Of course morality comes from society, and religion is helpful in amplifying and officiliazing those morals. The Christian morals are the morals society has been founded on.
Which morals? The ones that allow abortion? The ones that could care less what religion your future husband or wife is? The ones that accept homosexuals as equal citizens? Or that makes it OK to eat meat on Fridays? I'm looking around, and failing to see your Christian morals at work in my society. I'm not saying religion does not play a part, but at this point (and for a long time now) Christian morals are not the morals of society. There are a few standards in the Western world, but even things like adultery are widely accepted.
Well, a couple of reasons. First, the theory of evolution has withstood all the tests. There are a number of very difficult steps any scientific theory must go through in order to be accepted by the scientific community, let alone a school textbook, and evolution has gone through all of those steps. Creationism (or ID, as they are dressing it today) has not. They have not submitted their work to any peer-reviewed journals, have not attended any science forums, and have not taken even
one step in the process that evolution--and everything in a science book--has had to go through. They want to shortcut it.
Second, evolution is good science; creationism isn't. I'm not a fan of making a distinction between micro and macro evolution, but we've seen first-hand evidence of microevolution as it happened, and we have countless transitional fossils as evidence for macroevolution. We have
direct evidence of it. On the other hand, there is no evidence for creationism. Now, because some zealots don't take the time to study the field, they simply cast it as a religion itself--which it isn't--and try to get it removed from schools. This is quality science here, and Christians (as usual) want it removed from schools. OK, so now they're asking for "equal time" (which still isn't fair, for the reasons I listed above), but they have no intent on teaching evolution in their bible studies...so give me a break. It's stone age thinking.
I don't know, but various psychologists and neural scientists are studying consciousness and some say it exists independent of the brain. As of now, we don't know much about consciousness.
What a shock, you don't even know what they concluded. If a scientist says he or she actually believes it exists independent of the brain, they are speaking from faith, not from science. There is not one shred of evidence to support it. Not
one. So there goes
that argument.
The only evidence regarding consciousness and the brain is that consciousness is a result of the brain's activity. Have you ever been knocked out? Even if you're up and walking around, you can be completely unconscious.
Not evidence really, but the accounts are certainly rather interesting considering that they happen to people of all backgrounds, health, and religious belief, including atheists, and all share some things in common. One interesting point is that some people who experience NDE's are able to accurately recount things that happened while they were dead.
They are interesting because so many of them are so similar, but I'd have to question how much their religion, or at least their knowledge of religion and the afterlife, influenced their experiences. Much in the same way your dreams are dependent on your experiences while awake, I would imagine these NDEs are simply the result of what the brain expects to see when dying.
Also worth noting here is that according to the Bible, we don't go to heaven at death, correct? I thought we didn't go to heaven until Jesus came back...am I wrong on that?
