On 1 May 2007 09:04:21 -0700, ScottyFLL <ScottyFLL1@lycos.com> wrote:

On May 1, 11:35?am, t1gercat <wexford1...@yahoo.com> wrote:

On May 1, 11:25 am, George Orwell <Use-Author-Supplied-Address-

Header@[127.1]> wrote:

by Christopher Orlet
Wall St Journal - May 1, 2007
..The Rev. Greg Epstein, a "humanist chaplain" at Harvard University,
is encouraging the fundamentalists or "New Atheists" to pipe down, and
warns that their outspokenness is keeping fence-sitters from coming
over to the side of the humanists...
The soft atheists have it in for three bestselling authors in
particular:
Richard Dawkins (author of "The God Delusion"),http://snipurl.com/God_DelusionSamHarris ("Letter to a Christian
Nation")http://snipurl.com/1ix6aandChristopher Hitchens ("God Is Not
Great").http://doiop.com/Hitchens_GodThoughthey differ on many
points of scripture, all three are passionately antireligious. Mr.
Dawkins considers God "a psychotic delinquent." The doomsayer Mr.
Harris thinks religion will destroy the world if not stopped, and Mr.
Hitchens holds that "religion poisons everything." Mr. Epstein finds
these authors rigid and intolerant, which ultimately makes them no
different from the religious fundamentalists they condemn...
==========
Complete article:http://snipurl.com/1ix5f

"Though they differ on many points of scripture, all three are
passionately antireligious. " They're atheists, idiot; they all think
scripture is bunk. This has to be the most moronic comment I've seen
uttered by a theist this year. Thanks. It always helps to know that
believers are utterly incomprehensible.

Jesus claims he is true-for-everyone and not just true-for-me. ...
"If
you were born in India you would be a Hindu." "Isn't truth a matter
of
preference? Your truth is a distortion of the morally and socially
accepted truth. How do you distort us? Let me count the ways.

Who gives a ***** what some fictional character in somebody else's
religion is alleged to have said?

On 1 May 2007 09:14:18 -0700, t1gercat <wexford1...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Religious belief is the result of years and years of indoctrination. I
vividly remember my first time in church, before I was 6 years old. I
thought it all arrant nonsense. It took the Christians literally years
to indoctrinate me, but it didn't readily stick, as it apparently does
with some people.

Well, no wonder. Six is way too late to start the indoctrination
process. You are already developing the ability to reason at six. If
they aren't a Christian by three they will be an atheist by ten.

--
satyr #1953
Chairman, EAC Church Taxation Subcommittee
Director, Gideon Bible Alternative Fuel Project
Supervisor, EAC Fossil Casting Lab

On May 1, 9:14 am, t1gercat <wexford1...@yahoo.com> wrote:

On May 1, 11:49 am, Immortalist <reanimater_2...@yahoo.com> wrote:

On May 1, 8:25 am, George Orwell <Use-Author-Supplied-Address-

Header@[127.1]> wrote:

by Christopher Orlet
Wall St Journal - May 1, 2007

..The Rev. Greg Epstein, a "humanist chaplain" at Harvard Universit=

is encouraging the fundamentalists or "New Atheists" to pipe down, =

warns that their outspokenness is keeping fence-sitters from coming
over to the side of the humanists...

The soft atheists have it in for three bestselling authors in
particular:

Richard Dawkins (author of "The God Delusion"),http://snipurl.com/G=

Nation")http://snipurl.com/1ix6aandChristopherHitchens("God Is Not
Great").http://doiop.com/Hitchens_GodThoughtheydifferon many
points of scripture, all three are passionately antireligious. Mr.
Dawkins considers God "a psychotic delinquent." The doomsayer Mr.
Harris thinks religion will destroy the world if not stopped, and M=

Hitchens holds that "religion poisons everything." Mr. Epstein finds
these authors rigid and intolerant, which ultimately makes them no
different from the religious fundamentalists they condemn...
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
Complete article:http://snipurl.com/1ix5f

What if an Atheist believes that he has no choice but to be religious,
as he or she hasn't much choice being sexual, instinctually that is?
What if there is no god but there are these nerve cells inborn and
ready to go,making us all desire the religious life in some way or
another? What if these inborn desires to be religious are as strong as
sex or hunger instincts, what are to do with them, cut them out of our
heads?

Certain religious ideas, specifically, the personal nature of "spirit"
persist in cultures worldwide. There are certain concepts that our
minds easily entertain. Much like language acquisition, the mind
automatically receives certain concepts more readily than others.

Religious belief is the result of years and years of indoctrination. I
vividly remember my first time in church, before I was 6 years old. I
thought it all arrant nonsense. It took the Christians literally years
to indoctrinate me, but it didn't readily stick, as it apparently does
with some people.

Religion ...is the normal product of normal human minds, functioning
in the normal way, and that the normal way is the normal way because
of the evolutionary design of the human mind.

Why? Because you say so? If it were, we wouldn't be beating religious
beliefs into people almost from the moment they're born

Actually its all the rage in "evolutionary theory," you know, the idea
that mutations, and natural selection, have crafted human nature. More
to the point though, it is not necessary that all times when beating
religion into people are always times when religious instincts exist
or not. Religious instincts may or may not exist while these beatings
take place, you need to learn the difference between necessity and
sufficiency.

Evolutionary psychology is an approach to the psychological sciences
in which principles and results drawn from evolutionary biology,
cognitive science, anthropology, and neuroscience are integrated with
the rest of psychology in order to map human nature.

By human nature,
evolutionary psychologists mean the evolved, reliably developing,
species-typical computational and neural architecture of the human
mind and brain. According to this view, the functional components that
comprise this architecture were designed by natural selection to solve
adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and to
regulate behavior so that these adaptive problems were successfully
addressed (for discussion, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1987, Tooby &
Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology is not a specific subfield of
psychology, such as the study of vision, reasoning, or social
behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied
to any topic within it - including the emotions.

The analysis of adaptive problems that arose ancestrally has led
evolutionary psychologists to apply the concepts and methods of the
cognitive sciences to scores of topics that are relevant to the study
of emotion, such as the cognitive processes that govern cooperation,
sexual attraction, jealousy, aggression, parental love, friendship,
romantic love, the aesthetics of landscape preferences, coalitional
aggression, incest avoidance, disgust, predator avoidance, kinship,
and family relations (for reviews, see Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby,
1992; Crawford & Krebs, 1998; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Pinker, 1997).

An evolutionary perspective leads one to view the mind as a crowded
zoo of evolved, domain-specific programs. Each is functionally
specialized for solving a different adaptive problem that arose during
hominid evolutionary history, such as face recognition, foraging, mate
choice, heart rate regulation, sleep management, or predator
vigilance, and each is activated by a different set of cues from the
environment. But the existence of all these microprograms itself
creates an adaptive problem: Programs that are individually designed
to solve specific adaptive problems could, if simultaneously
activated, deliver outputs that conflict with one another, interfering
with or nullifying each other's functional products. For example,
sleep and flight from a predator require mutually inconsistent
actions, computations, and physiological states. It is difficult to
sleep when your heart and mind are racing with fear, and this is no
accident: disastrous consequences would ensue if proprioceptive cues
were activating sleep programs at the same time that the sight of a
stalking lion was activating ones designed for predator evasion. To
avoid such consequences, the mind must be equipped with superordinate
programs that override some programs when others are activated (e.g.,
a program that deactivates sleep programs when predator evasion
subroutines are activated). Furthermore, many adaptive problems are
best solved by the simultaneous activation of many different
components of the cognitive architecture, such that each component
assumes one of several alternative states (e.g., predator avoidance
may require simultaneous shifts in both heart rate and auditory
acuity; see below). Again, a superordinate program is needed that
coordinates these components, snapping each into the right
configuration at the right time.

Emotions are such programs....

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/emotion.html

An agent is just some
entity that is moved or guided by its own awareness and goals; for
humans, other human beings are among the most important agents in our
environments, but there are also the various non-human animals. Given
that the presence of other agents (and what they are doing) matters to
our prospects for survival and reproduction, partially explains why we
are over-sensitive to their presence. Detecting a predator that is not
there is not a terribly bad thing; failing to detect a predator that
is there is much more serious. And something very similar goes for
prey: Detecting lunch that isn't there is much less serious than
failing to detect lunch when it is there. Our capacities for agency
detection should be tuned to generate more false positives than false
negatives. For evolutionary reasons, we should expect to 'detect' some
agents which are not there. The perception of (accidental) patterns of
cues in our environment may be at the root of the detection of
supernatural agents, of gods.

Yes. And all you've said could be unadulterated nonsense, too.

Actually it is a theory in science,not claimed to be an undisputable
fact. Didn't your papa ever teach you the difference between a theory
and a fact, son?

Inquiry is any proceeding or process that has the aim of augmenting
knowledge, resolving doubt, or solving a problem. A theory of inquiry
is an account of the various types of inquiry and a treatment of the
ways that each type of inquiry achieves its aim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry

A hypothesis consists either of a suggested explanation for a
phenomenon or of a reasoned proposal suggesting a possible correlation
between multiple phenomena. The term derives from the ancient Greek,
hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose." The scientific
method requires that one can test a scientific hypothesis. Scientists
generally base such hypotheses on previous observations or on
extensions of scientific theories.

Evaluating hypotheses. The hypothetico-deductive method demands
falsifiable hypotheses, framed in such a manner that the scientific
community can prove them false (usually by observation). (Note that
confirming (or failing to falsify) a hypothesis does not necessarily
prove that hypothesis: the hypothesis remains provisional.)

As an exa