David Gergen engages Sissela Bok, a fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, author of "Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment."
DAVID GERGEN: Sissela, you begin your book on violence on television by talking about the gladiators in Rome.
God is an imagined concept of a higher intelligence which we accept by faith, the singularity will be a real thing,. With the advent of artificial intelligence we will have a God, and a personal guardian angel that will grow up with us. It will teach us, transport us and be with us every day we will love our angle and our God. Our intellect is a finite substance, there is only a limited amount we can know or believe. What we believe is also limited to basic human attributes and therefore our belief in God is also limited. Although there can be many different interpretations of the relation and aspects of the unknown, metaphysical, and infinite attributes of God, there can only be one true, ideal belief. This ideal is what will serve the individual life and the future of mankind best, in fact the ideal Religion.
Unless you are a devout creationist, you understand and accept the basic concepts of evolution, that nature produces biological change over time.
What most of us don't notice is that evolution is an underlying mechanical aspect of our universe which appears to behave like fractals, creating order from the chaotic nature of entropy..
Today we take our solar calendar for granted. But it was the ancient Egyptians who were the first to develop a solar calendar. Before the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt around 3150 BCE into what we call the Ancient Egyptian civilization, the two countries developed their own calendars. In Lower Egypt, the winter solstice was regarded as the birthplace of their sun god Ra. Around 4500 BCE, they counted the time elapsed between Ra's visits to his birthplace as 365 days. To keep track of his birthday, they introduced a lunisolar calendar of this length. It had 12 moons or months of 29 or 30 days each and an additional or intercalary month every two or three years as the first month. This meant the celebration of the birth of Ra could always be in the last month
On January 10 49BC Caesar croses the Rubecon and then inters Rome, Pompey, the Senators that are with him and their armies sail to Epirus. Epirus is where the oldest Hellenic oracle is, where Alexander the Greats' mother came from. A region that Aristotle considered to have been the most ancient part of Greece and where the Hellenes originated.
Think about this for one moment... These men have gone to the most holy ground they know to fight the last battle of a long civil war.
To the Roman religion these must be extremely sacred grounds.