Why did Christianity survive when empires collapsed around it. Ideas: At one point, it was the "state" religion, effectively outlawing competitors. This tradition continued in one form or another well into modern times; Christianity offers eternal life if and only if you "believe" in some formula that all Christian sects agree on. The Devil is in the details; Christianity continues the tradition of other Abrahamic religions in having a written tradition. Disagreements on dogma routinely result in schisms - effectively creating a religion based on human opinion but also leading to the spread of hundreds of variations. The dazzling family tree of "Chrisitan" sects is presented here .

Watching this podcast on Kant. Kant's categories seem like a primitive version of object-oriented analysis. UML gives a taste of what happens when you extend this idea to describe what actually happens in the real world. Surfaces and Essences challenge Kant's idea of categories. In S&E, categories are analogies analogies and can get spectacularly arbitrary. I see a glimmer of how Hegel challenges the idea that we can know anything in the cut-and-dried categories Kant describes. It would be interesting to compare Kant's ideas with a modern understanding of the brain's workings. For example, space and time are hard-wired in the brain. Kant represents thought as processing categories - a kind of calculation. In our modern efforts to build a brain, we find this approach is limited ( Expert Systems ). Lately, we have learned the role of language. Large language models rely on patterns in language--not necessarily structured and logical. Intelligible language can be pro...