Al-d aside, there has been some discussion on this site about the lower moral standards of todays Americans and the impact that will have on whatever occurs next year. The following is a snip from a book review in the San Francisco Chronicle [for Educational Purposes Only; although I doubt that they care whether I use a 40 year old book review]: In 1939 Steinbeck probed and revealed the hardscrabble morality of the thirties with Grapes of Wrath. In 1952, Steinbeck bared to the pitiless, white light of day the conduct and ethics of three generations of Americans in East of Eden. Now, Steinbeck scrutinizes with an unsparing eye our careless ways with decency, honesty, loyalty, the moral slackness that besets the men and women of our country today, in The Winter of our Discontent. Given, they were looking back at the recent descent of America to bottom of the moral abyss with Tail-gunner Joe; but still, have we changed that much during the last half of this century. Whats you opinion?

Best

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 26, 1999

Answers

I think that morally our society has worsened because of our excuse-making culture.

(About all the excuses: I am neither Roman Catholic nor a psychologist. But my understanding of the underpinning of a degree in psychology that one would get from a Catholic university would be a belief in free will with some constraints. Anyhow, this is always what I have personally believed.)

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 26, 1999.

One way to view the moral "decay" America is now experiencing, is as a bridge between past and future. This can be difficult, as we are living in the now, and humans have a tendancy to project current perspective onto past and future.

What I mean is this: "Morals" are an ever-shifting thing. In cultures past, it was "moral" to conduct human sacrifices to the gods in order to keep the rain falling and the crops growing. The people who were sacrificed understood that being the sacrifice was the role they played in the continuation of the society. I don't know if it would be all that easy for you, with your perspective, to convince them otherwise.

In cultures past, slavery was a normal way for getting the work done. One bunch of people would raid another bunch of people, steal humans to be their slaves, and work them until death. The gods of various cultures allowed people all sorts of justifications for doing this. If you were a planter in the southern U.S. in 1792, you found justification in the bible to allow you to engage in slavery, and you probably had no problem living with yourself.

War is another good one. Christianity and Islam, as examples, (and this is true of most others) have been excellent at justifying the existence and perpetuation of war. The "reason" may have really been to take the other guy's resources, but religions made it morally acceptable.

Yes, there have always been people who pointed out to societies using various methods, that these things were not "moral", and the first two at least, have been all but wiped out. ("corporate" slavery and the Sudan not-with-standing.) It took a hell of a long time though...

So, where are we going? I don't know. But I can venture a guess. Looking at the long-range, I think that maybe we are in a painful and long period of transition. A transition from "Morals from Without" to "Morals from "Within."

Throughout most of history, and in most cultures, at least the big ones that are easier to study, morals were dictated from outside the individual. Religion and other codes of behavior provided the model. You behaved inside of what this book or that set of laws or decreed, or you were outside the "norm", and punished.

I think it can be difficult for some people to behave according to many religions or sets of laws, because they tend to be riddled with contadictions. The longer religions or law books function, the weightier they get under their own contradictions, and it gets even more difficult for the individual who tries (or doesn't) to fit in to that mass of contradictions to know what to do.

I think that's why there are so many violent outbursts in our culture now. The contradictions.

There are of course people who know how to behave in a "moral" way, using what comes from "within" as their guide. I don't think this is rocket science, you don't need some ancient text or 6,000 pages of laws to know what's right and wrong. But the culture makes it difficult for many people, because it is so riddled with contradictions, and discourages recognizing the value of "within."

What happens next? Will there be a backlash against the culture of irresponsibility? I think that maybe if Y2K does turn out to be pretty bad, there will be. Maybe individuals will come to understand the need to be responsible for their own lives, from within, rather than following the dictates of culture from without. I like to think that human consciousness is an evolving thing, and that "we" have not reached the apex of that evolution. There's plenty more to come, if we allow it. I like to think that the next step (or maybe a step or two after that) is an understanding within each individual that they are repsonsible for themselves AND their society. If Y2K shakes out as badly as I think it has the potential to, it may turn out to be one more factor in a long serious of factors that gets each person on the planet to see that need.

Of course, it often takes a lot of growing pain (in the individual and in society) to make the jump from here to there. We can certainly bitch and moan about how "immoral" our society has become, it's easy to do that. Or, we can each search the realm of "within" and try to find that "universal right and wrong" and live by it. We can then attempt to, by example, emanate that energy out into the world, rather than lash out against those who don't "get it." If each of us can try to do this, maybe on the eve of the 22nd century, our descendants will have gotten to a place where "Morals from Within" are the norm?

(Sunday morning stream of consciousness sermon mode *to myself* off...)

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), September 26, 1999.

jesus said if he sets you free,your free indeed. free from what? clue> SELFISHNESS.--SELF PRESERVATION.--THE god of meme.

-- adamic nature=out. (dogs@zianet.com), September 26, 1999.

But what will free you from the suffering caused by clinging to an eroneous view of self?Others might show you the path,Al,but you're the who must walk it.Quit looking to supernatural messiah zombies for your salvation,Al.The effort must come from you.

-- zoobie (zoobiezoob@yahoo.com), September 26, 1999.

Al-D: I never said that you are wierd.

Pshannon: Your point is taken. You say that it is difficult to discover the wheat in the chaff in the ever changing religous books that those in Western Society use as a guide. Your view is Eastern. Do we have the internal ability to determine that universal morality? Are we driven by survival? Do we need the things written in books [however flawed] to keep us in line? You have outlined the question. Folks, only you can provide the answers.

Best wishes,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 26, 1999.

Yes, but P.Shannon, corporate slavery is STILL slavery, it can't be excused just because its 'secular'. It reminds me - in fact Y2K and the DWGI's remind me of a song by Kansas, that has these words: "Your Future is managed and your Freedom's a joke; You don't know the difference as you put on your yoke. The Less that you know, the more you Fall Into Place: A cog in the wheel; there is no soul in your face." So people listen to their gov/god telling them about bad 'religious' wars, even as bill goes to war because of goddess monica. What a joke. The Bible points out that nakedness was forced on people who were subjected and became 'slaves'. So who are the slaves in today's society? They're not slaves because of 'religion'. Not that I'm a fan of 'religion'. I am a 'fan' of Y'shua, Jesus; Mr. God-Man. (God, I love you, Y'shua! YOU are my God. You do such Wonderful things! You planned them long ago, and now you are accomplishing them, just as you said. And you're the REAL meaning of Meek: Stallion under control. I mean Power Under Control.(chuckle)). I am a fan of free-will, and people who take FULL responsibility for their actions. Let's hope the people who are doing NOTHING to prepare because they're continually being fed pablum from their gov/god will understand that doing nothing was their choice. Willingly Believing a Lie Was Their Choice.

-- I Understand (youaremy@God.com), September 26, 1999.

Dogs, why do we need a messiah? Isn't that part of the reason why so many don't take responsibility? "The answer lies within, so why not take a look now..." I have a feeling that if you REALLY understood the MEANING of what Mr. Y'shua was saying, you wouldn't feel the need to quote him. You would be able to express things in your own terms, because you would understand what you are saying. You wouldn't need to look for messiahs in books written in dead languages, because you would find your messiah in yourself.

Sorry to tell you this, but Jesus is dead. Dead, dead, DEAD! The Christ consciousness, or Buddah consciousness, or objective consciousness lives inside of ALL of us, if we choose to look for it. That's what Mr. J was saying. Bad translations and church politics skewed that message beacause the church politicians didn't want you to KNOW that the truth was within you. Can't control sheep that way.

Rather than looking for Jesus and taking your cues from him, why not look for the real Al-d and take your cues from yourself?

-- (sorry@al.d), September 26, 1999.

Ya know, for a "dead man" Y'shua, you sure SCARE a helluva lot of people. Ooh, yes.

-- doorbaby (TempleofmyGod@heaven.com), September 26, 1999.

There's a lot to be said for Sunday morning stream of consciousness, Patrick. Beautifully stated!!!

The question as to our species spiritual (read: moral) evolution is a bothersome one. When I consider the state of our collective evolution, well, I cringe. My optimism, as it pertains to individuals, fades quickly when I turn my attention to humanity as a whole.

I dare say I'm embarrassed at the behavior I witness day in & day out. This forum is a fine example. Can I imagine the TB2000 boors evolving to a significant degree in this lifetime? It's certainly possible. Yet I wouldn't bet on it happening.

I feel the same regarding the macrocosm of humanity. We've a long, long way to go in order to reach the point of truly loving each other irrespective of our individual characteristics.

Love is the starting point, IMO. Mistakes can & will be made in the course of our daily activities. Yet if we act from that place in our hearts where love dwells; if we pour out our love to each other - forgiveness does come easily. Slights are somehow less painful. The cuts don't go so deep, hence the healing ocurs much more quickly.

Z, I take responsibility for my thoughts, words & actions. I blow it sometimes. But I'm always vigilant that I may catch my transgressions quickly. You may label my thinking "eastern" if you wish.

It matters not whence the inspiration comes. It is the execution which counts. IMHO, of course. :)

Smile From The Heart,

-- Bingo1 (howe9@pop.shentel.net), September 26, 1999.

Bingo1:

Please note that Eastern is not an insult. Christianity and Islam are both Eastern religions [as are all of the remaining major religions].

Best wishes,,,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 26, 1999.

Yes, Z. I understand completely. I've read many of your posts & have found you to be of sound mind (for what that may be worth!). You are not one of the forum boors I refer to! :)

-- Bingo1 (howe9@pop.shentel.net), September 26, 1999.

Dogs, I was actually referring to other people.

Now Me, I'm not Scared of Jesus, but I fear Him with a Godly awe, cause I am well aware of Who He is, and like it says in Malachi, God has a Book of Remembrance, and in it are the Names of all of us who fear Him and Love to Think about Him. That's Me! I'm in there. (I LOVE to think about ya, Y'shua)

And what I Really believe is that we're all just a figment of GOD'S imagination. Yeah; or He's having a nightmare. and if satan was God, he'd be taking Valium right about now. But he Ain't God. Take care, Dogs.

-- doorbaby (templeofmyGod@heaven.com), September 26, 1999.

Correction:

That would exclude Wicca and Animism [sp], but I don't know how big they are.

Best wishes,,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 26, 1999.

Whoever wishes to slam true Christianity, should at least bone up and know of what they speak. "Blame not before thou has examined the truth."

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who supress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man - birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen." Romans 1:18-25

"For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God - through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation to thse who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condmened sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." Romans 7:15- 8:4

"...knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.' For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth which now exist are kept in store by the same word, reserved for fire until the day of judgement and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up." II Peter 3:3-10"

"But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power." II Timothy 3:1-5a

"Take heed that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name, saying 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive many. And you wil hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name's sake. And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. but he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come. Therefore when you see the 'abomination of desolation', spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place (whoever reads, let him understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains: Let him who is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house. And let him who is in the field not go back to get his clothes. But woe to those who are pregnant and to those with nursing babies in those days! And pray that your flight may not be in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be. And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect's sake those days will be shortened Then if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or "There!' do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to deceive, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand. Therefore if they say to you, 'Look, He is in the desert!' do not go out; or 'Look, He is in the inner rooms!' do not believe it. For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For wherever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered together. Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory." (Jesus) Matthew 25: 3-31

Study up, and then one day either mock or cry for mercy. If you do not believe, and see the following come to pass, you should reconsider...

"And I will give power to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy one thousand two hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands standing before the God of the earth. And if anyone wants to harm them, fire proceeds from their mouth and devours their enemies. And if anyone wants to harm them, he must be killed in this manner. These have power to shut heaven, so that no rain falls in the days of their prophecy; and they have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to strike the earth with all plagues, as often as they desire. Now when they finish their testimony, the beast that ascends out of the bottomless pit will make war against them, over come them, and kill them. And their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. Then those from the peoples, tribes, tongues and nations will see their dead bodies three and a half days, and not allow their dead bodies to be put into graves. And those who dwell on the earth will rejoice over them, make merry, and send gifts to one another, because these two prphets tormented those who dwell on the earth. Now after three and a half days the breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and great fear fell on those who saw them. And they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, 'Come up here.' And they ascended to heaven in a cloud, and their enemies saw them. In the same hour there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city fell. In the earthquake seven thousand men were killed, and the rest were afraid and gave glory to the God of heaven." Revelation 11: 3-13

Something to watch for, eh?

-- Mumsie (Shezdremn@aol.com), September 26, 1999.

Mumsie:

Have you read the stuff from the library in Alexandria. Works by people who knew Jesus. They don't undermine the religion but sure put a damper on what a 4th century monk in Austria wrote and called revelations. If you read the history, even the Roman church had questions about this.

Best wishes,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 26, 1999.

Regarding the Resurrection issue...excerpt below:

"Fortunately, one of the most well-attested events in the ancient world is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. When confronted by the religious leaders of His day, Jesus was asked for a sign to demonstrate that He was the promised Messiah. He answered, 'An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign shall be given to it, but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth; (Matthew 12: 39, 40) The sign of the resurrection was meant to set Jesus apart from anyone else who ever lived and it would designate Him the Son of God (Romans 1:4). The accounts of His appearances are recorded for us by eyewitnesses to whom Jesus appeared alive over a forty-day period after His public crucifixion. As the scriptural account sets forth, to these 'he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God' (Acts 1: 3) Writing about A.D. 56, the Apostle Paul mentions the fact that more than 500 people had witnessed the resurrected Christ at one time and most of them were still living when he wrote (I Corinthians 15:6). This statement is somewhat of a challenge to those who might not have believed, since Paul is saying that there are many people yet living who could be interviewed to find out if Christ had indeed risen. The historical evidence is more than sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of the honest inquirer. This can be seen not only by the positive defense that can be made for the case for the resurrection, but also by the lack of any evidence for an alternative explanation. The theories attempting to give an alternative explanation to the resurrection take more faith to believe than the resurrection itself. Frank Morrison, who was an agnostic journalist, attempted to write a book refuting the resurrection of Christ. After much investigation, his opinions changed and he became a believer in Jesus Christ. This is how Morrison described what happened to him: 'This study is in some ways so unusual and provocative that the writer thinks it desirable to state here very briefly how the book came to take its present form. In one sense it could have taken no other, for it is essentially a confession, the inner story of a man who originally set out to write one kind of a book and found himself compelled by the sheer force of circumstances to write another. It is not that the facts altered, for they are recorded imperishably in the monuments and in the pages of human history. But the interpretation to be put on the facts underwent a change' (Who Moved the Stone? Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1971 preface). Morrison discovered that Christ was publicly put in the tomb on Friday, but on Sunday morning the body was missing. If He did not rise from the dead, then someone took the body. There are three interest groups that could possibly have taken the body: the Romans, the Jews, or the disciples. The Romans would have had no reason to steal the body, since they wanted to keep the peace in Palestine. The idea was to keep the provinces as quiet as possible, and stealing the body of Christ would not accomplish this objective. The Jews would not have taken the body, because the last thing they wanted was a proclamation of the resurrection. They are the ones who asked for the guard, according to Matthew 27. The disciples of Jesus had no reason to steal the body, and if they did, they later died for something they knew to be untrue. Moreover, the religion which they proclaimed emphasized telling the truth and not lying. Their actions would have been inconsistent with that which they knew to be true and commanded others to follow. The other reasonable explanation is that Christ has risen, and the eyewitnesses make it plain this is the case. The disciples of Jesus may not have been as sophisticated as 20th century man in the realm of scientific knowledge, but they surely knew the difference between someone who was dead and someone who wasn't. As Simon Peter said, 'For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we make known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty' (2 Peter 1:16). ~ Answers to Tough Questions skeptics ask about the Christian faith ~ Josh McDowell

Josephus, (a Jewish historian who wrote to please the Romans (at the end of the first century A.D.), said this in ~Antiquities 18.3.3: 'Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him many Jews, and also many of the Greeks. This man was the Christ. And when Pilate had condemend him to the cross, upon his impeachment by the principal man among us, those who had loved from the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive on the third day, the divine prophets having spoken these and thousands of other wonderful things about him. And even now, the race of Christians, so named from him, has not died out.'

Chancellor Lyndhurst (recognized as one of the greatest legal minds in British history) left this writing behind: "I kow pretty well what evidence is; and I tell you, such evidence as that for the Resurrection has never broken down yet."

Who moved the stone? It was so heavy that twenty men could not roll it. Romans who quit their guard were punished with death.

"In Jerusalem, the place of Jesus' execution and grave, it was proclaimed not long after his death that he had been raised. The situation demands that within the circle of the first community one had a reliable testimony for the fact that the grave had been found empty....[the resurrection proclamation] could not have been maintained in Jerusalem for a single day, for a single hour, if the emptiness of the tomb had not been established as a fact for all concerned.'" Paul Althus

"Is it conceivable then, that the apostles would have had this success if the body of the one they proclaimed as risen Lord was all the time decomposing in Joseph's tomb? Would a great company of the priests and many hard-headed Pharisees have been impressed with the proclamation of a resurrection which was in fact no resurrection at all, but a mere message of spiritual survival couched in the misleading terms of a literal rising from the grave?" J. N. D. Anderson (lawyer and professor at University of London)

"Note that when the disciples of Jesus proclaimed the resurrection, they did so as eyewitnesses and they did so while people were still alive who had had contact with the events they spoke of. In 56 A.D. Paul wrote that over 500 people had seen the risen Jesus and that most of them were still alive ( I Corinthians 15:6). It passes the bounds of credibility that the early Christians could have manufactured such a tale and then preached it among those who might easily hve refuted it simply by producing the body of Jesus." ~ John Warwick Montgomery

"The Church was founded on the resurrection, and disproving it would have destroyed the whole Christian movement. However, instead of any such disproof, throughout the first century, Christians were threatened, beaten, flogged and killed because of their faith. It would have been much simpler to hve silenced them by producing Jesus' body, but this was never done." ~ W. Pannenberg

The silence of Christ's enemies "is as eloquent a proof of the resurrection as the apostles witness." John R. Scott

-- Mumsie (Shezdremn@aol.com), September 26, 1999.

Mumsie:

By the way, there is a lot of the Dead Sea Scrolls available on the WEB, in translation. If you are interested in knowing about the "poor" , you can find your answers at that site.

Best wishes,,,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 26, 1999.

Mumsie:

As a final note, if you are really interested in these things, I recommend reading James the brother of Jesus by Robert Eisenman. It is well documented but a difficult read. It is a good starting point. You can go from there back through the documents [you can do that because of the WEB]. That is if you are really interested. I am out of here. See you in Jan. Best to all.

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 26, 1999.

Mumsie:

After this I am really out of here. The oldest parts of the New Testament were from Paul, who never met Jesus. The other parts were written from oral tradition. I hate to be hyper on the subject, but I have spent my whole life contemplating the "subject". If you want to know the truth, you much search. I've given you a place to start. If you want to know, then you will. See you'all in Jan.

Best wishes,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 26, 1999.

We have a problem here. Beyond salutations and best wishes (however they may be worded), the problem of christian eschatology being as relevant as other eschatologies on the one hand, and the difficulty of confronting eschatologists without offending others. For example, if you don't like al-d, and you start digging in at christianity, you end up flaming Christian in general and not just al-d. I'd like us to think about this problematic some more and take greater care when the heated debate treads unwisely to religion-- especially my religion. [smile] I'm a Catholic. And I am a convert. Anyway, let's not let religious debates divide us and babelize our efforts to explore the risks of Y2K, how we shall survive those risks (individually and as a community), and how we can benefit (in more ways than mere survival) from this danger that has brought us together.

Bingo 1,

I love you like a brother, man. I still think you gotta let your heart hold more love.

Z1X4Y7,

I knew Bob Eisenman personally. And he's a smart guy. I worked with him and others on the Dead Sea Scroll stuff. I also got an A in his class (and after I made an unpleasant caricature drawing of him in an Israeli bomb shelter (with a permanent marker) where we used to get smashed). He had lots of interesting hypotheses about Christianity and Islam. I didn't buy into them, but Bob once thought that I had taken his Christian hypotheses to the appropriate logical conclusions-- however unfounded. Anyway, you'll never know the truth of Christianity unless you have truly have faith. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't lose it. So you wouldn't be stuck per se -- if you are worried about that. (laughing)

Mumsie,

They know not what they do.

pshannon,

Same thing I said to Z: you'll never know the truth of Christianity unless you truly get faith. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't lose it. So you wouldn't be stuck per se-- if you are worried about that. (grin)

al-d,

While you seem to want to be a prophet, sometimes you seem to be trying too hard.

Sincerely, Stan Faryna

-- Stan Faryna (faryna@groupmail.com), September 26, 1999.

Z1X47... I hope I got that right! Thanks for the response, I printed yours, and will check in to it. Especially now that I know I can pester Stan for information on it! :0)

-- Mumsie (Shezdremn@aol.com), September 27, 1999.

AL-D,

You want to share something important with us... and you may have the kind of rugged and barefoot humility that would let the bible speak for God. Well, you have some mountains to move, my friend. I have ears to hear and eyes to see. So I can admire your courage and also be amused by your wild-eyed fool-hardiness. And it's ok for you to be a fool for God. Pray to God that he will put his hand over me, AL-D.

Sincerely, Stan Faryna

-- Stan Faryna (faryna@groupmail.com), September 27, 1999.

From: Y2K, ` la Carte by Dancr near Monterey, California

I dare say I'm embarrassed at the behavior I witness day in & day out. This forum is a fine example. Can I imagine the TB2000 boors evolving to a significant degree in this lifetime?

The bulk of participants on this forum are folks who are committed to not stealing from others, and who are taking arduous steps now to lead themselves from that temptation. Those who cannot be bothered with preparing are deciding that if things get bad, then they will either let their own children die, or they will steal from others. Oh, they may not steal directly, but they will let their government do it for them. Shame on them.

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage), September 27, 1999.

The Biological Basis of Morality-----E O Wilson

Do we invent our moral absolutes in order to make society workable? Or are these enduring principles expressed to us by some transcendent or Godlike authority? Efforts to resolve this conundrum have perplexed, sometimes inflamed, our best minds for centuries, but the natural sciences are telling us more and more about the choices we make and our reasons for making them. by Edward O. Wilson

CENTURIES of debate on the origin of ethics come down to this: Either ethical principles, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience, or they are human inventions. The distinction is more than an exercise for academic philosophers. The choice between these two understandings makes all the difference in the way we view ourselves as a species. It measures the authority of religion, and it determines the conduct of moral reasoning. The two assumptions in competition are like islands in a sea of chaos, as different as life and death, matter and the void. One cannot learn which is correct by pure logic; the answer will eventually be reached through an accumulation of objective evidence. Moral reasoning, I believe, is at every level intrinsically consilient with -- compatible with, intertwined with -- the natural sciences. (I use a form of the word "consilience" -- literally a "jumping together" of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation -- because its rarity has preserved its precision.)

Discuss this article in the Community & Society forum of Post & Riposte. Go to part two of this article. Related feature: o"All for One, One for All," (March, 1998) An Atlantic Unbound interview with Edward O. Wilson. From the archives: o"Back From Chaos," by Edward O. Wilson (March, 1998) "One of the century's most important scientists argues, against fashion, that ... we will discover underlying all forms of knowledge a fundamental unity." o"Can We Be Good Without God?" by Glenn Tinder (December, 1989) Many of the virtues of liberal democracy, such as a belief in the dignity and equality of all people, have strong roots in the union of the spiritual and the political achieved in the vision of Christianity. Can such values survive without these particular roots? An essay on the political meaning of Christianity. o"Thinking About Crime," by James Q. Wilson (September, 1983) "Some combination of constitutional traits and early family experiences accounts for more of the variation among young persons in their serious criminality than any other factors, and serious misconduct that appears relatively early in life tends to persist into adulthood."

Every thoughtful person has an opinion on which premise is correct. But the split is not, as popularly supposed, between religious believers and secularists. It is between transcendentalists, who think that moral guidelines exist outside the human mind, and empiricists, who think them contrivances of the mind. In simplest terms, the options are as follows: I believe in the independence of moral values, whether from God or not, and I believe that moral values come from human beings alone, whether or not God exists. Theologians and philosophers have almost always focused on transcendentalism as the means to validate ethics. They seek the grail of natural law, which comprises freestanding principles of moral conduct immune to doubt and compromise. Christian theologians, following Saint Thomas Aquinas's reasoning in Summa Theologiae, by and large consider natural law to be an expression of God's will. In this view, human beings have an obligation to discover the law by diligent reasoning and to weave it into the routine of their daily lives. Secular philosophers of a transcendental bent may seem to be radically different from theologians, but they are actually quite similar, at least in moral reasoning. They tend to view natural law as a set of principles so powerful, whatever their origin, as to be self-evident to any rational person. In short, transcendental views are fundamentally the same whether God is invoked or not. For example, when Thomas Jefferson, following John Locke, derived the doctrine of natural rights from natural law, he was more concerned with the power of transcendental statements than with their origin, divine or secular. In the Declaration of Independence he blended secular and religious presumptions in one transcendentalist sentence, thus deftly covering all bets: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." That assertion became the cardinal premise of America's civil religion, the righteous sword wielded by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., and it endures as the central ethic binding together the diverse peoples of the United States. So compelling are such fruits of natural-law theory, especially when the Deity is also invoked, that they may seem to place the transcendentalist assumption beyond question. But to its noble successes must be added appalling failures. It has been perverted many times in the past -- used, for example, to argue passionately for colonial conquest, slavery, and genocide. Nor was any great war ever fought without each side thinking its cause transcendentally sacred in some manner or other. So perhaps we need to take empiricism more seriously. In the empiricist view, ethics is conduct favored consistently enough throughout a society to be expressed as a code of principles. It reaches its precise form in each culture according to historical circumstance. The codes, whether adjudged good or evil by outsiders, play an important role in determining which cultures flourish and which decline. The crux of the empiricist view is its emphasis on objective knowledge. Because the success of an ethical code depends on how wisely it interprets moral sentiments, those who frame one should know how the brain works, and how the mind develops. The success of ethics also depends on how accurately a society can predict the consequences of particular actions as opposed to others, especially in cases of moral ambiguity. The empiricist argument holds that if we explore the biological roots of moral behavior, and explain their material origins and biases, we should be able to fashion a wise and enduring ethical consensus. The current expansion of scientific inquiry into the deeper processes of human thought makes this venture feasible. The choice between transcendentalism and empiricism will be the coming century's version of the struggle for men's souls. Moral reasoning will either remain centered in idioms of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or shift toward science-based material analysis. Where it settles will depend on which world view is proved correct, or at least which is more widely perceived to be correct. Ethicists, scholars who specialize in moral reasoning, tend not to declare themselves on the foundations of ethics, or to admit fallibility. Rarely do we see an argument that opens with the simple statement This is my starting point, and it could be wrong. Ethicists instead favor a fretful passage from the particular to the ambiguous, or the reverse -- vagueness into hard cases. I suspect that almost all are transcendentalists at heart, but they rarely say so in simple declarative sentences. One cannot blame them very much; explaining the ineffable is difficult. I am an empiricist. On religion I lean toward deism, but consider its proof largely a problem in astrophysics. The existence of a God who created the universe (as envisioned by deism) is possible, and the question may eventually be settled, perhaps by forms of material evidence not yet imagined. Or the matter may be forever beyond human reach. In contrast, and of far greater importance to humanity, the idea of a biological God, one who directs organic evolution and intervenes in human affairs (as envisioned by theism), is increasingly contravened by biology and the brain sciences. The same evidence, I believe, favors a purely material origin of ethics, and it meets the criterion of consilience: causal explanations of brain activity and evolution, while imperfect, already cover most facts known about behavior we term "moral." Although this conception is relativistic (in other words, dependent on personal viewpoint), it can, if evolved carefully, lead more directly and safely to stable moral codes than can transcendentalism, which is also, when one thinks about it, ultimately relativistic. Of course, lest I forget, I may be wrong. <<<<<>>>>>>>>> THE argument of the empiricist has roots that go back to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and, in the beginning of the modern era, to David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740). The first clear evolutionary elaboration of it was by Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man (1871). Again, religious transcendentalism is bolstered by secular transcendentalism, to which it is fundamentally similar. Immanuel Kant, judged by history the greatest of secular philosophers, addressed moral reasoning very much as a theologian. Human beings, he argued, are independent moral agents with a wholly free will, capable of obeying or breaking moral law: "There is in man a power of self-determination, independent of any coercion through sensuous impulses." Our minds are subject to a categorical imperative, Kant said, of what our actions ought to be. The imperative is a good in itself alone, apart from all other considerations, and it can be recognized by this rule: "Act only on that maxim you wish will become a universal law." Most important, and transcendental, ought has no place in nature. Nature, Kant said, is a system of cause and effect, whereas moral choice is a matter of free will, absent cause and effect. In making moral choices, in rising above mere instinct, human beings transcend the realm of nature and enter a realm of freedom that belongs exclusively to them as rational creatures. Now, this formulation has a comforting feel to it, but it makes no sense at all in terms of either material or imaginable entities, which is why Kant, even apart from his tortured prose, is so hard to understand. Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong. This idea does not accord, we know now, with the evidence of how the brain works. In Principia Ethica (1903), G. E. Moore, the founder of modern ethical philosophy, essentially agreed with Kant. In his view, moral reasoning cannot dip into psychology and the social sciences in order to locate ethical principles, because those disciplines yield only a causal picture and fail to illuminate the basis of moral justification. So to reach the normative ought by way of the factual is is to commit a basic error of logic, which Moore called the naturalistic fallacy. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), once again traveled the transcendental road. He offered the very plausible suggestion that justice be defined as fairness, which is to be accepted as an intrinsic good. It is the imperative we would follow if we had no starting information about our own future status in life. But in making such a suggestion Rawls ventured no thought on where the human brain comes from or how it works. He offered no evidence that justice-as-fairness is consistent with human nature, hence practicable as a blanket premise. Probably it is, but how can we know except by blind trial and error? Had Kant, Moore, and Rawls known modern biology and experimental psychology, they might well not have reasoned as they did. Yet as this century closes, transcendentalism remains firm in the hearts not just of religious believers but also of countless scholars in the social sciences and the humanities who, like Moore and Rawls, have chosen to insulate their thinking from the natural sciences. Many philosophers will respond by saying, Ethicists don't need that kind of information. You really can't pass from is to ought. You can't describe a genetic predisposition and suppose that because it is part of human nature, it is somehow transformed into an ethical precept. We must put moral reasoning in a special category, and use transcendental guidelines as required. No, we do not have to put moral reasoning in a special category and use transcendental premises, because the posing of the naturalistic fallacy is itself a fallacy. For if ought is not is, what is? To translate is into ought makes sense if we attend to the objective meaning of ethical precepts. They are very unlikely to be ethereal messages awaiting revelation, or independent truths vibrating in a nonmaterial dimension of the mind. They are more likely to be products of the brain and the culture. From the consilient perspective of the natural sciences, they are no more than principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates -- the behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are themselves willing to accept for the common good. Precepts are the extreme on a scale of agreements that range from casual assent, to public sentiment, to law, to that part of the canon considered sacred and unalterable. The scale applied to adultery might read as follows: Let's not go further; it doesn't feel right, and it may lead to trouble. (Maybe we ought not.) Adultery not only causes feelings of guilt but is generally disapproved of by society. (We probably ought not.) Adultery isn't just disapproved of; it's against the law. (We almost certainly ought not.) God commands that we avoid this mortal sin. (We absolutely ought not.) In transcendental thinking, the chain of causation runs downward from the given ought in religion or natural law through jurisprudence to education and finally to individual choice. The argument from transcendentalism takes the following general form: The order of nature contains supreme principles, either divine or intrinsic, and we will be wise to learn about them and find the means to conform to them. Thus John Rawls opens A Theory of Justice with a proposition he regards as irrevocable: "In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests." As many critiques have made clear, that premise can lead to unhappy consequences when applied to the real world, including a tightening of social control and a decline in personal initiative. A very different premise, therefore, is suggested by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do." Rawls would point us toward egalitarianism regulated by the state, Nozick toward libertarianism in a minimalist state. The empiricist view, in contrast, searching for an origin of ethical reasoning that can be objectively studied, reverses the chain of causation. The individual is seen as predisposed biologically to make certain choices. Through cultural evolution some of the choices are hardened into precepts, then into laws, and, if the predisposition or coercion is strong enough, into a belief in the command of God or the natural order of the universe. The general empiricist principle takes this form: Strong innate feeling and historical experience cause certain actions to be preferred; we have experienced them, and have weighed their consequences, and agree to conform with codes that express them. Let us take an oath upon the codes, invest our personal honor in them, and suffer punishment for their violation. The empiricist view concedes that moral codes are devised to conform to some drives of human nature and to suppress others. Ought is the translation not of human nature but of the public will, which can be made increasingly wise and stable through an understanding of the needs and pitfalls of human nature. The empiricist view recognizes that the strength of commitment can wane as a result of new knowledge and experience, with the result that certain rules may be desacralized, old laws rescinded, and formerly prohibited behavior set free. It also recognizes that for the same reason new moral codes may need to be devised, with the potential of being made sacred in time.

The Origin of Moral Instincts IF the empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced) to do, and then codified. The naturalistic fallacy is thereby reduced to the naturalistic problem. The solution of the problem is not difficult: ought is the product of a material process. The solution points the way to an objective grasp of the origin of ethics. A few investigators are now embarked on just such a foundational inquiry. Most agree that ethical codes have arisen by evolution through the interplay of biology and culture. In a sense these investigators are reviving the idea of moral sentiments that was developed in the eighteenth century by the British empiricists Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. What have been thought of as moral sentiments are now taken to mean moral instincts (as defined by the modern behavioral sciences), subject to judgment according to their consequences. Such sentiments are thus derived from epigenetic rules -- hereditary biases in mental development, usually conditioned by emotion, that influence concepts and decisions made from them. The primary origin of moral instincts is the dynamic relation between cooperation and defection. The essential ingredient for the molding of the instincts during genetic evolution in any species is intelligence high enough to judge and manipulate the tension generated by the dynamism. That level of intelligence allows the building of complex mental scenarios well into the future. It occurs, so far as is known, only in human beings and perhaps their closest relatives among the higher apes. A way of envisioning the hypothetical earliest stages of moral evolution is provided by game theory, particularly the solutions to the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. Consider the following typical scenario of the dilemma. Two gang members have been arrested for murder and are being questioned separately. The evidence against them is strong but not irrefutable. The first gang member believes that if he turns state's witness, he will be granted immunity and his partner will be sentenced to life in prison. But he is also aware that his partner has the same option, and that if both of them exercise it, neither will be granted immunity. That is the dilemma. Will the two gang members independently defect, so that both take the hard fall? They will not, because they agreed in advance to remain silent if caught. By doing so, both hope to be convicted on a lesser charge or escape punishment altogether. Criminal gangs have turned this principle of calculation into an ethical precept: Never rat on another member; always be a stand-up guy. Honor does exist among thieves. The gang is a society of sorts; its code is the same as that of a captive soldier in wartime, obliged to give only name, rank, and serial number. In one form or another, comparable dilemmas that are solvable by cooperation occur constantly and everywhere in daily life. The payoff is variously money, status, power, sex, access, comfort, or health. Most of these proximate rewards are converted into the universal bottom line of Darwinian genetic fitness: greater longevity and a secure, growing family. And so it has most likely always been. Imagine a Paleolithic band of five hunters. One considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on his own. If successful, he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide -- five times as much as if he stays with the band and they are successful. But he knows from experience that his chances of success are very low, much less than the chances of the band of five working together. In addition, whether successful alone or not, he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their prospects. By custom the band members remain together and share equitably the animals they kill. So the hunter stays. He also observes good manners in doing so, especially if he is the one who makes the kill. Boastful pride is condemned, because it rips the delicate web of reciprocity. Now suppose that human propensities to cooperate or defect are heritable: some people are innately more cooperative, others less so. In this respect moral aptitude would simply be like almost all other mental traits studied to date. Among traits with documented heritability, those closest to moral aptitude are empathy with the distress of others and certain processes of attachment between infants and their caregivers. To the heritability of moral aptitude add the abundant evidence of history that cooperative individuals generally survive longer and leave more offspring. Following that reasoning, in the course of evolutionary history genes predisposing people toward cooperative behavior would have come to predominate in the human population as a whole. Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave rise to moral sentiments. With the exception of psychopaths (if any truly exist), every person vividly experiences these instincts variously as conscience, self-respect, remorse, empathy, shame, humility, and moral outrage. They bias cultural evolution toward the conventions that express the universal moral codes of honor, patriotism, altruism, justice, compassion, mercy, and redemption. The dark side of the inborn propensity to moral behavior is xenophobia. Because personal familiarity and common interest are vital in social transactions, moral sentiments evolved to be selective. People give trust to strangers with effort, and true compassion is a commodity in chronically short supply. Tribes cooperate only through carefully defined treaties and other conventions. They are quick to imagine themselves the victims of conspiracies by competing groups, and they are prone to dehumanize and murder their rivals during periods of severe conflict. They cement their own group loyalties by means of sacred symbols and ceremonies. Their mythologies are filled with epic victories over menacing enemies. The complementary instincts of morality and tribalism are easily manipulated. Civilization has made them more so. Beginning about 10,000 years ago, a tick in geological time, when the agricultural revolution started in the Middle East, in China, and in Mesoamerica, populations increased tenfold in density over those of hunter-gatherer societies. Families settled on small plots of land, villages proliferated, and labor was finely divided as a growing minority of the populace specialized as craftsmen, traders, and soldiers. The rising agricultural societies became increasingly hierarchical. As chiefdoms and then states thrived on agricultural surpluses, hereditary rulers and priestly castes took power. The old ethical codes were transformed into coercive regulations, always to the advantage of the ruling classes. About this time the idea of law-giving gods originated. Their commands lent the ethical codes overpowering authority -- once again, no surprise, in the interests of the rulers. Because of the technical difficulty of analyzing such phenomena in an objective manner, and because people resist biological explanations of their higher cortical functions in the first place, very little progress has been made in the biological exploration of the moral sentiments. Even so, it is astonishing that the study of ethics has advanced so little since the nineteenth century. The most distinguishing and vital qualities of the human species remain a blank space on the scientific map. I doubt that discussions of ethics should rest upon the freestanding assumptions of contemporary philosophers who have evidently never given thought to the evolutionary origin and material functioning of the human brain. In no other domain of the humanities is a union with the natural sciences more urgently needed. When the ethical dimension of human nature is at last fully opened to such exploration, the innate epigenetic rules of moral reasoning will probably not prove to be aggregated into simple instincts such as bonding, cooperativeness, and altruism. Instead the rules will most probably turn out to be an ensemble of many algorithms, whose interlocking activities guide the mind across a landscape of nuanced moods and choices. Such a prestructured mental world may at first seem too complicated to have been created by autonomous genetic evolution alone. But all the evidence of biology suggests that just this process was enough to spawn the millions of species of life surrounding us. Each kind of animal is furthermore guided through its life cycle by unique and often elaborate sets of instinctual algorithms, many of which are beginning to yield to genetic and neurobiological analyses. With all these examples before us, we may reasonably conclude that human behavior originated the same way. . <<<<<>>>>> MEANWHILE, the milanges of moral reasoning employed by modern societies are, to put the matter simply, a mess. They are chimeras, composed of odd parts stuck together. Paleolithic egalitarian and tribalistic instincts are still firmly installed. As part of the genetic foundation of human nature, they cannot be replaced. In some cases, such as quick hostility to strangers and competing groups, they have become generally ill adapted and persistently dangerous. Above the fundamental instincts rise superstructures of arguments and rules that accommodate the novel institutions created by cultural evolution. These accommodations, which reflect the attempt to maintain order and further tribal interests, have been too volatile to track by genetic evolution; they are not yet in the genes. Little wonder, then, that ethics is the most publicly contested of all philosophical enterprises. Or that political science, which at its foundation is primarily the study of applied ethics, is so frequently problematic. Neither is informed by anything that would be recognizable as authentic theory in the natural sciences. Both ethics and political science lack a foundation of verifiable knowledge of human nature sufficient to produce cause-and-effect predictions and sound judgments based on them. Surely closer attention must be paid to the deep springs of ethical behavior. The greatest void in knowledge for such a venture is the biology of moral sentiments. In time this subject can be understood, I believe, by paying attention to the following topics: * The definition of moral sentiments, first by precise descriptions from experimental psychology and then by analysis of the underlying neural and endocrine responses. Go to part one of this article. * The genetics of moral sentiments, most easily approached through measurements of the heritability of the psychological and physiological processes of ethical behavior, and eventually, with difficulty, through identification of the prescribing genes. * The development of moral sentiments as products of the interactions of genes and the environment. Research is most effective when conducted at two levels: the histories of ethical systems as part of the emergence of different cultures, and the cognitive development of individuals living in a variety of cultures. Such investigations are already well along in anthropology and psychology. In the future they will be augmented by contributions from biology. * The deep history of moral sentiments -- why they exist in the first place. Presumably they contributed to survival and reproductive success during the long periods of prehistoric time in which they genetically evolved.

-- (______@_____________.________), September 27, 1999.

From a convergence of these several approaches the true origin and meaning of ethical behavior may come into focus. If so, a more certain measure can then be taken of the strength and flexibility of the epigenetic rules composing the various moral sentiments. From that knowledge it should be possible to adapt ancient moral sentiments more wisely to the swiftly changing conditions of modern life into which, willy-nilly and largely in ignorance, we have plunged. Then new answers might be found to the truly important questions of moral reasoning. How can the moral instincts be ranked? Which are best subdued and to what degree? Which should be validated by law and symbol? How can precepts be left open to appeal under extraordinary circumstances? In the new understanding can be located the most effective means for reaching consensus. No one can guess the exact form that agreements will take from one culture to the next. The process, however, can be predicted with assurance. It will be democratic, weakening the clash of rival religions and ideologies. History is moving decisively in that direction, and people are by nature too bright and too contentious to abide anything else. And the pace can be confidently predicted: change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard, even when they are demonstrably false.

<<<<<<<<>>>>>>> THE same reasoning that aligns ethical philosophy with science can also inform the study of religion. Religions are analogous to organisms. They have a life cycle. They are born, they grow, they compete, they reproduce, and, in the fullness of time, most die. In each of these phases religions reflect the human organisms that nourish them. They express a primary rule of human existence: Whatever is necessary to sustain life is also ultimately biological. Successful religions typically begin as cults, which then increase in power and inclusiveness until they achieve tolerance outside the circle of believers. At the core of each religion is a creation myth, which explains how the world began and how the chosen people -- those subscribing to the belief system -- arrived at its center. Often a mystery, a set of secret instructions and formulas, is available to members who have worked their way to a higher state of enlightenment. The medieval Jewish cabala, the trigradal system of Freemasonry, and the carvings on Australian aboriginal spirit sticks are examples of such arcana. Power radiates from the center, gathering converts and binding followers to the group. Sacred places are designated, where the gods can be importuned, rites observed, and miracles witnessed. The devotees of the religion compete as a tribe with those of other religions. They harshly resist the dismissal of their beliefs by rivals. They venerate self-sacrifice in defense of the religion. The tribalistic roots of religion are similar to those of moral reasoning and may be identical. Religious rites, such as burial ceremonies, are very old. It appears that in the late Paleolithic period in Europe and the Middle East bodies were sometimes placed in shallow graves, accompanied by ocher or blossoms; one can easily imagine such ceremonies performed to invoke spirits and gods. But, as theoretical deduction and the evidence suggest, the primitive elements of moral behavior are far older than Paleolithic ritual. Religion arose on a foundation of ethics, and it has probably always been used in one manner or another to justify moral codes. The formidable influence of the religious drive is based on far more, however, than just the validation of morals. A great subterranean river of the mind, it gathers strength from a broad spread of tributary emotions. Foremost among them is the survival instinct. "Fear," as the Roman poet Lucretius said, "was the first thing on earth to make the gods." Our conscious minds hunger for a permanent existence. If we cannot have everlasting life of the body, then absorption into some immortal whole will serve. Anything will serve, as long as it gives the individual meaning and somehow stretches into eternity that swift passage of the mind and spirit lamented by Saint Augustine as the short day of time. The understanding and control of life is another source of religious power. Doctrine draws on the same creative springs as science and the arts, its aim being the extraction of order from the mysteries and tumult of the material world. To explain the meaning of life it spins mythic narratives of the tribal history, populating the cosmos with protective spirits and gods. The existence of the supernatural, if accepted, testifies to the existence of that other world so desperately desired. Religion is also mightily empowered by its principal ally, tribalism. The shamans and priests implore us, in somber cadence, Trust in the sacred rituals, become part of the immortal force, you are one of us. As your life unfolds, each step has mystic significance that we who love you will mark with a solemn rite of passage, the last to be performed when you enter that second world, free of pain and fear. If the religious mythos did not exist in a culture, it would quickly be invented, and in fact it has been invented everywhere, thousands of times through history. Such inevitability is the mark of instinctual behavior in any species, which is guided toward certain states by emotion-driven rules of mental development. To call religion instinctive is not to suppose that any particular part of its mythos is untrue -- only that its sources run deeper than ordinary habit and are in fact hereditary, urged into existence through biases in mental development that are encoded in the genes. Such biases are a predictable consequence of the brain's genetic evolution. The logic applies to religious behavior, with the added twist of tribalism. There is a hereditary selective advantage to membership in a powerful group united by devout belief and purpose. Even when individuals subordinate themselves and risk death in a common cause, their genes are more likely to be transmitted to the next generation than are those of competing groups who lack comparable resolve. The mathematical models of population genetics suggest the following rule in the evolutionary origin of such altruism: If the reduction in survival and reproduction of individuals owing to genes for altruism is more than offset by the increased probability of survival of the group owing to the altruism, then altruism genes will rise in frequency throughout the entire population of competing groups. To put it as concisely as possible: the individual pays, his genes and tribe gain, altruism spreads.

<<<<<<<<>>>>>>> LET me now suggest a still deeper significance of the empiricist theory of the origin of ethics and religion. If empiricism were disproved, and transcendentalism compellingly upheld, the discovery would be quite simply the most consequential in human history. That is the burden laid upon biology as it draws close to the humanities. The matter is still far from resolved. But empiricism, as I have argued, is well supported thus far in the case of ethics. The objective evidence for or against it in religion is weaker, but at least still consistent with biology. For example, the emotions that accompany religious ecstasy clearly have a neurobiological source. At least one form of brain disorder is associated with hyperreligiosity, in which cosmic significance is given to almost everything, including trivial everyday events. One can imagine the biological construction of a mind with religious beliefs, although that alone would not disprove the logic of transcendentalism, or prove the beliefs themselves to be untrue. Equally important, much if not all religious behavior could have arisen from evolution by natural selection. The theory fits -- crudely. The behavior includes at least some aspects of belief in gods. Propitiation and sacrifice, which are near-universals of religious practice, are acts of submission to a dominant being. They reflect one kind of dominance hierarchy, which is a general trait of organized mammalian societies. Like human beings, animals use elaborate signals to advertise and maintain their rank in the hierarchy. The details vary among species but also have consistent similarities across the board, as the following two examples will illustrate. In packs of wolves the dominant animal walks erect and "proud," stiff-legged and deliberate, with head, tail, and ears up, and stares freely and casually at others. In the presence of rivals the dominant animal bristles its pelt while curling its lips to show teeth, and it takes first choice in food and space. A subordinate uses opposite signals. It turns away from the dominant individual while lowering its head, ears, and tail, and it keeps its fur sleek and its teeth covered. It grovels and slinks, and yields food and space when challenged. In a troop of rhesus monkeys the alpha male is remarkably similar in mannerisms to a dominant wolf. He keeps his head and tail up, and walks in a deliberate, "regal" manner while casually staring at others. He climbs objects to maintain height above his rivals. When challenged he stares hard at the opponent with mouth open -- signaling aggression, not surprise -- and sometimes slaps the ground with open palms to signal his readiness to attack. The male or female subordinate affects a furtive walk, holding its head and tail down, turning away from the alpha and other higher-ranked individuals. It keeps its mouth shut except for a fear grimace, and when challenged makes a cringing retreat. It yields space and food and, in the case of males, estrous females. My point is this: Behavioral scientists from another planet would notice immediately the parallels between animal dominance behavior on the one hand and human obeisance to religious and civil authority on the other. They would point out that the most elaborate rites of obeisance are directed at the gods, the hyperdominant if invisible members of the human group. And they would conclude, correctly, that in baseline social behavior, not just in anatomy, Homo sapiens has only recently diverged in evolution from a nonhuman primate stock. Countless studies of animal species, whose instinctive behavior is unobscured by cultural elaboration, have shown that membership in dominance orders pays off in survival and lifetime reproductive success. That is true not just for the dominant individuals but for the subordinates as well. Membership in either class gives animals better protection against enemies and better access to food, shelter, and mates than does solitary existence. Furthermore, subordination in the group is not necessarily permanent. Dominant individuals weaken and die, and as a result some of the underlings advance in rank and appropriate more resources. Modern human beings are unlikely to have erased the old mammalian genetic programs and devised other means of distributing power. All the evidence suggests that they have not. True to their primate heritage, people are easily seduced by confident, charismatic leaders, especially males. That predisposition is strong in religious organizations. Cults form around such leaders. Their power grows if they can persuasively claim special access to the supremely dominant, typically male figure of God. As cults evolve into religions, the image of the Supreme Being is reinforced by myth and liturgy. In time the authority of the founders and their successors is graven in sacred texts. Unruly subordinates, known as "blasphemers," are squashed. The symbol-forming human mind, however, never remains satisfied with raw, apish feeling in any emotional realm. It strives to build cultures that are maximally rewarding in every dimension. Ritual and prayer permit religious believers to be in direct touch with the Supreme Being; consolation from coreligionists softens otherwise unbearable grief; the unexplainable is explained; and an oceanic sense of communion with the larger whole is made possible. Communion is the key, and hope rising from it is eternal; out of the dark night of the soul arises the prospect of a spiritual journey to the light. For a special few the journey can be taken in this life. The mind reflects in certain ways in order to reach ever higher levels of enlightenment, until finally, when no further progress is possible, it enters a mystical union with the whole. Within the great religions such enlightenment is expressed by Hindu samadhi, Buddhist Zen satori, Sufi fana, and Pentecostal Christian rebirth. Something like it is also experienced by hallucinating preliterate shamans. What all these celebrants evidently feel (as I felt once, to some degree, as a reborn evangelical) is hard to put in words, but Willa Cather came as close as possible in a single sentence. In My Antonia her fictional narrator says, "That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great." From the archives: o"The Latest Fashion in Irrationality," by Wendy Kaminer (July, 1996) "When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven." Of course that is happiness -- to find the godhead, or to enter the wholeness of nature, or otherwise to grasp and hold on to something ineffable, beautiful, and eternal. Millions seek it. They feel otherwise lost, adrift in a life without ultimate meaning. They enter established religions, succumb to cults, dabble in New Age nostrums. They push The Celestine Prophecy and other junk attempts at enlightenment onto the best-seller lists. Perhaps, as I believe, these phenomena can all eventually be explained as functions of brain circuitry and deep genetic history. But this is not a subject that even the most hardened empiricist should presume to trivialize. The idea of mystical union is an authentic part of the human spirit. It has occupied humanity for millennia, and it raises questions of utmost seriousness for transcendentalists and scientists alike. What road, we ask, was traveled, what destination reached, by the mystics of history?

<<<<<<<<>>>> FOR many, the urge to believe in transcendental existence and immortality is overpowering. Transcendentalism, especially when reinforced by religious faith, is psychically full and rich; it feels somehow right. By comparison, empiricism seems sterile and inadequate. In the quest for ultimate meaning the transcendentalist route is much easier to follow. That is why, even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart. Science has always defeated religious dogma point by point when differences between the two were meticulously assessed. But to no avail. In the United States 16 million people belong to the Southern Baptist denomination, the largest favoring a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, but the American Humanist Association, the leading organization devoted to secular and deistic humanism, has only 5,000 members. Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to the science of biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result, those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth face disquieting choices. Meanwhile, theology tries to resolve the dilemma by evolving, sciencelike, toward abstraction. The gods of our ancestors were divine human beings. The Egyptians represented them as Egyptian (often with body parts of Nilotic animals), and the Greeks represented them as Greek. The great contribution of the Hebrews was to combine the entire pantheon into a single person, Yahweh (a patriarch appropriate to desert tribes), and to intellectualize his existence. No graven images were allowed. In the process, they rendered the divine presence less tangible. And so in biblical accounts it came to pass that no one, not even Moses approaching Yahweh in the burning bush, could look upon his face. In time the Jews were prohibited from even pronouncing his true full name. Nevertheless, the idea of a theistic God, omniscient, omnipotent, and closely involved in human affairs, has persisted to this day as the dominant religious image of Western culture. During the Enlightenment a growing number of liberal Judeo-Christian theologians, wishing to accommodate theism to a more rationalist view of the material world, moved away from God as a literal person. Baruch Spinoza, the pre-eminent Jewish philosopher of the seventeenth century, visualized the deity as a transcendent substance present everywhere in the universe. Deus sive natura, "God or nature," he declared, they are interchangeable. For his philosophical pains he was banished from his synagogue under a comprehensive anathema, combining all the curses in the book. The risk of heresy notwithstanding, the depersonalization of God has continued steadily into the modern era. For Paul Tillich, one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, the assertion of the existence of God-as-person is not false; it is just meaningless. Among many of the most liberal contemporary thinkers the denial of a concrete divinity takes the form of "process theology." Everything in this most extreme of ontologies is part of a seamless and endlessly complex web of unfolding relationships. God is manifest in everything. Scientists, the roving scouts of the empiricist movement, are not immune to the idea of God. Those who favor it often lean toward some form of process theology. They ask this question: When the real world of space, time, and matter is well enough known, will that knowledge reveal the Creator's presence? Their hopes are vested in the theoretical physicists who pursue the final theory, the Theory of Everything, T.O.E., a system of interlocking equations that describe all that can be learned of the forces of the physical universe. T.O.E. is a "beautiful" theory, as Steven Weinberg has called it in his important book Dreams of a Final Theory -- beautiful because it will be elegant, expressing the possibility of unending complexity with minimal laws; and symmetrical, because it will hold invariant through all space and time; and inevitable, meaning that once it is stated, no part can be changed without invalidating the whole. All surviving subtheories can be fitted into it permanently, in the manner described by Einstein in his own contribution, the General Theory of Relativity. "The chief attraction of the theory," Einstein said, "lies in its logical completeness. If a single one of the conclusions drawn from it proves wrong, it must be given up; to modify it without destroying the whole structure seems to be impossible." The prospect of a final theory by the most mathematical of scientists might seem to signal the approach of a new religious awakening. Stephen Hawking, yielding to the temptation in A Brief History of Time (1988), declared that this scientific achievement "would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we would know the mind of God."

<<<<<>>>> THE essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Can we find a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and empiricist world views? Unfortunately, in my view, the answer is no. Furthermore, the choice between the two is unlikely to remain arbitrary forever. The assumptions underlying these world views are being tested with increasing severity by cumulative verifiable knowledge about how the universe works, from atom to brain to galaxy. In addition, the harsh lessons of history have taught us that one code of ethics is not always as good -- or at least not as durable -- as another. The same is true of religions. Some cosmologies are factually less correct than others, and some ethical precepts are less workable. Human nature is biologically based, and it is relevant to ethics and religion. The evidence shows that because of its influence, people can readily be educated to only a narrow range of ethical precepts. They flourish within certain belief systems and wither in others. We need to know exactly why. To that end I will be so presumptuous as to suggest how the conflict between the world views will most likely be settled. The idea of a genetic, evolutionary origin of moral and religious beliefs will continue to be tested by biological studies of complex human behavior. To the extent that the sensory and nervous systems appear to have evolved by natural selection, or at least some other purely material process, the empiricist interpretation will be supported. It will be further supported by verification of gene-culture coevolution, the essential process postulated by scientists to underlie human nature by linking changes in genes to changes in culture. Now consider the alternative. To the extent that ethical and religious phenomena do not appear to have evolved in a manner congenial to biology, and especially to the extent that such complex behavior cannot be linked to physical events in the sensory and nervous systems, the empiricist position will have to be abandoned and a transcendentalist explanation accepted. For centuries the writ of empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start but quickening in the scientific age. The spirits our ancestors knew intimately fled first the rocks and trees and then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will refuse to yield to the despair of animal mortality. They will continue to plead, in company with the psalmist, Now Lord, what is my comfort? They will find a way to keep the ancestral spirits alive. If the sacred narrative cannot be in the form of a religious cosmology, it will be taken from the material history of the universe and the human species. That trend is in no way debasing. The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined. The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times as old as that conceived by the Western religions. Its study has brought new revelations of great moral importance. It has made us realize that Homo sapiens is far more than an assortment of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn in each generation and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future. Such are the conceptions, based on fact, from which new intimations of immortality can be drawn and a new mythos evolved. Which world view prevails, religious transcendentalism or scientific empiricism, will make a great difference in the way humanity claims the future. While the matter is under advisement, an accommodation can be reached if the following overriding facts are realized. Ethics and religion are still too complex for present-day science to explain in depth. They are, however, far more a product of autonomous evolution than has hitherto been conceded by most theologians. Science faces in ethics and religion its most interesting and possibly most humbling challenge, while religion must somehow find the way to incorporate the discoveries of science in order to retain credibility. Religion will possess strength to the extent that it codifies and puts into enduring, poetic form the highest values of humanity consistent with empirical knowledge. That is the only way to provide compelling moral leadership. Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science, for its part, will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition and in time uncover the bedrock of moral and religious sentiments. The eventual result of the competition between the two world views, I believe, will be the secularization of the human epic and of religion itself. However the process plays out, it demands open discussion and unwavering intellectual rigor in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

-- (______@_____.______), September 27, 1999.

Stan my friend, I'm trying every day to translate my love for God into love for all Creation. We the supposed caretakers of this Creation aren't the most lovable residents of it!

I prefer the company of my dogs to that of ANY human being I've ever met. (My wonderful wife knows this; she suffers me gladly! Why? I'll probably never know the answer.)

Bottom line, Mr Faryna: You are correct in your assessment!

Love to All, (easy for me to write, LOL)

-- Bingo1 (howe9@pop.shentel.net), September 27, 1999.

Most of you have really veered off the original premise here, but I will attempt to address the issue raised and then touch upon some of the others raised as well.

1. Morals--

We live in an ever-changing society. The pendulum swings both ways. We are currently swinging erratically waiting to decide if we want to become more amoralistic (situational ethics) or return to a more conservative bent (ala Victorian moral basis).....Time and troubles will determine which way we go... we are in a state of flux.

2. Man--

Sorry, but Man really hasn't changed much since the beginning. We just "rephrase" our moralities. If we could get away with it we'd still have slavery...we certainly still have prejudice. you are right when you say it needs to be internally determined and for many it is...always has been. Unfortunately, that again, has always been in the minority. Jesus knew this when he said, "the poor will always be with you..." He knew then that we'd never solve all of our problems before his return.

3. Jesus/Christianity--

I am a believer. But folks, quote the bible all you want. You can't use the bible to prove the bible...or the existence of God or the existence of Jesus. Facts are that there is no tangible proof that Jesus ever lived. I know he did because of my faith...and that is what the bible is really all about. It is not works, your efforts, or anything else that gets you "home". It is your faith in something that to science is unprovable. No scientist who relies on the scientific method was ever convinced of the existence of God or Jesus by science...He/she came to God through faith....and that is the only way any of us will find him. Stop using the bible to "prove it"...You can't. I could write a book, post date it and claim all of my prophecies were proven. I could make miracles for a non-existent person. Am I saying Christ did not exist? ABSOLUTELY NOT! I believe in Christ. I repeat however, the bible does NOT prove his existence. I sure wish fundamentalists would get a handle on this one...drives many folks away from finding him...as it makes no sense to an unbeliever. You reach him through FAITH, folks.

-- Ynott (Ynott@incorruptible.com), September 27, 1999.

ALL MY POSTS-ON THIS THREAD=DELETED.---IS THAT FAIR?? GOT SOME SICK SYSOPS.--POWER DOES STRANGE THINGS TO FOLKS.

-- SO WHAT,S NEW HERE. (dogs@zianet.com), September 27, 1999.

Hmmm...

I just came back to this thread, which turned out to be quite a thread afterall. And, at Al-d's prompting, I noticed that yes, indeed, ALL of his posts were removed.

Sysops -- I think this is a horrendous thing. The originator of the thread mentioned Al-d from the outset, and he reponded to it, as well as lots of other comments.

This is the kind of thread that is somewhat Off Topic and free for all. I TOTALLY agree that Al-d should be discouraged from disrupting many if not most of the discussion on this board with his OT loony-tunes, but I think that this thread was OK for him to do what he wanted.

Even though I basically do not like the character, in this instance I believe that a grave injustice was done to him.

(Now, Al-d -- please, don't slip into self-righteousness because someone is defending you.)

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), September 27, 1999.

Stan and Bingo1:

I am not questioning the value of faith. But, since I decided not to attend divinity school, 35 y ago, I have been studying the information. I have found nothing that would make sport of your faith. It appears to be well founded. It is the details. There is much to be learned and, if, you consider yourself a Christian [or a Muslim, etc], you are obligated to learn them [otherwise you are suggesting that your God-given intelligence is a mistake]. As I said yesterday, I have to leave. One of the horrible parts of my job is travel. Northwest tomorrow, then horrible foreign places like New Zealand.

Best wish

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 27, 1999.

Ynott:

I don't know what you mean. Read the letters from the library in Alexandria. They say that Jesus existed and was killed by crucifiction [Romans did it]. It is documented. There is a lot of information that people don't seem to be aware of.

Best wishes,,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 27, 1999.

my,my this thread'sure has been TAMPERED WITH.666-no freedom here.

-- point=proven. (dogs@zianet.com), September 27, 1999.

My this thread has wandered from the original post!

How many people here are lied to everyday?

How many here have personal defense "weapons" in their household?

How many murders to you "experience" on television on any given day?

Life has been "cheapened" by the modern experience. People actually get "monetary compensation" for a loved one's passing, whether by accident or by "natural causes".

There is always someone pushing their beliefs upon anyone that will listen, whether the recipients want it or not.

We as a modern society have become spoiled in our "civilization", yet our children are killing each other in open warfare, every day. A day does not pass when there is no one killed on the news, usually violently.

We have successfully poisoned our enviornment, and ourselves.

(religious on)

IMHO, we are an experiment running it's course, and God, or Yahweh, Jehovah, YHWH, Yeshua... you may pick your identifier, is the great scientist running the experiment. Man was never designed to rule himself... period. It is not in our makeup. We were meant to be ruled by a higher being. Well, the experiment is about to come to a close, and I wonder... Will the experiment be saved? Or will we be poured down a celestial sink?

Trust in God... I hear this saying all the time. I guess you just need to elaborate on "which god" you a speaking about.

(religious off)

Anyone who says that mankind has always been like they are today has blinders on. Yes, mankind was like this at one time, but the story of the flood seemed to wash this deprivation away.

I am a religious person. I pray everyday. My temple is the desert, at night. I need no one to tell me what to believe, or what book to read so I will know what to believe. I merely believe. My church requires no tithe, no penance.

It bothers me when all someone can do is quote scripture to me. I do not need that... You are merely repeating something you have read, and have interpreted for yourself. I firmly believe the Bible, and the Koran are stumbling blocks for true believers. They get so wrapped up in reading the text, which by the way may be interpreted a million different ways IMHO, that they fail to think for themselves.

They do not listen to their conscience, which IMHO, is your contact with God, Jehovah, Yeshua, etc...

Which is another problem in this "modern" world. There is a whole, large group of people who DO NOT HAVE A CONSCIENCE, IMHO. Why else would all these horrible things happen on a daily basis?

I absolutely believe be are in "the winter of our discontent"...

growlin' at the narrow mind...

The Dog

-- Dog (Desert Dog@-sand.com), September 27, 1999.

I think we have changed from a society that accepts certain Universal values to one that has fractioned into one that accepts group or individual values. I.e., be your own God. It's your own private universe, and the things around you are just the stirrings of your private dreams.

This is wrong. Even if you don't believe in God as an arbiter or source of morality, you can still buy Kant's concept of the categorical imperative: a good choice is one that is not eaten by its consequences if it were univerally applied.

Too bad good and evil are out of fashion now. Evil now has an easier time than ever of going undercover, disguising itself as good intentions, as sickness, as unnoticed mechanical cogs in the machinery of civilization.

-- coprolith (coprolith@rocketship.com), September 27, 1999.