—“You are clearly analyzing religion as some kind of intentional civilization building thing rather than a set of existential beliefs that individuals possess in light of the full human ignorance of the origins and purpose of reality.”—John Marshall
A) Yes I understand human demand for mindfulness. I simply observe that this particular means of mindfulness is catastrophically destructive, and that there are scientific and philosophical means of achieving the same ends, without the same side effects. So did the conquering christians – which is why they closed all the stoic schools, and killed or chased off the philosophers, and destroyed the arts letters and architecture of the ancient world – to prevent men from independence they would gain by stoic training, and epicurean lifestyles, rather than abrahamic mindfulness submission and slavery. B) You don’t think each and every institutional religion was designed to employ suggestion, empathy, and false promise as a means of coercing primitive illiterate ignorant petty people into a politically beneficial behavior? I mean, I’m pretty well read on the development of every religion and by and large there isn’t any difference between the development of a logic, a science, a philosophy, a work of literature, a work of mythology, and a theology. it’s all engineering the human experience by a combination of techniques. There is no difference between the script writer and director provoking an experience, than that of Saul of Tarsus trying merge the various Roman, Greek, Persian, Mesopotamian religions into a jewish rebel’s narrative, in order to replace the primary religious works of the Mediterranean (Homer and Achilles), with an anti-hero (Abraham and Jesus). The fact that we desire the provisions of science, history, literature, philosophy, and theology and that we have produced religions for different classes in every civilization except islam is rather obvious. it’s just that the underclasses are better governed by theological superstition, the middle by philosophical sophism, and the upper by exercise of power, is nothing more than evidence of the need for a system of achievement accessible to classes possessed of different degrees of agency. Escapism and supernaturalism; justification and sophism; empiricism and power. You need to feel you aren’t manipulated by those with greater agency – I understand. It’s just false. Religion largely provides sedation as a means of mindfulness, while buddhism, stoicism, and wisdom(science, history) incrementally provide mindfulness by providing one with agency – rather than sedation. Just because drugs feel good doesn’t mean that they are good for you. Just because theology makes you feel good doesn’t mean it is good for you. Just because lying feels good doesn’t mean it is good for you. —“To be clear: You believe in Evolution and a 4 billion year old Earth, while taking the entire Book of Genesis as a fraud or a work of fiction?”—John Marshall Of course. I mean, we know the origin of every story in it. I’ve written about Adam and Eve and Cain and Able. These stories predate the jews. They were just appropriated. Most of it’s Babylonian. And the story of Egypt is also claiming victimhood rather than defeat. I mean, I don’t make errors. I have to compensate for a lot of you. It’s not that hard. I just do the work instead of presume. —“Where is your evidence that all living things in the world share a single celled common ancestor, despite the fact that the change of a kind of animal into a totally different kind has never been observed? Wheres your evidence for a 4 billion year old Earth, despite the fact that this is impossible due to the rate at which the Moon is leaving the Earth, and that those years are simply added to give more time for Evolution to happen in the minds of Evolutionists? Seems like you’re just accepting myths from above like everyone else.”—John Marshall Why would we share a single celled common ancestor. Parallel evolution happened all over the place. (you don’t understand Gelernter’s argument, and even if you did, he is a jewish theologian first, and a professor of computer science last, and if you were able (or i was in front of him) it would be a very short conversation to humiliate him. ) –“Wheres your evidence for a 4 billion year old Earth”— Radioactive materials decay at invariant rates, giving rise to daughter products, and it is a nearly perfect clock. Radioactive materials require sun to terminate in order to produce them. The oldest material in the solar system is 4.6b, from the period of first consolidation (formation) and the estimate of the age of the earth (4.5 or so) varies only by whether we’re talking about the beginning of accretion or the beginning of granite flotation. In other words we cannot falsify the evidence, since no matter where we look in the solar system everything else is explained by the same time frames. —“Do you believe that human beings share a common ancestor with gorillas and chimpanzees?”— I don’t ‘believe’ anything – that is a theological statement. Instead, I can’t falsify the theory. And, if you’re asking ‘did we share a set of common ancestors rather than a single ancestor, then yes. The only bottlenecks I know of are relatively recent and seem to be largely on the female side. These were later offset by a minority of males fathering a majority of children. Why? Similar to rates of change in radiation, there is a measurable mutation survival rate in all DNA including that of all the great apes. (This is how Gelertner and others have tried to fool the ignorant – by conflating survivor mutation rate in surviving samples with mutation rate in population.) Taking advantage of people’s ignorance combined with their wishful thinking. The evolutionary trajectory is traceable, and rather obvious, the only problem we really face is that while we differ from chimps by about 5-6%, 90% of DNA is Junk (unused). And recombinant genetic expression is far more complex than we had originally thought. meaning smaller numbers of increasingly complex proteins can replace larger numbers of less complex proteins. I mean in theory at some point we should be able to build a human with one very complex protein, which , ooops… would look like the next generation of DNA, just as DNA is a revolution over RNA. Anyway. Yeah. We, like all great apes, evolved from groups of related ancestors.