Nnnno.
The Councils at Nicea were VERY complex efforts to decide the entire nature and course of the evolution of Christianity.

The "editing" of the biblical texts, was crucial to deciding the very nature of God.

Your name calling is objectionable and uncalled for.

In addition, you are almost completely wrong, in your "logic." When someone is IN DEBT, reducing spending does nothing at all to make the debt go away. Only paying down the debt does that.

And blindly declaring that spending has to be reduced in order to take what income is present now, and channel that to pay down the debt, requires that one refuse to examine whether or not the existing spending is necessary to maintain the state or not.

For individuals as well, if you are in debt, and decide to "cut spending" to pay it off, but your spending is on food for your children, cutting that would mean killing them. Instead, arranging for more income would be the only logical thing to do.

On the government level, that means looking for things to tax, that will minimize negative impact on the poor, and I think in the case of taxing sports betting and e-cigarettes, which are NOT things that poor people will suffer by having less access to, fits the bill.

Calling that "tard" thinking isn't even rational. It's just thoughtless and rude.

This reminds me of a couple of things.

One, is something I learned anew a while back, when one of my children joined the Marines. There is a sort of doctrine or formal statement that each member is taught to repeat when they get their primary weapon, which goes something like
"This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will... My rifle and myself know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit... My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will ever guard it against the ravages of weather and damage as I will ever guard my legs, my arms, my eyes and my heart against damage. I will keep my rifle clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will... Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and myself are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but peace!"

At the same time as they are being trained to say and think this, they are made very aware that their weapon still belongs to the Marines, and not to them, in a physical sense. They can NOT stop being a Marine, and take it home with them; they may NOT give it to anyone else for any reason.

I am also reminded of a number of "thought experiments" that people I knew growing up, got into, during the "time of rebellion and reflection" that constituted the 1960's and 1970's protest culture. Lots of people questioned the use of terms LIKE "my," just as you have here, and their intent (the more on point, and non-manipulative ones anyway) was to get people to think thoroughly through what they actually DID mean when they used such words.

Basically, I myself came to always be wary and on the look out, for situations where the everyday GRAMMAR of a given word usage, was open to interpretations that I did NOT intend to support.

What I would caution most people about this, is to POLITELY ASK whenever you fear someone is using a word like "my" or "mine," to indicate both connection AND personal dominance or ownership.

Final note: where such things become very clear, I think, is in the use of the label in a sort of reverse situation. Such as, if I refer to "MY EX WIFE," it's very clear that I do NOT consider that person to be a possession of mine, but if I say "MY GIRLFRIEND," that I MIGHT intend to imply possession in some sense. I wouldn't, but I MIGHT.

If the ship was a flat piece of metal, it would sink too.

Dent your sheet metal deeply enough, and it will displace water, and float as well.

Ah yes, virtue.

Another of the commonly misunderstood or confused but very important concepts in the world.

I have found that a lot of people confuse "being virtuous," with "making a show of having morals." I also happened to come of age in a time when some of the more powerful people in the world, have made being sort of ANTI-virtuous into a "clever" faddish rebellion.

I'm thinking there, of how plenty of people I've had to deal with, have grinned and laughed at others who behaved politely and thoughtfully, and seen them as "suckers," not as someone to admire.

Virtue does seem to play a rather odd part in our American world. Lots of people simultaneously decrying the lack of it, while sniggering or even verbally attacking those who urge them to show some.

Wow!!! Everyone has so many excellent thoughts and beginnings of thoughts about this.

I'm well familiar with the ideas that MKgentleman mentions, about how we are learning that the way each human is "wired," our biology, does affect what and how we perceive the world, as well as what our inclinations may be about it. I've seen that too for a long time, ever since I noticed in my studies in history, how tremendously important the ORDER OF LIFE EXPERIENCES can be, to even the most sane and logical person's decision making and reasoning.

I liken it to some of my frustrations with myself in my daily life, where I make mistakes or overlook things, or act on assumptions and deductions that turn out to be wrong... and when I tease out how I got things wrong after the fact, I often find that it isn't a matter of someone lying to me, or even of the facts of the matter being distorted. It's often that the order that I came to be aware of things, was such that I made little mini-conclusions, that I was later loathe to give up; or that I sort of wandered through a decision making maze, and one seemingly logical decision led me into a long series of turns that led to a dead end.

My biology DOES influence how likely I am to react rapidly, or nervously, or calmly to events. I learned THAT, from all the various kinds of "drug use" everyone participates in. Not just the illegal stuff, "drug use" in humans includes everything from how what we eat and drink, does or doesn't supply our bloodstream and thereby our brains, with healthy and balanced sustenance; to our willingness to allow ourselves to "fall in love," and swim in the luxurious brain chemicals like dopamine.

At the same time, though, I am convinced that in this, as in everything else in existence, it isn't a binary set of possibilities. That is, what is true and real, isn't JUST a choice between "it's all mechanics," and "it's all divine guidance." The fact that my physical substance does limit some aspects of my possible perceptions, doesn't mean that I am incapable of being other than I am. I know that, because I HAVE changed over time, even as I have remained me. I have made different choices at different stages of my life, using the exact same sets of circumstances. That means that I am a mix of bodily predetermination AND of independent learning and decision making: both predestination AND "free will," if you like.

More later...

I don't use any of those aps for two reasons: one, I don't have a personal cell phone any more, just one provided for work, and I'm prohibited from adding personal aps like those to it.

The other reason is that I am a confirmed fuddy duddy snob. All those aps have the reputation with me, for being for the kind of people who are involved with lots of surface nonsense, like sending each other dick pics or boorish "memes", or for young people to flirt and sext each other.

My work-provided phone has unlimited texting built in, easily linked directly to the person's phone number, so there's no extra ap required.

As for GPS functions, we use Google Maps, which is a free ap, and that has GPS built into it that's good enough for me. I only had to buy a dashboard clip to hold the phone up where I can see and hear it as I drive.

Almost from birth, I've been a fan of Vanilla ice cream in various configurations.

I'll never forget my first experience with vanilla ice cream topped with hot butterscotch. As chance had it, that happened when I was about seven years old, on a vacation with my family, touring Scotland in the early 1960's. I thought for years, that since it was called Butterscotch, that I would only be able to get it IN Scotland, so I never thought to ask for it after we got home to America again, until I saw it mentioned on a menu at a restaurant.

It's still hard to beat.

I never liked Chocolate ice cream. No one I know, has made a chocolate ice cream that didn't taste washed out an weak, without the wonderful creaminess possible in other flavors. And please NO MINT.

I'm familiar with that partial quote. How this particular guy meant it, would require a lot more detail about him than I care to know.

My first reaction to it, is that he's like too many people I've known, who grab things like pithy phrases, deep-sounding quotes from alleged "smart people," or some "meme" that they read online somewhere, and then toss them all into an unsorted mess in the back of their minds, and label that bin "my personal philosophy."

The short way of saying all that, is that more often than not, someone who says something like that, is just spewing something that sounded clever to them when THEY heard it, and seemed to shut other people up, so they repeat it whenever THEY want someone to shut up.

The biggest problem with this particular gem, is that it was always designed to SOUND deep and meaningful, without actually providing anything "actionable." That is, like most WISECRACKS (as opposed to real Wise Sayings), this phrase doesn't tell you anything you can use to make good decisions about anything or anyone, it just makes the speaker feel "clever."

Just for the record, I DESPISE "clever."

Characterizing ANY large and obviously varied group of people with a single short phrase like that, isn't going to accomplish anything positive, even if the observation is occasionally accurate about a particular individual.

Anyone want an altered version of this idea, that might ACTUALLY be helpful? I'll take a shot here.

It MIGHT be true or accurate to say, that "men and women, engaged in trying to understand each other, using only what they know of themselves, CAN be like trying to complete a complex picture puzzle, without realizing that half the pieces are missing, or belong to other picture puzzles entirely."

Were you JUST looking for advice on whether or not you can evict him where you are? Or were you looking for additional or alternate thoughts about your reasoning about him? I ask, because I'm used to the word "insight" being used to talk about understanding each other and ourselves as humans, rather than just talking about legal and functional mechanics.

So I'll put something in, which you can of course ignore, if I'm off the mark from what you were after.

You repeatedly said that he "paid his debt to society." I have always found that to be a very dicey, and sometimes even misleading idea. Society doesn't get "repaid" by a member being imprisoned, even if they get treatment or guidance on how to avoid repeat incarceration. It's just a nice-sounding phrase, that we're supposed to use to close our own concerns about someone who did something wrong.

That's one of my own "insights" about this: since you mention it twice, as though you think you have to convince everyone else about something, the fact that you do, suggests the strong likelihood that you have a lot of doubts about it yourself. You might want to put in some more introspection about that.

Another thing to consider: the fact that someone is charged with aggravated assault first, and then that charge is reduced to something less, doesn't mean that the ORIGINAL charge was the more accurate one. In other words, more investigation would be needed to be sure that you've correctly assessed this person in either direction. The news is often full of people being charged with more intense crimes than they have actually committed, as well as with people who manage to use lawyers help to get the system to pretend they really didn't do anything as bad as they actually did. It's not logical to ASSUME that we know reality, from the charges.

A long time ago, a famous science fiction writer, discussing the state of published science fiction literature, made the observation that became a "meme" of his era:

"ninety percent of everything is crap." Or crud, depending on which version of the story you see.

It's a good observation, I think, and one to keep in mind at all times, in order to gain and keep a balanced view about life.

The same thing holds true for mate hunting, in a slightly different way. The saying can be adjusted to read something more like "90% of everyone available, are NOT looking for you."

The reason that recognizing this is a POSITIVE step, is that once you ACCEPT that you have to dig through tons of steaming piles of crap to find the occasional valuable nugget of whatever, the steaming piles of crap wont annoy you nearly as much.

Just the price of doing business, so to speak.

The ironic challenge of all of this kind of questioning and reasoning, to the person who seeks logical and rational answers, is that what conclusions you may come to, depend more on your base collection of inexplicable beliefs, than on factuality and careful use of logic.

What I discovered in my own questioning of such things many years ago, is that any answers one can arrive at, are direct results of the starting point one chooses.

If you begin with the assumption that stories such as the Tree Of Life are factual, one set of logical conclusions is possible. If you instead decide that the stories are allegories only, then another set of conclusions arise. If you decide that the stories are millennially muddled hand-downs, who's original truths have been lost in translation, then still more conclusions can be drawn.

It is not possible to be sure that any of those possible starting points is the correct one.

It is also possible, as some theologians have said, that NONE of the stories were ever really intended to be tested for truth. The goal was always to have them be cheerful self-contradictory mysteries, to teach the ultimate act of faith, which is to believe, despite being unable to KNOW.

The basic idea is that the religious leader responds to such questions by saying "of COURSE it makes no sense to YOU, you are only a finite human. Gods may not even USE reasoning, as understood by mere humans."

I think men and women are GENERALLY different in various ways about this, but I'm not sure one or the other feel romantic losses more deeply. Perhaps we "perform mourning" differently.

I know I've seen lots of people who broke off with their mate, and then very ostentatiously behaved as though they were absolutely in heaven because of it. But sometimes it was a charade, a sort of revenge.

I've known some who appeared to suffer horribly, too, but not all were suffering the same ways or for the same reasons. Some were really only in agony, because their ego had never before suffered such an insult. They weren't mourning the loss of their mate, they were worshipping at the great "poor me" altar.

Especially when I was younger, I was convinced that at least the girls/women who had claimed to love ME, easily recovered and moved on. But I'm of an unusual constitution, being genetically shy, and overly thoughtful; and the women/girls had plenty of easy to find replacements for me. I don't actually know whether they felt the hurt of failure any less deeply than I did, especially since I made it a point to stay away from anyone who I broke with.

When it comes to observations of famous people, everything is different. Lots of famous people I've watched, seemed to be in relationships for reasons other than a search for a long term partner to begin with. One thing I think I saw more than once, were famous couples that I was sure only paired up because they looked like each other. And that they loved THEMSELVES so very much, mating with a look-alike, was as close to having sex with themselves in another body as they could manage. Those kinds of couples always broke up a few years later, I think because they finally realized that the other person WASN'T themself after all.

I have become convinced that everything that humans do, can be recognized to reflect themselves. Religions are all logical extensions of basic common human behaviors.

Mainly, the core human effort to try to use their minds, to gain some recognizable step up from a purely reactive life.

Each religion reflects what the people who eventually became the most powerful advocates for it, wanted to see in everyone else, to reassure themselves that THEY were "on the right track."

So, if the early powerbrokers of a religion were homophobic, then the religion they guided would be as well.

There also seems to be something that I think of as a "fanatic acolyte" effect, where people who are eager to prove to the people in charge that they "get it," take the early general ideas, and change them from admonitions to commandments; and from worries to "sins," and from investigations and questions, to "eternal mysteries."

Everything gets exaggerated as time goes by, especially if religions build up administrative power structures of their own. That's how some religions that also have "forgiveness" as an original central idea, so often end up as complex rule systems that allow no room for ACTUAL forgiveness or understanding at all.

Actually, while my kids were in school, I didn't see any time being spent on "social ills and fluffy stuff." I didn't see NEAR enough work being done in requiring reading of any kind, and because of the huge addition of the need to train children to use technology, there wasn't a lot of time put in to other things.

The biggest thing I'm upset about this subject area, is that education has become so much of a political battleground, that education ITSELF takes a back seat to which political party gets to take credit for some slap-dash quick fix that they can "prove" is working, via some sort of computerized metrics.

That, and the problem I've always seen, where people argue about COST, more than they do about ACCOMPLISHING EDUCATION.

Just as an example (and this is NOT an anti-Bush attack), the still-born "No Child Left Behind" initiative a decade or so back was a classic case in point. It had lots of political SOUND GOOD words involved with it, but the insistence by the people pushing the idea out, on "measurable metrics," to prove that whatever money was spent, had been spent "wisely," utterly prevented the original goals of Bush's idealism from being brought to fruition.

In particular, the idiotic decision to make teacher pay, dependent on the percentage of children who passed standardized multiple choice tests, absolutely guaranteed that education would consist, not of learning to think, but of learning to memorize pre-written answers.

Whenever ANY goal is changed from "getting the task done," to "making sure the least amount of money is spent," the results will ALWAYS be the poorer for it.

Sounds like what I've heard about groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. Doesn't qualify as a Secret Society, even though they require that no members tell non-members about the meetings. Their secrecy is to protect the members from social invective, not to hide their evil plans to overthrow the government.

I suspect what you may be getting at, is that it IS inherent to many "secret societies," that the reason they need to BE secret, is that they know that a LOT of people would be very unhappy with their ideas about how to make the world a better place. I would agree with you entirely in that.

What I always worry about when the subject of Secret Societies comes up, are the people who want to claim that all sorts of people who are NOT in such societies, actually are, and should be treated as enemies of the rest of us. Essentially using the fear of "secret societies" to hide what is actually some sort of anti-ism. Trying to make genocide or ethnic oppression into a heroic cause, rather than the vile crime that it always actually is.

I understood what you were getting at. What I was somewhat obliquely trying to point out, is that what we do about a given situation, requires accepting ALL of the consequences of our acts, and not just the INTENTIONS behind them.

We do NOT, for example, have an option available to us that includes preserving everything the way that it is now. In order to limit human population expansion significantly, or even further, to forcibly reduce how many are here now, requires the end of a LOT of existing human standards of behavior, the ideas of rights, freedom, and all sorts of things.

I've paid attention, while doing other historical investigations, to the MANY times that humans on this planet have tried to gain control of all of humanity, in order to try to make the future safe for whatever they had in mind as an ideal life for all. In every instance, the journey from what we were, to what we would have to become in order to find that "Eden," or "Nirvana," involved doing things that were VERY unpleasant to a VERY large number of people.

That doesn't mean I personally think we should do nothing, by any stretch of the imagination. What I am intent on getting across, is that regardless of what we jointly choose, there will be "unpleasantness," especially including if we do nothing.

I am convinced that population ALONE, is not the problem. Even a much smaller population than we have now, has in the past, managed to nearly destroy itself, on a number of occasions, due to fairly obviously "bad behavior."

In order to do better than the previous people who attempted to solve the Problem Of Humanity, will require a FAR higher dedication to education, to self discipline, and to assiduous protection of respect for each other, than any large number of human's has yet managed.

I believe it can be done, simply because there is nothing inherently stopping us. However, there is no sign anywhere in the leaders of the current world, of anyone who WANTS to find the best solution to our challenge.

We only have a lot of people looking for quick fixes and short cuts.

There is a difference between a TRIGGER for a war, and a CAUSE for a war, and who "started" it.

I know of no war where all three were the same.

As for what BECAME World War 1, the fighting began when Serbia was attacked by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

And that wasn't actually "caused" by the murder of the Archduke of Austria, all by by itself.

This is a little tricky to answer directly, because the question is overly simple.

As written, literally, the answer is probably "no," in that the mere EXISTENCE of a secret society doesn't make anything happen.

A secret society only matters, if it happens to gain enough real power behind the scenes, to effect shifts in the overall activities and choices that a society makes.

A critical element, is the matter of loyalties. Even an entirely PUBLIC group, such as a political party, can effectively be horrible for a society, if it's members call for loyalty to the PARTY over loyalty to the nation they are trying to lead.

Oh, and one thing to watch out for: lots of people use the IDEA of Secret Societies operating behind the scenes, as a trick to try to get normally rational people to support or oppose various things that they should take the opposite side on, out of "fear of the hidden."