Yes, immortality can cause its own problems (though at least we don't have to face death.)

Yet seeing how we are creations--not having any say in being created or the body and mind we are given, having to face various forces which we did not create nor can fully control, at the mercy of our needs and emotions which continually limit our freedoms, we are likely to feel like objects and not subjects. It is difficult to take full responsibility unless we are subjects. And maybe it's all a mental trick--sort of what we do with cognitive therapy. Maybe it's how we construct our reality.

I don't know. You may disagree with me but I have the sense that humans are ultimately objects, powerless ones, and victims of circumstances. Sometimes we feel powerful because we can change things. And we are amazingly resourcesful and good problem solvers. But in many circumstances we can't and the best we can do in these situations is simply accept, something that is often hard to do but is functional. Yet it leaves us ultimately powerless and ready to blame.



Science has certainly helped, no doubt about it. But it has created difficulties as well. For instance, industrialization has lead to some negative social and environmental changes. Unfortunately we deal with a sort of a closed system with everything in precious balance with everything else on Earth, so whenever we make some major changes, we end up paying the price such as with antibiotic resistance. I do not mean to encourage a fatalistic attitude but to point out that we have a long way to go before we can entertain the idea of mastery over the environment and feeling in control. Maybe then we can refrain from blaming outside forces.



I don't think that's always the case but I've heard that many times before and there are examples that support that view.

I think Science and Religion overlap, in terms of some of the questions they try to answer. Science has been quite successful in answering many of the issues there. But my personal spirituality is focused on the questions that science can not and perhaps should not answer, such as purpose and meaning of life, and some "why" questions (such as why am I here?) as opposed to "how" questions that science can potentially answer using the empirical method.

Other questions have to do with values. Think of human and animal rights (e.g. torture of terror suspects and animal experimentation), selling human organs, treating sex as a commodity, child labour, pedophilia, etc. Are we expendable? Should we let science decide such things? Keep in mind that psychological science itself has been abusive of its human and animal subjects (mostly older studies).

Should we decide that child labour or prostitution is okay if several studies indicate that they have no longterm effects on these people's mental and physical health? What if future studies give conflicting results? What if studies were sponsored by some "questionable" parties?

You may propose secular ethics, relying more on philsophy as opposed to religion, an interesting topic to explore further. You can also question the consistency of religious teachings, seeing how a religion's political ambitions sometimes overshadow the moral imperatives it teaches the followers. Obviously this is more politics than religion, and is also present in much weaker form in scientific circles. Of course organized religion connects to our emotions and our identity and as such, akin to politics, is much more open to manipulation (spirituality is much less corruptible.) But the point I like to end with is that we need a set of values and I don't think science can tell us what is important. Religion can but its political dimension is perhaps even more corruptible than normal politics.

I think people turn to God and religion when they can't find answers or won't accept answers.

Good point. I don't think the analogy entirely holds up - the entire internet is not supposed to have come into existence from one act of special creation - but, in any case, I said suffering caused either intentionally or through 'bad design': we may expand upon that by saying that a God, like the designers of the internet, was limited in its ability to predict and obviate the negative repercussions of its creation.

But I've been around here long enough to know that you will claim the entire point of your Christian God was to give humans free-will; that they will succeed or suffer by their own efforts. This is fair enough, if a little ethically ambiguous in my mind. However, surely this means that God is transcendent from the world he created, and does not interfere with it: the designers of the internet have no power to comprehensively change the network protocols once they are up and running; it is out of their hands. Thus praying for worldly change is futile, and lamenting disasters or praising triumphs as the work of God is futile. Prayer and piety could only reap dividend in an afterlife.

And the people who created the internet didn't claim they were infallible, incapable of imperfection and outside of space-time.

I think I sort of agreed with this in my previous post. There aren't actually many things we encounter in our lives that are beyond human control. Death is ultimately beyond our control. Humankind has no natural predator aside from viruses and diseases; nonetheless we will eventually die through natural processes of some sort. In many ways infirmity in old age is partly a consequence of natural selection. Genes are selected to reproduce, not to live endlessly. In other words in a genepool where genes have been selected to make the individuals of a species survive long enough to reproduce, genes that lead to infirmity in old age have not been selected out.

Geological events are beyond our control. Tomorrow an earthquake could kill millions in San Francisco, a large solar flare could issue forth from the sun and effectively render the earth uninhabitable. A large asteroid will collide with the Earth in the next few million years, etc etc.

A lot of other events which seem beyond our control are probably more consequences of mass human actions whose myriad ramifications and effects are too complex for any person or computer to comprehend. Look at economics. The chain of cause-and-effect is so complex, and in many cases ultimately circular, that they are 'out of control'. All humans can do is try to get their own house in order and make the best decisions on what they understand. At any point the interactions of the n-billion other humans can outpace them and render all their calculations and assumptions useless.

Obviously, blaming a God is technically incorrect. Can it be made to be psychologically beneficial? Maybe.



Well, I don't think anyone is going to disagree with that. Remember that humans have always been modifying their environment. It didn't start with the industrial revolution. Just by reproducing to increase our population we affect the dynamics of the biosphere.




I've never seen where these purely religious 'values' and 'ethics' are, though! Right from the beginning, you are dependent on interpretation of written rules, and of selecting certain interpretations and ignoring other interpretations. 'Religious' values are nothing more than human, secular values, created according to conceptions of right and wrong, that claim authority in a supernatural non-discomfirmable entity. When have humans not relied on secular ethics? Humans are genetically programmed to work together. All primates are social animals. We are not like polar bears or leopards. Is it really a coincidence that so many human cultures with different supernatural beliefs have all generally done quite a good job of surviving and living amongst one another?

And we improve: the ethics we have today, the respect for human rights, our dislike of violence, are more advanced than ever before.

Just being nitpicky here (slap me if you like) but we haven't always modified our environment. Arguably that started with the Agricultural Revolution in the Neolithic. Until then it was hunt, gather, and move on in a subsistence lifestyle.

But your point is obviously that humans have done it for thousands of years and it has become second nature to adapt our environment rather than to adapt ourselves to an environment.

This is probably a bad place to admit it, but this is an aspect of evolutionary theory I can't yet completely explain. Where does human behavior go beyond evolution. How is it more natural from a human to coexist with its environment, than it is for a human to lay waste to its environment, if it is capable of doing so?

For instance a population of lions will keep eating and eating and eating until all of its resources are exhausted and members of its species begin to die. A lion does not say "I'll only eat 2 antelopes today, because I want to make sure a healthy breeding populations remains". It eats as much as it can consume.

I suppose the key difference is that if humans know that their actions will destroy their environment - a foresight lions don't have - then we are technically acting unnaturally by carrying on with such actions.

The only thing that really sets us apart from every other species is that we are the only species that uses tools to make other tools. It really is as simple as that. When you have mastered that concept, there should be no end in sight.

As for the Neolithic Revolution, well I'm not sure that it was a sudden change. The revolution itself covers a period of about 10,000BC at its very earliest in China to its arrival in Europe about 2000 years later. It isn't really my period but I wouldn't be surprised if we will soon (if we haven't already) discovered some semblance of limited and single-season cultivation on hunter-gatherer sites across Asia before the slash and burn economies of the Bronze Age.

It doesn't seem like a very big step from identifying that certain edible plants grow better in certain soils, to identifying those soils and deliberately planting those edible plants, to then deliberate seek to destroy virgin vegetation in order to plant those same crops for a season or two.

But I'm rambling now, and I'm way off subject, so I will stop.

No; That's not at all what I was saying. God isn't responsible for everything put on the Internet. I also don't think he is the one that created the Internet (though I also don't believe this can be attributed to Al Gore, as often referenced). But he is the creator of the people who invented the Internet. So think about it this way...

Jonas Salk is credited with creating the first effective polio vaccine. God created Jonas Salk, so he can indirectly be credited with creating the first effective polio vaccine. However, who needs a vaccine for (Disease X) if the disease itself does not exist? This creation must also be attributed to/blamed on God. If you'd like to consider Him the base/creator for 1 but not the other, I think you then have to ask yourself the question that is the title of this thread.

That's interesting. I have to think about that one. It's certain types of questions I think. But generally I think this goes beyond matters of curiosity and understanding. It's our powerlessness and vulnerability. Accepting can be functional, it helps us move on. But can we truly accept? I have to look up more info on what it means to really accept something.