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q is a Voiceless uvular stop, IPA [q].

Q is a Voiceless uvular affricate, IPA [q͡χ].

… Not one aggressively secular, historically informed answer to the question? Really? OP is clearly looking for one:

Some religions made it a main cause to conquer countries i.e. Islam, others’ was to unite religions i.e. Sikhism.

I’m not contradicting the other answers, but there is a place for this answer too. If any of you as Christians do not wish to be scandalised by a secular perspective, well, please stop reading now.

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The purpose behind the Historical Jesus’ preaching, so far as secular scholars can discern (and Historical Jesus research is notoriously slippery) was either apocalyptical (the majority view), or a commensal egalitarianism (Crossan’s view). Either to prepare Jews for the end days and the return of the Messiah; or to subvert the power structures of Jewish life with a community of embryonic socialism.

I like the latter narrative, but it seems to have fallen back out of fashion now.

The purpose of Jewish Christianity was to keep the Historical Jesus’ vision going, within the framework of Judaism.

The purpose of Pauline Christianity, and all the other shards of practice that emerged away from Jerusalem over the next century, seems to have been more radical still (leading to its rupture with Judaism), but also much less coherent. Whatever their theologies (and there were many), a common social imperative was offering support and succour to the Roman underclass.

The purpose of Imperial Christianity was to harness the emerging religion to the cause of unifying the empire. As civic institutions decayed, the emperors noticed that the hierarchy developed around the Christian church could fill in many of the functions that the civil service and noble benefactors no longer could—including, but certainly no longer restricted to, offering support and succour to the Roman underclass.

A2A McKayla.

McKayla, I squirm under this question. You and Jeremy are the two people that, when you started following me, I thought “… I should be a better person”.

I’m not a better person in the past three months. But I did think I should be, for a moment.

I’ve given a monthly tithe to two charities, because they both accosted me at the train station, because I’d finally started earning an actual salary, and because I knew the causes and knew them to be just. And because secular, apathetic, and big-government though I am, I reflected that, now that I had money, a tithe was a reasonable thing for me to give back.

One charity got overly aggressive with cold calling me to increase my tithe, so they’re out. Come to think of, I now remember there was an added reason why that charity got my initial tithe: the accosters were two young blonde Swedish twins, completing each others’ sentences.

No I am not making this up.

No I am not above that kind of thing. Neither, it would seem, was the charity.

Shame, because it is a charity close to my libertarian heart. Amnesty International.

The other charity has had me hooked for well over a decade. Doctors Without Borders. To heal the sick and the wounded where humanity is at its lowest ebb. That is a truly noble thing. That is Tikkun olam.

(What’s that? “Repairing the world” is only the liberal Jewish interpretation of the phrase, and the Orthodox interpretation is “eliminating idolatry”? That’s… *shrug*.)

Ah, OP.

The core lesson of life, which I rebelled against at 20 and acquiesced to at 40, is that all that we do, and all that we are, and all that we love shall one day be dust.

The core lesson of Silicon Valley is that, without a clear plan to profitability or even not-for-profit sustainability, all the online services that you do and are and love shall be dust, a hell of a lot sooner than you think.

My profile says I love Quorans, and I hate Quora Inc. My main reason for the latter is the ongoing bumbling of UI and knowledge management and moderation.

The subsidiary reason is what my One True Quora Master Scott Welch and I mutter darkly to each other, in our monthly meetings of the Insurgency. With no discernible leadership or roadmap, I’d be rather pleasantly surprised if Quora is around in five years’ time.

Quora is not made to last forever. It is not a government agency, it is a private company. And as private companies go, it is not made to last 100 years.

Is there anything Quora can do to prevent this fate? Yes, have a completely different structure and a real business plan. And the time to do that, from my uninformed external perspective, was several years ago, when they last went cap in hand to the venture capitalists who are paying for our daily salon.

You can thank me for my cold shower of Silicon Valley Venture Economics 101 later.

What shall we do in the fact of this prospect, OP?

• Bookmark Brian Bi’s answer to When, and how, will I be able to download all of the Quora content I have produced, like the Facebook and Twitter feed export options? If you can’t run Python on your computer, get in touch with someone who can. Archive your answers, and archive them periodically (and incrementally, lest the ScrapingBot be roused into rampage). You will lose the comments, but then again, Quora’s notion of copyright is that you have no right to archive others’ comments anyway.
• If there are people whose company you cherish, get their contact details now, through more sustainable avenues. Facebook is one. Email is another. And find ways to stay in touch with them.
• I’m anticipating Quora In Exile groups on Facebook. I’m anticipating lots of small Quora In Exile groups; not all 80 million of us (or whatever the inflated user count is) actually want to hang out in the one place.
• If you have been writing, find other venues to write. Blogs still exist, even if they aren’t as cool and now as they used to be. (I’ll most likely be reviving Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος and opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr, my two defunct blogs.) Other Q&A sites exist, though they don’t have the balance of seriousness and sociability that Quora has; your choices are Reddit and StackExchange.
• As Jordan Yates drolly put it, Grindr is a more plausible alternative to Quora than Yahoo Answers is.
• If you have been learning, find other venues to learn. They won’t be as wide-ranging and sociable, so you will truly need to hone in on core topics you’re interested in. If Wikipedia’s around (and that’s likelier), reacquaint yourself with it. Even if you can’t stand to write on the very snippy StackExchange, you can probably get a lot out of reading it.
• We’ll all get our lives back. Let’s just make sure we don’t lose our thirst for knowledge in the process.

I’m generalising this to: what is the purpose of the phatic function of language—of which hello and goodbye are canonical examples.

Phatic expression

In linguistics, a phatic expression /ˈfætᵻk/ is communication which serves a social function such as small talk and social pleasantries that don’t seek or offer any information of value. For example, greetings such as “hello” and “how are you?” are phatic expressions.

…

The utterance of a phatic expression is a kind of speech act. According to Malinowski, even such apparently “purposeless” communication as polite small talk, like “how are you?” or “have a nice day,” even though its content may be trivial or irrelevant to the situation, performs the important function of establishing, maintaining, and managing bonds of sociality between participants.

Oh, and btw:

Besides speech, in the digital world, phatic expression can also cover digital interactions. For example, liking someone’s social media post can communicate social approval and as a consequence build rapport.

You say hello, for the same underlying reason you Like (or Upvote).

We use phatic expressions, because we don’t speak just to convey information. We speak to be sociable. In fact, without being sociable to others, we may not get to the point to conveying information to them at all.

Because it was already created elsewhere, as U+210E PLANCK CONSTANT ℎ. Unicode will not differentiate between the symbol for the Planck Constant, and a mathematical italicised lowercase h (which is what the Planck Constant is).

Every character has a story #20: U+210e (PLANCK CONSTANT)

OP.

• Why has Yishan Wong refused Top Writer status on Quora? (tl;dr; he’s refused to say)
• Why do some Quorans reject the Top Writer title? (no other instances given)
• Why do people decide to opt-out of the Quora “Top Writers” program? (a comment reports that a Mary Bennett did)
• How can I opt-out of being in the Top Writers program?
• Who opted out of the Top Writers (Quora program) program? (Anon, appears to have hinted he was Yishan Wong)
• I Declined To Be In The Top Writer Program (Yishan Wong only member)
• What is it like to opt-out of being a Top Writer?

So lots of interest in declining the TW in particular, but not much evidence to date since the TW program was launched.

I have seen at least one other Quoran say they’ve refused the award, but of course, Quora Search (and it may have been in a comment); so I can’t find it.

EDIT: Godfrey Lawrence Noel McDonnell’s answer to Is there a way to remove the grey top writers quill and inkwell from a grey/ex TW’s profile? Although that is removing retrospectively a past TW badge.

EDIT: Rory Young : https://www.quora.com/What-are-c…

EDIT: Bhuvi Jain : https://www.quora.com/What-are-c…

I dearly, earnestly, ardently want you to learn Modern Greek for the pop culture.

But don’t do it to help you with Ancient Greek philosophy. You’ll trip over more false friends than you can shake a stick it. Meanings and connotations of words have changed over the millennia, and nowhere is getting the precise connotations of words more important than philosophy—especially given how hopelessly vague Ancient Greek philosophical terminology is.

Do however relish the magnificent juxtaposition of Heraclitus and St John Damascene in this 1993 pop song:

Τα πάντα ρει, τα πάντα ρει
Γι’ αυτό απόψε είναι Λαμπρή

Ta panta rhei, Everything Flows.
So let’s make tonight an Easter party!

[St John Damascene wrote the Easter hymn “Day of resurrection, let us be bright ye peoples”, Ἀναστάσεως ἡμέρα λαμπρυνθῶμεν Λαοί. Bright-Day is the colloquial Greek word for Easter.]

{“Tier 1, Lurkers”:0,

“Tier 2, Occasional Users”:44,

“Tier 3, Regular Users”:27,

“Tier 4, Serious Users”:157,

“Tier 5, Popular Users”:45,

“Tier 6, Superstars”:4}

So: I mostly follow “serious users” (like myself: 20–1000 followers). I follow a few “popular users” (1k–10k followers). And I follow very few “superstars”:

• Jordan Yates
• Sam Morningstar
• Judith Meyer
• Quora

Jordan and Sam will be relieved to know they have only just hit the Superstar threshold; and Judith is sadly inactive.

I got a fifth of the way through the Temple on holiday (his complete works), before deciding that I needed to go back and get a listing of what the good stuff was.

A couple of the short poems I read were good. Not transcendentally good, but good enough that I looked forward to finding even better ones.

But most of the longer poems were dreadful. Sermonising in rhyme that did not have any real fervour to it. And I’ve come to accept that the rhyme glory/story is his equivalent to McGonagall’s signature without delay/without dismay.

Yes, I went there. And McGonagall at least is inadvertently funny. Although the intro said that on occasion so is Herbert.

Like I said. I believe there is brilliance there; and I saw some flashes of it in the first fifth of the Temple. (I don’t think any of his most famous pieces are in that first fifth.) But I will need to come back to it with a cicerone.