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Author | Topic: Humans faults and evolutionary biology | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hyroglyphx Inactive Member |
But what I wonder is, while it's true some of our traits make sense in a way, why is god so mad and disappointed in humans, when he knew our many traits would backfire horribly and cause suffering God cannot be omnipresent, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent while humans are sinful, without God indicting himself. If God is the Creator, then God has dominion over everything. Even giving us the choice makes him complicit in the ultimate outcome. It's a logically inescapable conclusion. So you are right to question why God would become indignant over human sin when he supposedly knows long before the actual ever takes place what we will do, and is the one who created us with said desire in the first place. "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction." — Blaise Pascal
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hotjer Member (Idle past 4574 days) Posts: 113 From: Denmark Joined: |
Ahh
but it is not a ploy by the priests, at least not in the sense I speak of it. I was trying to speak as a Lutheraner/protestant. They do not want that kind of power since they are sinners just like other people and therefor not more worthy than other people. However, I understand your line of thoughts but I suspect it is more of an American (and maybe Catholic) than a Scandinavian/Protestant phenomenon. Personally, I voluntarily give money to the church through my taxes; not because I am Christian as said earlier, but because I think it is a good thing for the society and culture to have such church we as have here (in Denmark). Anyways, let us end it here or PM me. This seems way to off-topic.
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Kairyu Member Posts: 162 From: netherlands Joined: |
Alright, I think the debate about the money making bit of religon is off topic.
I've been thinking about this. I still lack a bit of information. Could some people give their personal opinion on this subject? A few facts would be handy as well.
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Kairyu Member Posts: 162 From: netherlands Joined: |
Alright this thread has died I think. It's been more then a month. But I am still lacking knowledge on this problem. Does there exist a topic here that also deal with this problem? I am still not sure if my troubles with this are true or not. Some people have been trying to help me fit it in with christian thought, but I would like some neutral feedback on the subject.
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jar Member (Idle past 423 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
I'm still not clear what problem you have?
Maybe if you tried explaining your issue in other words it might help. Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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thingamabob Junior Member (Idle past 2645 days) Posts: 23 From: New Jerusalem Joined: |
Hello WSW24
WSW24 writes: Also, to gain a good view, can somebody support my problem, to gain a good view from both sides? I thought God created the first man sinless, was I mistaken? If God created him sinless, then God is not responsible for us being sinners. The man that was sinless had a choice to obey or disobey. He disobeyed God's command. Bringing physical death to the body and spiritual death (separation) from God. So why is it God's fault we are all sinners. God did love us and provide a way we could be reunited with Him. Now the only choice we have is to remain separated from Him which is no choice at all. So the only real choice we have is to accept His offer of forgiveness and be reunited with Him. Being restored to the condition the man was befoe he disobeyed God by eating the fruit. thing,
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thingamabob Junior Member (Idle past 2645 days) Posts: 23 From: New Jerusalem Joined: |
Hello again,
WSW24 writes: A important facet of Christian teaching is that humans are prone to sin, and we choose so by free will. I thought the Bible taught we were sinners by nature. So we sin by natural desires. We can choose not to sin if we so desire. thing,
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Coyote Member (Idle past 2135 days) Posts: 6117 Joined: |
I thought the Bible taught we were sinners by nature. Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. The belief that humans are inherently evil is the most pernicious nonsense ever to dribble from the fevered minds of shamans. Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
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Jumped Up Chimpanzee Member (Idle past 4971 days) Posts: 572 From: UK Joined:
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Hi WSW24
Some people have been trying to help me fit it in with christian thought, but I would like some neutral feedback on the subject. I'm an atheist, so not sure if my opinion counts as "neutral" feedback, but here is my opinion which I hope may be of interest to you. Your basic question seems to be: Why did God make us in such a way that we do things that anger him? That’s a very reasonable question. It certainly seems illogical. It’s a question often asked by atheists such as myself to challenge the whole idea of the Judeo-Christian god. I think at the heart of the sin issue in Christianity is a universal difficulty all humans have in trying to make sense of apparent conflicts in their own behaviour, emotions and sense of morality. From an atheist evolutionary perspective, I think it is easy to understand the conflicts. Humans are a social species that benefit enormously from cooperating with each other. We have a much greater chance of survival (both as individuals and as a species) when we work together. So, for our system of cooperation to work, we need to demonstrate selfless behaviour in order to be socially accepted and, (this is the critical bit) by demonstrating selfless behaviour, we stay in the social group and thereby achieve a selfish aim of increasing our individual chance of survival. There is a sort of knife-edge balance we all walk in life between being selfless enough to be a valuable and trusted member of society, while still retaining an element of selfishness that guarantees our own welfare and survival. Obviously, you can’t be too selfless, like give all your food away, or you’d die. Not only would this obviously be bad for you, it would be bad for society to lose a valuable member. So we need selfish instincts to counter our selfless instincts (and vice versa). We need emotions to drive us towards being good citizens, and we also need emotions to drive us towards looking after number one. This is where I think the root of the God v Sin comes from. God represents the selfless instincts we have to be good citizens, and Sin represents the selfish instincts we have to ensure we survive and reproduce. So, in my opinion, the stories in the Bible were just metaphors that portrayed this dilemma of why we could be both selfless and selfish long before anyone knew about evolution.
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Otto Tellick Member (Idle past 2360 days) Posts: 288 From: PA, USA Joined: |
Hi, WSW24.
I hope that the reply from Jumped Up Chimpanzee was helpful for you. Personally, I think that post is the best explanation I've seen yet for the "morality / sin" dilemma that everyone faces, regardless whether they've been raised in Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology, or Hinduism or Buddhism or Santaria or even with no specific religious upbringing at all -- it's just part of the overall human condition. It seems as though lots of people have trouble understanding the nature of the dance between selfish and selfless, between the free will of an individual and the constraints of a group, between the narrow-mindedness of a clique and the diversity of a complex, interdependent society.
WSW24 writes: I am still not sure if my troubles with this are true or not. If you draw the conclusion that God is imaginary, that people make up statements about God as a means of projecting the things they are trying (but often failing) to understand, then it all starts to make a lot more sense. Obviously there's a lot about the human condition that any one individual will have a hard time understanding. If the individual decides that there must be some external deity that accounts for it all, this does not lead the individual to actually understand things any better, and anything the person says about this deity will tend to reflect the imperfection of his or her own general understanding. Even when referring to some "standard" text, such as the bible or koran or vedas or whatever, any one person's understanding of the text will be as imperfect as that of the person who first wrote the text. Everyone makes mistakes and everyone has their own point of view, and authors of "holy books" are no exception, their own claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Obviously, imperfection affects the non-religious as well as the religious, but there is an important difference: the non-religious are willing and often eager to learn what their mistakes are, and to correct them. They'll revise explanations that were written years ago when new evidence shows a problem with the existing text, and they'll try to be careful about understanding the limitations of their current explanations. So the point is to use your brain, use observation, try to know your own limitations, and try to understand the limitations of others. You can actually do a pretty decent job of it without positing anything at all about any sort of deity. It's all just a matter of living; if you think there should be more to it than that, go ahead and make something up to suit your perceived need -- but don't let that get in the way of actually trying to understand things as they really are. autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
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Kairyu Member Posts: 162 From: netherlands Joined: |
Your explanation in these post rolls back to a explanation that used biblical literalism, a young earth, and the fall. In this sense, you can have a clear answer.
But: While that may make sense when addressing this problem, I have a issue with it: I do not believe in a young earth, I believe in theistic evolution. I was brought up as such, and from what I learned at school in biology, geography, and history , from science sources that I encounter everywhere, and also this site. Generally the evidence from a old earth seems to be the right one for me. The topic if the earth is young, and the fall is true, or that the scientific timeline is true, and humans evolved somehow with god's help is another one entirely. It's good to have the literalistic view in this topic though. For this topic. I am going to assume the latter. *The goal is to discuss if: do general and evolutionary human traits clash with the behavior god wants us to have? * From a atheistic standpoint, they do. From a literalist standpoint, we have not evolved, and our negative traits have a other causes, that god did not want. (the fall) And now I am looking for what old earth creationists have to say on this matter. Questions would be:A do these traits indeed clash? B If they do, could there be a explanation for it why god made us like this? I am sorry if I am being vague, English is my second language, and debating is hard, even more so with this very complicated subject. My knowledge is also lacking.
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Dexx Junior Member (Idle past 4968 days) Posts: 7 From: Perth, WA, Australia Joined: |
Putting aside theological considerations for the moment - what is the purpose of right and wrong? Humans are social animals. It appears that the bonds we make in families, tribes, nations etc are a very strong survival trait. Being immoral or breaking laws weakens those social bonds and is therefore selected against.
However this relatively recent biological imperative is at odds with a much older imperative: selfishness. So why are some people more intrinsically kind and moral than others? The human brain is a complex thing. Subtle differences in structure can have profound affects on intelligence, personality, propensity, etc. Some people are born with a neural makeup that tends them more towards immorality and selfishness than the norm. Others are rewired that way by their experiences. Edited by Dexx, : No reason given.
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
However this relatively recent biological imperative is at odds with a much older imperative: selfishness. I'm not sure how well this contention holds up. There is plenty of evidence for social and co-operative behaviours throughout the animal kingdom. It may be recent in terms of the entire history of life, but then so is multi-cellularity. In fact even in terms of unicellular organisms we can see that co-operative strategies evolve. TTFN, WK
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Kairyu Member Posts: 162 From: netherlands Joined: |
Yeah, that part about the neural makeup that makes us more or less immoral is what I meant.
Sorry for the theological follow up, but that's what I mean. Why do mutations exist that make us more evil? That's not free will. A neurally immoral human can alter his fate, I know that , but is it his fault as his makeup makes him prone to evil? It just doesn't seem logical to me.
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jar Member (Idle past 423 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Evil is something a given society determines and has nothing to do with biological evolution. Good or Evil are purely human constructs.
Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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