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Originally Posted by filtherton
I am calm.
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My mistake.
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Originally Posted by filtherton
How do you know it would help the tribe? What if the person's car broke down while they were on their way to kill somebody? There are many situations where doing the obvious thing to help someone out could turn out to be the wrong thing to do as far as the tribe is concerned.
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As an alpha male (yes, I recognize that I am, in most situations, an or the alpha male. It's not ego, it's simply reality), I feel an inate responsibility to help others and make sure that my community and even society as a whole runs more smoothly. It's part of why I, ironically, habe a bit of a christ complex. The idea is that when a member of the pack needs help, it is ultimately the responsibility of the pack to help them. I've studied wolves, and a prime example is when a member of a pack is injured. Instead of leaving the wolf to die, which only happens when it's clear that the animal is mortally wounded and even that is rare, they assist the wolf, licking clean wounds and slowing the pace of the entire pack so that the single wounded member can keep up. The old adage of a team being only as strong as it's weakest link is proven. The pack functions better as a whole, and in maintaining that cohesive social structure and the efficiency of the pack, one improves the survivability of the pack.
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Originally Posted by filtherton
How you can make that claim about the existence of ethics without using any sort of faith?
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Ethics predate faith. That in and of itself is proof, but I'll do you one better. I'm an atheist and I'm ethical. I see it as perfectly logical to practice the golden rule and to protect the pack.
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Originally Posted by filtherton
And as far as consciousness goes, intuition is all we have; scientists can't even define what consciousness is.
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Neither can religion. That's why we have philosophy.
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Originally Posted by filtherton
The enemy of progress isn't theism, it's intellectual laziness. Science and theism can co-exist; all it requires is an open mind. Like i said, i know of theists who allow their faith to change in light of scientific discovery. The idea that theists are holding us back completely ignores the facts that descartes(father of modern mathematics), leibniz(co-inventor of calculus) and newton(father of modern mechanics) were all super religious.
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Theism is intellectual laziness. The unwillingness to recognize that faith is an intelectual cop out is the fundamnetal flaw of theism. 2000 years ago a carpenter's son walked on water and turned water into wine instantly simply doesn't work, whether it supports a system of values or not. The real problem is that religion has spread so far. If Christianity were a small cult in the US, or if Islam were a small cult in the Middle East, no one would care because it wouldn't really hurt anyone. Also, people can be intellectually lazy in one way and not in another. Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton were all religious, and all brilliant. The thing is, they were brilliant not because of but in spite of religion.
As I recall, Descartes was working at the same time as another great figure in science: Galileo. Galileo was, of course, condemned by the Catholic Church. Did you know that because of that condemnation, Descartes abandoned his plans to release "Treatise on the World", a book about matter and mathematics, because he was afraid that the church would burn all his books as they did Galileo? The church prevented one of the earliest works of what would eventually become atomism, which was revolutionary. Here you have provided me with proof that the church stands in the way of progress.