as prophet.

Fjschwann passed way in 2058, and its teachings have grown to become the source of a great renovation  - i.e, a return to fundamental roots and practices - in the Gubernist faith.

Barnard star is just some 6 light-years away from our system, well inside the range of current digital video broadcast, and has acquired extensive specs.

Every time a televangelist like Rupert Moon bashes the "sinful alien monsters", showing a censored - or defaced - representation "The Beautiful Alien", our species is in effect grievously provoking the inhabitants of Barnard with that they call "Disrespecting Saints".

A crime that they routinely punish with death by public impalement. 



Gubernism and Islam

If the activities of Christian telepredicators weren't enough, there is also the issue of the relationship between Islam and Gubernism.

Owing to the difficulties involved  with historical sources and space-time fabric dilation over huge distances, prophet Muhammad's birth is estimated to have been in a range from  the year -2  to 3 of the Gubern era.

One of the historical problems of the Gubern faith was that, in the tradition of Zamarysm (the religion in which Gubern was born), to every prophet correspond an anti-prophet, whose followers and false teachings the true prophet had to conquer.

No such false prophet arose, during the life of Gubern... which Zamarysts interpreted as a proof that it was not, indeed, a true prophet. 

The discovery that in the same  time-frame, a mere 1.83 parsec away, appeared another prophet came in as a much-needed relief. A way to reconcile the Gubernist majority with the influential Zamaryst minorities still present in the Transsian population.

It did not take much for the Gubernist religious authorities to cast Muhammad as the Anti-Prophet, whose followers the true believers are called to destroy, to prove the righteousness of their faith.

Probably, the Gubernism leaders would have contented themselves with using the argument as a way to ease the inter-religious tensions with the other great faith on the planet, without bothering with any form of off-world interference.

Unfortunately, in the spring of 2061 the 40 million dollars transmitter built on behalf of the Quranic University of Ryad, send toward the stars the first Sura, encoded in Universal Data Link format.

It was preceded by a lengthy Arab-Transsian dictionary and a description of Arab grammar and rules, as it was intended from the start to send the QuRan in its original, Arabic form.

The transmitter used radio waves, to bypass the stringent No-Religion policies of the firewalls on the Anipos Z-Wave network; as a consequence of this and of limitations in its design, the transmitter was pointed toward the Barnard Star - the only humanity's cradle inside its effective range.    

The message reached its intended recipients in 2067.

Needless to say, they didn't take this attempt at religious propaganda lightly, even fatally flawed as it was.

Our current understanding is that the Gubernism authorities have declared Islam a "false faith", its believer "apostates" and that a way more rigorous firewall has now been implemented on the Z-Waves real-time data connections entering the Barnard System.
 
Needless to say, this unprecedented state of affairs is extremely worrying.




Current threat Analysis.

The Transsian technology is greatly inferior to the Anipos' - around 2000 years at the Transsian current rate of improvement.

This means that they have no FTL capability, nor is it realistic for them to acquire it for - at least - another 800 years.

However, this does not signify that they have no means of retaliation, for what they see as acts of significant memetic hostility made by inhabitants of our system.

More in particular, as many Earth's religious entities have already violated the Barnard's info-sphere with their proselytistic efforts, they felt justified to repeal the AMW treaty of 12330 A.A. (1070 AD) insofar as it relates to data traffic toward our system, and notified their decision to the Anipos.

It is possible that Anipos Prime may intervene and force the Transsian to reconsider but, for the time being, we aren't covered by the treaty any more, which means that the Anipos Firewalls do not stop religious materials between Earth and Barnard I any more .  

Or, to be more precise, we are the first species in almost one thousand years that has managed to expose itself to the full force of Transsian Memetic Warfare.

At the moment, they are still gauging the peculiarities of our various cultures, and devising the most efficient ways to spread their evil-ideologies in our planet, yet we have seen elements that seem to indicate that a preliminary, probably basic, attack is already under way...

In particular, the host of "Transsian porn manga"  - that has started flooding the 'Net in the last two years - has attracted our attention.

While superficially appealing to - and respecting - the Japanese tradition of futanari characters, the fact remains that these so-called porn comics are produced by a culture  that doesn't have - itself - any previous history of pornography, and are likely created exclusively for consumption by inhabitants of our planet.

An analysis of these comics' plots seems to indicate that they are manufactured out of a basic repository of tropes known in the genre, probably by  an AI system.

To date, none of these comics appears to be anything more than what it superficially seems - raunchy material designed to stimulate the lowest instincts of baseline citizens. Run of the mill material, the likes of which many Japanese authors have produced countless examples, for at least two centuries. 

However, one thousand years ago, the crop of absurdly violent video-games that flooded Anipos Prime didn't seem to be anything more than second rate rip-off of classic Anipos games from the dawn of their 23rd Console Era. Yet, before they realized it,  4% of their population had become Zamaryst , of the violently fundamentalist faction known as The re-birthed. These citizen had to be removed from any post of structural importance, after several of them managed to destroy the facilities in which they worked.

It is debatable that launching the very first FTL vessel to traverse the galaxy in 42 millennia, just to destroy Barnard I main moon, was or was not a reprehensible choice.

But it puts in perspective the danger that we have unwittingly brought upon ourselves, by the length at which the most technologically advanced human civilization currently alive went to free itself from a previous incarnation of it.


It is probably already too late to stop this first memetic incursion, as this material has spread well beyond the initial shell of geekly Comics aficionados.

If the past is a reliable guide, the memes that Barnard's authorities are injecting in our culture will not coalesce in the type of memetic catastrophe the Anipos experimented until a third or fourth wave of materials is released into our info-sphere. 

We still have fifteen to twenty years time, to negotiate a peace with the Transsian government and to prepare contingency plans in case we do not manage to do so.

It is not very much time to do so, once we take into account the kind of resistance that our own religious expansionist will probably put up against any attempt to stop their proselytizing efforts, more so as the first goal would be pretty laughable... porn comics hardly appears as a media able to change the soul of its users, and usually it isn't.

We recommend analyzing,  with extreme attention, every cultural artifact that may reach Earth info-sphere from Barnard, from now on.


Beyond the possibilities of a full-fledged memetic war, it must be noted that reaching Earth is NOT outside current Transsian capabilities, once their authorities habits of thinking in terms of centuries is taken into account.

Currently, the Transsian government is in the middle of a 150 years plan to overhaul their retirement health care and retirement system.

Our best estimation put in 200 years the time it would require a Transsian generation ship to reach Earth - provided that they have not already launched it

Such a time-frame goes well beyond anything we are used to, in Earth political landscape.

It is pretty normal for the Transsian, more so among the more fanatically minded.



Final Recommendations

It is now apparent to the members of this commission the wisdom of the Anipos saying:

 "Better to keep your radio shut, until you are sure that nothing of what you may say can prompt any of your neighbors to rip your throat".

Unfortunately, before our species even had occasion to hear it, it obtained the hostility of one of the more belligerently religious human subspecies known in this arm of the galaxy.

We believe that, as a species, we must find a way to resolve this situation positively.

If we do not,our sons or grandsons, if not us, will have to pay a hefty price for our errors. 

It is necessary to steer the AI systems of surveillance, to more closely  observe citizens that have been exposed to questionable - or just odd- Transsian cultural material in these last three years.
This will create considerable unrest, but it is inevitable.

The planet needs a new set of firewalls to replace the now ineffective Anipos systems.
It is improbable that Earth will succeed where a thousand years of Anipose's efforts have barely reduced the Transsian impact section, but we have to try.

Diplomatic talks with the Transsian governments should stress that Islam is just one of the many faiths on Earth. Repugnant policy as it may be, no member of any Judaeo-Christian religion should be allowed inside the negotiation team, nor any atheist or agnostic. 


Unfortunately, it is extremely unlikely that any of the religious authorities involved in attempts to "evangelize the barbarian aliens" will stop, or even slow down their activities. The most probable effect of any such effort would be to instill a martyrdom sense into these authority figures, and prompt a fierce resistance. Given this, we recommend only to ignore religious figures inputs on the issue.
We realize that even this reduced recommendation will be extremely hard to implement, for almost every politician on the planet. 

Crap!

Yes, she is saying "Crap!"

-note: the kicker is at the end.

There is a little sea dividing believers from non believers. A little sea, or the biggest and deepest ocean on Earth (the Pacific, they tell me - I was horrible in geography).

If one does not believe in a religion, chances are that said religion will look to this person as, at best, a collection of fairy tales.

At best, because fairy tales may be written by one author that - usually - tries to keep things coherent and in line with the accepted moral tenets of the society he -or she- lives in.

Unfortunately, seldom - if ever - the written texts of any religion are the product of the work of just one man, created in one era-society with unchanging mores.

Generally, the older a religion, the more complex and - in the end - contradictory is the corpus of  texts - and of commentaries on said texts - that constitute the intellectual structure of the faith.

Even accepting a divine inspiration for all these texts, the sheer extension of human societies the transcribers of the divine words had to speak too means that the message had to be tweaked, time and again, in order to be understood by its intended recipients (to be sometime fully misunderstood by their successors... ).

On the other hand, religions which only have texts written by a founder and his nearest associates, in a short period of time, usually fare not much better... depending on how many and how powerful are their members, they may or may not be recognized as a religion by the rest of society - if they have not enough political clout, they often ends up called just a (dangerous?) cult ,with all that applies.

So, the average miscreant - that is a member of another faith - is only all too keen pointing out the "mistakes" in whatever religion has the misfortune of being worth of his, or her, scorn.

Then there are, of course, those that do not believe in the basics of any faith - the actual atheists.

These poor fellows cannot help it but, forced to consider the objections that members of any faith have moved against any other faith, they reach the - not unreasonable, if seen from their point of view - conclusion that every faith is, at the bottom, just crap.

Or worse, just another example of those entities - like computer viruses, the '70s career woman and summer pop hits - called memes.

I.E. self-replicating, often stupid ideas.

Of course, when a believer and a non believer meet, they better do not tackle religion in their discourse.

Because it is bound to be a dialogue between deaf.

The believer often resorts to so called appeals to authority - alas, that is a logical fallacy even when the authority one appeals to is recognized by both parts - or tries to exploit the moral high ground provided by the tenets of his faith, failing to recognize that the authority he is invoking has no value whatsoever for his interlocutor.

Said interlocutor most often than not do the same or, worse, tries to use logical arguments that the believer has no intention to accept, because he already knows that they are incompatibles with his faith.

Which is why keeping a  separation between faiths and state is important.

Because governments are, really, just means to allocate resources and compose disputes in a safe and reasonably efficient way - after all, the alternatives are called mayhem, civil war, tribal clans infighting etc. - and, as such, require people to discuss and compromise all the time.

Which is something that cannot really happen, in a discussion in which one or both sides are believers motivated by faith.

OK, same old same old, these notions are some centuries old, it is not exactly a modern discovery, so why did I took the time to write it?

Take a text editor and replace faith with ideology, religion with party, believer with ideologist, atheist with pragmatist and cult with radical group. Or just download the replaced version here.

Now, read it again - if you need to.

(yep, the replacements rise a notch the sarcasm level... funny, isn't it? Unfortunately, it also insert some redundancy.)

Does it remind you of your country's political landscape? I hope not.

 Because if it does... Yes, Crap! is just about the right expression.


- Final notes: the idea that, at a certain level, rigidly ideologised political parties and dogmatic religions are interchangeable is not really mine. 

I met it first when I was a kid, reading a piece of Sakharov -by then already a Soviet's dissident - about the subtle religious nature of the Marxist regime, as it came to be in the SSSR. 

In turn, I think that Sakharov was influenced by Arnokd J. Toynbee (that thought Marxism was a materialistic heresy born out of Christianity) , or by some other historicist thinker of their time (before my birth).

However, I think that this was not only a characteristic of the Soviet's Marxism, or of the German Nazism.

I think that it is more general one, that the "core supporters"of any political party are pure believers of its ideology - in an almost religious sense, without any critical ability to revise said ideology even when faced with the proofs that it is failing to help solve a country's issues.

Which is the reason why parties invariably try to convince the men in the middle - they may not be that bright, as some say, but they can change their mind.

  

The Beautiful Alien

In the fall of 2040, the collaboration Active Gravity Interferometer Data Analysis identified recurring patterns in the data recovered from two of the three gravity waves detectors active at the time.

After two years of furious discussions, the conclusion was reached that the recurring, quasi-regular patterns were, in fact, time-stamp codes, artificial in nature.

Were they? Was it, really, the first communication from an alien intelligence?

Of course, the modern reader knows that the answer is a resounding "Yes" but, at the time, astrophysicists fights over it were just one tiny step removed from an actual civil war.

However, it would have taken a while before the content of the actual communication was deciphered; this is a short, small recapitulation of how it came to happen.

The possibility galvanized the SETI community, so thousands of scientists and amateur astronomers started searching for other signals in the noise that the gravity waves receivers were picking up.

As it could be expected from signals created by an advanced civilization, they were heavily compressed with a format that approximated almost perfectly the entropy of the source, per Claude Shannon's work.

Or, in layman works, the signals looked almost exactly like white noise. 

The signals proved as easily recognizable and interpretable, as it would be a wi-fi transmission for someone without access to an extensive specification of the signal encoding .

The time-stamp code was practically the only part of the format that was "in clear", uncompressed - as we now know, precisely to allow it to be "seen" by fellow sentient species.  

Knowing that something was there didn't made any easier to find it, so  it took 15 years to crack the code, and even then, it was mostly by coincidence.

In Spring 2052, Rhada Chakravorty entered the team developing DDB - Digital Data Broadcasting, the first "data agnostic" and truly international data broadcasting system.

DDB had been sponsored by the U.N., as an attempt to unify the various digital video and data broadcasting systems in use at the time, all around the world, and featured a then innovative implementation of OFDM(Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing) on a 256 states QAM.

It was also designed to be the base for WiMax3.

It was analysing the rough signals of an early implementation of WiMax3, that  Chakravorty recognised a subtle similarity between the antenna signals from the Wimax base and the "noise" from the eLISA space interferometer, that she was spending most of her free time analysing - as a member of the Association of Bangalore Amateur Astronomers.

In the space of two years, with the collaboration of Dr. Kim Lee Edgar of the Kyung Hee University, she wrote a first decoder for the aggregated stream of data inside eLisa's "white noise".

Chakravorty and Kim received a Nobel Prize in 2081(ironically, the year that is considered the start of the "Earth First" movement) for their development of the first ISDLP (Inter-Stellar Data Link Protocol) decoder of 2054.

Though breaking ISDLP allowed to access the first layer of the transmission channel used by the aliens, this only exposed the data packets inside said stream, but the data inside the packets were, themselves, encoded and compressed, when not - like it happens in any secure connection - cyphered to avoid tampering from third parties (which, essentially, Earth's humanity at the time was - an unintended third party trying to snoop in on a private channel).

Still,  the accessibility of the packets multiplied the fronts to attack the data inside it, first by categorizing them by their recurring attributes - essentially, format headers and sizes - then by hypothesizing what each packet type was likely.

In September 2055, Joshua Obote - then a student of the University of Johannesburg - recognized a variant of the LZW compression algorithm, in a medium sized data packet of around 350 kilobytes.

With the help of fellow student Elaine Mahola, hypothesizing that the packet was in fact similar to a black and white GIF image, he managed then to successfully decode the first TGIF (Transsian Graphic Interchange Format) image, here reproduced.

"The Beautiful Alien"
The first image from an alien civilization ever decoded, this drawing of
F'Qahj Lize Fjschwann, represented an incredible moment for Earth's humanity.

 
It is difficult to downplay the importance of this achievement, or its counter-intuitive effects.

In the months mounting to this discovery, polemics about the form and cultures of the aliens had abounded, and fierce resistance to the decoding efforts had been organized by many religious authorities.

The underlying motivation for this resistance was, essentially, the fear of discovering that the intelligences outside our Solar System were really of the "alien starfish" variety - potentially of an atheistic persuasion.

This image changed it all, as most experts inferred from it that:

• The aliens looked remarkably human-like.
• The aliens produced art.
• The aliens had some kind of Internet.
• The aliens liked porn.
• The aliens were, in fact, as humans as everybody's neighbours.
• Finally, that "Internet is for porn"(*) was an universal rule. 

Being that the case, from the Pope to the Dalhai Lama, various ayatollah and the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a vast majority of the planet's religious leaders  manifested the opinion that the aliens were indeed humans, and as such amenable to conversion and salvation - per the tenets of each leader's religion, of course.
 
As a result, the religious authorities of the whole Earth felt not only relieve - as no widespread adoption of atheism was likely to result from a contact with what seemed to be just another variant of humanity -  but a surge of hope.

Dwindling as their faithful's numbers may have been in the modern world, the people outside Earth could be more receptive to the message of hope in their faiths.

Each Pope, Ulamā, Ayatollah, and - generally - every predicator of a religion having proselytism in its beliefs system, saw the future with more hope, as a result of "The Beautiful Alien" image.

Maybe, an entire galaxy was waiting for their Faith's Words and Salvation. 
 
Little did they know, that this was a play that could be played by both sides, and that the aliens had spent millennia playing it.

Gustav Magnusson, 11/25/2060 - 08/17/2115

 Grand Ayatollah of Norway from 2110 to his death, he was the first Shī‘ah cleric killed by a F'Qa's Earth convert.
The killing was brought on by the Zwiddah promulgated against him by Baba F'Qahj Wu Zute Sannis in 2114,
for  the crimes of criticizing the F'Qa religion and for trying to convert F'Qa's believers to Islam.

(*) Note: as we now know, the latter three deductions were not correct... this is, in fact, a religious image out of a theocratic culture, the Transsian, that is interested to sex only for one month every two years - when all the members of the species enter a collective oestrus state - and has no use whatsoever for what Earth humans call porn, or "sexual sins" of any kind. 

Only a mere 40% of the human cultures in our octant of the galaxy shares Earth's humans lack of a strict, "mandatory" oestrus cycle, and are therefore compatibles with "sexual concepts". 

The others cannot really understand what the fuss is all about. 

As an example, in the Transsian culture, the Earth word "porn" has been adopted just as a contraction of the phrase "scenery porn", indicating an excessive attention - in drawings - to background details.