plasmid

Hi seeksit, thanks for the Belief-o-matic link. Octopuppy: your next job is to write an app that lets you fill out a questionnaire and then crunches the results to uniformly reach the conclusion that you belong in Uberfaith The Belief-o-matic does seem pretty legit, though, I don't mean to bash it. The evolution of religions when left to their own devices had left me underwhelmed. That's been going on for the past couple hundred years in the US and has produced less than stellar results. Televangelists can thrive precisely because half of the population is dumber than average. I just saw a documentary that was re-playing the reverend Wright tape, and that's an example of what a generally well respected leader of the free world had selected until it became a political liability. Unitarian Universalism might have some useful characteristics that should be preserved and adapted if we went the Uberfaith route. But since the goal of this project is to create a religion that fills the void so to speak but prevents spiritual beliefs from becoming detrimental: how much control does UU have over individual beliefs if someone were to come in and say something along the lines of "I come from a long line of Christian Scientists and I definitely think prayer healing is the way to go. No way am I going to let my kids go to a hospital." Even if the UU were to discourage something so blatantly dangerous, I would imagine that more insidious problems like creationism are tolerated. While it may seem harmless, I would suggest that raising new generations to believe in creationism is an impediment to the advancement of biology. That's why I think it would be useful to have doctrine specifying what is and isn't acceptable to keep people in line. But something UU-ish might have a favorable consequence: If UU were to become widespread and everyone had their own independent beliefs, then people would become less and less able to support completely baseless claims simply because they perceive them to be consequences of their faith. An example of such a thing carried to a ridiculous extreme recently is John Shimkus, a congressman from Illinois, arguing that we don't need to worry about global warming because it's not in keeping with his interpretation of scripture ( ). While in this case he's certainly only using it as an excuse to enact policy that would otherwise be indefensible, it illustrates that people can go around using faith as a defense for their actions and expect others to simply accept it. If people are known to be setting their own doctrine, then maybe they would have more responsibility to be able to defend it. If nothing else, I suppose that UU is one way to have a doctrine evolve over time without having the leadership responsible for setting the doctrine become corrupt: the "leadership" is just one person who's setting their own doctrine and doesn't have any power that would be corrupting. Whether or not memetic selection would behave any differently in a UU setting than it has with a bunch of denominations, I don't know. I think you're the only one here who has access to the experimental data on how belief selection has worked in practice in UU, seeksit.

I would suggest: A small blank grid + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +[/codebox] With some lines added [codebox]+ +--+--+ + | | + + + +--+ | | + +--+ + + With some initials filled in. + +--+--+ + |BD|BD| + +--+--+--+ |RM|RM|ID| + +--+--+--+[/codebox] It's probably easiest to copy into Notepad (or whatever you use with a fixed-width font) and paste back into a codebox instead of using the forum's editor.

So you open one of the locks. EDIT: Changed C value Sam if spaced out in (presumably) deep thought trying to figure out what the clues mean, so this time you try the combination yourself

Sam tries out the combo.

Continuing from Part I, Part II (which still has a solution that hasn't been found), and Part III. Sam takes the onyx you've just won and examines it closely, then pulls out a scrap of paper and traces the pattern of its bands. A moment later, as if coming out of a trance and realizing that you're still in the middle of a carnival, Sam suggests getting some snacks from the other end of the fairground. On the way, a carny approaches you with a challenge, "Guess what I am, just one dollar!" Before you can protest, What's my name, can you fathom? I'm made of many, many atoms. Inside a canyon I can fit. Often people call me 'it'. What am I? You exchange a wry look with Sam, and then retort: (In case you haven't seen the previous puzzles in this series, you don't always take on ridiculous problems in a conventional manner. No offense to the WAIers, the carnies just happen to be crooked.) After the two of you have sat down to eat, Sam takes out and re-examines the onyx and tracing. "Looks like this is a live one. Want to take a look at it?" It's a stone with mostly black and dark red bands, and a few blue bands. In one of the regions between two blue bands, the pattern on the stone is slightly different from the pattern on the tracing. "I'll let you in on a secret. This isn't just any old stone, it's a locater. I thought the bands would be black and white instead of black and red, but I'm sure that's what this is. Those bands changed when we walked from one end of the fairgrounds to the other. If we go to the spot where the bands in that area are all completely black, we'll be at the location it's tuned to. You handled those carnies pretty well, you might be able to help out at this place." You ask, "what's this locater going to locate? And how was this thing made? By who?" "You'd think I was nuts if I just told you. Better if I showed you what's going on." The two of you leave the fairground and travel a short way down a road, then Sam points out an abandoned shack in the distance and says "Wait until you see what I've got stashed in there." As you approach the shack, Sam stops short and cries "Aw nuts, someone locked this place up! I bet they found out what's inside and plan on taking it as soon as they can get a truck, and of course they don't understand what it really is." ENOUGH WITH THE PLOT, TIME FOR THE PUZZLE: There are two padlocks on the shed. You don't have any tools to cut or shim the locks with, or to dismantle the shack with, there aren't any other doors or windows, and it's built on a foundation that you can't dig through. Not seeing any easy way around it, you decide that you've got to open the locks. One is a combination padlock, a type with 40 numbers (1 through 40, no zero) on a dial face and three numbers in the combination. Since you are in puzzle land after all, you search for the cryptic clue left behind by the bad guy, and you find a scrap of paper that says "Easy as a b c. a3bc-2b3c-7bc = 0." As for the other lock, it has a keyhole and there are no keys around. The back of the scrap of paper says "The other lock came from a room with 10 foot thick steel walls and no doors or windows or any sort of opening."

It seems a governing system to keep things running smoothly will be imperative. Power will certainly corrupt, especially after all other competing religions are wiped out. I don't know of any effective way of preventing corruption except by having competition that selects against it. But if there are other approaches that might work, then go ahead and bring them up. If there were competition between many denominations of either Philosophy or Uberfaith (not between the two, we'll ultimately pick one and then make denominations of it), each with their own leadership and each competing for supremacy... We probably don't want to let just everyone freely move to whichever denomination they want, because the characteristics that would accumulate the most members are not necessarily going to be the characteristics that best promote a benign replacement for religion. Ideally we would want a system of natural selection where the denomination that has the characteristics we're looking for will end up being the one that's best suited to survive. (This might be easier if they're in geographically different places and behave almost like independent nations.) So, on to the list of characteristics that unreality mentioned. 1) If a denomination fails to adapt and gets in the way of social or scientific progress then we want it to change quickly or die. We can let scientists switch denominations, that way anyone that imposes oppressive doctrine hampering progress will drive all of their scientists out and will pay a natural selection price for it. 2) Education should be important, so we can give all the smart students scholarships to go to whichever denomination they want (and stay there for at least oh say 10 years or so). They'll probably go to the places with the best schools. But considering how college students are they might just end up going to the ones with the best beaches. I guess that's as good as we can do though. 3) When it comes to gaining members: you convert em, you keep em. Early on, expansion will be important. But if the qualities required for expansion end up being detrimental in the long run, other denominations will overtake once most of the world has been converted. 4) Wars would be detrimental to both sides involved. That should put belligerent types at a serious disadvantage. Of course the denominations that they fight against will also face a disadvantage. I guess that's okay, we don't want to end up with a bunch of members who are just chumps asking to get invaded anyway. 5) We might not need to impose any specific rules for this one. Anyone who shoots themselves in the foot will already put themselves at a disadvantage. 6) If any denominations get too obtrusive, their followers will be less productive because they're wasting all their time with senselessness. 7) Adaptability I guess was covered with the first one. 8) If your denomination has some new pagan religion starting to emerge from within it then it has fundamentally failed in our primary objective and all the others are required by doctrine to band together and trounce it mercilessly. 9) Scientists and students can migrate and I guess artists can too. Do you think that would be a reasonable way of having a government that can keep everything adaptable and accomplish our goals without becoming corrupt? Scientists, students, and artists can migrate. Others can't migrate because they would probably be migrating for superficial reasons that may or may not be in our real interests. New converts are finders-keepers. Hostility is discouraged, except in the event of a rogue religion in which case it's jihad time. That should take care of the heretics octopuppy mentioned... if people don't want to be bothered with religion then they can claim membership and not really do any worshiping, but there's definitely no room for active troublemakers. There might be other people who we should allow to migrate too; this idea's pretty new to me so I haven't thought through a bunch of the ramifications yet.

1. Grayven 2. andromeda 3. Izzy 4. scsw 5. Pet Rock 6. plasmid 7. CyberSpace17 8. Y-san 9. Marth 10. woon 11. Kay 12. Kat 13. Bb 14. clozo 15. LIS 16. IDNE 17. GMaster479 [spoiler=This is for CyberSpace17 ONLY. Any snickering from those of you further down the list and you're gonna get it ]

Hmm, it sure was. I guess that that I can sure get fooled easily. And I revise my previous answer: I should've first asked "Swindlecant god, are you a god?" Then "Randomcant god, are you a god?" Then "Honestant god, are the Astros going to beat the spread in their next game?"

If we're not allowed to take this route, then I get the feeling we're about to be hornswaggled with something as silly as a female firefighter that will let you go around calling her a "fireman" without getting a whalloping.

Indeed! 123gio gets this one

Nah, I wouldn't be likely to take him in as a guest.

(This is a "what are you?", not a "what am I?") I brought you to my home, a guest With promise to change my life for the best You carried me (we both were stressed) And listening close to what you'd suggest I was shocked at what I heard I couldn't believe that this had occurred "Your number's up", so went your word Impossible! Lies! That's simply absurd! Your fame for truth means naught, you hear? Don't threaten to rob my honey so dear For I'm no slouch stuck on my rear Undoing your curse, I will persevere

I'd never heard that quote from Seneca before, I like it! For the philosophy, not religion, route: I think I'll hold off on saying too much at the moment. It sounds like octopuppy would consider philosophical ideas along the lines of karma to be just as delusional as any concept of an afterlife or spirits or anything else. But I'm running dangerously close to putting words into others' mouths. Dancing around it as much as I can for now, though: yeah, the paths could give people a sense of purpose in life without really any sort of delusion behind it. It seems ok to say "whether or not there's any inherent purpose or meaning in life, we're establishing a philosophy advocating these paths, because that's the best course that some really smart people could come up with for now and we've got to do something so let's do that". When it comes to suggesting something like karma to bring a sense of justice to the world and an opportunity for absolution, are you suggesting something along the lines of Buddhist ideas which (if I understand correctly) say not so much that God is keeping tally of how much good and evil you did so he can pay you back, but instead that the universe is somehow built in such a way that the laws of nature will end up doing good stuff to good people and bad stuff to the wicked? Or do you have something in mind that would be even less metaphysical and more practical, like "if you're a jackass no one's going to be nice to you"? For the uberfaith route: I'll definitely accept that introducing unsubstantiated assertions about spirits and such (including any sort of metaphysical spirit of humanity) qualifies as delusional, and is practically a requirement for anything that would be thought of as a religion. Is it fundamentally incompatible with the search of truth?... well, yeah, it would definitely at best be an impediment and could easily be worse. So I agree that we need a way out for freethinkers. And I definitely don't think that everyone needs or even wants to be let out. I don't mind too much if there's a sizable portion of the population that's happily deluded because one of the premises of this riddle is that a bunch of people just can't seem to live without religion. I guess I can't go with my original idea of just telling everyone to leave nonbelievers alone and let the afterlife sort them out. You're right, the heathen need to be actively converted so the uberfaith can grow; it's whole point is to wipe out all uncontrolled religions and tame stuff down after all. And it would be nice if we could avoid bothering the freethinkers with followers pushing them to convert all the time. It sounds like we need two classes of followers. How about if there are active believers who are really into all the mumbo jumbo and can go to cathedrals and sing hymns and whatever else floats their boats. And there are mediators who seek an inward connection with the spirits or whatever and spend their time in some private place where they are not to be disturbed by the corporeal world and where their actions should not be monitored to make sure that they really are meditating or have tabs kept on how much time they spend meditating or anything because that would be heresy. You get to pick which group you want to be in. Active believers get more glamor, but both are acceptable. LOL, I'm just imagining what would happen if a hacker got into www.uberfaith.com and had free reign to dictate doctrine. Before you know it, everyone would be wearing a plaid cape and carrying a stapler around at all times just in case the origami attacked. But actually, a governing body would be important to keep up with the times and correct problems as they arise. And in fact probably a majority of the things that (well at least I personally) don't like about Christianity aren't things that are written in the Bible, but are practices that have emerged as time passed, from indulgences in the old days to opposition to stem cell research now. Now this is a tough one, though: How do you design a governing body that has the power to set religious doctrine but won't instantly become corrupt?

Well the goal I had was to come up with something that could supplant the current religions and replace them with something that would at least be benign and at best be beneficial. In a perfect world, you'd have a society where you don't need any religion because people inherently see the solidarity of humanity and are driven to make it something great. But humans don't seem to be built that way. They seem to have some intrinsic need for religion that drove it to proliferate wherever civilization arose. (Maybe a sizable population can exist without religion, but I don't think it's ever been done yet.) That's just the machine we've got to work with, so what's a good way to make it work? That's a tough question of whether or not there should be an afterlife. The reason not to have an afterlife is because, well it is a lie after all, and it's better to do as little lying as necessary if you want to build a humanity that is going to pursue truth. If you could make a replacement for religion that would work without an afterlife and deal with the world as it really is, then I would prefer to do it that way. But the way I set up the problem is by saying that civilizations can't seem to do without religion. Can the void of religion be filled without some degree of lying about the afterlife or spirits or whatever? Interesting question. The concept of the five paths could provide people with a purpose in life, one of the typically religious tasks, without having to resort to lying. There are of course many other things that people look for in religion, and I'm afraid I can't really put my finger on all of the factors that drive people to spend their Sunday mornings listening to someone rant about spirits and saving your soul, and then try to model their lives around it. A better understanding of what motivates people to follow a religion than what little I have would be very useful in designing a lie-free replacement. Oh, one observation on not having an afterlife that I just can't resist bringing up. It's funny the reactions I get when someone says “no one knows what happens after we die” and I respond by saying “I do. And so would you if you thought about it. We were both dead for all of eternity until we were born.” Man, human brains just weren't made to deal with that. The argument for having an afterlife in the uberfaith would be that even if it's a lie, it's something that large numbers of people just can't seem to do without and it could potentially be a useful lie, so we should go ahead and design an afterlife system that will be useful. I like octopuppy's version of heaven much more than the typical Christian one where everyone shares the same heaven. If you just sit there and believe then you get the free version where you have to put up with ads on the sidebar, and if you kick butt in your current life you get the deluxe model. We'll need to spell what sort of criteria people will be judged by. Do you think we'll need to spell out a bunch of laws like Moses with the whole “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not steal” plus “thou shalt get the good stuff if you follow one of the fivefold paths”, or would it be better to just say something like “the better you (intentionally) make life for the people around you and future generations, the better your afterlife will be”? I'll go ahead and drop the idea of making biophysicists rule the afterlife (way to ruin the party, unreality ). And the heathen will burn in hell. We'll just need to a better job than the other religions of stressing that the afterlife is where judgment gets doled out to nonbelievers: we don't want our followers to go around persecuting people, now do we? And that would also allow people who don't need no stinking religion to live their lives without having to deal with this silly (but still awesome) uberfaith. I like the idea of having a little supercharging adrenaline godling inside you that you can call upon to help you accomplish stuff. It's actually a really good way of giving people something akin to prayer or meditation (it seems like part of the religious experience that people have a hard-wired need for) but which is more likely to drive them to do something useful. I was too hasty to dismiss it earlier.

Holy cow dude, raising Atlantis!? If someone were able to pull that off, I'd sign up for jumping off a cliff if they asked me to. Mostly because anyone with that much power would be able to obliterate me if I refused, but also because it'd be freakin' awesome. (The Atlantis raising, not me jumping off a cliff or being obliterated.) But how to design something new and better to replace religion as it exists now, or in some other way fill the void that religion seems to sprout in. There are a lot of things that a religion needs to accomplish like you brought up: comforting the masses, providing them with a worldview, giving them a path or a purpose to life, and not meddling where it doesn't belong. Giving them a worldview seems like it's probably diminishing in importance as time goes by and nature is more completely explained with science, and as cool scientific innovations improve the quality of life and show how important and useful it is. Giving them a worldview without all the old superstitions would help eliminate one of the biggest problems with religion: its obstruction of scientific advancement. Could a set philosophical ideas replace the traditional worldview that an omnipotent God created the universe and has everything under control with a master plan (a falsely comforting thought for those who face an unjust loss) without leaving an opening for other religions to seize on and take root? That will have to be kept in mind when designing the details of the philosophy. Giving people comfort, especially when they feel powerless or abandoned, is something that they'll always crave. Religions that claim to give people a direct channel through prayer to request intervention from an all-loving God with no effort on their part are definitely offering baseless comfort – it would be much more useful to teach people to be self sufficient whenever possible and turn to their friends whenever necessary. But I think it would be difficult to ask people to give up the opiate of unconditional love from their imaginary omnipotent friend and instead face the harder reality; given human nature, when the going gets tough they would be prone to regress and want to just pray to God to save them. This is probably one of the big things that the human mind craves that drove it to invent religion, and the solution to our riddle will need a mechanism to prevent religions from pouncing on it to get a foothold and expand. Then there's giving people a sense of purpose in life. It seems like almost anything would be an improvement over a goal of "I want to get into heaven and live forever", and pursuing science in any of its forms, or even the arts, to advance the progress of humanity is probably the most worthwhile goal there is. Again though, one of the problems is that something like Christianity offers a false promise of salvation just for accepting Jesus as your lord (too often left undefined and interpreted as "think good thoughts" or "open your heart" instead of "go help your fellow man"). Really understanding science, and especially discovering or creating something new, is a lot of hard work that most people probably just aren't going to be capable of. And it doesn't even grant you immortality if you succeed. I would like very much to include it in the replacement religion, though. With the multiple paths you were talking about, maybe it could promote advancing scientific understanding as the most venerable path, with other paths like good old fashioned building up karma with good deeds for those who aren't scientifically inclined? And religions have definitely used tales of reaching an idyllic afterlife to take root and spread. This might sound like it's counter to what rational people would want to promote, but would it be safe to have a replacement religion that does have a completely baseless (but comforting) promise of reward in an afterlife-like existence for doing good deeds? Doing this alone would fill one of biggest desires that people have come to expect from religion, and it seems like an innocent enough lie that doesn't in itself cause social problems. OK, the major differences I see between conventional religions and their new replacement so far would be 1) de-emphasis on calling to God for help, more on being self-sufficient, 2) shifting the goal of life away from developing some sort of state of mind or relationship with God and instead focusing on doing something (anything) to advance humanity or help your fellow humans (still unsure whether a reward after death should be promised), 3) getting rid of the mythology that's becoming obsolete with modern science, 4) having the religion itself promote the idea of separation of church and state like unreality said. All of these seem like admirable goals, how to accomplish them in such a way that we fill the hole in the human psyche that religions have grown in would still need to be fleshed out. Are any other functions that a religion carries out that need to be covered by the replacement? What mechanisms can and should be set in place to prevent the replacement religion from running amok (like the polytheism that I'm keeping in the back of my mind)? And unreality talked about advancing science and education, are there other more positive things that an ideal replacement religion ought to be doing but isn't yet? But dude, raising Atlantis... if there are other ideas like that on how to win converts then post those too!

And with that last stab, Shakeepuddn slays the evil beast! In case a re-read of the riddle when you know the answer doesn't bring the metaphors to life, here's what I had in mind when writing it

Seeing if this has to do with the fact that I'm a structural biologist? Nah, nothing work related here. No mad cows, just your everyday stuff. But frostbite, you say?

Interesting, the idea of having many different small religions to prevent one from running amok or oppressing the others. I don't think the specific example of ancient Greece was really so idyllic, though. Socrates was sentenced to death for heresy, Pythagoras ended up being chased out of Croton by Cylon. The worst irony of all is that apparently the Pythagoreans themselves who tried to have a sort of faith based around mathematics were responsible for exiling or executing Hippasus for proposing that the square root of two is an irrational number because they considered the concept heretical. But there definitely was something special about ancient Greece that allowed philosophy to thrive, even if it was at times like grass growing through concrete. I don't know what it is and I would be interested in learning the answer. Similar but different would be the emergence of all sorts of denominations as Protestantism spread across Europe, and particularly across the United States. These really were more like many little competing religions, rather than one overarching religion that formed from the amalgamation of others. In principle, if one religion were to do something really stupid, then all of its members would just defect and that would be the end of it. That probably does happen to some degree, but it hasn't wiped out practices like Christian Scientists refusing to give their kids medical care or Jehovah's Witnesses doing the same with blood transfusions. And it certainly hasn't prevented characteristically Christian dogma like the denial of evolution from persisting on a very widespread scale for over 150 years. But I might now be digressing from your original point. Despite their flaws when put into practice to date, polytheism, whether of the Greek variety or modern multi-denominationalism, could be a valuable piece of a solution.

A couple of people were sniffing around the answer, but I think I was overzealous in obfuscating it. No vampires or spiders; the antibiotic suggestion was an interesting fit though. So here's an earlier draft that had more clues. I promise to explain the metaphors I had in mind after it's solved. Viper, slither 'cross the plains Find your mark and sink your fangs Summon spirits armed to kill Bind them to my heinous will You've seen your final living day Now to your tomb, I'll light the way You won't reach heaven, I'll be terse: This land of milk and honey's cursed! The blood that courses through my veins, Bewitched, it is. Corrupt! Profane! My icy touch will leave you numb Be sure, my Gods bring worse to come Prepare to face the hellish flames As pitchforks stab, play twisted games If you face them, yet persist You'll soon return into my midst