Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Why does evolution select against atheists?
- Thread starter S.A.M.
- Start date
"Are we having fun yet?" ~~ Zippy Pinhead
Yeah, haven't you seen any movies on ice age men being defrosted in the modern age?
uh, post #?Did you see my posts about the meaning of 'supernatural' ?
If not, see if you agree
no, because all you are doing is laying there.
you could at least wiggle around a little.
your metaphors are really hard to understand sometimes.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
So that's a yes ?
What about the guy driving the car ? Is the car supernatural according to him ?
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Hmm a lot.. lol
But see post 442 and 466.
Sam is making the argument that the term supernatural is subjective (as in dependent on the observer), which is really surprising because she said earlier that a supernatural thing cannot be perceived.
I did?:bugeye:
Supernatural=things yet to be discovered.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
And what I meant was that US atheists woudl be the last people on the planet to overlook that - it's a major issue in our daily political life.diamond said:
Except for the times when they do, of course. But that's no big deal - I haven't been talking about that anyway, and neither have most of the other people you've been sandbagging with that kind of crap around here.diamond said:
A ray of hope! One of the major problems with certain kinds of religion, that. It's a powerful weapon in the hands of tyranny - and it seems to fall into the hands of tyranny very quickly and easily, almost as if invented for the purpose. Look at North Korea - a theistic religion (Juche) invented by a local tyranny, with no other apparent role except the service of the local tyranny. And some obvious parallels with the circumstances and origins of the Abrahamic theisms await recognition, whenever you have the time.daimond said:
? Now what?leopold said:
It has obviously been accomplished. Nobody knows how it happened, is the issue at hand.leopold said:
It means you've overtly denied the possibility of finding a natural place for it, on principle - that it is not part of the natural world, discovered or undiscovered. Among native speakers of English, that is.SAM said:
So that the argument over whether UFOs are supernatural or not does not rest on whether they've been explained naturally or not. Likewise sprites, or the loud musical tones emitted by sand dunes.
So a hundred years ago, the atomic theory of matter would have been your ground of the supernatural? Scientific theory is the basis of the supernatural? That is not a common use of the word, among native speakers of English. It would be ragarded as "wrong", by people who care about things like definitions and reason and consistency and other such trivialities. That usage is what people like Dawkins accuse theists of promulgating, and get labeled shrill and hostile and irrational and simplistic and so forth in consequence.SAM said:
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
There have been plenty of times and places when the Christian community managed to behave itself and apparently you had the good fortune to live in one of them. Perhaps the USA in the 1950s and 1960s when the Religious Left (a label which, strangely, was never actually coined until long after the Religious Right came into power) was campaigning for an end to war and racism. In fact, an unweighted measure based strictly on number of years multiplied by number of Christians, Muslims and Jews might give the illusion that the Children of Abraham have spent more of their time on Earth being good than being bad. But you have to weight the measure and take into account their positive and negative accomplishments. When you do that, Abrahamism is revealed as the epitome of evil that it truly is.
Mankind has only created six civilizations, and Abrahamists in the name of their god and with the active encouragement of their religious leaders obliterated three of them: Egypt, Inca and Olmec/Maya/Aztec. It's hard to imagine a more unpardonable "sin" than the destruction of an entire civilization, with all of its ideas and motifs; it's an incalculable loss to human culture that can never be atoned. We will live with that shame until our sun flares out. And this was done, precisely, by people who believed that those who didn't believe as they did were "inferior, evil or downright inhuman."
It's hard to ignore the long history of the Europeans and Arabs considering the "heathen" Africans to be subhuman, justifying slavery. Or their similar feelings toward the Jews. Or those of the good Anglicans in England toward the Catholic Irish. Or (arguably a majority of) today's Christian Americans toward Muslims.
Add to that the wars the Abrahamists wage upon each other, or when no one else is handy upon rival sects within their own clan--Jung pointed out that "the wars among the Christian nations have been the bloodiest in human history." Of the non-Abrahamist tyrants only Genghis Khan is in their league.
(At this point Sam will jump in with another of her disingenuous arguments and try to convince you that the death toll of the communists can be charged to atheism, carefully ignoring the fact that communism is an offshoot of Christian philosophy and that "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability" is a quote from the Bible. Imagine a Confucian or a Hindu believing that what a man takes from civilization does not need to correlate with what he gives back. The Confucians have already put Das Kapital back into what's left of Marxism.)
Homo sapiens is a species of ape. And the last time I looked at the newspaper it was clearly religionists who were dead set on destroying civilization, not atheists. Sam can't blame the commies any more even if we believed her twisted rant about communism being an atheist philosophy.
I realize this thread is so long as to be unmanageable and I haven't read more than ten percent of the posts either. In one of my earlier posts I explained what Jung calls archetypes. They are instinctive beliefs that are hard-wired into our synapses by our DNA, and they can be recognized by their occurrence in all societies in all eras. Religions are collections of archetypes.
The basic answer to the question in the O.P., "Why does evolution select against atheists," is that we are pre-programmed to believe in religion. For most people atheism is something that has to be arrived at by reasoning and learning, in order to override instinctive behavior. Being masters of cognitive dissonance, many humans can accept an incredible amount of evidence against religion and still believe in it.
As to why we happen to be preprogrammed for a destructive behavior, I went into that in my earlier post. Religion may have done some good in the Stone Age, but it's far outlived its usefulness. Or it could be a random mutation passed down through a genetic bottleneck.
Not all of us are that way, the force of mutation is active. I was never indoctrinated into a religion and I never developed any yearning for it; the gene seems to have skipped me. Perhaps the one thing I regret most about never having children is that I didn't pass that mutation into the next generation. Unfortunately by the time we understood about DNA and archetypes my wife and I were way too old to start.
No, it's the other way around. What they offer as evidence does not satisfy any scientific criteria, so they're labeled as crackpots or (in some cases) simply manipulative liars. The scientific method is objective enough that it doesn't take an Einstein to spot the flaws in a hypothesis. Circular reasoning and other fallacies, or no reasoning at all but arguments based on faith, are the stock in trade of the creationists. They don't even understand the science they object to, since they posit divine creation as being a denial of evolution, yet what they're arguing against is actually abiogenesis, not evolution.
We've been able to trace the tree of life from its current astounding complexity back to some amazingly humble and simple progenitors. Clearly the definition of life as a local reversal of entropy, increasing entropy all around it in order to develop ever greater complexity, is supported by a couple of billion years of evidence. What came before those pathetically simple single-celled prokaryotes, pray tell? Anything simpler than those lifeforms would be organic compounds, but not life.
Be patient. We keep finding bits and pieces. As the 19th was the century of chemistry and the 20th the century of physics, many are predicting that the 21st will be the century of biology. They might have this all worked out by its end.
The overwhelming majority of the evolution denialists. If you're not one of them then good for you, but you're a soft voice in the wilderness compared to their bleating.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
No!
DiamondHearts
Registered Senior Member
Egypt ceased being an independent civilization with its destruction by the pagan Roman empire. Furthermore, only when Arabic culture and Islam entered Egypt, did Egypt again become a global superpower. You should read more about Egypt, the Egyptians were speaking Latin when the Arabs came. The Egyptians embraced Arabic culture in denial of the Roman culture which they were forced to adopt. Furthermore, American civilizations were destroyed for secular means, control of the people and of their resources, not religion.
Except however, they readily intermarried with the Africans. What does this say about the Arabs, think about it.
Stalin, Lenin, and the rest of the atheist murderers are somehow absent. I guess it doesn't serve our purposes to emphasize them.
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Speaking Roman?
Intermarried?
It tells me they were screwing the women.
DiamondHearts
Registered Senior Member
Aren't you embarrassed to say such things? Have some shame.