The difference between a human and a rock

Evolution isn't about the survival of individuals, it's about the survival or failure of specific gene configurations. Killing everyone else is a good survival strategy for individuals, but terrible for genes because there's no one alive to reproduce with.Birds of a feather flock together. Do they do it because they believe in God? Seriously, tiny feathered critters work together to protect each other from predators and raise their offspring safely. They don't have enough brain to them to believe anything, they do it because the ones that didn't got eaten by cats and foxes and so forth before they could reproduce a lot more than the ones with the gene configuration and nervous system programming that the ones who flock have.Southern bigots used to lynch black men just for whistling at white women in admiration. Did they do it because they believed in God? Or was it because that had been a successful strategy for the "honky" geneset for long enough to become common? And did they stop doing it because they stopped believing in God? Or because we started putting them in prison where their reproductive aggression was rechanneled into activities that didn't perpetuate any genes and re-educated their existing children to use their nervous systems in a somewhat different strategy?

That's just learned behavior though, isn't it? I mean, you don't believe anyone is born a buddha, do you? Long, long ago, certain clever people learned that by manipulating people's emotions to make them feel bad about the conditions of their existence they could gain great power while doing very little work, right?Don't get me wrong, I do my ahimsa by consciously refraining from participating in the killing of spiders, snakes, and other venomous creatures. In this way I can pay mindfulness to the 6th Commandment while actually contributing a lot to the actual death rate of vermin like insects, rodents, and neighbors. Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My maker was divine authority,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me nothing but eternal things were made,
And I endure eternally.-- Dante