Science and Religion must unite to confront the biology of evil.

[wcepler]

So often in life a unity is approached with a multitude of specializations, and only later do we understand that, like the blind sages feeling the elephant, the elephant is one and only the sages are many.

This is virtually the Summum Bonum of science and currently theoretical string physicists are searching for such a unity of formerly distinct physical forces. The specifics are profoundly different, but the "Unified Field" theory of Einstein was also such a vision.

The Bush/Republican neo Nazis are now literally destroying human civilization, and indeed the very planet Earth, and this Heart of Darkness may be just such a unity which we can combat and eliminate only with passionate and harmonious commitments from BOTH science and religion.

God knows, evil is all around us. The essence of this evil are the vampire elites who, for whom establishment religion and politics are puppets filled with the hands of the astronomically rich. If we have learned only one thing during the last seven years, it must be that the United States of America is a textbook Dictatorship of the Rich!

We also have learned (hopefully) that we have a ONE party system, made up not only of elite-owned neocon/Bush/Republicans, but also of dem cowards and traitors like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed (our alleged Democratic "leaders"). And of course there's also the DLC Hillary Clinton Doll who never has (and never will!) take a moral/rational stand about ANYTHING.

We could go on and on, but the point is that politics is not the means to protect 99% of the human race from the elites, but rather it is the very INVENTION of the elites to give the peasants (that's us) a bone to chew on while they go about their Greek God-like existence.

It is of the essence that we realize that politics means NOTHING! It is not our protector; it is our jailer, and it has always been so. The elites have been the Gods and Goddesses of planet Earth from the beginning of time, and "politics" is just their most recent concoction to keep the cattle in their corrals. Once upon a time it was "Divine Right", and then "Manifest Destiny", and on and on and on. Now it is the "Democratic Party". Well, the Democratic Party is Nancy Pelosi and Judas Joe Lieberman. Enough said?

Perhaps a new way to look at this infinite tragedy is to see evil in the context of science (and in a certain sense, visa versa). However, this doesn't mean "explaining away" evil, turning it into a psychological and even genetic aberration. Certainly, such variables are supremely relevant and helpful to construct some kind of vast strategy to deal with evil.

And yet, something is lost if the baby of evil is thrown out with the bath water of such explanations. Almost certainly, most human beings simply don't want to do that. Millions and millions of us think religion (or perhaps better, spirituality) also has a place in this. Or said differently, evil (e.g., Bush, Cheney, and their minions) touches upon dimensions not directly accessible to science.

Don't you agree there really is a "Heart of Darkness" aspect to the self righteous hatreds of the religious fanatics of ALL religions?

And as Jesus Christ saw so very, very clearly, "It's harder for a rich man to get into the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle." Metaphysical talk, mythological talk, call it what you like, but there's something in these words which we KNOW is absolute truth.

Bottom, bottom line, we're talking about the perennial horror of the Have and the Have Not distinction (why does Paris Hilton come to mind?). THIS is the dead (literally) center of human existence. Pig, pig rich people, vampire-like, drinking the blood of wounded planet Earth and our own vulnerable lives. AND THE LIVES OF OUR CHILDREN.

Somewhere in this "biology of evil" alchemy there's a way to deal with this.

Here's a piece. The elites are incredibly "in grown", both biologically and culturally, and the more in grown they get is the more evolution will select them out. A genetic line doesn't have much of a future the closer your spouse is to your own blood line. And the elites are determined to keep all their commode cleaners (us again) as far away as possible from their Rothschild/Murdoch/Bush/Saudi "purity".

The premise here is that evil (more than anything else) equals the elites. The "Have's" are literal monsters of satanic-like greed and will do ANYTHING to maintain the status quo (the definition of a fascist). And "anything" includes assassinating authentic humanitarian liberals, e.g., J. F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Paul Wellstone, and a long, long list of Republican assassinated American martyrs.

And let's not forget all those targeted high profile Democrats who received anthrax in the mail very shortly after the Bush's year 2000 criminally stolen presidential election.

Well, perhaps we haven't taken any giant steps in the understanding of "biological evil" (meaning scientific/religious evil), but hopefully groping for a binocular vision of what is inevitably ending human existence is at least a significant step in the right direction.

Last thought. The fascist elites are going to be in for a colossal shock if they think they can subjugate and command Mother Nature the way they have literally enslaved the world’s Have Not's. Plus, the exponentially growing Internet permits us to keep fighting the good fight from within our collective human consciousness.

Evolution is very good at selecting out counter productive, dysfunctional biological mistakes, and rampant, international human immorality may be just such a mistake. Mother Nature may still be looking out for us!
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W. Christopher Epler (Bill)

<http://theliberationofrealism.blogspot.com/>

[trixie]

1. While I agree that..

Don't you agree there really is a "Heart of Darkness" aspect to the self righteous hatreds of the religious fanatics of ALL religions?

I just don't get the whole spirituality/religion thing at all. I disagree that science has to unite with fiction.

[bhikkhu]

2. appreciate the need, but...

how about starting with a scientific definition of evil, or perhaps a rewrite leaving science out of the argument. There are good reasons why "science proper" has nothing whatever to do with judgments of good and evil. There is no question that the humanity involved in the application of science is hardly immune to flaws, but that is a separate issue.

[lvx35]

3. "scientific definition of evil"

Interesting thought. Off the top of my head, I would have to say good is "the sustainable health and well many of as many people as possible" and so evil works against it. But of course there are mad problems with any kind of quantization of this sort of thing.

[Demeter]

7. That's Ethics, Not Science

And ethics is the one thing religion discarded long before it trashed science.

Science has ethics only in that what it teaches must be reproducible and verifiable. The linking steps in the reasoning have to be enumerated and examined for logical consistency.

Religion, with its reliance on faith and miracles, will have no truck with any of that. It automatically discards the scientific methods as a matter of principle.

So no, Religion, unless we revert to the quasi-religions of the Enlightenment: Unitarianism, Universalism, and Deism, is no path to Enlightenment!

[lvx35]

10. But if you quantize good like that you can use science to optimize it.

With policies or whatever. The problems are there are a lot of things you can't observe/quantize, like happiness or love. Its the same thing with spirituality. It exists in a different space inside our heads, the same place where love exists.

I for one think the two can and should co-exist. Basically, if your spiritual ideas have gone over into the realm of science and contradict them, they should be discarded. If your scientific beliefs have become your religion (i.e. you think science has "the answers" and ignore the vast unknowns around us in life) than your scientific ideas should be discarded: Science is how we relate to what little we can know, religion and spirituality are how we relate to the unknown.

[RainDog]

14. do you mean quantify?

Science is also how we relate to what we don't know in an attempt to understand the functions of existence (at the sub-atomic or astronomic level.)

Science is the same as philosophy, in that it is inquiry. If someone does not believe in a religion, they are not making science something with all the answers, they are merely saying that religion does not hold answers that they can believe, for whatever reason.

in other words, science is not the opposite of religion. this opposition, tho, has been touted for a long time by those who want to give some sort of intellectual panache to religion. The west is all about dualities (oh, hey, good and evil...) and since you have been raised in an environment in which you heard this all your life, you will tend to think in terms of dualities unless you consciously catch yourself doing this and ask yourself if this is a true idea for you or if this is an idea that came about because you have been taught to see the world in such a way.

science can confirm some ideas behind religion, tho.. for example, prayer or meditation is good for people. that doesn't mean prayers are answered, it just means that spending some time in a meditative state allows the body to stop producing so much cortisone and get out of the "fight or flight" physiology of our sort of world. this "good for you" can be quantified by knowing that constant cortisone production is not good for people because it over stresses some organs, and that calm breathing and a quiet environment can help the body to reduce levels of cortisone. this doesn't mean that prayer is or is not what a religious person thinks it is, but it can say that meditation or prayer can be good for humans. it is not necessary to pray to a god for this to be good for someone, tho.

Life is more complicated than yes or no.

[lvx35]

16. What a good post.

Did you intend to make a comment on the fact I accidentally said "quantize" with your final line "life is more complicated than yes or no"? I suppose you know that quantizing is the process by which continuous signals are converted to lots of "yes/no" bits, and information is of course always lost. (i.e. digital, I'm into signal processing)

Regardless, in the context of what we were talking about, this gives me something of an epiphone, or at least some seriously good stuff to think about. Too much to think about writing here.

Anyway, thanks for that post. I basically agree with everything you are saying.

[reprobate]

4. In my opinion there is a simple and straightforward definition of both good and evil.

It is neither scientific nor religious but pragmatic: That which provides the most benefit for the most people is good. That which narrows the beneficiaries to the fewest people is evil.

[bhikkhu]

12. and yet such a straightforward definition can lead to the worst

disasters of social engineering. It is only necessary to consider that many exercise their freedoms for things which are not good for them, and that a pragmatic policy would eliminate those freedoms. And then consider that it has many times in history been judged that the very existence of some minority or other was a detriment to the well-being of the majority, or that some belief or practice or language or culture was a detriment, or that some concentration of wealth was unjust and required correction for the benefit of the majority.....and so on. Pragmatic good intentions are a fine thing, but in practice over the course of history their results can become difficult to distinguish from those of conscience-free bad intentions.

[reprobate]

5. Bill once more you write with reason and passion. Sometimes the pig elite remind me

of the drug dealer who is so hooked that he snorts his own supply and soon has neither drugs or money.

The greed of the pigs may lead to such horrible social and environmental effects that it will kill them along with the rest of us. But they don't seem to care, not think that far ahead.

[Didereaux]

6. Pictorially, this says it all....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12461951@N03/


'nuff said...............

[wcepler]

8. fun and realist pictures

Thanks,

Fun and realistic.

Bill

[RainDog]

9. Science has no business with religion (and vice versa)

this is how "social darwinism" came about, and measuring people's heads to see if they were a criminal or not, and using "science" to declare that females were soil into which a homunculus (fully formed teeny tiny human) flowed from a male's brain, down his spinal cord and into the stupid female (da Vinci even made scientific drawings of this "fact."

if you want a totalitarian society, linking science to religion is very useful to declare "deviants" -- and don't forget that some these days, even now, think the homosexuals should be "cured" of their disease.

Neither science nor religion are perfect. if you put them together, you have a combustible mix.

[wcepler]

11. Is there an interface in the quantum soup?

Sigh. You may be right. I know science and religion seem like oil and water, but neither are they a "duality" apart. Mostly what I'm groping for (and I know its groping) is SOME way to profoundly acknowledge and deal with evil. I know science almost by definition is not preoccupied with evil, but perhaps somewhere in the quantum soup may be an interface between these two seeming utterly different dimensions. Of one thing I'm certain, Mother Nature will not allow herself to be destroyed by evil. Nature will find a way to deal with planet-sized evil even if we can't.

[RainDog]

13. there is no quantum soup

quantum level life exists as DISTINCT energy units called.. quanta. elementary particles may act as waves or particles. at this time, it is not possible to accurately observe where and what is happening with a particle at the same time. At this level of life, randomness is all, at least so far in the understanding of those who work in this area. I don't, so I'll stop at this most basic definition, except to add...

The atomic world is nothing like the one in which we reside. The atomic world is mostly made up of nothingness, so, I guess I'd have to wonder what a quantum soup might be. As far as a religion that can deal with this issue, buddhism is the only one that I know of that can accept that nothingness is a something to balance somethingness..which are, to the enlightened, the same.

I think your terms are way too "fuzzy." But I think that's because you are trying to define something that defies your attempt to define it. Religion is based upon a creed, a set of beliefs that cannot be tested or replicated because theses beliefs reside in the world of the indefinable/impossible to understand( i.e. faith.) This is the opposite of the scientific method. A scientist may have "faith" that a result is reproducible, but if it is not, then that scientist has to renounce that "faith."

Evil, at the level of brain imaging, might be areas of the brain that are gratified by dopamine when someone does something that we would consider heinous. But this same area of the brain might also be stimulated when doing something good... in the same person. Or in a different person, and the frame of the issue of "evil" could make people jump to incorrect conclusions.

A definition of evil, tho, occurs within a specific place and time. It was not evil to burn witches (more likely merely women who were somehow offensive to the received order) It was not evil to subjugate women. It is still not evil in some cultures to perform clitorectomies. Evil does not exist outside of societies because evil is a human definition of actions.

Even so, at the level of human societies, how do you find one definition of evil?

As far as the issue of mother nature and planet-sized evil.. technology made many things possible and people were not far sighted enough to understand consequences, or they benefited from technology and didn't think it was a bad thing.. they thought they were improving people's lives.. and they did in many respects. Mother nature is not reacting to evil. Mother nature is reacting to climate change. Whether or not there is a massive die off because of this is really of no concern to "mother nature." Nature is random...this is also the point of evolution...no being (at least before now) manipulated his or her own genes to respond to some random event when they were alive, say, competition for an area with food, that made one group immigrate to a savannah to look for food. Those that survived had nothing to say about any genetic benefit that made it possible for them to survive (say, holding excess body fat so that they could migrate and find food before dying.)

NO, instead I appreciate the great wisdom of the enlightenment founders of this nation who had no truck with mystical ideas of governance and instead set down principles that were intended to stop tyranny and promote individual and national happiness and freedom. They knew that laws were necessary to govern a society. At the level of law, it is possible to define behavior that is generally accepted as something outside the realm of that society... like cannibalism. Something everyone I know would consider evil... but this is not the legal definition of this act.

But if you lived in a society that accepted cannibalism, would that be evil? Weren't there societies that engaged in human sacrifice? Or others that felt animal sacrifice (a "scapegoat") was necessary to absolve them from the evils they had done and to protect them from retribution or karma... and finally symbolic/metaphoric cannibalism in societies that have disallowed animal or human sacrifice. (i.e. communion)... at least at the level of religious ceremony, tho you might wonder about those in prison for what are really misdemeanor crimes for possession of a personal level amt of marijuana, for instance.

Better to let one area be what it is and let the other do what it does.

[wcepler]

15. a unity/whole that is greater than the sum of the parts

I think your terms are way too "fuzzy." But I think that's because you are trying to define something that defies your attempt to define it.
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Alas, I suspect you're right. "Definitions" here just don't work. I was hoping for a unity/whole that was greater than the sum of the parts . . . but wishing isn't causing.

Bill

[Vidar]

17. I sure as hell do agree. While I don't believe in a personal devil.

I most certainly believe in a power of evil in which Bush & company are thoroughly immersed.

[Andy Canuck]

18. The thing is, the fundies believe truth and reality

are what you believe it to be. Therefore, they believe, if they can get everybody believing their truth, it will be truth in reality. As a contemporary analogy, it's like the Matrix, but they are trying to take control of the Matrix and reprogram to it their story, instead of escaping the illusion of the Matrix and understanding reality.