Tone Deft wrote:So you sold out for some JAP (Jewish American Pussy), come back to the other side, get your balls out of your wife's purse and accept what you knew all along, there is no god, it's a lie.
Hey who knows? she could look like Natalie Portman for all we know? or Susan Siverman. I would say whatever those two wanted me to say if they tossed my salad!
i wouldn't go on message boards arguing with people about the moral superiority of my religion though.....
So back to the subjects at hand. Compassion and helping complete strangers is held up as a mystery by both secular and religious people for some reason? I'm at a complete loss as to why Dawkins finds this so strange etc. and has to 'figure' out how it fits into the evolutionary model etc. Or why the religious think this is an indicator of a religious based moral code of behavior that permeates civil societies etc.
Here's my personal take on it:
We are a pack animal, we existed for thousands of years in tribal societies. In a tribe you help others simply because it's a matter of survival, their well being in turn enables you to survive etc. Hell, if the leader tries to get the tribe to do something obviously stupid to the rest of the tribe, in most cases, guess who's not the leader any more?
At some level we are about survival of the species. It makes perfect sense to help others, and be helpful yourself. What doesn't make sense is murder, and unnecessary hostility.
To me, those things are the product of overcrowding, we haven't developed a concrete way to deal with overcrowding so we have war, greed, hostility etc. It's a reaction you can see clearly in lab rats to the sort of overcrowding you have at every level of society. Even the small town people channel this feeling of suffocation through their TV sets and media outlets.
Seriously, if any of you haven't seen the studies they did on overcrowding and rats, you really should, it's pretty amazing.
Because of this feeling that we have of a lack of global community, we enshrine ourselves in little groups of people with little names that say we belong to this or that religious or ethnic group etc. Then unfortunately some of those groups challenge the validity of some other group, it's Star Belly Sneeches with sometimes bloody effect. War is a game of fear played by sad little monkeys in retaliation to a lack of global community.
Here's the punch line though, or Catch 22..... protestants and catholics (can't say what the others believe...) are convinced that a global community would be run by the anti christ!
So, our one chance of becoming mentally sane as a species by becoming a global tribal community, at this time in mankind's history, would be a sure sign of the end times, and the person or group that organized it would be thought of as demonic...........
But hey, atheists are lacking in moral fiber etc. right? We have no ethics, it's just a matter of some religious teachings that permeate our society, and religion has never been a dividing factor with people.
Religion is always a dividing factor with people. Jews, Catholics, Muslims and Protestants vote against gay rights, and largely think of the others as having it wrong. I have never witnessed an atheist talk about the religious with as much vehemence as a protestant has when talking about catholics. Whatever you say about Dawkins, he never chased preachers off his property when confronted with a challenge to his logic like Ted Haggard did with him. Yeah, that ted haggard!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPmJhg7HCME&eurl=
it doesn't take a scientist to see all the ridicule in it. it takes a dumbass (brainwashed) these days to actually give more value to it than some of the ethics (often sick ethics) it has. or flawed account of history for that matter.