Posted on 10/28/2006 8:46:36 PM PDT by Jacob Kell
In the United States, atheists are becoming an ostracized minority. But now evolutionary biologists are trying to turn the tables: According to their argument, religion is the source of evil. Morals and selflessness are not God-given - they are the result of evolution.
When Richard Dawkins, a zoologist at Oxford University, steps up to the altar he seems visibly pleased to see the pews in the church fully occupied. In the best Queen's English, he reads from his book: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Hey, I can still have all the reproductive success I can handle and yet have you over for dinner with enough left over for the week. It simply doesn't require enlightened self-interest to have sex or dine well.
Those humans who cooperate with each other and adhere to basic rules like, "Don't kill each other" "don't have sex with another's mate" and "Don't steal from each other" will, in the long term, leave more descendants than those who do not.
The Greeks saw their gods as no less corporal or real than you take Moses. Different type, but equally real.
I think...
The fellows who put pen to paper in ancient times to transcribe the bible from the source documents had never seen an ape and didn't even know what they were. It's certainly not clear that God ever illuminated them to the nature of apes.
Ever see a mother mountain gorilla tend her baby? That's exactly how human mothers do it. We have some over here in the zoo and we stop by to see them every now and then. There can be no doubt that we and they are kin.
God's message to mankind also extends to those who we identify as animals ~ else God would not have asked us to name them ~ or to treat them "humanely" ~
Otherwise, animals are just meat.
Alas, the Greeks did NOT believe their gods were people. Certainly those gods had human characteristics, but they were celestial and immortal beings.
He stole everything and had sex with every woman within his view at anytime he wished.
That mindset has caused some people on these thread to even deny that humans are mammals. They pointedly mock those who recognize that humans are descended from other apes. And they explicitly base their beliefs on the bible, because the bible says that humans were made in the image of God. Why they would believe such stuff is beyond me. Why don't you ask them.
Ever see a mother mountain gorilla tend her baby? That's exactly how human mothers do it. We have some over here in the zoo and we stop by to see them every now and then. There can be no doubt that we and they are kin.
Well, if you can understand that we are evolutionarily related to the other apes, then you are not of the mindset of those I described. They refuse to believe that humans and the other apes are related at all.
God's message to mankind also extends to those who we identify as animals ~ else God would not have asked us to name them ~ or to treat them "humanely" ~
Of course, you have to buy into the rest of the religion in the first place for this to be so.
Otherwise, animals are just meat.
This attitude -- that nature and the animals in nature are nothing but tools for humans to use -- is another notion that I find all to familiar in some religious people and quite distasteful.
They didn't believe they were human, but they were people, in the sense that they were believed to be individual rational agents. Anyway, we were talking about whether they were real. and whether being mentioned in a document establishes whether they were real.
He didn't do it all alone, either. If he tried to randomly kill his fellow Mongol warriors, he probably wouldn't be known today because he would have been killed early on. He was successful because he was able to cooperate with those he needed to cooperate with.
If you haven't already, you should read C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. He addresses this topic brilliantly.
That is a splendid piece of irony: If Dawkins is right, the the forces he believes in will favor the survival of the people who think he's wrong!
All available evidence points to the brain as the seat of consciousness; therefore the burden of proof rests with those who believe that consciousness can somehow exist without brain activity.
A breathless world await your evidence.
Dawkins would be the first to admit that life is neither fair nor just.
The same country that brought the world Marx and Hitler.
AFAIK, "fair" and "just" are as meaningless in Dawkins' worldview as "up" and "down" are to a two-dimensional being.
Wrong. Hitler was Austrian.
That has got to annoy Dawkins in his quieter moments.
"With no G-d, what moral axioms do they use to call religion evil?"
My inexpert understanding is that the field of sociobiology is
trying to explain the general human concept of "Moral Law" in terms
of evolution and biology.
My best guess is they are simply aiming to say "morality arose and
persisted because it gives an evolutionary advantage".
(I hope that's not an unfair representation.)
This attempt by sociobiologists is mentioned in this book that I've just
started reading:
"The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief "
by Francis Collins (director of the Human Genome Project)
http://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/0743286391/sr=8-1/qid=1162159180/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9954971-4358516?ie=UTF8&s=books
for a recent interesting thread from the other side of the aisle:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1723345/posts
Really and truly no one knows. For all we know there's an underlying electronic network of some sort, or maybe something even more basic than that.
The brain does seem to be an input/output device of somesort, but so, too, is the slave circuit that drives the screen on my CRT.
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