As well, above a link was provided about Ricks contention that Israel ( the government) is deliberately endangering it’s own people by leaving rockets in Lebanon.http://www.radioopensource.org/chomsky-my-dinner-with-hassan/#comment-15288

For me, these are instances, ones that I could notice anyway, where both Ricks and Chomsky harm themselves, and the communication of otherwise good insights/criticisms.

They realized that mass murder of innocents was wrong. ”

Depends on what sense of “wrong” you mean. They realized that their intended audience of potential supporters – whatever that group of Americans is who might be attracted to their right-wing wacko message was NOT favorably impressed by deliberately killing lots of innocent civilians. Americans of ALL political stripes find that repulsive.

Not so for Muslims. Many Muslims all over the world might tsk-tsk car and train and plane bombings but in the same breath will imply that it might be justfied by this or that conflict or struggle they support. Successful bombings and other acts of extreme violence in which different Islamic extremist organizations try to top each other have proven to be successful recruiting methods.

But at least that HAVE a search for evidence. No major religion attempts to systematically study the evidence for and against their beliefs and run experiments to test them, and alter their beliefs based on the results.

Science does this routinely, and the result is that science advances and changes, whereas religion starts with a set of theological “truths” that are regarded as universal and permanent. Religious people who claim that science is just another religion don’t understand science.

An interesting tidbit – in recent years it’s been noted that some of our spacecraft seem to be exiting the solar system faster than expected. This and other recent experimental data suggest that some basic assumptions or constants that a lot of other stuff is based on in physics may be wrong. How has the world of science reacted to this? With EXCITEMENT! Everyone is talking about it, proposing various explanations and alternative models and new experiments. This is the most fun physicists and astrophysicists have had in years! If the same thing happened in religion – some discovery that Jesus was never crucified or Mohammed was a woman, they’d be freaking out!

Religion regards its truths as truth with a capital “T” – universal and permanent. Scients accepts that its truth is truth with a lower-case “t” – provisional – the best we can do for the time being but subject to change – hopefully not until the research grant or tenure arrives – but still subject to change.

I don’t know if that’s true or not.

The nation-state was the dominant focus of power in the 20th century, so having “actual regimes” maye have been more important.

Today trans-national or inter-national movements don’t NEED a nation state to be powerful and influential.

In another thread I mentioned that terrorism is based on the open-source paradigm, and our top-down, hierarchical, centralized, power-based attempts to confront it are like Microsoft’s efforts to counter Linux.