Holy

A political term signifying that something is absolute and does not depend on any human-reachable thing.

Ancient traditions, from times when education was too expensive and superstition was a better way to propagate information, have imposed the cult of some things as holy as an easy way to have people propagate this information.

As with any method, this method can be used (and was used) to propagate all kind of information, bad as well as good. But this method, where people learn without questioning, leads to crooks taking advantage of people's ignorance, and either the method stresses on conservatism, and information cannot be enhanced, and integrate feedback from real life, or it doesn't, and crooks will corrupt the information. This method for propagating information thus has high noise level, low adaptation rate, and nasty side effects; but it requires no civilizational investment to be possible.

This is why this method is inferior to other methods that do not involve reason in place of blind trust, that accept feedback most adapted to real-life, and not utterly corrupted by crooks, or stoned by conservatism. Note that there is a full range of intermediate methods between these, where belief slowly gives place to reason; actually, reason is always founded on beliefs, and beliefs can only be narrowed, never eliminated. Also note that, narrowing beliefs requires an ever larger cultural background, to confront beliefs with knowledge from real-life. Thus, only the progress of civilization makes use of reason possible, while this use makes civilization possible in turn, by having it compete against the natural tendency toward entropy and chaos, as is expressed by crooks.

As humans can only reach human-reachable things, we can conclude that nothing that is a holy thing is in a human's grasp. Conversely, we see that nothing that is in human grasp is holy. Thus, anything we can successfully talk about is not holy, and there's no point trying to talking about holy things.

If you don't want to apply this to the human world, at least you can apply it to the computer world, where nothing is holy as everything was decided and can be changed by humans.

Note that happily, things do not need be holy to be useful. Also note that things needn't be holy or universally true to deserve respect. But these are quite another debate.


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