Food for Thought
MakeOutCity has some interesting quotes from other blogs on the subject of religion and politics.
There are also some postings pertaining to the subject of how agriculture and the resulting changes in the food supply may be impacting evolution.
The intersection of religion (mysticism), politics and evolution get me hot. As a biologist, I am primarily interested in how mandatory coercive governments based on mystical premises are altering the evolution of the human species; turning man into a race of highly organized insects, less capable of rational thought with each new generation.
I will try to summarize this briefly:
Begin with the binary circumstance: things either exist or they do not. Knowledge and evidence can only be acquired about things that exist. Knowledge is nothing more than a state of mind that is in sync with existence. That knowledge state of mind is constucted of concepts and ideas that are rational because they can be reduced to existents, things that exist. A mind that is full of concepts and ideas that have no connection to existence, is an irrational, mystical mind.
Things either exist or they do not; and an individual human mind is either in sync with existence or it is not. That’s two binary circumstances for you; one is existence itself and the other pertains to the state of each individual mind.
Religion is a poison to the human mind because it is mystical, rejects evidence and therefore reality. Mysticism forces the mind into a delusional state. Real knowledge and truth are not possible in religion because mysticism is built on subjective faith, causing knowledge and whatever it is that is believed to be “known” to be completely subjective and unrelated to any objective reality. Religion is built upon concepts and ideas that have no verifiable connection to existence; it is therefore irrational by definition.
A mandatory government is based on what I call the plantation premises: some superficial collectivist identity, like skin color, ethnicity or sex, makes certain groups inherently superior to others and those individuals or groups have a “right” to control the lives of others. This control requires that those who are being controlled cannot act in their own rational self-interest (by law), and must surrender the fruits of their labor to the superior class (taxes).
The plantation premises are mystical because they cannot be reduced to anything that exists; there are no “rights” in nature in the sense that there are no innate entitlements for certain people to enslave others. In order to function and thrive in such an environment, individuals must accomodate the plantation premises in their minds. In other words, they must be irrational and believe in something that is not supported with evidence in order to stay on the good side of the government and the law.
A mandatory government, built on the plantation premises, is in reality a mandatory religion where any rational mind becomes by default an outlaw. In the dark ages, the Catholic Church tortured and condemned scientists like Galileo who pointed out that Church beliefs were not consistent with evidence. While the concept of freedom of religion, or from religion, has made religion voluntary, mandatory governments have taken over that that role by becoming secular, atheistic religions. If you don’t agree with a religion you can walk away from it. If you don’t agree with irrational, mandatory government, where are you going to go? You comply or you die.
Any rational individual who dares to point out that the government is based on irrational premises will be ostracized if not put in jail. If he uses force in self-defense to protect his natural state as a free, rational man, he will be killed. This puts selective pressure on rationals in the gene pool, making it more difficult for them to pass along their genes, while making it easier for mystics, irrationals and the delusional to rise to positions of power.
Just as the Catholic Church or the Taliban or the Islamic Republic of Iran will select against reason and rational minds while empowering mystics and irrationals, all mandatory, coercive governments will do the same thing. In the process they will wipe the genes for rational minds out of the gene pool, making the world a crazier and crazier place.
As the gene pool becomes progressively better adapted to a mystical environment, the cycle picks up momentum and people will create social and cultural systems that feed their need for mysticism thinking creating even more selective pressure against rational minds.
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