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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (185033)	4/12/2006 1:57:58 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Most people are highly egocentric and are concerned with their own happiness, so they don't care about total human happiness. Darwins outstanding realization was that it is birth rates > replacement which leads to an unpleasant life. You are claiming the opposite. Thats quite astonishing. In fact, as near as I can tell, the so called issue of theodacy,which religious people struggle with in finding a theological answer, is in fact explained very simply by science, namely that evil exists because life arose on this earth with reproduction > replacement. Whether one could design life such that this would not have happened is an interesting question, but we are certainly children of a lesser god, one who could not produce stable life without > unity replacement, hence we are burdened with evil. The problem is that evolution is dependent on evil, whereas static life need not be. So a designed world with static life might be free of evil, but not an evolving ecosystem. It is true that intelligence can go a long ways towards mitigating said evil, but it remains the original sin. I've always found it amusing that religions focus on sexual matters as a sin, while glorifying reproduction, when in fact, its reproduction which both gives life and evil. However, the history of intelligence as brought to bare on the matter is largely of mitigating the unpleasantness of ones own life, while increasing it for others, often with the most unpleasant increase being placed on those having a further genetic distance from oneself. Thus our Founding Fathers in the USA thought it useful to apply their intelligence to improving their own lot wrt to King George (and uttered many fine and noble words on the subject) while not being quite so concerned about other creatures with darker skins. Their intellectual descendents today are with us in force, although the genetic vector of kindness has lengthened a bit. If it were true that endlessly increasing numbers of any species makes the sum total of life on earth better, a Nobel Price awaits the first individual who can prove it. Take a shot!