My guess, even if "young Crowell" objects, is that religion confers an evolutionary advantage to those so, deluded. Thus they, we, breed more offspring with this psychological trait, whilst the socialists doth diminish, hence, their mad- rush by progressives, worldwide, to embrace the Islamists as their chums, those wielders of the jihad. Chief enemy? Oh, any nationalist of any type will do. In any case, as it confers evolutionary advantage, the religions will evolve in their own Darwinian fashion, because around these regions, them's the rules! Nationalism, can surely be suicidal among the pig-ignorant, but among the more nuanced it too, can be am effective tool of survival. With religions tuned toward survival, even yes, postmortem, survival, as illusionary, as this may be; this also is a good evolutionary trait! May, the Spaghetti Monster guide thy path!
-----Original Message----- From: Lawrence Crowell <[email protected]> To: Everything List <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, Sep 1, 2019 9:34 pm Subject: Re: Quantum Foam On Sunday, September 1, 2019 at 6:54:58 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 9/1/2019 4:28 PM, Lawrence Crowell wrote: On Sunday, September 1, 2019 at 6:38:31 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 31 Aug 2019, at 20:41, Lawrence Crowell <[email protected]> wrote: On Wednesday, August 28, 2019 at 9:46:21 PM UTC-5, Samiya wrote: فَاذْكُرُونِي أَذْكُرْكُمْ وَاشْكُرُوا لِي وَلَا تَكْفُرُونِ So remember Me, I will remember you and be grateful to Me and (do) not (be) ungrateful to Me. [Al-Quran 2:152] The Quran does not discourage the HOW questions, rather it encourages humans to ponder upon the creation, but it emphasises the WHY questions. God does not need our help in creating, sustaining, destroying or recreating everything. What He wants from us is realisation and acknowledgement for all He has done, and is continuously doing, and to realise that there is great purpose in all of this. For this reason religion has the effect of dulling minds. Science is about asking how, it is not really about why questions that are more in the philosophical domain. There is no reason to not exige as much rigour in philosophy than in any other domain or inquiry. Theology has been rigorous for one millenium, but 1500 years of dogma made us forget this. Paul in one of his epistles admonishes against study of the world because one is worshiping the "creature" and not the creator. As such this sort of religious ideology induces people to focus on "the Truth," or really some illusion of such, and they lose the ability to ascertain whether some proposition has some probability or reason for being true or false. When religion takes over you get a dark age. When fake religion, or dogmatic religion, takes over. That leads to absence of (genuine) religion. The term genuine religion makes about as much sense as a “dry hurricane.” I have to give my low down on religion now. I think it stems from the evolution of the brain and in particular with the development of language. At some point in hominid evolution language developed to a level of sophistication that our ancestors started to tell stories. Fouts et al showed with sign language that Washoe and other chimpanzees communicated elemental language, and later it was found the chimps in the wild appear to sign to each other. However they do not appear to tell stories. With our hominid ancestors these stories were important because they communicated information about the environment in narratives the projected human beings onto nature. This makes the stories interesting and relative, so this means aspects of the natural world were anthropomorphized. These are spirits, totems and demiurges and so forth. To cut to the chase, with the developments of large scale societies, city states, nations and empires religion matured from simple forest gods called upon my shamans to organized social systems with big gods or later with the “BIG GOD.” Right. Originally there was no boundary between the supernatural and the natural. Weather was driven by storm spirits. Disease was possession by demons. Animals moved in accordance with totems. But with the development of agriculture and city states man seemed to have conquered most of the nature spirits. The city state had its culture and morals and they were commanded by the leader; but to give them more force he claimed they were the commandments of a great spirit leader in the sky who handed down these commandments on stone tablets. And our people are right and moral and other people, who don't agree are wrong and evil, and we should conquer them and take their land. Got mit uns. Brent There have been of late archaeological finds in what is N. Iraq and S. Turkey of pre-Akkadian cultural remains. These people were forming small sedentary settlements around 5000BCE. One central aspect to these are shrines, where these appear to reflect the start of organized religious activity that was less tribal and more city-state oriented. This seems to reflect the emergence of a priest class with probably some sort of associated political/dynastic class. This has gotten a bit off track from quantum fluctuations. LC So I do think there is an evolutionary basis for mythic narratives and this includes religion. However, religion starting in the ancient world became totalitarian social control structures. Both Christianity and Islam are complete totalitarian systems, and it works by instilling the commands of an infinite authority into the minds of people. Eric Blair wrote a fascinating treatise on the social psychology of totalitarian power, where he noted how this is the most effective way of controlling people. Eric Blair wrote this in fictional form as 1984 under the pen name George Orwell. His catch phrases about THOUGHT CRIME and the rest are references to the sort of internal control over minds based on terror, and in religion this is called sin. Religion though has ultimately this “emperor's new clothes” problem in that our examinations of the world have revealed how religious ideas about the world are wrong. The cosmology of the Tanach, or old Testament, is based on Sumerian cosmology of a flat earth covered by an iron dome all submerged in water. Ever wonder why the Israelis called their anti-missile system Iron Dome? So much else is just wrong as well. The intellectual power of religion has weakened since the 15th or 16th century. Religions, thought of as memes or sort of brain viruses are fighting back hard these days. I would compare the state of religion as similar to WWII Germany during the Ardennes offensive in late 1944. At least intellectually this is the case, and over half of young people raised religiously are leaving. Christianity and Islam are worn out mythic narratives, which will in time if we survive pass on as did the Orphic gods of the ancient Greeks.. What I see emerging is a new paradigm for mythic systems, and we see it in superheroes Yugio and Magic cards etc. It is a suspension of rational thought to imagine super-powered people, who are almost like gods, but it does not command your complete attention and it is largely a systems of games and entertainment. This fulfills the psychological need for mythic narratives, but without the totalitarian ideology. LC The expansion of the influence of Christian fundamentalism is one reason the US has this orange baboon, or Godzilla, as President. People are becoming stupid, and this unfortunately appears to be a trend in the rest of the world as well. It is just that we have not yet transformed the Renaissance. Not all science have come back to reason. We are still leaving theology in the hand of people advocating (if not imposing) dogma. The entire God/Non-God debate hides the original questioning of the greek, where the question was about the existence of the universe, not of God, which is a nickname for the truth that we search, with the (enlighten) understanding that nobody can claim to have found it. It is the separation of theology from science which has made some people thinking that science = truth, and religion = fiction, when (of course) science is doubt, especially about the ontology commitment, be them personal and impersonal. Please, I wish this religious stuff were taken somewhere else. Religion has no more sense than if I wish upon a star my fairy godmother will come, transubstantiate mice and a pumpkin into a horse drawn coach and take me to eternal bliss --- or happy ever after. It is all just magical thinking and ultimately preposterous nonsense. It can be, but biology has become a similar non sense in the materialist dogmatic USRR. It is not the domain which is a problem, but the use of dogma, and the discouragement of the doubt, and that is insane, but is not “religion”, it is the fake religion that we deserve as long as we don’t let the domain to come back to reason and experiences. Bruno LC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ msgid/everything-list/ 09e49351-9bd8-41b4-b6c0- d640dd0f7531%40googlegroups. com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everyth...@ googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ msgid/everything-list/ 201a68dd-9b27-4b59-a3ef- 2e72b7f835b3%40googlegroups. com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/5bb1ccb2-2e9a-4be3-8ec2-a3a4933e8b7d%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/1807903942.1213533.1567393058131%40mail.yahoo.com.
