Topic: Religious beliefs on bitcoin - page 10. (Read 22437 times)

An even better one is the simple faith that that piece of paper with our private key that's storing thousands of our dollars is still in tact, and that the private key we've been sending money to all these years actually works.

Simple.  If the word hash makes you think of http://www.ozone3d.net/public/jegx/201212/cluster_node_radeon_gpu_cracking_opencl.jpg instead of http://www.simplyrecipes.com/photos/corned-beef-hash-b.jpg?ea6e46 or http://www.denverrelief.com/images/hash/bubblehash.jpg, it's already too late.

One might:
- religiously commit their passphrases to memory,
- religiously practice downloading abstinence in their stand against crypto-stealing-spyware, and
- religiously proselytize the "outsiders" to accept their faith in Bitcoin...

For those of you just realizing you're in a cult... you're not alone.

Enough already, let's move on!
What I really want to know is what religious rituals do Bitcoin practitioners follow, which are fact based and which are superstitious?

Is there any value in becoming religious about Bitcoin?

And how about a help group, and a Q&A - how to tell you have become religious about Bitcoin???

No doubt the Muslims in the Middle Ages were much more tolerant towards "heretics", then Western Christians, however, this kind of tolerance is still not the religious freedom in the modern sense, only "peoples of the Book" are protected, although in practice they have a funny way to randomly expand the scope of such people, like just assume another religion's saint is an Islamic prophet coming before Muhammad,  in the end even Zoroastrians are considered "peoples of the Book". Also, I am sure that atheists are/were not tolerated.

   As I understand it the reason for the massacre of the tribe of Qurayzah was treason. This was war time. They swore to be allies to the Muslims and then broke the treaty. Leaving enemy troops behind your lines would be to invite a massacre of your own people by opening the rear. Of course, I wasn't there, so I don't really know.

    The subjects of Byzantium and the Persian empire also had to pay taxes. Non-Roman citizens were also second class citizens in the eastern Roman empire. If a 2.5% tax(the exact same amount paid by the first class citizens) on monetary wealth is humiliating(that means income, residence, and purchases were not taxed- only assets like gold) then how humiliating must it be to live in the US or Europe today.
   Anyway, I am not trying to change anyone's opinion, just pointing out that the US was not the first place that religious freedom was secured by constitutional law.

    

  

    

I'm not sure of what point you wish to make.  I'm not a history buff, so i can't even be a fun sparring partner.  The little i know about this comes from vaguely remembering that non-Muslims had to pay extra tax or convert (i assume that's your "humiliating protection tax"?) and a quick glance at a wikip page.
From the little i've learned this seems like a typically ugly thing man has done to man since the beginning of time, regardless of faiths involved.  The link to Islam is interesting.  Muhammad was instructed by Gabriel, God's messenger, if we're ready to give Islam the same benefit of doubt we offer Christianity?  In that case, what choice did he have?  Abraham was ready to slaughter his own son on God's say-so.
As for "second-class citizens," more than a thousand years more recent is importing cargo-holds worth of human cattle into US of A by decent, God-fearing Christians.

Do i think modern Muslims would oppose "that tax" globally?  I doubted.  I also have my doubts about Jews, Christians, atheists & just about everyone else.  I bet they all would levy that tax, given half the chance.  Wouldn't you?

And no less, either...

America also wasn't overthrown by an army of treaty-breaking caravan-raiders based on the personal vendetta of a leader who had been rejected from it...

Even after that, the Islamic Constitution simply instituted Dhimmitude. Non-muslim subjects and slaves were forced to pay the Jizya, a humiliating protection tax. They were decidedly second-class citizens, a bit like how the MB would have it in Egypt.

Freedom was hardly the point of it, it was about keeping their ill-gotten control.

The only reason I lambaste it now is that hardly any modern Muslim would oppose the idea of instituting such a tax globally, given the chance. Stop me if I'm wrong...

No more than US had to do with mass murder of pesky injuns (now that they're no threat & we got their land: Native Americans)

That's so humanitarian. How did Medina get a Muslim state? Anything to do with mass murder of Jews?

   Freedom of religion was a right secured by the Constitution of Medina which founded the first Islamic state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Medina
    This was at least 1150 years prior to the revolutionary war in the british colonies. Just for the record. Christians, Jews, and people of other beliefs lived in Islamic countries, sometimes in peace, sometimes in conflict, to the present day. Muslims and Jews, on the other hand, were expelled from their homes in Italy and Spain, from the 12th to 15th centuries after Jesus (Peace and blessings be with him and with his mother).

Funny you brought up the torture and death, so I figure something should be said about the medieval justice system. For hundreds of years, trial by fire was the prevailing method of determining who is guilty, it stayed in use because, guess what, it somehow worked. People on trial really believed in things like divine intervention, and usually confessed immediately  after such a decision was made by the judge.

Now back to the question of whether there were people who are atheistic but were too afraid to speak up, it maybe true there are people who did not speak up due to the fear of torture and death, but I think it's also important to understand why people gradually started to speak up after a certain time point, the fact that theologists like Aquinas would feel the need to reconciliate Christian belief with Greek philosophy and logic, is quite telling.

About the freedom of/from religion, it's true that the American founding fathers were the first with the important foresight to establish it formally as one of the basic principle of the government, probably due to their ancestors' experience of being persecuted religiously, yet it still should be pointed out U.S was not the first nation to treat all religions equally before the law.

The main difference between today and Medieval Times is that back then heresy was a crime punishable by torture and death. It is very possible that people back then were tempted to lose their faith even more so than today but were too afraid to speak their minds. If they didn't speak up, you would have no way of knowing about it today would you?

One of the great gifts given to us (in America) by our founding fathers was the freedom of religion and freedom from religious persecution. Now we are free to use our own minds to question our faith and discuss it in, hopefully, rational conversations with others, and through the use of the Internet, all over the world.

I tend to believe that people losing their faiths in religion not because of their misfortunes, but their fortune to be able to live in the modern era, and the availability of alternative explanations. Medieval people suffered a lot more than perhaps any of us, yet they are always feverishly religious, without finding out how much better life could possibly be, or having access to alternatives(they didn't know about Confucianism, and Greek/Latin literatures are off the limit for most people) , you will just choose to believe life is what it should be, because it's the same for everyone, or rather, your material well-being, and everything else is decided by you lineage, you have not seen an exception. Actually, the real revolution of thoughts only happened after the scholars(all of them clerics) started studying works of Antiquity, and learning things that none of them had conceived for the previous hundreds of years. Then slowly it started to transform every aspect of people's life, first the nobles, then the poors.

Also hundreds of years later we are perhaps much more confident with our own judgement, be it about morality or something else, seeing that people here pretty much question God because they are already assertive about certain things being right regardless of God, unimaginable for the Medieval folks.

Like it really takes a lot for you?

Correction: They don't know what's going on

...

Until you ask them!

*rim shot* 

And this is just a side-pursuit for me. The greatest minds in Quantum Mechanics admit they don't fully understand what's going on. But that's what makes science so fun. The thrill of discovering what's over that next hill.

I'll have to look into it. Thanks.

My husband tries to discuss things like this with me.  He also tries to explain the code he is working at work.  I have learned to nod and smile and say, "That is very interesting."  It makes him feel good.

So, Myrkul, everything you have said is very interesting. 

If you love physics and the study of the universe though you might want to read a book called "Starlight and Time" by Dr. Russell Humphreys.  It was really fascinating.  My husband loved it, tried to dumb it down enough for me to understand.  I could sort of grasp some of the concepts, but I probably should not start another debate here. It is more about the age of the universe than anything else though, but for minds who really like to think there is some interesting things in there for sure.