Robot rites and rituals

The core mechanics of religion is acquisition and development of the power to ignore.

Good religion helps you ignore your immediate sense of suffering and loss,  allowing you to exert beyond and grow beyond.  Eventually it can lead to  loss of self, and the attached suffering, sometimes permanently.

Bad religion helps you ignore others' suffering, and makes for great loot. 

The difference is morality & ethics. 

Hence the first precept is always non violence and non taking .

One needs to go past Aristotle and Confucius to reach Plato and Lao-tse, and often canmot leap-frog the first step (which is long arduous and many stepped)

Jeet Kune Do didn't spring forth from Bruce Lee's  brow magnificent and fully formed, it was a result of his mastering the many martial arts expending horrendous amounts of effort,  boxed in by iron discipline.

Exercises for deferring gratitude form the first step of religious training. To the uninformed, it looks like self-inflicted suffering. Like fasting. Or doing a slow boring thing again and again. It is important that the context be kept in perspective, and self-inflicted-suffering  not be seen as a noble end in itself.

a word on education

grammar and logic form the first bring in the edifice that is education.

arts provide a great medium for education. they train to improve sensory acuity. Drawing, painting, and sketching teach the eye to note details and distinguish between colours & shades, strokes,  and their effects. playing a musical instrument is an intensely cerebral task - reading the symbols in their notation, translating them to hand movements pertaining to the instrument, keeping in mind the melody/harmony while co-ordinating with others also doing the same. writing forces one to distil thoughts into a structured form. reading the classics stocks up the mind with many dilemmas one is bound to run into sooner or later

team sports teach deploying skills amidst alliances, uncertainty, and shared goals. Co-operation is the principle of which collective bargaining is the manifestation, and source of much wealth accumulation.

one key skill to acquire, is the skill of plugging away at learning and mastering a technique, and producing with it, until it is in the bone. all other skills are built using this skill.

now back to our regular programming...

Robots, if determinate, which by definition they are, cannot have intentions. Humans ,and programs, choose. Is there a non-deterministic element in  this choosing ? Probably not , I'd assume the machinations are not visible, but follow an algorithm, which doesn't involve tossing a coin as any of its steps.