Hey.....just checking out threads..the gopher has been away for about a month, just piecemeal postings (most, I'm personally sorry to say, in the Hot Girls Thread
).
I have a B.S. in anthropology. Doesnt mean a thing, but it starts a good story. I would spend a lot of time in the grad anthro lounge at IU. Some dilligent person would put literature, most often pamphlets, in the lounge. The most interesting one, directed right at us anthropologists, was a list of questions that science could not answer, but that religion did have an answer (or at least theory) for. It was truly interesting to read basic questions about life that werent even close to being answered by science. Of course, the creation of the universe has been brought up. But there are tons of other questions that I raise here just for the sake of interesting trivia. The fact that teh questions have not been answered does not mean they cannot be, but it is interesting.
The most interesting question to me is one I brought up with a Polish philosopher long before I had read this pamplet. The question itself is a little hard to understand, and the answer is (currently) totally outside the scope of human knowledge:
What is the drive to reproduce? We know that all living things reproduce. And we study the ways in which they do so, and how various habits improve the chance of survival. We also understand the biological drives behind reproduction (as any man can tell you
). But what is the drive to reproduce? Why should something "care" to reproduce itself? Why is the coninuation of a species so important?
A directly related question is: Do all organisms have a concept of life and death? And if so, why would life be so precious? It sounds a little backwards, but there is no philosophical reason why life should be continued, or why there is a drive to reproduce. It is as yet unanswered by science.
A lot of questions follow similar veins, that is they are very simple (in wording) "why" questions behind much more complex "why" questions (like why different animals look different, which we are still answering through genetic expression and evolution).
On the flip side, there are lots of things that science would seem to have proven that contradict the Bible (if not the word of God untouched by man). The most obvious one (which was alluded to earlier) involves tracing back through the geneaology of the bible to determine when Adam and Eve were put on the earth. Perhaps the earth is only 2 billion, or even 2 million years old. However upon tracing the bible's geneaology back to adam and eve (going through that long "begat" and "knew" section that no one reads
) and giving folks a really long average lifespan, we find that Adam and Eve, the first folks, would have lived 4K or so years ago, or about 7K if you give everyone ridiculously long lives, and assume that people a couple of millenia ago lived to be several hundred years old. We have carbon dating, however, that shows human remains a hundred times as old. If one doesnt trust carbon dating, then one can use the soil strata from which the soil was found to know that the remains are old. On a related note (and this one gets folks pretty mad sometimes, unfortunately), there are in fact two creation stories in the bible, people just rarely discuss it. There is the "and on the Seventh day, God rested" story and the story of Adam and Eve, both of which are familiar to most people.
This is actually the basis of the multiple-creation theory as adopted by far-out (in my opinion only) religious/social groups across the world, like the Aryan Nation, Nazis, Nation of Islam, and some more orthodox sects of Rastafarianism. But it suggests that perhaps not all people living are "children of god." The garden of Eden, then, was just one place where people lived, and there were in fact other places where people lived who were not children of God. Again, used by all sorts of wackos. But the passages are correct.
The important thing to realize is that the Bible is not a book, it is a library. It is a "compilation album" (forgive the very bad joke) of religious AND secular texts and stories from the time. The canon of literature as it exists in the Bible knowingly contradicts itself. Despite how it is taken today, the Bible was not originally meant to be read as one book, one story. It was a reference library, a holy set of encyclopedias, if you will, from which to pull information and facts. One of the reasons (the biggest) that there is such a diversity among the Christian faiths is which passages supercede other contradictory ones, and how to interpret more obscure metaphors of morality.
Sorry. I spent most of my life talking about this.
And again, my own beliefs notwithstanding, I have also come to the conclusion that a person's goodness is determined by their actions, and not the ornament on their neck, the covering on their head, or the book that they carry. I would rather be around a hundred athiests who treated each other with love than one person "of faith" who bore ill-will towards others. Of course, by definition, those folks would not be Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc, but by many definitions they are.
Love to all of you, and good life.
