About that last post, here is how I see it.
Evolution doesn't happen overnight. There wasn't an ape, and then from him was born a man. No, more likely, it took thousands of years. Gradually, certain early humans were born more intelligent. Gradually, they started learning to make things. Fire, tools, weapons. I don't see any missing link. The missing link is a myth, as evolution is not a chain, as it's impossible to point at specific links. Think more of a rainbow. Can you point at one specific color? No, but every color is there somewhere though.

A bit out of topic, but it reminds me of something...
When I was a kid, I remember a scene in a movie (I totally forget exactly what movie it was though). It was mediaval times, and there were two armies preparing for battle. You then saw the general of both camps make their prayer to God to lead them to victory, as they were fighting for His glory. Now, I was probably 7 or so, and I remember asking my mom "If they both fight for God, who is God going to take for?"
by paxx - 9/17/2003 12:12:22 PM

hehehehe! paxxy (now that you've posted that pic of yourself somewhere around here I can really picture your face) how cute!!!!!!

anyways, lots of ppl cry they know God (me too) but he takes his own one by one no matter what side of the war they are on too...
[Message Edited]

Doreen sits back and enjoys Baker & Paxxy debate and grabs a sandwich

Can I have a bite too? All this is debating is making me hungry.

(all right, leaving this thread for today, got other things to do. See you tomorrow, Auguste.)

ahhh shoot! and now he leaves...

Doreen tosses you the lettuce and tomato

totally disagree with your assumption that a godless person has trouble discerning right from wrong. I have a feeling most horrible crimes come probably from very religious people (fanatics). I'd be interested to read some statistics about it if they exist somewhere.

Same here paxx.

Morals by the way are nothing more than personal tools one makes use of to decide if they can accept their own behavior. Not standards one uses to apply to others in dictating who they are and how they should act.

I do kind of slip to the side on the parents teaching morals, they present a template, but a child designs their own as they grow intellectual and emotionally.

[br]example:[/br] My parents morals on the subject of children is that they hold ownership and can do as they like with them.

Mine are much different to say the least.






[Message Edited]

Paxx: Your wrong, I don't believe that a 'godless' person has no values of morals. I don't believe anyone *can* be Godless, whether they believe in Him or not. You are differentiating between instinctive behavior and 'values' because it suits your argument. Evolution is as much about 'choice' as it is about chance.

That's why birds have such beautiful plumage and human women like a muscular, hard-thrusting backside. Selecting a preferable mate and euthanizing your wounded pack-mate are both parts of evolutionary theory. The same evolutionary influence that makes us dig a healthy looking girl at the mall also makes that momma cat kill the runt without remorse to free up food for the more viable ones. To a human, though, that's murder.

If there is no supernatural force influencing our ideals, then we have to accept that we are compelled only by our nature, genetics, instincts, and oddly those do not jive with human virtues. You're making my point. Humans *naturally* don't behave in ways that suit them evolutionarily. Why? The "negative", weeding-out, aspects are just as mandatory for our survival as the positive, but we have decided that they are 'wrong'?

The average Human would suffer shortage, risk their well-being, to pull along an inviable child or peer. We see things as "wrong", why? Whoever said killing someone that was eating your food and offering no benefit to your or your species was 'wrong'? Why would they have ever said that if they were only motivated by what we know of natural selection? If they aren't motivated by just that, then what?

Call it what you like. I believe that way down deep you are referring to the same thing i am, even if you don't realize it. In four posts I've made my point. If you consider your humanity a natural occurrence, you have that right.

BakerStreet:

If there is no supernatural force influencing our ideals, then we have to accept that we are compelled only by our nature, genetics, instincts, and oddly those do not jive with human virtues.

This is my opnion about it. We can also think. You forget that. We can also be taught by people in our environment and by real live situations. If you don't believe one cannot chose his or her destiny then we are merely machines.

Sugaree wipes the steam from her monitor

Baker,

Something very significant happened 30,000 or so years ago, though, and it calls into question evolutions's *sole* role in ushering us to where we are today.

I don't think it's necessary to postulate any event outside of a human context.

Evolution (in and of itself) had little to do with the explosion of human ability in the near past (evolutionarily speaking). There's no fundamental difference in the raw ability of a homo sapiens sapiens of today and a homo sapiens sapiens of 30 or even 70 thousand years ago. If you snagged a newborn sapiens from 70,000 years ago and raised him in today's world, he would fit right in, both physically and intellectually.

The progression of sapiens might seem to be unusually spectacular, but I don't think it's necessary to look beyond the ability of humans for the answer.

They started slowly, to be sure. In the absence of any preexisting knowledge or skills, they had to take 'baby steps' in their understanding of things around them and in terms of developing the mechanisms to interact with their surroundings.

The inflection point is essentially two fold; first, there was the increased tendency for humans of the time to interact more and more often, sharing knowledge (willingly or not), second (and most important, in this context) was the advent of an agricultural social structure, which allowed (for the first time) humans to be able to do something besides primarily focus their efforts on subsistence.

Both the option of pursuing tasks other than mere survival, and the need (due to clustering of population) for different ways to do things (such as new housing challenges, etc.) lit the fire under the pot, so to speak, for an explosion of invention and advancement. Having the need to do something, and the time to do it, was the primary cause of the sea change in human interaction with their environment.

What made your thinking, Mad? Other creatures don't think? Are animals just machines? Kinda runs counter to anything the animal lovers might think. "Humanity", though, is synonymous with compassion, charity. How can you use the fact that Creationism has no basis other than supposition when your own concept of "Humanity" simply springs form the forehead of Zeus fully-formed as well.

People decide to do things that make no evolutionary sense. Saving a busload of kids makes perfect evolutionary sense. Hospice, Assisted living, lovingly caring for the mentally retarded or severely deformed until they have lived a full, happy life makes absolutely no sense based upon the reality of nature. If you are not viable, you don't pass on your genetic material. This makes a healthy, prosperous species with plenty of resources to go around. That is how it works, whether by misfortune or purposeful culling by your peers.

So we spontaneously changed our mind in favor of... something entirely new and completely counterproductive? Sounds easily as implausible as Adam and Eve ( another literal item that I don't espouse ). You want me just to believe that people just decided to be different for no benefit to themselves, and I want to believe that they had an external, explainable reason to be different. Which makes more sense?

Man's creation of 'God' [in whatever flavour] was a long-standing attempt by him to find answers to the unanswered.

Fear of the unknown and more importantly fear of his own mortality and therefore insignificance demanded the existance [creation] of a superior entity to provide a breast at which to suckle....following the 'adult' separation from the mother [the erstwhile 'God' to a child].

Man's self-importance has always been to his undoing...and perhaps this 'superior entity' is a way of restoring a sense of relevance or balance....where the likes of Alexander the 'Great' can be humbled in the minds of the masses by a God the 'greater'.

I don't care for pidgeon-holing people with 'creationist' or whatever.....what I do believe though is in man's capacity to 'create' in his own mind the appropriate 'tools' with which to survive in an hostile environment.  In this case, a God came in handy as a palliative, just as a gun comes in handy as a threat suppressant.

So...to sum it up....Man created God....and through his insufferable ego created many permutations thereof, as each egotistical bastard demanded his 'creation' was superior....so we have Christian fighting Moslem, Catholic fighting Protestant....ad nauseum.

The Religious 'flavours' under which people congregate....whether it is the Peoples Front of Judea...or those bastard splinter group the Judean People's Front are simply the 'opiate of the masses'...mob mentality orchestrated for nefarious motive that has probably been forgotten over time.

If people would just create their God and allow others to create THEIR versions too the world would be a better place.

Think about it.....our current world racked by terrorism is all down to mass-mentality religions whose tenets are mutually exclusive and a lame excuse for war.

With tongue in cheek....come the revolution I'd have every organised religious leader shot.  They are a blight on society....

Nice, Kona. "good laugh" at what people have posted? So people's views, if not exactly like yours, are funny? I just can't understand that mentality.

I was referring to those who do not believe in God.

It is funny that someone could actually deny there is no God.

I actually feel sorry for those lost souls.

It puzzling to me that the atheistic view somehow separates Behavior from genetic evolution. There is no solid line between nature and nurture in my opinion. If you trace our behaviors back, they all will have parallels to behaviors that benefited our genetic forebears, however changed they are by our circumstances and tasks at hand. We learn, of course, but *that learning* should have a functional, evolutionary progenitor.

If you are gonna rely on Reason to explain who we are as people, don't take shortcuts. If you can explain our existence, you can explain it all, and you shouldn't have to say something like "We just decided to be different."


Aleatoric: evolutionary 'baby steps' take millions of years, not tens of thousands. When you compare how much we have changed, how we changed, and how long it took previous steps to occur for our progenitors, something is very, very different.

"We changed because we had to" is a reasonable explanation, but others didn't, and we have the ability to change our actions and behaviors at will, not through natural selection. We are intuitive even more than we are reactive now. We no longer have to change, we're fat and happy, but we continue fine-tuning who we are with values foreign to nature. Something besides necessity had to light that fire, because survival was possible without such a radical change. Ours is not 'specialization'. Specialization is a focusing of ability. Our abilities are diffuse and absorb everything we take to task, often far from necessity. We impress ourselves onto the world now, not vice versa.

What other species has survived in that way, diffusing their intellect over as many ideas and tasks as possible? "Do one job, and do it well" is almost alien to us now, but that is how everything else seems to work. Our continued progress tells us that we don't change because we need to, we change because we *want* to change. In that we differ from every other species on earth. How you explain that difference is the topic of the discussion.

BakerStreet (about your earlier response to me):

Well again this is my opinion. You are talking about "our ideals" and assumed they were human. If I'm saying "We can also think" then that doesn't tell much of what I think about animals. You are assuming too much. And I do believe we humans are able to select our destiny. I think humans are free to do what they want within the limits of their abilities and responsibilities. No need for a religion. We have done fine thousands of years without it.

About animals (a bit off topic): Every pet lover would agree that animals have a sense of fairness, but now scientists are investigating the subject. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0917_030917_monkeyfairness.html