Posted on 04/15/2007 2:50:37 AM PDT by shrinkermd
...And it occurred to me that while we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives, in fact a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around. Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere.
Scarcely a month goes by when Time or Newsweek doesn’t have a cover article on how our genes shape everything from our exercise habits to our moods. Science sections are filled with articles on how brain structure influences things like lust and learning. Neuroscientists debate the existence of God on the best-seller lists, while evolutionary theory reshapes psychology, dieting and literary criticism. Confident and exhilarated, evolutionary theorists believe they have a universal framework to explain human behavior.
Creationists reject the whole business, but they’re like the Greeks who still worshiped Athena while Plato and Aristotle practiced philosophy. The people who set the cultural tone today have coalesced around a shared understanding of humanity and its history that would have astonished people in earlier epochs.
According to this view, human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code. We are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species.
The logic of evolution explains why people vie for status, form groups, fall in love and cherish their young. It holds that most everything that exists does so for a purpose. If some trait, like emotion, can cause big problems, then it must also provide bigger benefits, because nature will not expend energy on things that don’t enhance the chance of survival.
(Excerpt) Read more at select.nytimes.com ...
The late, great Russell Kirk once asked, "..are we no more than the flies of Summer?" Answer that just for yourself and resolving this question becomes easy.
Well, what do you think Mr. Shrinkermd?
This suggests that only 'creationists' reject evolutionary theory in behavioral (or social) sciences, which is not true. Most if not all post-modern 'theorists' reject the use of evolution in explaning things because for them it still bears the notion of 'universal behavior', which for postmodernist--whose main argument is everything is a social construction, hence there's nothing universal about behavior--is a no-no.
I don't believe in God myself. Instead, I feel the tremendous weight on my back from all of those ancestors who fought and lived and loved and schemed and cried and died bringing me to this point: The wanderer who left Prussia to escape bad debts and settled in Wisconsin, my many times great-grandfather who sub-contracted to hunt down agate thieves for the Tutonic Order, and the Pole who over a thousand years ago decided to give Prussia a shot.
What a run-on that was.
There is no plan, everything is chance, but even flies have lives that they consider fulfilling. What you do may be insignificant, but that doesn't make it meaningless.
For all that we have learned about biology, we seem not an inch closer to this "somehow" then the ancients.
And we all know how cutting edge they are.
The game does seem to be designed that way. But who are the players?
Flies can consider?
Of course! And little bunnies bring you eggs at Easter time. And Santa's reindeer have conversations when they're not hauling toys.
- Charles Darwin.
If you understood Christianity more, you would know that it is a frightening and difficult path to walk. The unbelievers have chosen the easy route, hoping that life is just a meaningless journey -- but it is not, and failure to take the difficult road has its cost.
Further, it is difficult to explain why religion (broadly defined to include secular humanism, Marxism, etc) is universal and found in every culture.
Finally, while one can posit that religion (see Edmund O. Wilson) has a beneficial effect for the group, it is difficult to trace this to rules, procedures and so forth that can be analyzed by conscious mind.
You may posit as Pastor Rick Warren does that the inclination to look for God is built into us, or you can posit that religion enhances or limits a culture's ability to thrive but this leads to circular reasoning not amenable to logic.
Perhaps higher intelligence can cause oneself, or itself, to realise how scary things can be, and thus came the need for the salve of religion to "explain" the things that the higher brain thought about, and frightened itself?
MARCUS AURELIUS QUOTES ON DEATH
"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
He who fears death either fears the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if thou shalt have no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm; and if thou shalt acquire another kind of sensation, thou wilt be a different kind of living being and thou wilt not cease to live.
Altogether the interval is small between birth and death; and consider with how much trouble, and in company with what sort of people and in what a feeble body this interval is laboriously passed. Do not then consider life a thing of any value. For look to the immensity of time behind thee, and to the time which is before thee, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?
The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing—the present.
To conclude, always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus to-morrow will be a mummy or ashes. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.
Marcus Aurelius (161-180 a.d.) professional soldier, Emperor of Rome and stoic philosopher wrote “Meditations” for personal use only. His friends published it--posthumously.
Time Magazine.
Cutting edge news.
If you’re careless when you turn the page.
That's a statement of faith.
To fail to recognize it as such -- citing it as fact when in no way it can be demonstrated as such -- is logically inconsistent i.e. irrational.
For many, the belief that they won't ever be called to account for their deeds is far more comforting than a belief in an afterlife.
An excellent point. I'd like to add that I have never met a po-mo type who isnt at minimum a liberal, if not a far leftist. Which undermines the common claim that the Darwinism is the language of the left. In fact, a lot of lefties reject it (of course, they reject all kinds of scientific thinking in favor of what they want to believe.)
Thought maybe, not mind. Mind is not thought.
We are tools of mental processes we are not even aware of.
We are magical, divine beings, heirs to the vast eternal kingdom of God.
But unlike the reported "consciousness" of the those that are clinically dead?
Exactly how much processing power does it take to produce "consciousness"? How much ram? How many cycles per second? When does a physical process produce an observer to a physical process?
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