by Perry 156 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
"how do you deal with the fact that you are a living contradiction of your own belief since you pronounce the same thing both good and bad?"
Perry, sorry, but you lost me; exactly what is it that I pronounce both good and bad by accepting evidence for past history?
evolution supposes that life and ultimately man who is at the top of the chain got here through a process of the fittest dominating and killing off the weaker
Perry: If that is all evolution is to you then you really need to re-educate yourself on the subject. Of course 'survival of the fittest' is a factor but so is group cohesion, cooperation and reciprocation. The vast majority of human beings are not sabre-toothed monsters who are killing off their puny rivals, we have evolved to become creative and altruistic - as well as murderous and sadistic.
Some atheists are child molestors, so are some christians. The danger doesn't reside in the the 'theory' of natural selection or the 'theory' of divine creation - it resides with the individual.
Six, I think my point is rather clearly evident even if some are touchy on wording. If the process that brought us here (which I'm assuming is good since the A/E position is that we are a good thing by nature, correct me if I'm wrong) weeded out competing others (a failure of would be that we would not be here and that's bad) by a survival of the fittest, then why should people interfere (offer assistance to the weak) with a process that has worked so far?
Although I haven't read the book, here is an interesting quote from evolutionist Robert Wright in The Moral Animal:
Evolutionary theory, after all, has a long and largely sordid history of application to human affairs. After being mingled with political philosophy around the turn of the century to form the vague ideology known as "social Darwinism," it played into the hands of racists, fascists, and the most heartless sort of capitalists.
Personally, I have known both athiests/unbelievers and religionists/believers whose ideas and decisions based on those ideas made them seem quite dangerous to me, and the reverse is also true. So there ya go.
~Merry
nicolaou said:
we have evolved to become creative and altruistic
So, if we were creative and altruistic before, that would have been bad because we would not have advanced our species and gotten here. But now that we are here it is a good thing because, why? How do you know it's good?
Three questions:
Was Stalin not an atheist and also those that followed him as leaders of the old Soviet Union? They did not have a stellar record concerning human rights. Their victims number into the millions.
Did Hitler not say that any race who would not fight for it's survival, was not worthy of living, citing "survival of the fittest"?
If man is just a higher form of animal, why is there a system of punishment when he acts like an animal?
Warlock
Perry: Your conceptions of good and bad are irrelevant as far as evolution is concerned. The blind guide behind the evolutionary process is natural selection. It doesn't give a shit whether it produces 'benign' creatures or 'evil' ones it simply finds the most effective way of ensuring the survival of the best genes.
That may sound cold and harsh and perhaps unsatisfying to a religious person but there it is. No-one promised you anything deep, there is no meaning or purpose to all of this other than the one we give ourselves. As an evolved and atheistic individual my purpose in life is to follow the wise and pithy counsel of a visitor to earth, who died and was restored to life before ascending heavenwards;
"Be good!"
nicolaou,
I'm just trying to get a straight answer here. Am I correct in understanding you to be at peace who you are now even though you do not personally practice the principles of selection which produced you?
Am I correct in understanding you to be at peace who you are now
Yes.
even though you do not personally practice the principles of selection which produced you?
I guess I do practice them. I'm not going around killing physically weaker individuals but you can bet your god-given arse that if any human threatened my life or the lives of my family I'd try as hard as I could to remove that predators genes from the gene pool and ensure the survival of the fittest.
Wouldn't you?
