Today

Few would argue that its was not essential for John Calvin to change church dogma in the 16th century. Also, few would argue that it was wrong for the Church to insist the the earth was at the center of the universe.
From writing the Bible in a common language to the inquisition the Church as always prevented truth and light form shinning through.

From... http://forum.opensourceecology.org/discussion/502/democratic-process
I would avoid any community with a direct democracy like the plague.
The idea that majority rules and people are all equal is just as dehumanizing as brutal dictatorships. Although you're more likely to be left alone in a brutal dictatorship than you are in a mob rule society. A dictator only has so much reach to harm the populace while mob rule gives every participant the power and encourages them to dehumanize and devalue their fellow neighbor.
Any society premised on the idea that all people are equal and *must* be given equal opportunities has and will end in suffering.

Self knowledge is like lost innocece

Philosophy is a debilitation

estranges us by confromtimg us with what we allready know.  There is an irony the difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you allready know it works by talking what we know of familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange.  Philosophy estranges us from the familiar not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing but and here is the risk.once the familar turns strange its never quite the same again

http://www.springerlink.com/content/9072633443675517/

Abstract

Digital phlosophy or physics

Gregory Chaitin COLLOQUIUM: Leibniz on Complexity (March 2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKKD-_VxxFA

A rabbi is not a priest, neither in the Jewish sense of the term nor in the Christian sense of the term. In the Christian sense of the term, a priest is a person with special authority to perform certain sacred rituals.

A rabbi, on the other hand, has no more authority to perform rituals than any other adult male member of the Jewish community. In the Jewish sense of the term, a priest (kohein) is a descendant of Aaron, charged with performing various rites in the Temple in connection with religious rituals and sacrifices. Although a kohein can be a rabbi, a rabbi is not required to be a kohein.

A rabbi is simply a teacher, a person sufficiently educated in halakhah (Jewish law) and tradition to instruct the community and to answer questions and resolve disputes regarding halakhah. When a person has completed the necessary course of study, he is given a written document known as a semikhah, which confirms his authority to make such decisions.

What's puzzling is that morality so often comes thumping into it - when the subject has been taught for generations as if morality was someone else's job.

The economic historian Roger Backhouse says there was an historic split from "normative economics" - what we should do - to "positive economics" - the description of what we do in fact.

Some seem to blame this approach for the crash, implying that it somehow separated economic ideas from what people really are. Off goes the money into some virtual world that's nothing to do with me, back comes profit. So goes the parody.

An interesting question is whether this intellectual divorce might change in the light of the global economic mess of the last few years, in which much of the anger has been righteous. At least one leading economist, John Kay, thinks we should go back to talking about political economy, instead of economics, to show that moral values are still inescapably in there.