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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Mar 16, 2015 - 03:17pm PT
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Nice to see you guys maintaining such a continued high level of discourse... such athletic prose makes me weak in the knees, such certainty too. Nothing more heartwarming than the certitude of righteous indignation and method. Someday I've just gotta get back here.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mar 16, 2015 - 03:44pm PT
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We create meaning and purpose by taking on and overcoming hard things-
from your evolutionary stance what would be your opinion for the meaning and purpose of YOUR life?
and what was the meaning and purpose of your dear ol great,great,great grandfather's life? if you can even remember his name and occupation.
i mean other than procreation, unless that's all you got?
maybe easier, what is mankind's meaning and purpose for continuing today??
it's oblivious mankind has disrupted and put to extinction thousands and thousands of spieces in this evolutionalized nature. Along with polluting the air and water which if continues on the same trajectory will turn the planet unihabital. All in pursuit of luxurious living and pleasuring toys.
goes without saying the world would be a better place without man!
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 16, 2015 - 03:51pm PT
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The world would not be a better place without man - it would be a different place.
Better for buffalo and the dodo bird, perhaps. Not better for rats or crows, however.
Purpose? Leave place better than you found it and appreciate your life. Pretty simple. How that happens? Not so simple.
Mike - I had to skip out on your lecture for some self study. Sorry, Teach. HFCS liked my post, you didn't.
This is why I fkng love human beings.
Who wouldn't?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mar 16, 2015 - 04:38pm PT
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Can anyone still credibly argue in 2015 that religion is a force for good thing in the final balance? The religious folks I know who do the right thing would do the right thing without religion - that's just who they are.
It's a misconception that religious people are the only doers of good. Or that because they are religious they must always do good..
That's NOT christianity at all!
I've never met a spiritual christian that came to be one because they decided they wanted to do good. Doing any kind of so-called "good" is merely a byproduct for being grateful from knowing what Jesus did for them.
On the contrary, Jesus came to serve the broken and the sick. NOT the doers of good!
He renounced the Law to do good. Saying it only produces death.
Jesus announced the only true law, love your brother as you love yourself. That is a clear invitation to think. Sure we would all love to be only treated in a good way from everyone. But what about when one of our brothers treats us with harm? If one of us were in his shoes, how would we want to be treated upon realizing we had made a mistake?
Jesus is the epitome of forgiveness! He is the king of forgiveness! And He has bestowed this virtue onto us. This IS our Free-will!
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 16, 2015 - 05:42pm PT
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Tvash: Purpose? Leave place better than you found it and appreciate your life.
But, why?
Let’s look a little critically.
Your “purpose” above is an imaginative and emotional creation. But it doesn’t jive with the theory of evolution. Intellectually, you are without justification.
BUT, in your very practice of it . . . you argue for a theory when it serves your personal purposes. THAT is, indeed, consonant with a point of view to evolution: do what you need to do to win competitive games.
Cheers!
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 16, 2015 - 06:03pm PT
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do what you need to do to win competitive games.
Does evolution play by rules, Mike?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mar 16, 2015 - 06:27pm PT
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Evangelicals organize for a modern Crusade.
what this Mr. Lane is contriving certainly isn't taught in the bible. quite the opposite really.
he should do what he can to rally his troops to vote. But that should be the extent.
The bible's morales don't belong to anybody that doesn't want'em. Notice i say morales, and not laws. Activities such as homosexuality, and abortion are not breaking God's law, cuz they are not written in the law. We couldn't ever write the 10 commandments into man's law's. So why should we ever try to write the bibles morales into man's law's? Those morales are meant for personal enlightenment only. And if you have this you should hold onto your belief, but you cannot force a society to believe it too. <That's goin against God's law!
The Evangelist should stick to evangelizing with the bible, and not with man's law..
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feralfae
Boulder climber
in the midst of a metaphysical mystery
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Mar 16, 2015 - 07:33pm PT
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Hello.
I am wondering if the discussion of morals might be turned to one of ethics, to remove religion entirely from the discussion and bring in ethics as the study of applied logic for humans. Is this a possible segue which might prove worth discussing?
I am also wondering if it is possible to separate spirituality from religion, to enable a discussion of spirituality as a state of being which is both self-aware and self-knowing.
Te purpose of life: I think it may be to create human laughter/joy. Actually, I think the purpose of life is to live it, as well-directed toward our dreams/visions as we are able to direct our life, given the surprises and detours of living.
Yes, I think we are problem-solvers, and also creators and dreamers. Thank you for the interesting discussion. I wish I had more time to enjoy the various lines of thinking.
Tvash, thank you for your recent, interesting posts.
feralfae
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mar 16, 2015 - 07:36pm PT
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Time for a bath.
Awww. i'm sympathetic to ya:)
it wouln't feel right if i gave you props all the time would it
Ur my best link for what's going down on the dark side.
now go take that shot. maybe even two.
and get right back up on the stage cowboy!
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mar 16, 2015 - 07:52pm PT
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to remove religion entirely from the discussion
don't think it can be done here in the US. Every adult knows atleast the basic do's and dont's the bible has to say about morals and spirituality.
and the one's here prolly know'em moreso.
if you don't mind me ask'in, are there some biblical morales that you would dispute?
and,
what sort of spiritual life can you imagine, IF there weren't any afterlife, or before this life?
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 16, 2015 - 10:25pm PT
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MH2: Does evolution play by rules, Mike?
Its own, as I understand it. Evolution must be a mindless law, as currently expressed by science.
But. . . and you have to give me a lot of leeway here, please. . . if evolution were instead some kind of unfoldment, then I think the “story” reads very differently. Not driven to, but pulled toward something. What? Who knows?
Folks who are spiritualists are liable to argue that there are higher states of awareness that can either be cultivated (because it’s in them potentially) or that they can be uncovered by the veils of illusion and ignorance.
But who knows, really, and who could say who knows?
If these sorts of things interest a person, then he or she should look. If not, then the hell with it. Enjoy.
For me, past experiences forced what seem to be new ways of being, experiencing, or seeing. Almost dying in Viet Nam, cancer, total collisions in automobiles, and near misses brought on brief moments of “Whoa . . . wait a minute.” From there, add in about 7-8 years of psychedelics and movement into meditation (weirdly, at the same time), then 5-7 years of science training at a relatively late age (where I had the courage to ask serious questions), old age (where I don’t care what people say about my views), and finally experiencing no subject and no object while teaching over the past 4-5 years. . . viola: reasons for looking for “what the heck is really going on?” shows up.
I’m sure it’s different for every person, whatever it might be. It could be the mysteries and wonder of life as seen through one’s grandchildren, losing too many close friends too immediately, or simply seeing life’s frailties through the eyes of others’ experiences. All of these sorts of things force us to come to grips with the here and now, . . . whatever the hell that really is. I think many of us come to wonder whether we really have a handle on “what’s going on here.” At least that’s what happened with me.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 16, 2015 - 10:59pm PT
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"Your “purpose” above is an imaginative and emotional creation. But it doesn’t jive with the theory of evolution. Intellectually, you are without justification.
BUT, in your very practice of it . . . you argue for a theory when it serves your personal purposes. THAT is, indeed, consonant with a point of view to evolution: do what you need to do to win competitive games."
Idiotic pronouncements aside, let's look at this a bit more closely.
First, altruism and satisfaction are evolved traits, as all traits must be, so let's look at their costs and benefits in the aggregate. Altruism provides cohesion among social groups - which is critical to the survival of that group in a stressed situation. Soldiers win battles not because it's every man for himself, but because soldiers fight for each other. Satisfaction has a salubrious physiological effect - leading to better health, and therefore better choice of mates, in addition to longevity. Dissatisfaction famously has the opposite effect.
In the aggregate. That's not to say a dissatisfied individual will never live longer than a satisfied one. The survival benefit can be extremely subtle or slight, but over enough generations, given the wide variability of traits within a population - satisfaction versus dissatisfaction aided in the survival of the entire species.
You do understand statistical distributions, don't you Mike? That even though individual outliers on one end of a distribution or another, for a species to survive, a new trait must, over enough generations, skew that population towards survival - GIVEN THE ENVIRONMENT IT FACES.
Sickle cell anemia is one example. How could such a genetic trait possibly aid in survival? In the US, it certainly doesn't. In malarial Africa, however, where the mutation originated, it does. Malarial cells sickle preferentially in those that have the sickle cells genes - the body's response is to remove those malarial cells by macrophages. On the other hand, sickle cell anemic patients are weaker and and therefore susceptible to malaria's ill effects. The first effect - the benefit, slightly outweighs the second, however - in the net, sickle cell aids survival in malarial environments.
Evolution is full of such subtle, complex relationships that seem not to make any evolutionary sense if one only looks at the process as simpler than it really is.
And so it goes.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 16, 2015 - 11:17pm PT
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A zebra's stripes provide some camouflage, and play a role in mating displays, but their overwhelmingly most important survival benefit is body temperature regulation.
What if the environment gets hotter? Less vegetation would mean stripes would provide less camouflage (a negative) but better temperature regulation (a positive). Depending on how that balances out - a zebra could have it's stripes radically altered or disappear entirely over many generations, depending on how the vegetation and diurnal and seasonal temperatures change. It isn't a simple matrix of GOOD TRAIT = MORE SURVIVAL.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 16, 2015 - 11:32pm PT
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One of the most fascinating processes of living is to take an idea - a collection of electrical impulses in your body - and transform it into a physical reality. A marriage, a spaceship, a poem, a macrame spider fern holder. Something from (almost) nothing.
This is particularly true with human relationships. We don't 'find them', we create them. It's arguably the hardest but most rewarding part of being human.
Hopefully, all those macrame spider ferns won't extinguish such relationships before they have a chance to flower.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 17, 2015 - 10:01am PT
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Between 50 and 70,000 years ago, a population bottleneck greatly reduced the genetic diversity of our species - an effect that continues today.
A new study indicates that another bottleneck which further reduced our genetic diversity - and with it, our survival chances as a species, occurred between 4 and 6000 years ago.
The effect is primarily male only. It's posited that only wealthier males got to get jiggy with as many fillies as they could handle.
Interesting set of feedback loops.
Complicated stuff.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 17, 2015 - 10:42am PT
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Tvash: altruism and satisfaction are evolved traits, as all traits must be, so let's look at their costs and benefits in the aggregate.
You’re mixing evolution with economics and later statistics and psychology. They are incommensurate. (You play fast and loose and slightly oblique with theories.)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 17, 2015 - 10:42am PT
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I think many of us come to wonder whether we really have a handle on “what’s going on here.”
If we didn't we would not ask questions.
The mechanics of evolution are plain: variation within a species, including rare beneficial mutations, which affect reproductive success. Successful reproduction faces many challenges such as finding food, escaping predation, dealing with weather and being tested by your own species.
The phrase 'successful reproduction' condenses so many factors that it is obvious and almost meaningless. But science grows from examples to broader theories and principles, not the other way around. In the image below there are two butterflies.
from The Malay Archipelago
Alfred Russel Wallace
illustration by T.W. Wood
In this example it is predation that appears to have selected for a butterfly that looks like a leaf when it lands on a twig and closes its wings.
In the last 500 million years evolution seems to have produced more complex plants and animals from simpler ones, but that is only a notion or impression and not a well defined question that can be answered by a test. Same for spirituality.
And it is typical that an attentive student of the natural world will continually wonder whether they really have a handle on what's going on here.
Alfred Russel Wallace made the trip to the Malay Archipelago in 1854. He spent 8 years among various islands. His main goal was to learn about birds of paradise, which he says "... are characterised by extraordinary developments of plumage, which are unequalled in any other family of birds." He also makes the claim that the magnificence of the male plumage accords with the theory of natural variation and selection by females. Then in a footnote he says:
I have since arrived at the conclusion that female selection is not the cause of the development of the ornamental plumes in the males. See my Darwinism, Chap. X.
I don't know what Wallace eventually concluded, nor what current thinking is, but the example of questioning oneself is a good one.
Before going to the Malay Archipelago, Wallace had explored the Amazon basin. On both expeditions he endured many hardships, and came close to dying. On return to England he married and had three children.
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