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george tzindaro's avatar

I am an atheist, but I think there is an important role for traditional religion in a modern mostly secular society. Religion is a way to put on the brakes when technological or cultural chenge becomes too fast or goes too far.

It is a way to consult the collective wisdom of our ancestors, to ask them what they would think about things. We do not have to listen to them, but it is good to have a way to ask the questions before rushing headlong into assisted fertilization, human-computer merging, genetic manipulation, geoengineering, and other developments that at least some religions oppose.

Religion also is a good thing in providing a counter to the modern all-powerful state. It is very important to have at least a few people who do not recognize the state as the ultimate authority. Who insist there is some higher authority to which they give their ultimate aligence. Without them it becomes the state that can demand total control.

We saw this during the recent covid panic, when governments ignored and abandoned rights that were established over centuries and not without much bloodshed, and in many case it was the religious people, and especially the most religious, those we tend to label as fanatics, who stood up to the imposition of a medical dictatorship and resisted the tyranical demands of those who give too much authority to both modern science and the state it exists to serve.

So while I do not believe in any religion, I am glad somebody does. If we need to fight for our liberties, they will be among our best allies.

As for the conflict between Darwinism and the Judeo-Christian story of creation, that is not so immportant as both sides think it is. They have more in common than either will admit. After all, they both agree that life began a long time ago and has continued ever since by the well-known process of reproduction. They only differ on the minor point of exactly how it began.

The real challenge to both Darwinism and the Genesis story, both of which have serious shortcomings, is the now-abandoned theory of spontaneous generation, the claim that life, as a perfectly natural phenomenon, will naturally occur wherever and when ever the conditions are right for it and that the conditions under which it can be found thriving today are the right cconditions for it to first occur.

This theory of natural self-organization of living forms coming into existence all around us all the time, and mutlually adapted to the conditions under which they form, including others forming at the same time and place, better explains the diversity of living forms and the mutual adaptation of multiple species in an ecosystem than any theory that requires all living things today to be descended from ancestors.

Natural self-organization of living organisms happens all around us all the time, but is almost never observed by scientists due to their heavy indoctrination against it, although many uneducated rural folk are well aware of such things and frequently observe it happening in the woods, fields, and ponds.

The Creationists and the Darwinists have both done an excellent job of discovering the flaws in each others theories, but neither makes a really good case. A third viewpoint is badly needed and a modernized form of spontaneous generation, not just of individual species, but of ecosystems, is the most viable contender.

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Harley Myler's avatar

<sigh> Required reading for anyone remotely associated with this film, including those who have watched it, is Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." Not the whole book (very few can handle it), just the last chapter of book III, "The Auguries of Science." We are, as always, at the mercy of our collective cognitive imperative.

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