randomc

Oich. Science is not a religion. For example, i am trying to start multiple rows on the unifying theme of human nature. The fact that nobody round here is prepared to take it up is not representative of science generally. This forum is slanted to answer american politics more than scientific inquiry. But this is just a bunch of people, not science. Oh, and i am an anti-religious bigot, in that i can't be arsed to answer religious truth claims.

Ah, well, i hate everybody so i'll have to take your word for it

Or even better, tell her you like something she likes about her. I'm a cynic.

Apparently a spiritual element in our thinking is common to all of us.

That sexual preference is no more entirely biological than gender is. I was adressing this... which you in no way qualified.

Gender essentialism is slanted. Sexual preference essentialism is slanted.

As far as i remember he was saying if you place (i.e. migration) a child at any age under 12, they'll gain native-like fluency. "I know that the ability to differentiate unfamiliar phonemes drops off much earlier than that. " Citation? I'm not disagreeing, just interested.

Careful now, you live in the UK, right?

The age suggested in Pinker's book is 12 for native-like fluency.

i suppose the flip side of that is that a believer is more likely to ignore inconvenient facts. I prefer nuts-and-bolts politicians . I don't suppose it's starkly different elsewhere, just less pronounced.

I don't understand that. What's automatically superior about a conviction poilitician, a believer? It's a peculiarly american political thing, at least from my perspective, a faith in faith.

In general, a trait might be selected and sustained in a sub-population in the short term by environmental conditions, but over the long term there'll be a regression to genotypic mean when selection differential disappear, unless canalization. There's no reason to suppose that this doesn't apply also to at least some behavioral traits, and the epidemiology of conditions such as psychopathy and autism provide some evidence that this is the case (?). So culture can be affected by phenotypic expression of deviations from genotypic mean?

I don't know what to say to you, i don't feel like i've got a shred of influence over what happens in the EU. Anything that's rejected just seems to get put the vote again and again until accepted. Who are the people who introduce policy for the vote? Are they elected or civil servants? Tito did a lot of good work. It's the office that matters not what fills it.

Yeah it does, but how representative is it? I'm not a particularly ardent europhobe, i just think there's a disconnect. Maybe an oligarchy. EDIT: But ok to call it just an idea is too much

the EU is still just an idea. Might as well award the Nobel Peace Prize to peace, generally.

I don't know how true that is, but it seems plausible to me that churches, or any organisation really, would more likely reform for self-protection than any other reason. Kinda cynical, but incentives of self-interest always seems to win out over other incentives. So a slow reforming church is better in terms of preserving whatever it is in the influence of a church that is useful to a society.

Why can't the story tellers change the story even today? I mean, if, for example, there was a flaw in the institutional structure of a church that could be identified as a cause of conflict between clergy and followers, and if some convenient document showed up that legitimised change, the church would use it, right? Even the most conservative church is capable of reform. This is what i find fascinating about religion; which institutions were nurturing and which superfluous. I suppose you'd need a complete understanding of human nature to answer such questions. The difficulty providing answers lends legitimacy to general social conservatism. Probably you're right.

You're almost making a point, but i'm not religious so the frame your argument isn't all that interesting to me.

Yah, more scripture is religion nonsense. You will need to provide evidence that the bible is the actual word of Christ. EDIT: why assume religion is a set of truth claims? Why not assume that religion, at least successful religion, is a set of cultural innovations?

That's just the way i talk. Therefore the sanction against you i can justify is limited. As is sanction against women to terminate pregnancy. The autonomy of women to terminate pregnancy, on the other hand, can be well justified. OK,OK, try this: assume moral relativism. A principle moral 'faculty' (might not be such a good way to put it, but, onward) is that of fairness. So in any circumstance in which sanction is considered on a moral basis, that sanction must be justified in order to be fair sanction. The quality of a justification is a philosophical issue and not a moral one, so moral relativism needn't apply in selecting our framework for justification, but fairness should dictate that we pick the framework best suited to arbitrating moral differences. Obviously reason is better than gut-reaction in this. I suppose since moral relativism is assumed you could still simply say fairness isn't all that important to you, but you definitely do have that faculty so would be a dodge.

The puppy-eating issue seems to fall largely in the context of purity or sanctity, which is probably the most from-the-gut moral faculty hence relative to indivduals and cultures (i don't eat veal BTW; not an ethical position, i just can't get it down). But i don't think moral relativism is particularly applicable in other moral contexts, such as harm or autonomy. I suppose you could argue that insisting on grounding morality in reason and evidence is unessential, therefore relative. But then you've wandered out of moral relativism and into metaphysical relativism, and you run into the contradiction that if relativism then all postulates not true therefore relativism not true. Anyway, i think morality is most usefully defined and debated whithin the framework of reason and evidence, and moral relativism has validity in some but only some contexts. To the thread topic, the pro-life position falls in the context of sanctity, and arguments for autonomy don't supercede those of sanctity on this issue when it comes to my personal morality. When it comes to legality, i have it the other way around, any position based on sanctity is a highly relative gut response whereas autonomy can be objectively grounded and considered universal even with dissenters. The dissenters are just wrong.

Effective birth control? Two/three generations of a true monogamous mating system rather than the effective mild polygny resulting from traditional monogamy-with-infidelity style reproduction. Got to have an effect eventually.

I hope you don't include me in that. I asked you a question because your ideas are interesting, even if a bit inappropriately expressed for a forum that's focused on establishing facts. Which isn't to say that my style of posting is any more appropriate.

You can certainly educate to provide tools for moral reasoning and decision making, but how do you motivate people to actually use these tools? A powerful and lasting appeal to emotion, conscience, would be needed, and i doubt any educational system can provide that. That's the cultural innovation that i would want to see retained from religion, an institution that appeals to emotion thus motivating people to listen to conscience.

I don't think i argued for an inevitable decline. I didn't mention nazis or germany either, and any reference to the ussr was at most implied. I just thought communism might be an interesting case study for societies movining toward majority atheism. Which isn't to say that communism failed because of atheism, or even that it was truly an athesitic society (i tacitly assumed so occasionaly in earlier posts which was incorrect). There was a restructuring of critical institutions, and i think any society moving from religious to atheist will quite likely undergo some such restructuring. Denmark and Sweden hasn't yet, so i don't see them as a useful guide, a couple of generations is not enough time to consider them successful atheist societies. OK, so they are much better examples of atheistic society than communism, in the sense that they are in fact athesitic societies whereas communist weren't really. I'm contradicting what i said in other posts but they were already a mess of contradictions and non-sequiturs anyway, so yeah. I'm not trying to show that atheist society is inherently inferior/superior, just to think about what some of the changes might be in order to make a success of it. Religiosity is declining what with better education and better standards of living regardless.