is religious extremism a form of autism?

this idea struck me yesterday - a lot of the "failure to communicate" or empathise with the other of religious extremists (whether flyover state fundamental christians, or jewish settlers or suicide bomber islamic nutters), is very like the behaviour of autistics....discuss:-
i
litanes, chanting, nodding head etc etc look a lot like people disengaging and not managing human relationships properly - a lot of the other things (obsession/compulsion with detail, completeness, interprestation, trainspotting) is very like the stamp collecting mentality of the extreme asperger....

perhps its genetic ? maybe it is treatable

richard dawkings should talk to the sanger institute to see if they can find the "got god gene" and remove it:)

mappa mundi - topographics of meaning

so it seems to me that there is some sort of principle of conservation of obscurity with maps - looking over the map room in any good museum, you find what appears at first sight to be increasing knowledge about the world - the accuracy of the outlines of coasts, rivers and so on, improves visibly over the centuries, no matter what culture and history you survey.

however, this is at a cost - it takes people to survey areas and logistical support, and a reason to want to survey an area - typically, this means that a population is growing into an area (or a culture is invading it), and the complexity of views of what the area is for must necessarily grow exponentially with each consciousness that forms a view on what "this land is for". Indeed, this works equally well in cyberspace - as we map the Internet better and better, we add more compute resources, and they hold ever more data with ever more logical interactions, so that, no matter how accurate a physical model we form of the net (or the planet) is, the logical, virtual, social, economic, political, and other human maps will more and more dominate.

This explains, for example, why drawing lines on maps to solve political problems (viz Ireland, Israel, Palestine, Serbia, CIS etc etc) is a pointless excercise - a line is the shortest distance between two mistakes.

conspiracy theory #101

clearly the US presidential elections have been controlled by Al Qaueda for the last two terms - how else would you explain them being handed Bush on a plate?

All super-villains need a superhero, and, as in the so-so movie, unbreakable, if the superhero aint their first, the supervillain has to create one. Ergo, Fiat Bush!

joan baez and george bush

I can't decide who is more evil - joan baez is so triumphally smug that she has an opponent - personally, i think that that is a really really weird reaction. I think i will have to go back to listening to the klaxons really loud...that or else the good the bad and the queen

bah humbug