GOOGLE.COM -- SACRED WEB -- Transhumanism can be defined as the ideology which seeks to modify or improve the human race. A very basic question that must be asked before we presume to tamper with humanity is what it means to be 'human'. From the standpoint of traditional thought, transhumanism rests on the fallacy of materialism. Materialistic science's attempts to address these philosophical issues are inadequate. It reduces man to matter and humanity to its mechanisms, thereby rejecting their true spiritual foundations. By denying those spiritual foundations, transhumanism dehumanizes man, devaluing his true stature, substance, heritage and purpose, and deprives him of the humility of his creaturehood, the dignity of his spiritual status, and his capacity for the grace of transcendence. ...

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FS.BLOG -- Most of us are amateurs but we refuse to believe it. This is a problem because we're often playing the game of the professionals. What we should do, when we're the amateur, is to invert the problem. Rather than trying to win, we should avoid losing. This was a point Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett, made in a letter to Wesco Shareholders. Munger wrote: "Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.... It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent." ...

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WASHINGTONPOST.COM -- Last year, a group of liberal New Yorkers flew to Michigan to [stay with] a group of conservative Christian corrections officers. It was an improbable experiment in bridging the political divide. To complete the exchange, the Michigan conservatives flew to New York City and stayed in the apartments of the Jewish liberals. "I feel like this brought out the best of me," Ackelsberg [a liberal] told me. "I wish I could appear everywhere in my life the way I felt called to appear then." Follett [a conservative] found himself feeling unusually emotional around the New Yorkers. "This had a very therapeutic aspect to it," he said, "because we were being heard, genuinely heard, by those that we felt misunderstood us." ...

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THEATLANTIC.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2008: "The quest for identity can then become an exclusionary process -- we define ourselves less by what we are for and more by whom we are against. When this happens, diversity turns quickly from a source of beauty to a cause of discord."] ARTICLE: America's political divisions are driven by hatred of an out-group rather than love of the in-group. Why? A new study helps provide an answer. What they found is fascinating: Americans' mental image of the "other side" is a caricature. Among Democrats, education seems to make the problem much worse. Democrats with a high-school degree suffer from a greater perception gap than those who don't. Democrats with a college degree harbour greater misunderstandings than those who don't. And those with a postgrad degree have a way more skewed view of Republicans than anybody else. Americans who rarely or never follow the news are surprisingly good at estimating the views of people with whom they disagree, as compared to those who follow the news most of the time. ...

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PERCEPTIONGAP.US -- To learn how well Americans understand each other, we partnered with YouGov to survey 2,100 Americans. We asked Americans what they themselves believed and what they estimated people on the other side believed. We then calculated the difference between the predictions and reality. The conclusion? Americans have a deeply distorted understanding of each other. We call this America's "Perception Gap". Overall, Democrats and Republicans imagine their political opponents hold "extreme" views twice as much as they do. Even on the most controversial issues, Americans are less divided than most of us think. The majority of Americans hold views that may not be so different from your own. News media and (for Democrats) education increases, rather than reduces, the "Perception Gap." ...

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OZANVAROL.COM -- Mathematician Andrew Wiles became a celebrity after proving Fermat's Last Theorem -- which had remained unsolved for more than three centuries. When he got stuck -- which was often -- Wiles stopped, let his mind relax, and go for a walk by the lake. "Walking," he explains, "has a very good effect in that you're in this state of relaxation, but at the same time you're allowing the sub-conscious to work on you." Solutions to complex problems often come as a subtle whisper -- not a big bang. To perceive the whisper, you must walk away from the problem and create space for interior silence to oppose contemporary chaos. ...

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