A personal question

Hi Delshad.You seem to be holding your own quite well on this thread. I don't want to detract from what's going on here (since you are defending your faith), but I would like to have an opportunity to discuss some of the substantive questions you raise, if you're interested.I would like to propose as my starting position this essay. If you would like to discuss the ideas presented in there, I would recommend we open a new thread. Let me know.Now returning you to your regularly scheduled thread...[edited to fix link][This message has been edited by Quetzal, 10-18-2002]

Hi Delshad,Don't worry, I won't be "disappointed" if you can't refute the essay. As I said, it's a point of departure (and gives you a good idea where I'm coming from). Obviously, I consider human behavior/culture to have a neurophysiological foundation, although as you noted we are able to use our "intelligence" to overcome to a greater or lesser extent the purely biological imperatives.There are two pieces from previous posts on this thread that I would be interested in exploring with you. We can pick one or the other - or I'd be open to alternatives, whatever you wish.

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What I meant was that, the philosophy of "survival of the fittest" isnt very suitable outside the classroom. Because, although survival of the fittest isnt necessary by means of violence, the underlying message to the society is that feelings such as love and compassion exists only because of our interest to stay alive, they arent real.

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To my mind, this topic covers two distinct areas: 1) natural selection and its applicability to humans and 2) the origin and persistence of aggressive behavor vs altruistic or compassionate behavor. Both of these could be combined easily into a single thread.The other bit I found interesting is

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Let me further explain, animals are driven by instincts so of course they do not need any religion to maintain their social structure, they eat, sleep ,fight, make love etc without question. It becomes a little more complicated in our case, because it seems that our intelligence has outgrown our instincts thus it is our intelligence that mostly control how we see the world and respond to it. Therefore moral values isnt going to pop up on its own in our case, we need values coming from outside. So it isn`t just look at the animal kingdom and learn, their way of maintaing a social order isnt like our own.

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In this paragraph you seem to be saying several things: 1) that human behavior cannot be adduced from study of animal behavior; 2) a question on how morals and morality are derived, with the implication that the divine is the source, rather than nature.Either one of those two topics would be of interest. Alternatively, I'm happy to discuss the one you proposed here "The neccesity of religion in our modern society", although I would suggest rephrasing it as a question (after all, we're going to argue about the answer ). I'll leave the decision up to you.One advance apology: I will not be able to undertake this discussion in substance until probably Wednesday - I have a speech to finish writing this weekend which is giving me fits, and then a two-day long conference. However, I'd be happy to either start a thread or have you start one around then.I'm looking forward to the discussion. (See how much more fun being civil can be? )