Does it take an intellectual to knock God??

[SB_UK]

'It is harder to unlearn than it is to learn...to see with new eyes and to hear with new ears.'

'Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.'

Prophet
gain
lo$$

To have eyes
which though cannot see
ears
which cannot hear

~*~

All the same.

[labelwench]

intellectualism, n. Doctrine that knowledge is wholly or mainly derived from pure reason.

Why do people believe in god, or not?

Whether such a capacity comes from a creator or nature, is there a purpose? LW

The following is just another interesting snippet from the web.

Even among people who regard spiritual life as wishful hocus-pocus, there is a growing sense that humans may not be able to survive without it. It’s hard enough getting by in a fang-and-claw world in which killing, thieving and cheating pay such rich dividends. It’s harder still when there’s no moral cop walking the beat to blow the whistle when things get out of control. Best to have a deity on hand to rein in our worst impulses, bring out our best and, not incidentally, give us a sense that there’s someone awake in the cosmic house when the lights go out at night and we find ourselves wondering just why we’re here in the first place. If a God or even several gods can do all that, fine. And if we sometimes misuse the idea of our gods—and millenniums of holy wars prove that we do—the benefits of being a spiritual species will surely outweigh the bloodshed.

Far from being an evolutionary luxury then, the need for God may be a crucial trait stamped deeper and deeper into our genome with every passing generation. Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and bequeathed that trait to their offspring. Those who didn’t risked dying out in chaos and killing. The evolutionary equation is a simple but powerful one.

[SB_UK]

Colour coded
red and blue

Why do people believe in god, or not?

Faith in God -
- necessary anchors fixing us within essentially arbitrary space.

Our problem is that we've two characterizations of God (representing two mind sets)
walking the Earth.

One simple
- and the other more complex.

If the simple model is retained -
then the human beings whose minds these envelop -

- kill other people.

Kenneth Lay

Not only in the name of their parochial God -
- in the name of whichever selfish aspiration they set for themselves.

Simply - Moral inconsistency; the capacity for immoral behaviour is seen.

Not enforced moral consistency

~*~

The more complex model of mind represents our collective reality within one internally inter-communicating system or web -
- a more complex logical structure which forms the basis to mind

The metamodel web

versus a simpler structure of mind (model paradigm)

- to be thought of as a sparse forest (less complex model)
versus a rain forest (with canopy) (the more complex model)
- definitions of God as man and God as process
respectively.

God:
Noun -> Verb
~paraphrase~

[labelwench]

Perhaps we humans should be taking lessons in peaceful co-habitation from the following insect. There is much to be learned from the teachings of nature and nurture. LW

One big family

But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.

These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.

In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite living on different continents separated by vast oceans.

The most plausible explanation is that ants from these three super-colonies are indeed family, and are all genetically related, say the researchers. When they come into contact, they recognise each other by the chemical composition of their cuticles.

"The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society," the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings.

However, the irony is that it is us who likely created the ant mega-colony by initially transporting the insects around the world, and by continually introducing ants from the three continents to each other, ensuring the mega-colony continues to mingle.

"Humans created this great non-aggressive ant population," the researchers write.

The rest of the article may be viewed by following this link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth...00/8127519.stm

[SB_UK]

These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.

Sounds like a plan; now if only ... ... ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M_Gg1xAHE4

(-;)...|>-...(o:)

(-;)...-<|...(o:)

[labelwench]

Some more discussion of interest regarding religion, and our perceptions, from both the scientific and theological views. LW

At least one faith, according to one of its best-known scholars, formalizes the idea of gene-based spirituality and even puts a pretty spin on it. Buddhists, says Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University, have long entertained the idea that we inherit a spirituality gene from the person we were in a previous life. Smaller than an ordinary gene, it combines with two larger physical genes we inherit from our parents, and together they shape our physical and spiritual profile. Says Thurman: “The spiritual gene helps establish a general trust in the universe, a sense of openness and generosity.” Buddhists, he adds, would find Hamer’s possible discovery “amusing and fun.”

The Buddhist theory has never been put to the scientific test, but other investigations into the biological roots of belief in God were being conducted long before Hamer’s efforts—often with intriguing results. In 1979, investigators at the University of Minnesota began their now famous twins study, tracking down 53 pairs of identical twins and 31 pairs of fraternal twins that had been separated at birth and raised apart. The scientists were looking for traits the members of each pair had in common, guessing that the characteristics shared more frequently by identical twins than by fraternal twins would be genetically based, since identical twins carry matching dna, and those traits for which there was no disparity between the identicals and fraternals would be more environmentally influenced.

As it turned out, the identical twins had plenty of remarkable things in common. In some cases, both suffered from migraine headaches, both had a fear of heights, both were nail biters. Some shared little eccentricities, like flushing the toilet both before and after using it. When quizzed on their religious values and spiritual feelings, the identical twins showed a similar overlap. In general, they were about twice as likely as fraternal twins to believe as much—or as little—about spirituality as their sibling did. Significantly, these numbers did not hold up when the twins were questioned about how faithfully they practiced any organized religion. Clearly, it seemed, the degree to which we observe rituals such as attending services is mostly the stuff of environment and culture. Whether we’re drawn to God in the first place is hardwired into our genes. “It completely contradicted my expectations,” says University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard, one of the researchers involved in the work. Similar results were later found in larger twin studies in Virginia and Australia.

Other researchers have taken the science in a different direction, looking not for the genes that code for spirituality but for how that spirituality plays out in the brain. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has used several types of imaging systems to watch the brains of subjects as they meditate or pray. By measuring blood flow, he determines which regions are responsible for the feelings the volunteers experience. The deeper that people descend into meditation or prayer, Newberg found, the more active the frontal lobe and the limbic system become. The frontal lobe is the seat of concentration and attention; the limbic system is where powerful feelings, including rapture, are processed. More revealing is the fact that at the same time these regions flash to life, another important region—the parietal lobe at the back of the brain—goes dim. It’s this lobe that orients the individual in time and space. Take it off-line, and the boundaries of the self fall away, creating the feeling of being at one with the universe. Combine that with what’s going on in the other two lobes, and you can put together a profound religious experience.

Even to some within the religious community, this does not come as news. “In India in Buddha’s time, there were philosophers who said there was no soul; the mind was just chemistry,” says Thurman. “The Buddha disagreed with their extreme materialism but also rejected the ‘absolute soul’ theologians.” Michael Persinger, professor of behavioral neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., puts the chemistry argument more bluntly. “God,” he says, “is an artifact of the brain.”

[SB_UK]

... it combines with two larger physical genes we inherit from our parents ...

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(-;).(:o)

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~s~

~added~

male:female duality into the same cyclically repeating geometry
(as observed in the pulsar (as well known example))
in nature.

010
101
- a binary rhythm -
which defines the stably-formed emergent structure post- {evolutionary,duality} formation.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Best to have a deity on hand to rein in our worst impulses,

It is like that we like to read in a book or see in a movie that the bad guys got what they deserved.

Natural selection indeed induced a belief in false spirits. We are now advanced enough to not throw anyone out of the tribe and perhaps also face the real truth, but it seems like those retaining and pushing myth to the extreme like Al Quada are now in a real danger of extinction.

[SB_UK]

We are now advanced enough to not throw anyone out of the tribe and perhaps also face the real truth, but it seems like those retaining and pushing myth to the extreme like Al Quada are now in a real danger of extinction.

Absolutely yes
- I agree.

[Graybeard]

It's too easy to sell books and make much money off the back of the non-existence of a Supernatural God
- 'The God Delusion'

Nevertheless, in my opinion, history in the distant future will show that these type of books will be the 'books' of the new bible, long after the old ones have been forgotten.

It doesn't really matter whether we like him or not, whether he gets rich or poor. He still bears a gift, he has a part to play.

- of course there's no man with a beard in the sky (though the idea works stunning well if we unravel the metaphor).

I'm not sure how you unravel the metaphor, mine goes like this.

In primitive times, when life was still scary, and you managed to reach the age of 21 or 22 without being taken by a predator, wounded thru a hunt, dying of starvation or thirst, and eking out a terribly hard existence, and if you were male ... you probably, by default, became the leader of your tribe, about 8 to 12 people. You were probably also the oldest, and the most experienced, and the one retaining the most tribal wisdom, also by default. You were the font of all knowledge regarding the limits of your little tribe's world.

Also, purely coincidently, you started to grow a beard. So when the tribe looked to the leader, they looked to the man with the beard. Any male who reached the age of 30, a rare occurrence, was a God as far as his tribe was concerned, and he always had a beard.

The heuristic that can be drawn is that a man with a beard is a wise man. But this is a 'rule of thumb', it can never be proven. It can never become a fact by any definition.

But from an evolutionary viewpoint, its a beneficial natural selection ... I'm not referring to the fact that males grow a beard, but to the fact that we make the association with wisdom. However, you can't have one without the other.

Eventually, even you, the immortal, died. And you passed into the sky, or a tree, or a rock, or a river. But your tribal wisdom was retained, you hadn't totally gone. You were remembered over and above lesser individuals. And a new God, a younger man with a beard replaced you, took over your wisdom, became incarnate.

Statistically, those who were genetically predisposed to cling tighter to this rule of thumb lived longer. To live longer meant to produce more offspring who would also live longer. So that eventually they came to dominate the gene pool. Today, all of us are descended from this tribe.

So far as I know, all patriarchal societies envision a God with a beard.

But times change, new knowledge is revealed and uncovered, neither patriarchal nor matriarchal societies can meet the needs of a new world order. These societies are concerned with humanities welfare. But a broader view of humanity's welfare shows a critical relationship with the total ecology ... new heuristics are needed .... ones that must balance a total ecology within its productive economy and within its budget. We must pay for our productivity by factoring in the cost of 'reimbursing' the total ecology, not just our 'human' creditors

Its time to 'knock' god. Our 'memes' if not our 'genes' must change.

cool bananas ... greg