The mind is often thought of as a continuously operating “machine” handling all the inputs and giving all the outputs that are part of our daily experience. I have come to the conclusion that our minds are more like the SETI@home project than a Cray Supercomputer. Each of the things that must be processed, whether it is your homework, lunch, breathing, interpersonal relationships, driving a car, Mozart, walking or philosophy are processed by a part of your nervious system working in teams or semi-independently on the particular task at hand.

These different processes are coupled more or less closely by the neurological connections formed by habit. It is likely that you will solve similar problems in ways that are similar those that were sucessful before. The brain’s “wiring” is connected by experience. There is obviously a lot of “wiring” that comes from instinct, and probably from “race memory” where your ancestor’s successes in solving certain problems effected the morphology and ease of developing the same “circuits” as your grandparents’.

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Torture

(my Definintion)

1) An act to cause substantial pain to a person held in captivity.

2) An act that through pain or severe discomfort that terrorizes prisoner so as to fear imminent loss of life, body parts or permanent function.

3) An act described above proscribed by international agreements and accords.

Torture is Evil.

Torture is ineffective as an intelligence activity because an individual will say whatever the captor wants to hear, whatever will “make it stop”. What the captor wants to hear as often as not turns out not to be the truth. often is not the reality.
Torture will cause an individual to make false confessions, to implicate innocents, and fabricate plots or false history. This terrible for intelligence, as decisions are made on the preconcieved notions of the captor, and not the reality of the situation.
No civil society should employ or tolerate torture.

See:

Torture in Wikipedia

Fundamentalism –

1. Led by authoritarian males who consider themselves superior to others, and in religious groups subjugate women and dominate their fellow believers.
2. Leaders retain self-beneficial aspects of their historic beliefs and of the modern world.
3. Draws distinction between themselves as true believers, and others; convinced that they are right and anyone who contradicts them is ignorant and possibly evil.
4. Is militant and fights against any challenge to their beliefs. They are often angry and sometimes resort to verbal or physical abuse against those who interfere with their agenda
5. Self-definition is increasingly narrow and restricted to isolate themselves, to demagogue emotional issues and view change, cooperations, negotiation and other efforts to resolve differences as signs of weakness

(Jimmy Carter in Our Endangered Values : America\’s Moral Crisis)

Another characteristic of fundamentalism is that issues are distilled to binary values, there are no shades of grey: Your are either with us, or against us.

Fundamentalism is Evil

(Is this a fundamentalist statement?)

Major fundamentalists are:

• Adolph Hitler – leader of the Positive Christianity Nazi Party
• Tomás de Torquemada – Spanish Inquisition
• Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini – Leader of Shiite Islam and Iran
• David Koresh – leader of the Branch Davidians
• Jim Jones – leader of Jonestown
• Josef Stalin– leader of “godless” USSR
• Osama Bin Laden – leader of Al Qaeda
• George W. Bush ? – leader of Christian USA