Post by Magnet Man on Jan 28, 2008 15:31:44 GMT -5
Before Darwin published The Origins of the Species in 1860 no scientific argument was yet in existence that could explain the marvel of mankind’s unique position in Nature. Although Galileo and Newton had greatly under-mined many of the Holy Scripture’s sacred tenets on the origins of the Universe by revealing the position of our planet in the heavens and exposing the miracle that held it suspended in midair - the pivotal mystery of Man’s origins explained in the Book of Genesis, remained unchallenged. Though many intellectuals at that time may have thought that the myth of Adam was naïve, without an alternative rationale they had no intelligent way of deposing it.
Few then dreamed or even wanted to dream that our ancestors could be apes.
Thus the Old Testament’s claim of man’s special relationship with God God’s via the creation of Adam kept the multitudes of the faithful congregated inside the cathedrals praising the Name of the Lord, with their heads bowed in reverence before the spiritual authority of God’s anointed ministers. The belief in Divine appointment ensured that organized religion’s collection plates remained piled with the silver and the power that money bestows - while the irreverent scientists were relegated to secondary roles in their dingy under-funded laboratories.
Outside the halls of the Church, a lively atmosphere of realism and scientific thought, stimulated by the dialectics of Descartes and Hegel, pervaded the intellectual circles of that period. In that climate of burgeoning revolutionary thought, with Marx’s recently published Communist Manifesto, openly proclaiming that religion was an opiate numbing the minds of the masses of workers and keeping them bowed before artificially appointed Lords and masters, scientific researchers, eager to extend man’s knowledge of the physical universe and desperately short of funds, chaffed at the continued dominion of Church authority.
Charles Darwin, equipped with a wealth of physical evidence that could potentially trump religion’s ace card, was loath to publish his thesis and further undermine the established order. The religious heretical revelations inside his book, indicating that man descended from apes and not Adam, provided the precise physiological proof the revolutionaries needed to upend the religious domination of human thought. Spiritually, The Origins of the Species challenged the Christian doctrine of Original Sin and in the process totally refuted the consequential need for the sacrifice of a Christ Redeemer. Jesus was therefore not divine and Mary was not a virgin.
With Christianity stripped of it’s basic doctrine, the theory of evolution would put an end to almost two thousand years of spiritual guidance; alter the balance of power; transfer the flow of money away from the Church; and place the future direction of human behavior, as well as the fate of the planet we lived on, squarely in the hands of science. A deeply religious man, Darwin knew that although science had the power to govern the mind, it was not equipped to govern the heart. The thought that he would be the man chosen to make the masses lose their spiritual connection with God and Christ and Church and King, held his hand. Unwilling to face that reality, Darwin wanted to delay publishing his findings until after his death. It was the zoological researches of Wallace, who had independently arrived at the same evolutionary conclusions, which forced the publication of The Origins of the Specie.
Over the past century and a half since publication, the disarray Darwin’s theory of evolution has created among all cultures that have based their faith on Old Testament scriptures has never abated. Removing Man from his position of Divine Appointment, and Jesus Christ as our Savior, has created a potentially devastating crisis of identity and governing authority in mankind’s conscious evolution that is far more portentous in the long term than the less personal discoveries of Galileo and Newton ever were.
There can be no question that the Theory of Evolution has been a watershed in the subsequent evolution of global intellectual development and the social ethics that are founded on democratic governments. Six generations of state-enforced, systematic scientific childhood indoctrination in our school systems has refocused the collective Mind on the mechanics of a Universe that runs according to the laws of physics, with no evidence that there is a God at the controls. Millions of students now crowd the seats in university classrooms and pay huge sums for tuition in the scientific method, while pews inside the Church and its religious potential to evoke the powers of the Heart, have steadily emptied.
With the hand of science firmly at the controls for more than a century, well-funded technological research has advanced by leaps and bounds. At the same time the ethical government of human behavior, policed via man-written laws and administered by vast political bureaucracies, all struggling with divisive ideological conflicts, has steadily deteriorated. Regional wars have escalated into World Wars. Stripped by technology of their traditional agricultural base, half the families on the plant are now starving, living in ghettos and permanently impoverished. A deadly plague, spread by immorality, runs rampant. Ethnic genocide is endemic. Greed rules and wealth is increasingly concentrated. The air, earth and water of the entire planet is polluted and the atmosphere is steadily heating up. Every nation fears the spreading threat of weapons of mass madness. We are running out of fuel. Without energy, technology will collapse over-night.
With no mass focus on an authoritative religion of thought and feeling, there is no over-riding authority or super-power in existence today, which can peacefully coordinate the global effort that is needed to put an end to the deterioration and begin a New Age of sustainable planet management..
Before 1860 the power of the Church almost totally dictated the politics of human government and economic development. Any man, no matter his private thoughts, who did not religiously attended church service on Sunday, had no chance of ever being elected to any government office or find a seat on the board of any public company. No school assembled without prayers. If that centralized religious power was still available today, it is possible that a coordinated crusade to heal the planet could be initiated. As things stand now, despite the vast technological capabilities that can reverse the deterioration, the planet is dangerously politically and economically divided and essentially leaderless - with a host of religious fanatics screaming Jihad at the fringes while the military/industrial complex mass produces ever more sophisticated WMDs.
The psychological crisis underlying the argument between creationists and evolutionists is that there is no holistic understanding of how profoundly the impact all those generations of scientific schooling in analytical emphasis has had on the intuitive half of the human psyche. The concentration on left brain education has stifled the inspirational development of the right brain and its inner urge to transcend the finite and seek union with the eternal. Six hours a day of systematic analytical indoctrination on the child psyche, while confined inside a school classroom for twelve years and more, while almost entirely neglecting right brain intuitive stimulation, has had an indelible, lop-sided, impact on the modern human psyche.
Today the once vast cultural significance and authoritative theological arguments of Religion, which had reigned supreme for almost two millennia over the minds of men, can be challenged by any school-boy. Though the biblical ideas on Creation are now barred from the school classroom, influential sects of religious fundamentalists are instinctively still holding out. And like the festering thorn of the Zealots holding out against the might of Rome in the fortress of Masada, the legions of intellectual scientists today feel obligated to clean them out – not by the medieval method of torture on the rack, but via the more subtle and more cruel psychology of intellectual scorn.
While the planet burns, science fiddles
The hard facts we all have to deal with is that the on-going dissention between Creationists and Evolutionists creates significant educational, political and economic problems that seriously hamper the kind of healthy holistic development that could take place if entire cultures worked together with the kind of will that can only come if all its citizens shared the same mind and heart.
In the meantime increasing millions of disenchanted Christian parents are removing their children from government classrooms and are indoctrinating their kids into a separatist mind-set at home. The home-schooling trend is accelerating. If one factors in the cost of all the wars and persecutions over all the centuries that man has fought in order to instill a unity of modern thought, this rift, (one can almost say a holy war of words) right at the level of childhood education, of who man is and what our purpose on this planet is, is a disturbing trend. If it is allowed to grow wider it can only lead to serious future consequences. With exponential population pressures impacting on an already stressed-out global environment, we need to take steps forward into the 21st Century. We cannot afford steps backwards into the 19th.
For those parents who are truly concerned about a more holistic approach to child education, it is obvious that we all need a unified understanding of the origins and evolution of human consciousness and try to put an end to the impact our seemingly endless national arguments are having on our home planet,
Nobody as yet can prove or disprove, in scientific terms, that God does or does not exist. Nor has any of the five major religions found unity in defining who are what God is.
Those are the only truly indisputable facts in this war of words and the ominous symptomatic growth of fanatical international terrorism. In the meantime, with the jury still out, It might save a lot of wasted emotional turmoil if, instead of trying to batter down the walls of Masada and heap the religious zealots with ridicule and invective, a more constructive tone is politely enforced at every public and private debate on the subject. At the very least it would give us a less contentious platform for engaging in the kind of serious thought that might bridge the rift.
In this debate I am trying to address the 150 year old debate in more holistic terms than the way it has been conducted to date. It attempts the seemingly impossible – the meld of physics with metaphysics – seeking a modem of mutual respect between objective social realities and subjective spiritual needs.
My private purpose in initiating the creation/evolution debate on a number of international philosophical forums is to try to convince both scientists and religionist that; without a unity of thought and belief, we and our planet face most certain destruction. Timing is important if this appeal is to have any large effect.
We should all realize by now that there is no purely intellectually devised political or economic ideology on the plant today that has the influence to get us to end all wars and unite all nations behind a common effort of global stewardship. Our minds are seriously, even pathologically, divided. The only latent healthy power we have in common is the human heart and the commonalty of our basic family values. Without an ontological global religion of metaphysical practice, we have no concerted way of evoking the harmony of our social and spiritual potentials for self-policed ethical behavior and creative cooperation.
My arguments will be presented without resorting to the endless divisive arguments associated with political, economic and religious dogmas.
My central questions are basic:
If we accept the evolutionary theory that man evolved by gradual stages from ape to hominid to human, what event defines that final transition?
How did a former ape-man become hu-man?
What mental event in the expanded brain of an evolving hominid sparked the birth of a distinctly human consciousness.
What basically defines and motivates humanness?
Did Consciousness precede creation?
Or the reverse.?
Few then dreamed or even wanted to dream that our ancestors could be apes.
Thus the Old Testament’s claim of man’s special relationship with God God’s via the creation of Adam kept the multitudes of the faithful congregated inside the cathedrals praising the Name of the Lord, with their heads bowed in reverence before the spiritual authority of God’s anointed ministers. The belief in Divine appointment ensured that organized religion’s collection plates remained piled with the silver and the power that money bestows - while the irreverent scientists were relegated to secondary roles in their dingy under-funded laboratories.
Outside the halls of the Church, a lively atmosphere of realism and scientific thought, stimulated by the dialectics of Descartes and Hegel, pervaded the intellectual circles of that period. In that climate of burgeoning revolutionary thought, with Marx’s recently published Communist Manifesto, openly proclaiming that religion was an opiate numbing the minds of the masses of workers and keeping them bowed before artificially appointed Lords and masters, scientific researchers, eager to extend man’s knowledge of the physical universe and desperately short of funds, chaffed at the continued dominion of Church authority.
Charles Darwin, equipped with a wealth of physical evidence that could potentially trump religion’s ace card, was loath to publish his thesis and further undermine the established order. The religious heretical revelations inside his book, indicating that man descended from apes and not Adam, provided the precise physiological proof the revolutionaries needed to upend the religious domination of human thought. Spiritually, The Origins of the Species challenged the Christian doctrine of Original Sin and in the process totally refuted the consequential need for the sacrifice of a Christ Redeemer. Jesus was therefore not divine and Mary was not a virgin.
With Christianity stripped of it’s basic doctrine, the theory of evolution would put an end to almost two thousand years of spiritual guidance; alter the balance of power; transfer the flow of money away from the Church; and place the future direction of human behavior, as well as the fate of the planet we lived on, squarely in the hands of science. A deeply religious man, Darwin knew that although science had the power to govern the mind, it was not equipped to govern the heart. The thought that he would be the man chosen to make the masses lose their spiritual connection with God and Christ and Church and King, held his hand. Unwilling to face that reality, Darwin wanted to delay publishing his findings until after his death. It was the zoological researches of Wallace, who had independently arrived at the same evolutionary conclusions, which forced the publication of The Origins of the Specie.
Over the past century and a half since publication, the disarray Darwin’s theory of evolution has created among all cultures that have based their faith on Old Testament scriptures has never abated. Removing Man from his position of Divine Appointment, and Jesus Christ as our Savior, has created a potentially devastating crisis of identity and governing authority in mankind’s conscious evolution that is far more portentous in the long term than the less personal discoveries of Galileo and Newton ever were.
There can be no question that the Theory of Evolution has been a watershed in the subsequent evolution of global intellectual development and the social ethics that are founded on democratic governments. Six generations of state-enforced, systematic scientific childhood indoctrination in our school systems has refocused the collective Mind on the mechanics of a Universe that runs according to the laws of physics, with no evidence that there is a God at the controls. Millions of students now crowd the seats in university classrooms and pay huge sums for tuition in the scientific method, while pews inside the Church and its religious potential to evoke the powers of the Heart, have steadily emptied.
With the hand of science firmly at the controls for more than a century, well-funded technological research has advanced by leaps and bounds. At the same time the ethical government of human behavior, policed via man-written laws and administered by vast political bureaucracies, all struggling with divisive ideological conflicts, has steadily deteriorated. Regional wars have escalated into World Wars. Stripped by technology of their traditional agricultural base, half the families on the plant are now starving, living in ghettos and permanently impoverished. A deadly plague, spread by immorality, runs rampant. Ethnic genocide is endemic. Greed rules and wealth is increasingly concentrated. The air, earth and water of the entire planet is polluted and the atmosphere is steadily heating up. Every nation fears the spreading threat of weapons of mass madness. We are running out of fuel. Without energy, technology will collapse over-night.
With no mass focus on an authoritative religion of thought and feeling, there is no over-riding authority or super-power in existence today, which can peacefully coordinate the global effort that is needed to put an end to the deterioration and begin a New Age of sustainable planet management..
Before 1860 the power of the Church almost totally dictated the politics of human government and economic development. Any man, no matter his private thoughts, who did not religiously attended church service on Sunday, had no chance of ever being elected to any government office or find a seat on the board of any public company. No school assembled without prayers. If that centralized religious power was still available today, it is possible that a coordinated crusade to heal the planet could be initiated. As things stand now, despite the vast technological capabilities that can reverse the deterioration, the planet is dangerously politically and economically divided and essentially leaderless - with a host of religious fanatics screaming Jihad at the fringes while the military/industrial complex mass produces ever more sophisticated WMDs.
The psychological crisis underlying the argument between creationists and evolutionists is that there is no holistic understanding of how profoundly the impact all those generations of scientific schooling in analytical emphasis has had on the intuitive half of the human psyche. The concentration on left brain education has stifled the inspirational development of the right brain and its inner urge to transcend the finite and seek union with the eternal. Six hours a day of systematic analytical indoctrination on the child psyche, while confined inside a school classroom for twelve years and more, while almost entirely neglecting right brain intuitive stimulation, has had an indelible, lop-sided, impact on the modern human psyche.
Today the once vast cultural significance and authoritative theological arguments of Religion, which had reigned supreme for almost two millennia over the minds of men, can be challenged by any school-boy. Though the biblical ideas on Creation are now barred from the school classroom, influential sects of religious fundamentalists are instinctively still holding out. And like the festering thorn of the Zealots holding out against the might of Rome in the fortress of Masada, the legions of intellectual scientists today feel obligated to clean them out – not by the medieval method of torture on the rack, but via the more subtle and more cruel psychology of intellectual scorn.
While the planet burns, science fiddles
The hard facts we all have to deal with is that the on-going dissention between Creationists and Evolutionists creates significant educational, political and economic problems that seriously hamper the kind of healthy holistic development that could take place if entire cultures worked together with the kind of will that can only come if all its citizens shared the same mind and heart.
In the meantime increasing millions of disenchanted Christian parents are removing their children from government classrooms and are indoctrinating their kids into a separatist mind-set at home. The home-schooling trend is accelerating. If one factors in the cost of all the wars and persecutions over all the centuries that man has fought in order to instill a unity of modern thought, this rift, (one can almost say a holy war of words) right at the level of childhood education, of who man is and what our purpose on this planet is, is a disturbing trend. If it is allowed to grow wider it can only lead to serious future consequences. With exponential population pressures impacting on an already stressed-out global environment, we need to take steps forward into the 21st Century. We cannot afford steps backwards into the 19th.
For those parents who are truly concerned about a more holistic approach to child education, it is obvious that we all need a unified understanding of the origins and evolution of human consciousness and try to put an end to the impact our seemingly endless national arguments are having on our home planet,
Nobody as yet can prove or disprove, in scientific terms, that God does or does not exist. Nor has any of the five major religions found unity in defining who are what God is.
Those are the only truly indisputable facts in this war of words and the ominous symptomatic growth of fanatical international terrorism. In the meantime, with the jury still out, It might save a lot of wasted emotional turmoil if, instead of trying to batter down the walls of Masada and heap the religious zealots with ridicule and invective, a more constructive tone is politely enforced at every public and private debate on the subject. At the very least it would give us a less contentious platform for engaging in the kind of serious thought that might bridge the rift.
In this debate I am trying to address the 150 year old debate in more holistic terms than the way it has been conducted to date. It attempts the seemingly impossible – the meld of physics with metaphysics – seeking a modem of mutual respect between objective social realities and subjective spiritual needs.
My private purpose in initiating the creation/evolution debate on a number of international philosophical forums is to try to convince both scientists and religionist that; without a unity of thought and belief, we and our planet face most certain destruction. Timing is important if this appeal is to have any large effect.
We should all realize by now that there is no purely intellectually devised political or economic ideology on the plant today that has the influence to get us to end all wars and unite all nations behind a common effort of global stewardship. Our minds are seriously, even pathologically, divided. The only latent healthy power we have in common is the human heart and the commonalty of our basic family values. Without an ontological global religion of metaphysical practice, we have no concerted way of evoking the harmony of our social and spiritual potentials for self-policed ethical behavior and creative cooperation.
My arguments will be presented without resorting to the endless divisive arguments associated with political, economic and religious dogmas.
My central questions are basic:
If we accept the evolutionary theory that man evolved by gradual stages from ape to hominid to human, what event defines that final transition?
How did a former ape-man become hu-man?
What mental event in the expanded brain of an evolving hominid sparked the birth of a distinctly human consciousness.
What basically defines and motivates humanness?
Did Consciousness precede creation?
Or the reverse.?
