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They make any flavor they can think of on occasion. But their normal stuff is good, largely because they use actual sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.

http://www.jonessoda.com/files/yrlab.php <- For submitting label photos.

We should do a propaganda dump periodically into their gallery.

Yes, but it displays a horrid lack of 8s and 9s, and everyone knows those are the secret behind 23.

Operation Clambake links to Releasing the Bonds as a good book on counter-indoctrination. Has anyone read it yet? It sounds like it might be useful for our BIP work and similar stuff.

All Discordians have views. Well, sometimes. Sort of.

Anyone who thinks that definite, non-statistical things can be said about a religion of chaos is rather silly. We can catalogue commonly held beliefs, we can analyze their probability of occurring and such, but none of us all have the same belief (though there is a probability, however small, that we may hold the same belief for a time, because chaos is like that.)

WOMP!

There is tons of stuff in the Joy of Cooking. I recommend the 1975 edition.
So now for some blatant copyright infringement! Hooray!

Beef Stew Gaston (4-6 servings)
Cook a day ahead.
Cut into small pieces and, if very salty, parblanch briefly:
1/2 lb salt pork.
Dry and saute the pork slowly in a large skillet.
Cut into pieces:
2 lb boneless stewing beef
Brown the beef in the hot drippings over high heat. Spoon off most of the accumulated fat.
Sprinkle the meat with:
seasoned flour.
Combine and heat until boiling:
1¬? cloves garlic, chopped
1 large chopped onion
1 cup bouillon
1 cup canned tomato sauce
12 peppercorns
3 whole cloves
¼ cup chopped parsley
1/3 bay leaf
Place the meat in a heavy saucepan. Pour above ingredients over it. Simmer covered 2-3 hours or intil meat can be easily pierced w/ a fork.
During the last hour of cooking add:
¬? cup dry white wine
Cook seperately until nearly tender:
6 medium-sized pared quartered potatoes
6 pared quartered carrots
1 rib of celery, chopped
Add above veggies to the stew in the last 15 minutes of cooking.



There are other recipes for various stews, of course.

My mom makes a good stew. It's simple.

Sautee some veggies. Carrots, etc.

Make some broth. Stock works, you can make your own or use some pre-made stuff. Better than bouillon is reasonably good stock and not overly expensive.

Yes. Potatoes.

Spices are good. This depends on how you want the stew to taste. I like a cinnamon stick and cardamon and paprika and chipotle powder and some chopped habanero peppers. But I like spicy food. I'd prefer Bhut Jolokia peppers, but I've not seen any at stores around here.

Onions are good.

Cream/Milk are not really necessary, you can have a soupy stew. If you're lactose intolerant, or cooking for someone who is, or just lazy, use some cornstarch.

Boil water in a pressure cooker. Add veggies. add stew meat. etc. put top on. When the little vent thing starts to jiggle (it's meant to) then turn the heat down until it is just barely jiggling. Leave it for about 20 minutes. Then take it off the heat, run cold water over the cooker, this lets you actually open it without it exploding. Open it. Stew, without the 4 hour wait. Pressure cooker FTW.

Stew is basically pretty easy.

It's silly and weird, but that doesn't make it all happy. It's about chaos, and anyone who wants to be chaotic can't have such restrictions, unless one is determining restrictions in a chaotic manner (That meta-series can continue on up indefinitely, but you get the point.)

Except that entropy doesn't destroy things, it just makes things stagnant. And it probably doesn't apply to the universe anyway, since the 2nd law of thermodynamics only applies to certain types of systems and the universe may not be one of those types.

PD is happy and jokey? Since when?

My theory is true. It's totally useless, of course, since it would require a set of equations that could describe all belief, but if they did exist then I think they would have certain properties, and those properties that they probably have define Discordianism rather nicely.

So, yes, it's bullshit. But it makes pretty pictures, and those are nearly as good as the flowers.

Of course it's total bullshit, I'm trying to explain Chaos theory and the application thereof to theology in one post. Such oversimplification means everything I said is, in some way, wrong. However, it will give a basic understanding of the underlying concepts (hopefully) and maybe get people to understand more via their own research.
But probably not.
However, I made pretty pictures to go with it, which makes it both easier to understand and more amusing. Robert L Devaney's paper on the Dynamics of Simple Maps would be a good starting point to really understanding this, and I CAN scan it all, there's nothing too complex... (It's undergraduate level math, really.)

For now just copy/paste it and use it as an OMF I guess.

To sum up:
Any given Discordian might believe anything at any point in time (unlike other religions, who's members only believe certain sets of things) but Discordianism as a whole has certain beliefs that are orbiting at least one strange attractor and would make really cool pictures if we could compute that stuff.

Imagine a big box. Each point in the box (X, Y, Z) is one set of religious beliefs. A few thousand/million for the Catholics, a few million for the Jews, etc, etc. Little clouds, and some of them might overlap. But pretty much all those little clouds are confined, they don't spread very far. You don't get Jews who believe in Ramses and Odin, if they do that they aren't Jews.
Discordianism's cloud fills the WHOLE BOX. We can believe ANYTHING. Now, our cloud IS denser at some points. More of us believe in Eris or something similar, so there is a bit of a cluster around the "chaos" side. But I know one Discordian who is a devout Catholic. Goes to church and everything. It might all change next Tuesday, but he's spreading that Discordian cloud out to overlap the others.
Discordians can believe anything, and we know it. This wreaks havoc with finding core beliefs, because some of us are bound to disbelieve the ability of a true Discordian to believe in anything (after all, someone has to not believe that!)...
So I present it as a bit of Chaos theory, since putting it into math makes it easier to understand. It also lets us make pretty pictures and describe things with relation to the Chaos in quantum mechanics and such, which adds even more fun.

"Um... yeah.
Wouldn't it be easier to say "all is one", and stop the conversation right there?"

Not really, since all isn't one. That's silly.
All can be represented by a point traveling through phase space, but the sheer number of dimensions needed to do so is insane.
One needs position, momentum, charge, mass, strong & weak nuclear force, etc. So at least 10 dimensions for each of the 10^80 particles in the universe.
So all is 1/(10^82) and that one keeps jumping around constantly. And it's actually a lot bigger than that.


Let's give religion 4 paramaters:
A, B, C, and dT.
A = Number of Gods believed in.
B = Number of Commandments
C = Average number of small children molested by the clergy, per week.
dT = 0.03 because that's a good number, and it makes what I'm doing next look nice, though that won't change the point in any way whatsoever.

We'll plot points with X, Y, Z co-ordinates as follows:
x'=x+ad(y-x)
y'=y+d(bx-y-zx)
z'=z+d(xy-cz)

We start with 0, then take the output of that and set it to the input, plot it in 3D space, and get a picture of the state of the "religion" as time progresses. Each X, Y, and Z point indicates a different state of theological discussion, the more spread out the graph gets the more the discussion is varying, the more condensed it is the stricter things are.

Polytheism is fun, so let's have 9 gods and 20 major rules. These can vary, of course, but it's simpler to understand if we only vary C.

Now, this is a simple religious structure. Real religions have a LOT more variables. But let's see what a small change can do!

This week an average of 1 kids were molested. Let's take a picture of that plot, shall we? Hue changes based on how fast the point moves, Value based on angle from the viewing plane:

What happens if, instead, 2 kids were molested, on average, per week?

3:

4:

5:

Interesting! The religion has become rather orderly!
6:

Even more so, but look at how different the order is from before!
11:

It goes to a circle until 19....
19:

At which point discussion is all over the place, on so many subjects that we can't keep track of it, it's too dispersed.
At 79 or more kids the religion falls apart due to over-molestation. At 0 kids molested it falls apart due to the inability of the priesthood to get off. Without that they all quit and without priests there is no religion anymore.

Now, if this were real the equation would be a LOT bigger with a LOT more variables, but I do believe that the sensitive dependence to initial conditions displayed here would exist, and there's a lot of evidence for that, eg Jesus and Buddha both preached peace, enlightenment, and nonviolence, but Jesus got himself nailed to some over-sized toothpicks and the Christians that followed him eventually started the Crusades.

(A note to math geeks: Yes, that's a Lorenz attractor. I needed a chaotic system with a small number of parameters. I COULD have used a 5th order 3-dimensional quadratic map with 168 parameters, but that would have taken too long.)

So all is one point moving through a very, very high dimensional phase space, in a very chaotic manner. Which really means it's a hell of a lot of different things, just that it's possible to see it as one if you can imagine 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 dimensions or so. Probably more.

So if someone tells you they are seeing that the universe is truly One and that they are One with everything, they are lying.

So, yeah. Discordianism one particular path through the set of all beliefs in the phase space of all beliefs, and unlike most religions our path hits every point in the phase space, though not all with equal frequency.

http://www.sancairodicopenhagen.com/tbpmd.html

Amusingly random, in the style of Good Omens.
Then again, it's 3 AM so I probably think it's more amusing than it actually is ATM.

I haven't read the whole thread, my HDD died and I'm just getting back to this forum.
Anyway, I think Discordianism is easiest to analyze/define with some concepts from Chaos theory in mathematics.
Most importantly is the concept of a phase space.
A phase space is a representation of a system. Let's take a gas in a box. Each molecule has a position and a velocity, which can be represented by a vector (X, Y, Z position, a, b, c vector end position.) Thus we need 6 dimensions to represent all possible states a molecule can be in. (For position+velocity only, of course.) We can plot the state of a molecule by the movement of a point through this phase space.
Then we add another molecule. That adds 6 more dimensions, so one point can still convey all possible states of the gas.
Eventually the phase space gets really, really big.

Discordianism is the religion of the belief in the phase space of all belief systems. Discordians each believe something different, and we all know it. Some don't admit it, of course, but that's a point in the phase space too. It would be interesting but impractical to model the dynamical system of human belief, but it does SEEM chaotic.