Evolution, philosophy & questions
Offline i wouldn't doubt that some type of "evolution" has occurred. as a river runs over the landscape it shapes rocks and could wash away a mountain over time.
i have been curious why are humans the only species that developed intelligent and cognitive thought? monkeys are close to us yet they don't have a city, wear clothes, or throw a musical festival? we are not even the oldest lifeforms yet we have far surpassed our animal brethren.
although the bible (and other religious books) does not prove much to you guys but it does provide proof that for centuries we have "searched" for a higher power. so if these books inspired us to look for a higher power, why did the first person question? or why do we still question?
some of us have decided to believe in God and some of us have not yet we all have questioned the idea. even estranged civilizations have some sort of belief in something larger, a spiritual world coexisting with ours. could this be an instinct?
i have read a lot of arguments that we are not perfect hence there is not a intelligent creator because we would be physically flawless and every event would go our way. but what is perfection? it is subject to our ideas because we have freewill. if we where all the same we wouldn't' have our individuality. what would the good be if not compared to the bad.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
- Login to post comments
To say we have "far surpassed" is not accurate. First it assumes that evolution has "higher" and 'lower" levels, and that human intelligence is somehow more evolved than other kinds of intelligence. Many different kinds of organisms on the planet have been evolving their intelligence longer and have exactly as much intelligence (and the right kind of intelligence) as they need for what they do.
The answer to "why did humans evolve human intelligence" is the same as the answer to why anything evolves--the environment and selection shaped the changes in this direction, and it turned out to be a stable, workable survival strategy. Lots of different organisms currently living on earth have adaptations that are unique to their own species: human intelligence is no more remarkable than any of these other adaptation in terms of probability or uniqueness.
a
Actually it's more likely that the desire for a higher power inspired the books: the evidence shows that humans were around and doing ritualistic things (e.g. burying people with ritual objects) long before writing was developed.
Yeah, the current thinking based on the evidence is that humans have an innate tendency to generate the idea of a divine intelligence. The argument now is whether this is just a side effect of the way the brain works, or if it has an adaptive function.
I'll leave the perfection questions to somebody who is more interested in those issues.
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
from what i understand you are saying that we are no smarter than animals. that our "human" intelligence is just a means for survival and is on the same level as basic intelligence.
humm... i don't think that i stated my questions clear enough. maybe if i rephrase my thoughts we could come to a more accurate conclusion.
there is a difference between us and other animals. all the other life form on this planet has the suitable intelligence to fill their needs. the basic instincts to eat, populate and survive. monkeys, elephants, lions, bears.. all have basic needs. if they think deep thoughts we don't know that at this time. as far as we know that are content in their world and satisfied on adapting to their surroundings whenever they might change.
although a lot of animals have adapted in many ways it would be an understatement not to recognize how much different we are. animals for the most part naturally choose the best options for their survival whereas humans are not bound to choose what is best to survive but what feels good compared to a personal opinion.
we are able to adapt faster than animals for the most part. we are civilized and can make choices. we can put value on an object that has no means for survival. why haven't the animals evolved to a "human-like" intelligence? why haven't animals asked why? why do we?
if something didn't suddenly excel why did we crawl down from the trees and create cities. we naturally should have just stayed in the woods and caves. instead of clothes we should have grown hair to warm ourselves. we should have feed the mentally challenged to our predators. we should not morn death nor fear death.
we shouldn't be debating philosophy but communicating the best place to hunt for food. we shouldn't be breaking down atoms and searching the solar system. instead of a complex written and spoken language we should have just stayed with the simple yells and barks. why haven't other animals done this?
even though all animals "evolved" a different way there are some similarities. environments, food source, options provided. what impacted us to choose such an odd means for survival?
EDIT : fixed some grammar issues...
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
From a biological standpoint, this specialness that you ascribe to human intelligence is an illusion. It is different from the intelligence of other animals, but the evidence suggests that it is more a difference of degree--a particular specialization of the same generic intelligence that other animals also have.
This is a false distinction between animals choosing "naturally" and humans choosing some other way. The mechanisms of reward and punishment are the same in human behavior and the behavior of other mammals, so all mammals (at least) including humans choose based on what feels good. Many social mammals and birds exhibit behaviors that do not directly contribute to their survival (elephants draw pictures with a discarded rock, ravens body-sled on snowy hillsides) and they do it because it feels good.
Evolutionary psychology is the scientific discipline that collects evidence on how human behavior is on a continuum with the behavior of other animals.
I don't think there's much evidence that humans adapt *faster* than animals. Near where I work there's a huge flock of feral monk parakeets descended from a population that escaped from captivity in the 70's. They adapted immediately to living on the Atlantic seaboard, even though they evolved to live in South American jungles. Humans took a lot longer to adapt to living here. And nothing adapts to new environments as quickly as bacteria.
Many animals share some aspects of human intelligence. Primates, some herd ruminants and social birds all have theory of mind and cause-and-effect awareness to some greater or lesser extent. Apes can handle language, bluffing and double-bluffing (and triple bluffing). Ravens make and modify tools and can solve complex food-getting puzzles by looking at the problem and thinking about it, rather than by trial and error.
Again the question "why haven't animals evolved human intelligence" makes the wrong assumption because it assumes that humans are at some kind of "peak" of evolutionary height. There is no goal or direction to evolution. Animals haven't developed the same aspects of intelligence as humans because it would not be adaptive for them to do so in their present environment (we're not even sure how adaptive it is for humans). If the environment changed, maybe their intelligences would change too.
As for the meaningless object thing, bower birds exhibit what is apparently an aesthetic sense. Males build elaborate nests decorated with objects that do not contribute directly to their survival, but apparently have meaning for themselves and for potential mates. Over the course of years, male bower birds develop their own style and refine their use of preferred--meaningless--materials such as rocks, seeds, flowers, bits of fungus for decorating their nests. Birds have been evolving for a much longer time than humans.
Some primates did take the evolutionary the course you describe here. It's not working out for many of them because humans are destroying the environment they live in, but so it goes.
Nobody knows for sure what it was in the environment that resulted in humans developing our particular survival package of upright-walking, persistent tool use, human intelligence. There are some theories related to climate change and changes in the environment of ancestral Africa. The evidence is still coming in.
But there's no evidence that it was a magical or even necessarily unusual event. There's even some evidence (check out chapter 13 of S. J. Gould's "Full House"
to suggest that some aspects of evolution toward greater complexity are mathematically inevitable.
Elephants, apes and wolves all recognize death and exhibit mourning behaviors. There are probably other animals that I don't know about as well.
Evolution doesn't always lead toward maximum efficiency. It acutally allows for a lot of waste, as long as the waste doesn't push an organism under a certain threshold of viability in the environment. The evolutionary psychology theory actually predicts that there'll be a lot of "play" in the expressions of behaviors, because you never know when a harmless or neutral behavior suddenly becomes adaptive when the environment changes. Splitting atoms is working out for us right now. It might not always be that way (I think there's a Phillip K. Dick story called "The Golden Man" about this idea).
The answer to all the questions you're raising can be found in a lot of different books. I recommend two in particular: Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene" for an understanding of real evolutionary theory (not the creationist strawman version) and Melvin Konnor's "The Tangled Wing" for an overview of evolutionary psychology--that is, how animal behavior interacts with genetics and evolution.
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
A lot of your question saphen has to do with the fact that human beings can form abstract thoughts and ideas. This presumably, is something only humans can do and how some evolutionary scientists explain how we first concieved of our idea of God. Also, the fact that every human being will die, can also be explained as an evolutionary reason for thinking of a God who exists or a spiritual realm, etc etc. Thinking that a spritual realm exists and that your loved ones aren't really gone cold be considered an evolutionary coping mechanism facilitated by our ability to form abstract ideas/thoughts.
Hope that helps a bit.
The implication that we should put Darwinism on trial overlooks the fact that Darwinism has always been on trial within the scientific community. -- From Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth R. Miller
Chaos and chance don't mean the absence of law and order, but rather the presence of order so complex that it lies beyond our abilities to grasp and describe it. -- From From Certainty to Uncertainty by F. David Peat
a lot better response... thank you.
i still feel that there is just something else that can't be put into words. it seems that different animals display outstanding abilities and characteristics but humans have qualities of them all... if that makes sense.
an ape can handle language but has to be taught it. doesn't mean they can actually create a complex language and symbols. yet they wouldn't need it to survive but why would we? we want to record our history and that is something important to us. why wouldn't it be important to other animals? -but i think you said we are still getting more evidence on this topic.
you say that intelligence is an illusion but as far as we know time could be an illusion only perceived by matter. would energy be timeless? the rules that make up our body and hold everything together could be timeless. the rules that where already in place before the universe was created could be timeless. could God be timeless? (if you believed he existed of course)
"reward and punishment" could also be a misconception. i may have underestimated animals but some people could prefer punishment. feeling like they deserve it or sink into depression. do animals exhibit mind sicknesses such as depression or other psychological damage cause by life events other than birth defects? can an animal be brainwashed or hypnotized to believe it was another animal?
i do not have "Full House" at hand but am somewhat familiar with Stephen Gould's work. he is a very good writer with some radical ideas.
from what i understand things tend to evolve the simplest step not a preconceived direction. bacteria being superior in a lot of ways because of its simplistic makeup. yet mankind thrives for complexity. are we actually improving or just missing a lot more?
as for magical occurrences; it all is pretty amazing if you believe in God or not. if you are the magician and put on a show... even though you know all the tricks it is still magic
)
we are not sure how a lot of things work such as metaphysics or "mind readers". some people may have the potential to see the future, past or present; astral projection or remote viewing. topics such as these are hard to prove or disprove but nonetheless they exist in probability.
i believe that we have adapted and grown. i don't think we weren't pooped into existence. we don't have all the answers or the pieces to the puzzle. we may never have them all. i feel that there may be a reason why we have "evolved" the way we did and it's not because of the weather.
i'll check out some of the books you provided but as you know i am coming from a different position. between me and you i don't think we actually know why. maybe we are better at questions and hypothesis than answering. to bad we are not crows and God is the food source.
EDIT: grammar mistakes and a really weird phrase i'm not sure how it got in there... i think i tried to erase something and started writing something then went on to something else.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
Well we tend to characterize animals' mental processes in human terms, and I guess by definition it's impossible for humans to conceive of a non-human mental state. But for all we know, animals may have unique mental characteristics that we don't know about. Birds in particular have been turning up some weird results lately (because their brains use a different structural plan from mammals, apparently to accomplish the same kinds of mental operations).
Information storage is the big survival advantage that humans have. It allows us to do things like look in a book and find out, like the Torah for example, which kinds of grasshoppers are okay to eat and which ones to avoid. That kind of information--increasing food production, surviving droughts or other emergencies, books on medicine--clearly show the adaptive function of language and writing. Unlike the relatively slow-evolving "this plant tastes bad" that you'd get from genetic selection, the information "don't eat that plant" can be recorded quickly, but still passed across generations.
We know that non-literate aboriginal people store this kind of information as oral traditions, taboos and customs. That's how it contributes to human survival, and presumably how it did so in the early days too.
I said that the perception that human intelligence is "special" is an illusion. It is verifiably different, and arguably unique, but its just a specialization on a continuum of things we know about intelligence.
Uniqueness doesn't indicate anything special in the biological world: a peacock's tail is an adaptation unique to those species, but we don't see it as some kind of ultimate achievement of evolution--it's bigger and prettier, but we can see that it's just another tail.
I meant reward and punishment in more biological terms--endorphins make you feel good, stress hormones make you feel bad. If you exercise and get in shape (which is good for your survival) your body rewards you with endorphins and you feel good. If you work a stressful job that you hate (which is bad for your survival) your body dumps cortosol into your system, which makes you feel crappy.
Some behaviors and drugs can short-circuit the system by simulating the effects of endorphins (opiates) or dosing you with endorphins as a defensive reaction against pain (self-flagellation) or by giving you a delayed endorphin response for symbolically significant behavior (getting a paycheck at your stressful job you hate). But they're still just variations of the same basic chemical system.
Yep. You should see my cat when he gets out of the cat boarding place.
No animal, including a human, can be hypnotized to believe it's another animal. It's hard to be sure what kind of animal an animal thinks it is, but there are plenty of documented cases of all kinds of animals being raised by a mother of a different species. Maybe you could argue that a Maremma sheepdog thinks it's a sheep, but it might be hard to prove experimentally. Maybe it thinks the sheep are other dogs.
Gould's argument, briefly, uses an analogy called "The Drunkard's Progress" to explain why random variations in complexity--both getting simpler and getting more complex--will tend mathematically over time toward increasing complexity. This might not make any sense without seeing the diagrams and graphs, but basically because there is a lower limit on complexity (the simplest living organism) but no upper limit on complexity, these random variations will, in time, gradually *inevitably* wander up toward higher levels of complexity.
Biologists don't usually speak in terms of a "natural" order. There are things that are adaptive to the environment and things that are maladaptive, and things that are neutral. If the environment or the characteristic changes (or both) then a characteristic can change its adaptive-maladaptive-neutral category.
Right now the human survival strategy "set" is highly adaptive overall. If the environment changes, or humans change, it might become maladaptive.
I think it's a basic premise of this board that, given the changes in society, culture and civilization in the last hundred years or so, many of the human behaviors associated with religions have become maladaptive. Maybe it had an important adaptive function once, but it's not so certain anymore that it does more good than harm.
The evidence right now for these phenomena is not good.
Well of course you're entitled to your beliefs. But, again, the evidence is not good. Right now most of the evidence suggests that it was because of the weather.
Well I'm coming from my position because I was an evangelical Christian and a young earth creationist once. When I looked at all the evidence (mostly what the Bible actually says to start with) I came around to the other position. Once I knew all the arguments and had the necessary information, it became pretty clear to me that one set of arguments holds water, and the other is full of holes.
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
humm... what would a evangelical christian and a young earth creationist say about evolution and how things occurred?
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
Humans were not the only species to develop cognitive intellligence. However, unfortunately, the other species, the ones which are also in our family-the hominids, are all extinct, many by our hand, which leaves us the only Hominid and by extension, the only remaining species to develop cognitive capability
EDIT: That should be the homo genus, not the hominid family.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
any links or documention deluded?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_genus
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Well what we *learned* in my particular version is that God created the universe in six literal days about 6000 years ago. There were no dinosaurs or protohumans; all fossils and radiometric dating evidence were put there by Satan to make Christians doubt.
Even as a kid I didn't believe that for a second, so what I would have said back then--based on my own reading--is that the Bible is not clear on how much time passed between the last line of Genesis 2 and the first line of Genesis 3. I still don't know how much time Archbishop Usher had to assume in that spot, but for all we know it could have been billions of years.
Now that I actually know things about fossils and radiometric dating, I feel kind of sad that I had to go through all of that effort and trauma to try and make a fairy story be logical.
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
deluted... ty for the link. i remember seeing a discover channel special on it now. if we aren't killing each other over food and women, it's religion! lol
textom... thank you for the conversation. i respect the information you've brought to me however i still feel there is something more. i just can't deny that feeling. God has gave me proof many times over and over of his existence. i don't know how God did it but the creation of life and the development of man is too well constructed. it's magick!
i know you disagree and i totally respect your opinion. i so enjoyed an intelligent interaction and you've answered all of my questions. if i think of some more i'll be back!
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
Too well constructed?
1) There are many things that are sub optimal about us; things that just barely work. Now, just barely working is ok for evolution, but I think god could of done better...
2) Evolution has created some very stunning solutions to problems. Looking at genetic algorithms (they use evolution), there are some very impressive results; Just look here for some examples
"What right have you to condemn a murderer if you assume him necessary to "God's plan"? What logic can command the return of stolen property, or the branding of a thief, if the Almighty decreed it?"
-- The Economic Tendency of Freethought
i don't know how God did it but the creation of life and the development of man is too well constructed.
Too well constructed? Too well constructed for what? To have not been designed? I am a biologist whose works involves protein folding and genetic mechanisms, as well as moleculer level transduction events, cell biology and genetic homology. Absolutely nothing I see would make sense except that it evolved from common ancestors, undesigned, guided only from the environment. I am in the middle of writing an essay called The Power of Natural Selection, in which I explain why natural selection can make more complex and more intricate organisms than design can. An excellent example of this is a recent computational biology experiment involved chemical microcircuitry arrayed on an FGPS panel, running a genetic algorithm. It was really cool, and I'll find the link if I have time.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
ROFL!!!! i knew that was coming. only response i have to that is directed in the first post;
"i have read a lot of arguments that we are not perfect hence there is not a intelligent creator because we would be physically flawless and every event would go our way. but what is perfection? it is subject to our ideas because we have freewill. if we where all the same we wouldn't have our individuality. what would the good be if not compared to the bad?"
to be flawed is to be perfect.
---WARNING!! opinion ahead... you may get crazy offended but please don't. this is just my thoughts on it and it is not considered rational to you. i am not saying by any means that you should believe this or that this is the way it is. i am subject to reflection upon conversational discourse. this is just the leakage form the ideas swarming around my head. consider this a lose type of philosophy.---
i believe that God made us not to be perfect and to deal with certian flaws and circumstances. that includes design issues and problems that may arise. i believe that our body is just dirt and could have evolved with the animals BUT i also believe we have a spirit inside of us that is perfectly designed. i feel this spirit is responsible for our abstract thoughts and feelings.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
Are you going to respond to the other points?
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
with my last statement i was kind of saying that there is a part from the body that you can't see in a microscope... or at lease my opinion. science could explore the body and discover it's deepest secretes but never reach the soul.
i love and respect science. it has given us so much but throwing heresay and jargon at me isn't going to provoke a equally scientific answer.
i really don't put a lot of weight on science because it does change so much over time (matter of opinion). if you have some questions i'm sure there might be other theist more knowledgable in the area that could provide an answer.
else you could maybe try to restate it in layman's terms and we could work to a conclusion you are comfortable with. i'm glad you are discovering new things and if you have the time i will listen.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
Heresy? Heresy from what? Everything I have said is totally mainstream scientific opinion.
That's the beauty of science, not its weakness. The reason religion does not change or move, or rather has not changed or moved in 18 centuries, is because the notion of progress, of reason, of evidence, are totally antithetical to its dogma. Science does not operate like that, it is a highly fluid, powerful body of knowledge on a never ending quest for truth, as opposed to religion, which ignores contradicting evidence and continues to reassert.
In fact, this is one reason I put no weight on religion, because religion is antithetical to progress of ideas. Let us take some primevil ideas of ancient scientists like geocentricity, biblical creation, four elements etc. Today we know these are utter nonsense. And so, we can view religion in the same way. When a field of endeavor does not progress, you can be sure that the truth value of its statements are near-nonexistent.
Also, the scientific revolution since the information age has given birth to a new type of scientific revolution. Instead of new theories totally overthrowing the old, the truth is asymptotic, and information is added to, not overthrown. So, your best bet would be to put weight in science
I'm a little confused. Why would I need to ask questions about this, seeing as this is my field of experise?
Again. I don't understand what you want me to do. And I am not sure by the phrase "we could work towards a conclusion you are comfortable with". That is not how argument works. Argument works where both sides have a position and they argue for it. Compromise only occurs when one side has a more logically valid point than the other side.
And I don't know how to rephrase this.
You said: Life is very complex. I don't know how it could be without a designer
I said: That's an Argument from Incredulity, and I can show you (using FGPA genetic algorithms as an example) how natural selection is immensely powerful and can create much more complex and elegant solutions to problems than design can, using my own field of expertise as a backing.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
i think you've misunderstood my position. agreements work differently than conversation. i am not here to convince you of my ideas but to gain knowledge and insight on yours.
i take your opinion very highly and did not mean to make you think i brushed it off. i respect you for your profession and any perception that you wish to share with me, i will listen.
although i hold your reply in high regards, there are certain aspects i don't agree with BUT i am not coming in here and tell a dedicated professional about his daily job, that would be absurd.
you sound really bias towards science and i don't blame you but please don't be upset if i am bias towards religion. i have all the proof i need to confidently believe what i do... likewise i'm sure you are very certain of your standing. i don't know what kind of christians you've dealt with in the past but i am not here to "convert" you.
i am also here to learn more on different topics. too long have christians ignored ideas because they didn't fit within their box. i feel that God created science and whatever is discovered is his handy work. not just the individual cells but the rules that govern biology and matter in general. you telling me what is in mainstream science is like saying... "hey, look what God came up with".
now easy killa, i'm not trying to throw salt in your eye. i'm just expressing my thoughts on the situation. you can take it and try to debate with me or you can sit on it a while and see if you can understand the paradigm.
EDIT: only grammar errors.. it's late.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
I see this claim way too often to be comfortable with. I believe this opinion reflects an abysmal failure of science education.
As deludedgod mentioned, this is not a weakness of science, it is a fundamental strength. The idea is that everybody gets all the same evidence, and everybody should be able to come to more or less the same conclusions using that evidence. When the evidence changes, then you can modify the conclusions to get an increasingly accurate and usable version of what's going on. Science makes mistakes, but is self-correcting.
If you want a matter of opinion that changes all the time, take a look at the history of sectarianism in Christianity. Right from the beginning, there were huge disagreements over who Jesus was, what it means to get eternal life, what baptism is for (the author of the Gospel of Luke clearly believed people were saved at baptism).
Then once all those questions get settled by the Council of Nicea, there's fifteen centuries of burnings and imprisonings and hunting down and chopping up heretics and religious wars all over Europe over questions like (as Swift put it) "whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire."
And there are still new versions of Christianity coming out every year. Depending on what kind of Christian you are, Sapphen, your whole technology of salvation may be only a hundred years old. If you believe in the Rapture and the Tribulation, that idea also dates from the 19th century.
The idea that Christianity is unchanging and eternal is an illusion kept in place by the fact that Christians don't learn their own history.
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
yes, i would have to agree with you that there are a lot of debates on what to believe and infliction of others if they didn't believe the same as the "people in power" at that moment. i guess in some ways religion also changed in time. for me it's easy to believe. it is a misconception that religion should never change. it changed so much from the old testament to the new. it grows as we mature as a civilization.
i can understand the points you made and the truth is i don't have any proof or evidence i could show anyone. i will tell you that i am not about what is assumed and i don't agree with where the church has been going. nonetheless they are my brothers and sisters and i will try to defend them to the best of my ability. i feel that we all are a part of the body of Christ, some are hands, some are feet and some are even buttcheeks.
personally i don't think any of us (worldwide religious wise) have it right on target and it is not meant for us to. i believe God steps beyond the matter of this world and into the realm of the timeless. i feel that religion may have gotten violent in the past because in oppression we are at our greatest. YET that is no excuss to injure anyone, Jesus did not teach that. the people that preformed those horrific acts will be punished but it is not for me to judge their actions.
i really didn't grow up as a christian. although my parents were theist but it was never really talked about in our home. at the age of 12 i was introduced to the church and became a bible thumping follower. after a few years i fell to the waste side and never really thought about it again. i left disappointed in the church with a bad taste in my mouth.
i am kind of embarrassed to say but i fount God again in the occult. with ultimate evil there had to be ultimate good. i began my search again and fount what i was looking for. He is not in the traditions or the history but hidden in the quite parts of the mind and nature. the search for God is a personal path but you know when you truly find Him.
i guess that is one thing positive about science is that you don't have to claim a sect. whereas christians want to know first thing "what do you believe... and why my way is better than yours." too long did christians go unchallenged and they just kept multiplying and splitting untill there are hundreds of different types of christians.
i believe every christian has their individual convictions and that conforming to what a majority believes is what hindered us. we could learn something from everything around us.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.