Matt, I will agree with you that one can point to most religious laws and find their adaptive benefit. There's a law in Anthropology (I think it's called law of Cultural Adaptation or something) and it says that any habit of a given society at some point in that culture's development was adaptive. Just like foot washing made sense for desert people upon entering the home of another, or polygamy occurs in many fast-growing societies (and yes it did spring up in the US of A once the west became an available expanse), having a faith based on words and commandments as opposed to non-portable artistic renderings made with difficult-to-come-by-in-the-desert-materials would be the expected course for an arid-land herding society to take. I feel that most religions were adaptive to their society at a given point in time, and the variant nature of adaptive pressures within human civilizations explains why, for example, Buddhist Philosophy flowed out of India and now is much more successful in East Asian, or why different aspects of the protestant ethic survive differentially in divergent societies (compare Germany to the Midwest).
Public morality is for the public good. In the past, the best way to convince people to listen to laws beneficial to the sum population-and I'm not suggesting any organized group decided this, was to instill laws with panoptic or self-reinforcing properties. Sin and Karma, Heaven or Nirvana, Ancestors and Demons, all for various populations of hominids act as means to make the course of action advantageous to society also preferential to the individual. For most people in history, "don’t steal because it’s wrong" hasn’t been enough; it had to be "don’t steal because it’s wrong and God/the Ancestors/Santa (and so on) will see you AND YOU WILL BE PUNISHED OR AWARDED ACCORDINGLY."
Religion does make an unfair existence seem fair. Ingenious.
Now, some laws may prevent sexually transmitted diseases or keep the nuclear family stable, but by the same token, others can empower males which destabilizes the modern nuclear family, or deemphasize synthetic population control, which stresses our contemporary environment and the carrying capacity of the entire biosphere. Many segments of religious doctrine when practiced have proven detrimental to the esteem and social position of groups like women, 'outsiders' like migrants and minorities, and the downtrodden. I realize that I step on my own toes here because almost all religions urge things like charity and respect, and the corruption of pure doctrine comes in the maladaptation of these social commands or in their being used by people to justify the unjust, but Who Determines Just? ...idunno, that probably didn't come out clearly. I quit

So for those of you who feel that the Bible is inspired, as opposed to representing mythisory (Myth/History), would you extend the possibility of divine inspiration to other works such as the third portion of the Koran or the Ramayana? Are they no less worthy or accurate? Both of these texts could be supported by the same arguments used in justification of the Bible, and indeed the entire Koran includes the bible.
I believe that these and other texts contain truth in that many of the historical events did occur, however, I cannot believe that a man was the son of a deity, or that the world could be completely submerged with water. and so on.

Anything that can be substantially proven deserves permanent consideration, anything that cannot be proven remains theoretical. This is ironically the biggest problem that evolutionary biologists encounter thanks to decay and scarcity when coming to the rest of the scientific community.

If any man his holy, respect his ways. -Varanasi Proverb. Matt if you are devout and live well, than there is nothing wrong with your life. Do me a favor though, when you're in congress or something, remember that there are those of us who live softly without the light and would be deeply offended by having the ways of any single tradition thrust upon us. For myself I value logic and freedom of choice. It is how I have been raised and I will not say that it is any sort of absolute.

"In the beginning there was the cosmic "Om" the sound which resonates with the entire universe. From this sound came the gods and with this sound we may join them."

Churchill was a bloody racist imperialist hawkish douche. Not the say the Nazis weren't or anything, but that whole period was a bloody shame.

Yablon, when I said unable to cheat, I really meant difficult to cheat, or unmotivated to do so. We are a serial monogamous animal. Among wolves or Zebra, pair bonding is for life. If you put two together and they mated, then moved the male to an area bursting with comely females for the rest of his life, he would never cheat. Female mate-loyalty is a huge problem for recovering Zebra populations because when the stallions are poached, the females never reproduce. The motivation for him does not exist, thanks predominantly to pheromone-locking association mechanisms in his brain. If we were supposed to a monogamous animal, like gibbons or some of the smaller primates, we would have much smaller testicles and different sperm composition, since we would not be rigged to compete with other males, and there probably would me no sexual dimorphism. Among monogamous birds and mammals, dimorphism is slight, and outside of breeding periods there would not be gender-specific physical indicators like a 20% size differential or breasts (to begin with). Some creatures are as psycho-biologically resistant to mating outside of the pair bonds as say, we would be resistant towards eating our own offspring. There are plenty of animals with different reproductive strategies where that happens, but we are rigged so that infant-cannibalism is viscerally repulsive.

It's 2:48. I'm going to sleep.

posted by Adrian   [11:48 PM]

[ website ] :: [ contact ] :: [ home ]

XML