How is fasting supposed to get you closer to God?
I'm assuming that that is what the point of religious fasting is. I could be wrong (and if I am, tell me so). But if that is what fasting is supposed to do, then how exactly does it do this? Any help, especially from people who have fasted before would be very helpful. Thanks.
Do Australians generally feel culturally closer to the British or to the Americans?
For the majority of the population, I would say definitely British even if not always at a conscious level. Until quite recently in Australia’s history, culturally we were almost exclusively of British descent. It wasn’t until post WW2 that Australia began to actively encourage immigration from any other countries and even then, proportionally most immigration was still from Britain.I have frequently heard people accuse Australians of aping or “adopting” British culture and customs but this is not the case. In all essentials except for location, Australia was actually British. We speak the way we do, we play the sports we play, eat the food we eat and share the humour we do because it actually is our legitimate culture, not something we adopted from a foreign country.When you have millions of immigrants from just one area of the world, they are going to bring their culture with them and it will take many more generations before that changes to a completely “Australian” culture, if it ever does entirely.Compared with European countries our history is very short. Europeans have only been here for 228 years and Australia as a nation has only existed for a little over 100 years. Throughout my life I have had many friends and acquaintances of Greek and Italian extraction. Though they all, or almost all, identify as Australian, they still feel very strong ties to their cultural roots, even when they have been here for two or three generations.The cultural mix is changing now, and consequently so is our society, but it is still going to take a very long time to entirely breed the British out of us.
Is aging a disease? Is it even RIGHT to think like that?
Medical think tanks from the UK to Denmark to the USA are considering aging to be a disease process they would like to heal or reverse. What? If we increase the life spans of people in industrialized, or wealthy, nations, and don't adjust the birth rate to allow for keeping a stable population, then we have fewer resources to assist starving children in third world nations. On the other hand, if we DO adjust the birthrate for a stable population we will soon have a senior citizen heavy population for the few young to support. So tell me, please, is there ANYTHING positive enough about a population exceeding a life expectancy of 100 years to make it worth sinking billions of medical and drug research dollars into this instead of already existing diseases?