=v= I’m not sure what “contradictory contemporary critical sources” you mean, but I disagree that textual analysis “discounts” these writings. Without that analysis, you’ve got three books that contradict each other for no apparent reason. With that analysis, the contradictions mesh with historical context, and you end up seeing the writings from different perspectives, as if through a prism.

Anon> Prove Darwin was right even once? Or do you just beli[e]ve[?]

We have copious evidence that things evolve to adapt to changed environments. That means Darwin was right, even once. 

Posted by Jym Dyer

Religions were created by the guys who didn’t understand what the spiritual dudes were talking about otherwise there’d just be a whole bunch of spiritual dudes walking around.

“EVIL” is just
‘Live Backwards’
“LOVE” is the beginning of
‘EVOLution’.

Yo ‘big bang’ people…give your heads a shake…harder…learn anything?
let me help you out…to begin with “Coincidence” is the lazy one’s way of explaining events so he doesn’t have to think about it any further.
EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON.

To get to the END* of a cricle you must go to the BEGINNING* and step out or rise above it.

*If we CAIN stop killing, we’ll never be ABEL to survive what’s coming.

Just because I say it doesn’t mean it’s true and just because you don’t believe me doesn’t mean it’s not.
I invite you to visit and explore “Ancient’s History”.
your humble servant,
Ancient Clown 

Posted by Ancient Clown

Posted by hibiscus

second, unless we reject the evolutionary timeline, there are tens of thousands of years between the time when religious feelings maybe began to show in human societies and the supposed time of publication/compilation of our major inherited texts. what we knew or thought before we could put it to record is something we can only speculate now but it was probably pretty similar to what we can come up with now. seriously i’d be surprised if there were secret behaviors that have been discovered through modern empirical study that weren’t noticed and used 10,000 years ago. not that they would be used the same ways. 

Posted by hibiscus

Posted by Solomon

About religious sentiment: I think the senses of mystery and eternity and revelation are as human as the senses of falling in love and longing to understand and dreaming about treacle. We are, I believe, born prone to certain feelings. I don’t know, but I assume it’s related to the buildup of neuropeptides in certain dendrites, the circumstantial arrangement of our neurons, the way in which we grow and learn. If I’m right that religious awe is endemic to the brain, and not the result of an external all-powerful being, that would imply that it evolved to be there. For some reason, people may be more fit if they have the capacity for religious wonder. While I figured this out on my own sometime in the 1990s, I am unsurprised that a much smarter and more patient person have already examined the idea in great detail . 

Posted by hedgehog

Posted by hibiscus

Faith is knowing that the sun will rise in the morning and that the earth rotates, that babies will be born, that people will die because it is a natural thing to do. 

this makes it sound like we have a problem with worrying about the predictability (and inevitability) of arriving safely at a destination, and faith is the name of the feeling of safety we get when we identify landmarks and become assured that we aren’t lost.

it seems really easy to convince human beings that we are lost. or maybe we always think we are. seriously if there weren’t roads and signs and regularly scheduled airplanes, how many of us would be able to make our individual ways to las vegas from wherever we are now? but we’re not lost that way because other people have a fix and we can trust them. “lost” then maybe means “nobody knows where i am.” faith in a very high power extends that security very deeply into one’s own thinking.

also, “that the earth rotates” is a relatively recent article of faith.

If you were God and wanted to be worshipped, would you not build that desire into the stuff you made?

and if i were a creative animal that had a strong inner desire not to feel lonely, i would make an omnipotent, omnipresent friend to keep me company.

it could be that people never outgrow the need for bedtime stories. what we outgrow is simple stories because our nightmares can become real when we are out on our own with dreams in our hands.

My best guess was that, at least among certain kinds of people, the propensity to ask questions and questions and questions eventually leads to answerless questions given the absence of full knowledge of any situation about things that might deeply affect you.

i read a thing a year ago that really shifted me on this. the author (a neurologist, i think) found it insulting that people might be assumed to reach for the supernatural only when stumped. he thought our storytelling bent was too much part of ourselves to be a magic box people opened in case of logical emergency. this is too sensible for words.

but it also didn’t work because a lot of stories do come out of crisis feelings. so what i came up with was a situation where every question was simultaneously answered and unanswerable and every decision is a crisis no matter how certain the outcome. in that case religion is the brain’s way of taking a deep breath before diving under the water. 

Posted by hibiscus

But as I read these comments, I see that you are all discussing the questions at hand with civility and respect (for the most part), even when you disagree. That gives me hope.

I would reveal my position on faith, but that might take away from the main point I am trying to make, which is HOORAY for people who discuss this with open minds. Let’s just call me an anti-Bashite. hee hee.

JennLee