Genuinely spiritual people only become part of religious communities for pragmatic  and/or protection-seeking reasons. Today, most of them step aside from "religious belongingness". The advances of science have enabled them to step down to earth from the "dizzy" height of institutionalized class-self-appointed dominance over the minds of the plebs.

Unfortunately most of religion still has a vested interest in ignorance. Some religious leaders are well-educated, but almost all seem to have retained some link to the toxic blend of myth, superstition and higher-power special-pleading appeal. (Myth and story, of course, are in themselves wonderful.)

Spirituality is really only to be trusted when it gives what's due to science and philosophy. 'God' is not a kind of glue than sticks together the members of super-tribes through their space-time journey. 'God' is to be better defined as the root-justification of the species-survival necessity of the ethical life; as well as being the Mystery of how it all began and how it all will end.

How a transport network might work without the private car.

Ready transport availability for all is important. It can be fast and easy or slow and leisurely. It should have minimal impact on the nature of the land it crosses. Fast transport from village to village and in-and-out of towns is achieved, according to Terres (Syai), by means of  propeller-driven miniplanes that run on bio-fuel but are sped along an overhead magnetized rail above the ground. This interferes with the visual environment, but the advantages over long-distance tunnelling are very considerable (e.g. for fixing faults). In fact a long-distance tunnel system would not be feasible economically, nor be done with sufficient safety. The Syai rapid-travel system provides privacy and comfort as well as tourist-satisfying views. Each miniplane takes only one adult (perhaps with a small child), but they run plentifully for groups to go in 'trains' of them. I have drawn  a sketchy diagram of a bottom-up view of a miniplane, but a request for details would take up so much space here that I must leave it for a reply I could supply specifically to any genuinely interested person. 

Sport and other potentially creative activities as mirroring of the state of a civilization

THE WING OF CORRUPTION

Basic human nature is good, but "civilized" human nature is a balance on a knife-edge, between "civilized" survival (which ultimately requires ethical thought and practice) and corruption.  Sportsmanship is great but sport in itself (as with religion) shows how easily corruption can take hold, fouling-up whatever is genuinely creative and wholesome.

What changed the path of social evolution for Syai civilization was the profound understanding that the cleverness of the brain can be used  to enhance the benignity of civilization (from most individuals' point of view) and the beauty and sustainability of the natural environment. But on the other hand the cleverness of the brain can alternatively be used to enhance environmental over-exploitation, and the advantages of individuals and 'in-groups' over non-connected individuals and 'out-groups'. Unlike my imagined Syai world (and other possible worlds out there that may have awakened to the potentialities of long-term survival of intelligent beings) our world is at a turning point! A dark uncertainty hangs over it. Economics, religion and (professional) sport are three societal areas in which the Syai civilization would strike many people on this planet as very revolutionary; but not totally out of reach. Syai sport, for instance, has great regulatory importance in both fostering general happiness and preventing all kinds of malfunctions and self-seeking temptations, but there is no such thing as professional sports players or teams.  

Moving beyond the nuclear-family "hangup"

We live in a culture of bubbles. Each bubble contains a man a woman and two or more children. This is the nuclear family, designed by leaders of the industrial revolution. Throughout those times, the 'factory' demanded male hands supported by servant-wives. Conveniently for the new capitalists, the wives see to all the workers' personal and domestic needs while at the same time producing more workers-to-come.

Largely bolstered by religious conservatism the same nuclear-family social structure ("Ah, the Fam-i-ly!") has acquired an aura of holiness. But there is a saying that - in my futuristic Syai world - is taken seriously: "It takes a village to raise a child."  Adults in the Syai world live in villages, balancing their life-styles between private and communal activities. Towns are not their homes, although they may stay in them for quite long periods for specialized work and other recognized purposes. Women choose when to have a child, and with whom. Each child has a special carer; usually the mother but possibly the father or a guardian. In practical ways, it is the whole village that 'parents' the child for its first 20 or so years. However, at puberty the child moves into 'supervised' independence with a home cottage-caravan of her or his own.

"Tribal" attitudes to human fertility need to change.

This picture is symbolic of my subject here, but it might strike a familiar note with those of us who have been in the centres of major world cities, jostling our way slowly through crowds. An ominous feature of this drawing is the banners. Crowdedness will lead to formation of rival "tribes" of gangs, fighting for space.
   Predicted rise in population from year 2000 is from 8 to 9 billion by the half-century. We are told that the exponential rise in population will level off. Will it?  True, population replacement is falling in some developed countries and the rise is less steep in the so-called third world. I do not think this is going to be long-term effective against the strength-gathering factors that will keep population numbers rising.
1. Even spread of simple medical procedures has changed death-rates and modern medicine will continue to keep people alive longer, with fewer babies dying.
2. Large families are still common, and even encouraged by many world cultures and religions.
3. The "export" of children from poorer large families to countries where the pop. is static or falling will increase at an accelerated pace.
4. There is a limit on how far technologies, expansion into wilderness (with growing ill effects), and demands for satisfaction of the needs and cravings of the "civilized" human species, can go in solving basic problems.
5. Already environmental degradations, depletions and pollution have pushed us well beyond the limits of sustainability. A new "crunch-time" is beginning to emerge that will cause poverty to keep spiralling upwards and with it population growth will pick up and continue to grow toward global civilization's collapse.

The Syai world of my "utopian" vision gives some pointers to how the Malthusian catastrophe might be avoided. Even the Syai emperor and empress would never dream of having more that three offspring!
A limit of three is imposed democratically and universally. Some adults have duties toward children (and enjoy them!) but have none of their own, preferring the freedom of work and recreation without children. A "village" culture prevails in which adults work in "towns" and enjoy entertainment or sport that only "towns" can offer, but keep an anchorage in the "village" countryside in support of its "extended family". Of course I have written al lot more detail about this in writings I hope eventually to be able to offer to those interested.

If you have to end life, maybe the best way ...

Marie Antoinette hardly deserved to die in this way - the guillotine with all the "circus" around it!   But in regard to choice of death - if you were forced to choose and had a choice - this may be superior to any other.There is some recent anecdotal evidence of that. Dying quickly and "cleanly" is not as easy as many people think. In writings about Syai I take up the case for the guillotine as a punishment in very limited circumstances.

I recommend reading the mini-article that The New Penguin English Dictionary includes with its definition of 'Guillotine' (p.620). It could be the most "humane" choice of death in the cases of both felony and voluntary euthanasia. Because Syai society is geared to peace, fairness, sustainability and promotion of happiness for the vast majority, calculate murder is extremely rare. But there has to be certain boundaries that can't be crossed on pain of death. To eliminate war as we know it on Earth, such 'tribal' groups as there are must use only weaponry deployed by the individual's muscles and natural senses. All violence can deserve some degree of punishment, but introducing weapons of fire and poison has been made a capital offence.

Education: key to self-discipline and good citizenship

In our society the task of training up children to be good citizens and good to themselves has to be that of parents and teachers. While some discreet legal protection is to be extended by governments and their agencies, their task is mainly to ease the difficulties that crop up in the work of parents and teachers. In the Syai society I (fictionally) write about, the task is given to the guardian (usually the dedicated parent) and to elders who have the time for it, and - very importantly - to the children themselves!

As children's understanding of the world develops, they need proper general knowledge, not myth parading as knowledge. Their critical faculties (in Syai) are developed so that they understand the limitations of knowledge and the dangers in power-relationships; also, the proper place of myth-and-story in their emotional development. 

Neither the old-fashioned bullying teacher-pupil relationship nor the struggle of the teacher against some children's bad parenting - the teacher in a straight-jacket of powerlessness and governmental pressures - achieve anything but a society of "winners and losers", of  predominant dissatisfaction, stress and misery.

Physics, Time-travel and Free Will: Do we want to risk a dead planet?

According to Einstein (and no-one' yet proved him wrong) the Theory of Relativity does not preclude the possibility of time travel. But to avoid "the Grandfather Paradox"  one is obliged to postulate alternative worlds or universes. 

I go back and kill my grandfather. From the time I do that, or even before - if the world before that time is "leading up" to that event - that world is not strictly existing any more as the world I am existing in on my return to the present. It may be very similar to it, of course, because my time-travel act is insignificant in the big picture. Nevertheless, killing my grandfather would be something I do by "crossing over" into a parallel world.

Apply the same reasoning to free will. If parallel worlds physically explain away the paradox of time travel, it can also explain away the paradox of free will or choice. I make a choice that slightly alters the course of events as would have unfolded without that choice being made. But the world as it would have been is still real. It is the alternative world that gives my thought and act of choosing reality. If it were not, then it is the one world that dictates what I think and act as it "dictates" to the wind to break off a branch of a tree. Freedom of choice would have no meaning whatsoever. We would be robots cursed with a completely useless, meaningless "extra" (like an appendix) called "the illusion of freedom".

If there is plausibility to the general idea of parallel universes, then our real individual freedom to choose must extend to a collective freedom. Surely, we are "criminally" responsible if our choices fail to create a genuinely sustainable world (civilization) similar to the one I picture in my imagination and writings, the Syai world. Do we collectively want to fail - which will very likely mean a dead world, similar to the many as exemplified in the picture above?  No; and leaving aside all moral consideration, to keep doing what we don't want is an act of madness. 

'Picturing' the gods.

In Victorian times and earlier it was commonplace for artists to picture God and associated celestial beings, not to mention the old gods of Greek mythology. It's interesting that in these times we are more shy and more reluctant to represent gods and even human figures who were mouthpieces for a 'god'  in art, especially when it is being  done for the benefit of believers in a still-living religious faith. The modern 'believer in the One God'' seems to think material representation is best left to nothing more that old-time pictorial symbols not taken seriously. In Islamic religion is completely forbidden to picture Allah and His human mouthpiece in any way whatsoever. In my Syai world religion is pretty well identical with myth and the power of myth to awaken the inner mind. Accordingly, there is no trouble over picturing the gods as one might suggest they should look in an artist's imagination, in the imagination of a child or of anyone whether a skilled illustrator or not.   

The Syai world, possibly in another gakaxy.

The universe contains around 100 billion galaxies, each with between 100 to 500 billion stars. Most scientists are convinced that by dint of sheer numbers there must be aliens out there. This would include some races of beings similar to us. Biologists tend to me more sceptical about this than are mathematicians. One biologist put the chances at only one or two planets with 'intelligent' life in every 5-to-7 galaxies. But that was before up-to-date astronomers revealed that planets are far more common around stars that had been thought likely.

The Syai planet ('Feishoafeis') is one such planet as imagined. Who knows? At least some likeness to it may be out there. How would we contact the Syai aliens? I don't know. For my purposes in writing about them and creating this blog, I just assume the contact has been made. Someone records discussions and writes about the memories of a visitor who has been to the Syai world. The "Someone" I call Lakka (L.) and the "visitor" I call Terres, the name he/she called him/her self when with the Syai people.  L.

I have used Google to investigate how things are with constructed languages. Apart from the one(s) developed by Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings and old attempts at international languages like Esperanto, there doesn't seem to be much going on in recent times. 'WiseGeek' is a website which has a good summary of what constructed languages are about. I haven't yet registered to be able to contribute on this site, but am still trying. 'Syai' is a language linked to a fictional world and culture, quite well developed in itself. The Syai world has a  sustainable, small-growth stable civilization with a culture of individualized well-being. To me it suggests the direction in which this planet's human civilization might progress to avoid disaster. "Utopia is a beacon on a hill that can never be climbed", but its light can nevertheless show up more clearly the alternative ways. The picture contains an example of hand-written Syia script. The printed script is available but so far only on my personal computer.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26764929

This picture was on my face book posts and I added the connection to the above to get the more dramatic picture of the giant rat caught in a kitchen in Sweden. My interest in this is due the beginnings of the 'Syai' project when I decided that evolution on the Syai planet (Feishoafeis) would throw up a dominant human-like species not quite like us. It  would be of evolutionary descent from large rodents with some similarity to the rat. Marsupials and even birds can evolve to fill 'gaps' that cause them to become very similar in appearance to the mammals that would (if available) normally fill those gaps. I reason, then, that the Syai wouldn't be much different from us, as far as 'intelligent'  life goes. The chilling thought, exercising the minds of  some evolution-researching academics lately, is that our rats are waiting in the wings for out final  "stuff-up" and extinction. Some branch-species will grow to our size in the post-human regenerating world; will feed off the smaller rat-species, dress in their skins, live in caves and eventually replace our civilization (with one - hopefully - more like the Syai?!)

I need more assistance on how to operate this blog and to find the possible channels of interest in it. This blog is very relevant to the present global 'crisis' of confidence (and lack of it) in the future: whether we are moving more toward a 'dystopia' or making some progress out of the dangers we are in to approach some sate that is more 'utopian' than the state we are in at this start of the 21st Century.

 I have discovered by exploring through Google that there must be considerable interest "out there" in invented languages. There are or have been many 'experiments' in it and I believe they all have something to teach us about language, even if they aren't (in themselves) very successful. One of the uniquenesses of the Syai language is that it has its own native script (existing only on my computer so far, I'm afraid).