RealityRules wrote:

Stein wrote:Thoughts anyone? Stein

Yes, I thought you might post it here.

It may interest you to know, RR, that I've never made any bones about my being a complete skeptic when it comes to all religion, while being a deist (small d) who does not subscribe to the notion that whatever deity is has any direct involvement in events on Earth.

Pls elaborate on "being a deist (small d) who does not subscribe to the notion that whatever deity is has any direct involvement in events on Earth."

Oh sure. Hey, you asked. I've long had a series of reflections assembled on my hard disk for no special reason, other than to impose some discipline on my course of reading. They're in no special order. Hey, it never occurred to me someone might actually want to read it! But if you're a masochist enough to want to read it -- <shrug> --

=================================================

The human brain, belief/(delusion?) & all that



PREAMBLE

For me, it all starts with reading. I have always been a compulsive and omniverous reader since before grade school. And I spend time comparing things a lot -- historical patterns, texts, social reformers, everything.

Personally, I don't ascribe to any one creed/religion, and I am, furthermore, skeptical of many a religion's claims, including those of the Judaic-Christian-Islamic orbit. I do, though, not rule out the possibility of some kind of extra-dimensional presence that certain especially acute sensibilities may have glimpsed in the past. The question is if that presence is only inside their own (deluded?) heads, or if they're responding to something that is external and therefore real. I don't pretend to be able to answer that question. But to be candid, I don't think anyone else today can really honestly answer that question yet either. Many a future research project into the mechanisms of the human brain will be needed far into this century and beyond, most probably, before we can fully understand its workings well enough to know when it is concocting a mere delusion and when it's responding to something external. Only when we understand the mechanisms of the brain faaaaaaaar better than we do today will we even begin to barely comprehend just what was going on inside the heads of some of those "acute sensibilities" of the past.

It's still interesting to see which gods, whether concocted or not (we simply don't know which), might -- theoretically -- emerge as the more useful, viable -- whatever -- when scrutinized through a 21st-century lens. Whatever the "god"/"presence" is that some visionaries of the past may have glimpsed, I don't think it likely that this "presence" has any kind of active power over events on Earth. If it has any influence at all, it's more likely to be some kind of modest consciousness-raising inside certain isolated acutely sensitive minds rather than any physical dominance over any external events. The latter notion is just too replete with too many internal contradictions.

That said, I'm going quite a bit overboard here -- no question -- with certain speculations on just how the kind of consciousness-raising that I describe might really operate. In this overview, which is strictly speculative on my part, of course, certain concepts relating to this "presence" may emerge as more viable than others. Naturally, few posters will have time to read this (it's a slap-dash compendium of some fairly random jottings that I've assembled here and there on my PC over the past ten years or so), but still it's time for a relatively serious retrospective like this one.

Here goes!



Adaptive Doctrines and their Origins

I

Essentially, this involves a step-by-step process. The first step is to take evolution as being thoroughly random, as described in Kirschner's _Plausibility of Life_. Consequently, I do not believe there is anything purposive, either at the outset or later, in the evolution of any species. That said, there are certain common consequences that obtain for those species that are most dependent on socialization -- as the species of humanity, of _homo_ _sapiens_, definitely is -- the chief one being the ultimately destructive impact of anti-social behavior versus the constructive impact of "pro-social behavior" (if you will), with similar long-term results across the board for all such species in either case.

It is possible to confuse that with a sense of purpose of a sort, but that would be misleading. One can perhaps clarify this by citing the example of a table laden down with various dishes and suddenly impacted by an earthquake, resulting in many of the dishes clattering to the floor. Now, there is no deliberate purpose anterior to the possible survival intact of certain dishes that are not made of the most delicate china, versus the probable shattering into pieces of those dishes made of the most delicate china. Yet, the tendency to shatter, and/or the tendency to survive intact, still obtains in the general conditions prevailing at the time of the earthquake. That doesn't mean that the tougher dishes were deliberately "meant" to survive this particular earthquake at this particular time. But it does mean that stronger materials are more likely to survive sudden earthquakes -- in general -- than would pieces of the most delicate china.

Consequently, it's what obtains in _prevailing conditions_ for species A and/or Species B (and/or Species C, etc.) that I'm spotlighting. In spotlighting this, it occurs to me that if the more cohesive "pro-social behavior" seems conducive to greater social cohesion -- i.e., you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours -- then the opposite is probably true as well -- i.e., that anti-social behavior by too many members can ultimately impact negatively the prospects for an overall community's or a pride's or a flock's, or a herd's long-term survival. The conditions are already there, in either case, for a certain ultimate outcome that remains more likely than not. But it is still not a foregone (or purposely planned) conclusion. I forget where, but I recall that Stephen Jay Gould makes a similar comparison, showing (essentially) that the species where "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" prevails is more likely to survive the figurative equivalent of an "earthquake" than is a community where it's Each One For Oneself.


II

The second step is to analyze what may have been the chief circumstances behind any doctrines that have sprung up in Community A where, say, self-centered behavior has been promulgated, versus the chief circumstances behind any doctrines that have obtained in Community B where, say, selfless or altruistic behavior has been promulgated, and so on. This necessarily entails scrutinizing any and all cultural doctrines (including possibly opposing doctrines) at their originating point, or as close to their originating point as is humanly possible -- i.e., the earliest extant instance at which such or such a doctrine has first been advanced in the written record. Tracing all this is not so easy, but sometimes it is possible. Bear in mind that throughout this step-by-step process the possible future of a given community is always in the balance: Will it flourish and cohere with at least a minimum level of altruism and selflessness among its members that can prod a degree of growing social cohesiveness along, however haltingly, or will its members grow more and more self-centered instead, ultimately threatening its social cohesion altogether? As my brother often reminds me, "No man is an island" -- a lesson that applies just as well to Gould's description of other mammalian species that, like homo sapiens, also depend on socialization. This second step, then, entails analyzing how come some cultural doctrines have honored the "No man is an island" principle, while others haven't.

The paper trail for the various doctrines behind human communities/cultures throughout the past 5,000 years or so may not be complete, but it is still ample enough to be useful in detecting any general trends.

Extrapolating those general trends -- once one has assembled the chief doctrines and their earliest extant examples -- is the third and biggest step.


III

In first perusing these doctrines, back in the '80s/early '90s, I didn't study them with any eye at all to either atheism or theism. I was an atheist at the time anyway, while I'm not as sure today as to just how I'd call myself, although as a result of these studies outlined here, I'd say I'm no longer a skeptic -- at least, no longer a skeptic with a capital S. So when I started this doctrinal research, way back when, all such considerations of atheism/theism etc. seemed pretty irrelevant at the time. Instead, I simply viewed all such doctines as a straightforward sequence of sociological patterns. I only had one goal in mind: seeing if there were any consistent patterns of any kind behind the self-centered doctrines versus those behind the altruistic ones that have prevailed back and forth throughout the pushmi-pullyu odyssey of human cultures. I didn't necessarily expect to find a pattern at all, in fact. But I was hoping I'd find one. Why? Because I was dismayed first by the way that the Cold War was still being pursued in the face of all sanity at the time, then by the ostrich-headed response to the hard science emerging on polar warming and convulsive climate change, and finally by the dashing of all hopes that the subsequent end of the Cold War might bring some sanity to ethnic strife in the industrialized world in the mid-'90s rubble of Bosnia.

It seemed quite clear to me that all the more altruistic doctrines throughout history have emerged -- randomly, yes, but still luckily -- at points in the human story when cruel cultures are on the very brink of implosion through sheer brutality. However, I couldn't help thinking, now that such brutality has the newfound capacity in our new global village to impact an entire world and not just some puny hemispheric empire or other, Has our luck finally run out?

We are, after all, sailing uncharted waters. And today, the global village is so small that we know within minutes of a devastating earthquake down in Chile. Also, one lone maniac has the capacity to impact history globally in an instant -- Osama Bin Laden on 9/11. And so on (although in the '90s, we were all still innocent of Al Qaeda, of course).

Suddenly those doctrines that have (sometimes) sparked the better angels of our nature are no longer of merely academic interest. They have now assumed critical importance in our ultimate escape from imminent extinction. Frankly, I concluded back in the early '90s that the extinction of humanity was more likely than not within the coming century (where we are now). And I've seen nothing at all to change my opinion on that.





Chief Milestones in Social Reform

My own take is that there is some degree of evidence for any number of things that may be unlikely. But the question in each case is, Is it strong evidence or poor evidence? Not all evidence is automatically strong. At the same time, even if evidence is poor, it can still be counted as evidence. Just evidence for ... what? If certain evidence is duly weighed by peers and found to be lacking in buttressing one particular argument -- argument A -- that only means that that evidence is poor in sufficiently buttressing argument A. It is still useful in buttressing argument B, particularly if argument B convincingly disposes of argument A. It is simply that it is evidence that has been misinterpreted to mean one thing when it more likely meant another. So it is poor evidence in what it may be used to argue for. But it is still evidence, since it is evidence for something else that is being overlooked. That's why it still constitutes evidence. If it's not strong evidence for one thing, it makes sense to determine what it is indeed strong evidence for. One simply interprets it differently than at first. After all, evidence, whether poor or strong, doesn't simply go away -- unless you're George Orwell or Josef Stalin or David Irving, of course. Does it make sense to just dismiss evidence out of hand without proper scrutiny? Of course not. It is still useful evidence down the road for arguing B, even if trying to argue A with it has not panned out.

Now, I'd guess that moral/ethical codes are an inevitable development for any intelligent species that's also dependent on socialization of any kind, the way humanity clearly is. That guess alone got me interested in turn in all countercultural manifestations throughout the ages of socially frowned on expressions of solidarity with the helpless and the left out, as well as non-violence, as a way forward when a society reaches an impasse. Here's a rough rundown of the chief milestones in humanity's attempts at improving stability and community:

1. Mesalim of 3rd-millennium-B.C.E. Sumeria hearkens to the centrality of peace as the spine to all social values (and he institutes the worship of a deity, Ningirsu, who's conceived as a powerful god who safeguards all peace treaties);

2. Urukagina, the Sumerian reformer, presides over the establishment of protections for the treatment of the socially downscale and the introduction of the concept "freedom" ["amagi", the first known introduction of this term] (and he reconceives Ningirsu as the safeguard of "the widow and the orphan" [the first known use of this turn of phrase], thus instituting a new form of worship);

3. In Exodus, God's exchange with Moses introduces the notion that those who are afflicted and oppressed deserve the most respect and consideration of all (and Exodus signals the worship of a new god, Yahweh, who has "surely seen the affliction of my people .. and have heard their cry .. And I am come down to deliver them" --- in contrast to most other gods of that period who safeguard the mighty instead);

4. The I Ching introduces the fundamental concept of Yin and Yang ([the writer is thought by some to be a certain Wen Wang] --- this text also introduces something called "Tian" [loose translation: "Heaven"] as a metaphysical bulwark of all that is);

5. Hesiod, nicknamed "hearth-founder" for the first conscientiously designed Constitution in the Western tradition, institutes the groundbreaking Constitution of Orchomenus (and he also introduces into literature the classic picture of the cosmos as conceived in ancient Greek tradition, with its pantheon of gods like Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, and so on, as spelled out in his Theogony);

6. The writer of the Tao-te-king, called Lao-Tzu, establishes conventional wisdom as automatically suspect and the powerful's use of the jackboot (so to speak) as intrinsically antithetical to all nature (and this text also introduces a new form of worship, Taoism, which worships the Dao as [paraphrase] "the mystical source and ideal of all existence: it is unseen, but not transcendent, immensely powerful yet supremely humble, being the root of all things")

7. Buddha/Siddhartha, the originator of the sermons in the Digha-Nikaya, the earliest Buddhist text, introduces the utter repudiation of any and all violence whatsoever and a rejection of a caste system and of any system that imposes any types of discriminatory levels on the human family at all (and these sermons also re-conceive a new Brahma, a deity now "free of anger, pure of mind, free of malice, without wealth and free of worldly cares", capable of union with and inspiration of a sequence of "messengers" who "regard all with mind set free, and deep-felt pity, ... sympathy, ... equanimity");

8. Confucius/Kong-fut-ze introduces the primacy of reining in the arrogance and violence of those in power, at a time when civil violence threatens to destroy all of China for good, advocating a new-minted reciprocal and considerate reform in political life instead, thus shaping the extraordinarily peaceful and stable culture of the Han dynasty (and he also introduced the concept that all moral strength comes ultimately from "Tian", a new wrinkle on the "Tian" of the I Ching);

9. Socrates introduces ethics itself as the most important element in humanity's existence, together with a claimed capacity for anyone, from freeman to slave, to grasp it and master it better through continually sharpening self-knowledge (and he also introduces his conviction that he can sometimes hear God's own voice, when being dissuaded from a course of action that would not be right);

10. Christ/Jesus, as described in Josephus, Tacitus, the Mishnah, the 7 authentic Paulines and the Synoptic Gospels, introduces service to all and living purely for others, even loving one's enemies, in expectation of the last being first and the first last (and these texts also revive a Yahweh concept that is oriented toward the poor and the vulnerable);

11. John Locke introduces the primacy of personal validation using the senses and repeated experiment as the way to knowing, thus introducing Empiricism as the foundational outlook of modern man, alongside the importance of life and liberty as paramount to a just society (and he also, it's sometimes forgotten, is one of the chief expounders of Deism as a way out from organized religion and a new way of understanding God);

12. Baha''u'lla'h introduces a nuts-and-bolts path to total world peace in our modern world, and the first conception, within a combined political/theological context, of our globe as a single village long before other politicians ever take up this idea (and he also re-introduces the modern world to a then-new conception of deity as the inspirer of a sequence of "messengers", thereby introducing a new form of worship, Bahai).





Original Contexts for Self-centered Doctrines

It's uncanny the way each pioneering altruist here couples his socially risky idea of expanding the social compact with an equally risky and pioneering "take" on the idea of Deity that often earns him the opprobrium of his peers. To properly assess if this pattern is purely coincidental, it's just as important to take the fourth step now and look at the earliest (extant) examples of unequivocal self-centered philosophies overtly deaf to any claim on society by the more helpless among us. The very earliest surviving philosophy of this kind is the ancient Lokayata philosophy in ancient India, ca. the 7th century B.C.E., introduced by the ancient Indian thinker, Brhaspati. No earlier such philosophy can be traced. There may have been some earlier such philosophies, but this is the earliest for which we have a name and a primary source. This philosophy claims, first of all, that resting places and watering holes for travelers are a waste of time and designed only for people who, being indigent, are therefore of no value. It also decries the notion of occasional general dining invitations to people in the neighborhood (a frequent obligation of that time for the wealthy), decrying these invites precisely because they are ultimately of benefit to the indigent only, while inconveniencing those of greater substance and therefore of greater worth. Instead, it should be the interests of oneself only that guides individual behavior. Here is the earliest direct quote of the founder of Lokayata, Brhaspati:


"Chastity and other such ordinances are laid down by clever weaklings; gifts of gold and land, the pleasure of invitations to dinner, are devised by indigent people with stomachs lean with hunger.
"The building of temples, houses for water-supply, tanks, wells, resting places, and the like, please only travelers, not others.
"The Agnihotra ritual, the three Vedas, the triple staff, the ash-smearing, are the ways of gaining a livelihood for those who are lacking in intellect and energy."

Now, an odd coincidence here: Lokayata is not only the earliest overtly self-centered philosophy extant. It is also the earliest extant overtly atheist philosophy as well. Ascertaining the latter gave me, as an atheist, a bit of a shock, I can tell you. At the same time, I still think it very likely that certain primitive theistic assumptions (addressing the how and/or the why of the intricate ways of this universe) should still be viewed with skepticism today. And I have to say that I also view skeptically certain primitive concepts of deity itself that still prevail today.

However, the behavioral tendencies of those counter-cultural figures throughout time who feel a visceral sense of deity around them (such as Buddha et al) and who link this with an equally visceral "take" on altruism/empathy, versus those tendencies of those who counter-culturally articulate both self-centeredness and nonbelief as a linked philosophy (Brhaspati), certainly make one wonder which philosophies are more conducive to a thriving and evolving human species, as described by Gould et al.

This accords with a general pattern for all those pioneers in non-belief down the centuries who also generate a new social ethic. Lokayata is not alone in advocating a self-centered way of life instead of a caring one. The earliest extant overt articulation of self-centeredness in the West comes from Critias, the pioneering leader of the ruthless Thirty Tyrants at the end of the Pelopenesian(sp.?) War, at the end of the 5th century B.C.E. in ancient Greece. Disconcertingly, Critias is also the writer of the earliest extant articulation of atheism in Western culture. The earliest overt expression of atheism in Enlightenment France comes from the early 1700s, from Jean Meslier, who links his posthumously issued atheism with a call to brain everyone who disagrees with him, and a wish that "every noblemen might be strangled with the ripped-out guts of every remaining priest" (evidently a believer in collective punishment........). Even the introducer of the first thoroughly atheistic philosophy in Western Europe of the second millennium C.E., Matthias Knutzen in the late 1670s, whose ethics happen to be admirably other-centered, still shapes the ethics of his social philosophy around the injunctions of another, the ancient Roman jurist and polytheist, Ulpian, instead of arriving at a new "take" on altruism on his own. Those who are original in this respect (unlike Knutzen) seem to always arrive at a self-centered social ethic rather than an other-centered one (precisely the pattern that researchers like Gould, in scrutinizing cultural/social adaptations in various socialized species, single out as potentially destructive of stability and community).

I was thus disappointed to find that, although there are plenty of atheist social reformers of great altruism -- one thinks of some of the greatest humanitarians like Bertrand Russell, or Mr. Ingersoll, or Baron Holbach -- there does not seem to be a single such altruist who actually introduces both her/his new atheism and her/his own pioneering ethical code at the same time -- symbiotically -- and whose twin introduction of that as a two-part interlinked package results in a "fast-tracked" cultural impact on everyone around her/him. This contrasts with the picture for counter-cultural theist altruists.

Now, within the four corners of this phenomenon, the strict historical approach would be to ascertain which factor is the variable that causes such a pattern to obtain for one group (countercultural theists) and not the other (countercultural atheists)? If this evolving process for ethical codes comes from nature itself, and I would guess that it does for precisely the reasons provided by Gould et al, then how can the "hallucination" process of deity from specific -- (?)highly attuned(?) -- counterculturalists not come from the same thing, nature? -- particularly since it so frequently has this symbiotic relationship with ethical adaptation?

Before we get too carried away here, though, it remains obvious that ascribing the "hallucination" of deity to the general nature of our species still doesn't automatically make deity real. It just makes the "hallucination" natural and inevitable, which says nothing about any reality behind it. But since the practical value of evolving ethical codes seem all too real and urgent to me, not an illusion at all but an urgent reality without which our species will eventually sink into extinction, I have to ask why an individual direct deity "hallucination" isn't also reality-based after all, given the (apparent) symbiotic relationship between the two -- "hallucination" of deity and insightful countercultural selfless ethics -- throughout history.





History of pioneer atheists

B.C.E.

1. BRHASPATI

c.650 b.c.e.: Sarvasiddhantasamgraha (by Samkara); Sad-Darsana-Samuccaya (by Haribhadra Suri); Sarvadarsanasangraha (by Madhavacarya); Brhaspati - Thinker

There have probably been many atheists throughout history -- one might even speculate if the earliest believers predate or postdate the earliest atheists; but since all extant atheists see it as important to announce themselves as atheists precisely because they are engaged in active pushback against some prevailing brand of theism at the time, that means that the kinds of atheists for whom records survive are only the kinds of atheists whose beliefs are in response to theismS (after all, it's unlikely that anyone will hotly maintain there are no crocodiles who fly backward unless some other wise guy has first maintained the contrary) -- but humanity's written paper trail yields the name of one figure earlier than any other (known) writer in presenting an unprecedented, pioneering atheistic construct: an Indian thinker, Brhaspati (not to be confused with a mythical Brhaspati who is a divine figure in the Hindu pantheon), who pioneered the Lokayata philosophy. Brhaspati tied the Lokayata philosophy to an equally pioneering creed of social values. (Prominent in some ancient sources is the popularizer of Brhaspati's ideas, Carvaka.)

I go into Brhaspati in some detail here because he is the very earliest known philosopher who is atheistic, and we can also trace occasional echoes of his thinking in later philosophers (http://etd.lib.ttu.edu/theses/available ... 156333.pdf).

A century or so before Buddha, but of the same ancient Indian culture, Brhaspati contrasts with Buddha in asserting that there are no gods and no afterlife. But he does share Buddha's distaste for the caste system. An individualism in Brhaspati's creed resonates through later generations, not just the strong assertion by the Greek leader Critias in his Sisyphus that gods were merely invented to prevent people from thinking they could get away with deeds done secretly, but also later assertions for the privileges of the strong from those like Nietzsche and Rand. Brhaspati's own Lokayata Sutra is lost, but the reliability of the two earliest extant summaries of its contents, Sarvasiddhantasamgraha, by a Samkara early in the C.E., and Sad-Darsana-Samuccaya, by the roughly contemporary Haribhadra Suri, seem validated by a contemporary citation from these summaries in another tract, Tattvopaplavasimha, written by an admirer of Brhaspati, a certain Jayarasi Bhatta. Unfortunately, Tattvopaplavasimha is not a summation of Brhaspati, but merely an original take by Bhatta on the essence of inference, so I don't use it here. The most detailed extant summary of the Lokayata Sutra, with purportedly direct quotes from Brhaspati himself, is Sarvadarsanasangraha, by Madhavacarya. But this dates from approximately half a millennium later than the other two summaries. Still, some scholars (not all) tend to favor it because of its more detailed presentation. I give the first two earliest summaries in their entirety, together with the direct quotes from Brhaspati in Sarvadarsanasangraha.


Sarvasiddhantasamgraha (by Samkara)

The Lokayatikas do not admit the existence of anything but

"the four elements, earth, water, fire and air";

there is none other.
Only the perceived exists; the unperceivable does not exist, by reason of its never having been perceived; even the believers in the invisible never say that the invisible has been perceived.
If the rarely perceived be taken for the unperceived, how can they call it the unperceived? How can the ever-unperceived, like things such as the horns of a hare, be an existent?
Others should not here postulate merit and demerit from happiness and misery. A person is happy or miserable through nature; there is no other cause.
Who paints the peacocks, or who makes the cuckoos sing? There exists here no cause excepting nature.
The soul is but the body characterized by the attributes signified in the expressions, I am stout, I am youthful, I am grown up, I am old, etc. It is not something other than that body.
The consciousness that is found in the modifications of non-intelligent elements [i.e., in organisms formed out of matter] is produced in the manner of the red colour out of the combination of betel, areca-nut and lime.
There is no world other than this; there is no heaven and no hell; the realm of Siva and like regions are invented by stupid impostors of other schools of thought.
The enjoyment of heaven lies in eating delicious food, keeping the company of young women, using fine clothes, perfumes, garlands, sandal paste, etc.;
The pain of hell lies in the troubles that arise from enemies, weapons, diseases; while liberation is death which is the cessation of life-breath.
The wise therefore ought not to take pains on account of that; it is only the fool who wears himself out by penances, fasts, etc.

"Chastity and other such ordinances are laid down by clever weaklings; gifts of gold and land, the pleasure of invitations to dinner, are devised by indigent people with stomachs lean with hunger.
"The building of temples, houses for water-supply, tanks, wells, resting places, and the like, please only travelers, not others.
"The Agnihotra ritual, the three Vedas, the triple staff, the ash-smearing, are the ways of gaining a livelihood for those who are lacking in intellect and energy." -- so thinks Brhaspati.

The wise should enjoy the pleasures of this world through the more appropriate available means of agriculture, tending cattle, trade, political administration, etc.

Sad-Darsana-Samuccaya (by Haribhadra Suri)

There is neither god nor liberation. Merit and demerit also do not exist. Nor is there any fruit of virtue and vice.
This world consists of only as much as is within the scope of the senses. What the vastly learned ones speak of is but similar to 'Oh! Dear! Look at the footprints of the wolf!'
Oh! The one who has become all the more beautiful! Drink and eat. Oh! The one with a charming body! That which is past does not belong to you. Oh! The timid one! The past never comes back. This body is only a collectivity.
Moreover,

"earth, water, fire and air are the four forms of matter".

The only valid form of knowledge is the one produced by the senses.
When there is a collectivity of the forms of matter, the earth, etc., there is production of the body. Just as the power of intoxication from the ingredients of a spiritous drink, so also is determined the presence of the self's consciousness.
Therefore, on the part of the ordinary people, the activity for the obtainment of the unseen, leaving aside the seen, is only extreme foolishness.
The pleasure that is produced in a person due to the obtainment of the desired and the avoidance of the undesired is useless.
The implication of the conclusions is to be critically discussed by the intelligent.

Brhaspati citations in Sarvadarsanasangraha (by Madhavacarya)

"While life is yours live joyously;
No one can avoid Death's searching eye:
When this body of ours is burnt,
How can it ever return again?"

"That the pleasure arising to man
from contact with sensible objects,
is to be relinquished because accompanied by pain-
such is the reasoning of fools.
The kernels of the paddy, rich with finest white grains,
What man, seeking his own true interest,
would fling them away
because of a covering of husk and dust?"

"The Sacrifices, the three Vedas, the ascetic's three staves,
and smearing oneself with ashes-
[T]hese are but means of livelihood
for those who have no manliness nor sense."

"Fire is hot, water cold,
refreshingly cool is the breeze of morning;
By whom came this variety?
They were born of their own nature."

"There is no heaven, no final liberation,
nor any soul in another world,
Nor do the actions of the four castes,
orders, or priesthoods produce any real effect.

"If a beast slain as an offering to the dead
will itself go to heaven,
why does the sacrificer not straightway offer his father?

"If offerings to the dead produce gratification
to those who have reached the land of the dead,
why the need to set out provisions
for travelers starting on this journey?
If our offering sacrifices here gratify beings in heaven,
why not make food offerings down below
to gratify those standing on housetops?

"While life remains, let a man live happily,
let him feed on melted ghee though he runs in debt;
When once the body becomes ashes,
how can it ever return again?

"If he who departs from the body goes to another world,
why does he not come back again,
restless for love of his kinfolk?
It is only as a means of livelihood
that brahmins have established here
abundant ceremonies for the dead-
there is no other fruit anywhere."

=============================

2. LEUKIPPOS

Going back to the ancient Greeks, we have Leukippos of the 5th century b.c., the ingenious elder pioneer of the ancient Greek Atomist school, the first school to recognize that all life is composed of atoms. Epicurus appears to have remarked that Leukippos was no philosopher at all, and the one direct quote we have from Leukippos, "Nothing proceeds but from necessity", bears out our picture of Leukippos as never having explicitly addressed any social implications arising from atheism (unlike Brhaspati, who did address them), confining himself instead to strictly physical studies. Hence Epicurus's not viewing Leukippos as a real philosopher. In advancing the atomist model, Leukippos was clearly going against the model of a theistic created universe, even though we have no extant writing of his explicitly stating that gods don't exist. At the same time, plenty of contemporaries inferred precisely that conclusion as being implicit in Leukippos's atomist ideas.

=============================================

3. DEMOCRITUS

Now, Democritus was one who explicitly urged that everyone be engaged in public service, unlike Leukoppos, who may never have addressed any social implications at all. Democritus's implicit non-belief is not original with him, since he was an avid student of and proselytizer for Leukippos's atomist ideas, and roughly twenty years Leukippos's junior.

=============================================

4. DIAGORAS

Diagoras was a poet and a pupil of Democritus who only adopted his mentor's skepticism when an opponent of his in a suit for plagiarism failed to be punished by the gods for the perjury of insisting that a poetic conceit he had stolen from Diagoras was still his own.

=============================================

5. CRITIAS

d. 403 b.c.e.: Critias's Sisyphus

The ancient Greek leader Critias is the Western World's earliest extant formulator of an overt, unequivocal, comprehensive stance explicitly denying the existence of any gods. Coming roughly two centuries after Brhaspati, Critias is virtually the Western World's Brhaspati, so to speak, since neither Leukippos's or Democritus's or Diagoras's extant writings include their explicit statement that no gods exist, although there are second-hand accounts referencing explicit remarks made by Diagoras. Critias remains the Western World's virtual Brhaspati, since he is the earliest figure for which we have intact his own words for his explicit statement that gods do not exist, making the Critias fragment of incalculable historic importance, almost as valuable as the earliest direct quote from Brhaspati in the Sarvasiddhantasamgraha. Critias's words are preserved, with one lacuna, in Section I of Sextus Empiricus's Against the Physicists and was lifted from Critias's satyr-play Sisyphus. Its historical importance warrants its citation here in full:

A time there was when anarchy did rule
The lives of men, which then were like the beasts,
Enslaved to force. Nor was there then reward
For good men, nor for wicked punishment.
Next, as I deem, did men establish laws
For punishment, that Justice might be lord
Of all mankind, and Insolence enchain'd.
And whosoe'er did sin was penalized.
Next, as the laws did hold men back from deeds
Of open violence, but still such deeds
Were done in secret, -- then, as I maintain,
Some shrewd man first, a man in counsel wise,
Discovered unto men the fear of Gods,
Thereby to frighten sinners should they sin
E'en secretly in deed, or word, or thought.
Hence was it that he brought in Deity,
Telling how God enjoys an endless life,
Hears with his mind and sees, and taketh thought
And heeds things, and his nature is divine,
So that he hearkens to men's every word
And has the power to see men's every act.
E'en if you plan in silence some ill deed,
The Gods will surely mark it. For in them
Wisdom resides. So, speaking words like these,
Most cunning doctrine did he introduce,
The truth concealing under speech untrue.
The place he spoke of as the God's abode
Was that whereby he could affright men most, --
The place from which, he knew, both terrors came
And easements unto men of toilsome life --
To wit the vault above, wherein do dwell
The lightnings, he beheld, and awesome claps
Of thunder, and the starry face of heaven,
Fair-spangled by that cunning craftsman Time, --
Whence, too, the meteor's glowing mass doth speed
And liquid rain descends upon the earth.
Such were the fears wherewith he hedged men round,
And so to God he gave a fitting home,
By this his speech, and in a fitting place,
And thus extinguished lawlessness by laws. . .
- - - - - - - - - - - -[ lacuna ] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
. . .Thus first did some man, as I deem, persuade
Men to suppose a race of Gods exists.

Critias was the chief oligarch among the Thirty Tyrants at Athens, 404 - 403 B.C., instituting policies like abrogating the promise to cobble a new Constitution, executing without trial statesmen like his own friend Theramenes when faced with advocacy for a moderate course between oligarchy and democracy, and summarily executing without trial dozens of private citizens as well, just to facilitate the use of their wealth -- in the process thinning out the population in various pockets of the surrounding countryside. Even if we accept the notion that tyranny of this sort was less frowned upon in ancient times than it would be today, the Athenians of that era, in fact, reeling from such an extreme reaction to the world’s first democracy, immediately came to regard the brief reign of the Thirty Tyrants as a singularly cruel and bloodthirsty chapter by any standards.

==========================================

6. THEODORUS

A century or so later, there is Theodorus, another ancient Greek, who is -- unlike Democritus, inspired by Leukippos -- an original atheist, but also -- like Democritus -- a reasonable socially responsible philosopher. His brand of philosophical hedonism partakes partly of Epicurus's more thoughtful spin on hedonism and more directly of Aristippus's mild hedonism, the latter having pioneered the Cyrenaic school. Thus, these are all essentially borrowed ideas on social justice and responsibility, though admirable, unlike the equally admirable Democritus example, whose social reflections were mostly original with him, while his atheism was not.

==========================================

7. STRATON

Then there is Straton, another upright original atheist and ancient Greek, but seemingly uninfluenced by forebears like Theodorus and/or Democritus and/or Leukippos. His considerate social ethics constitute a wholehearted adoption of the Socratic model rather than a new paradigm of his own, so he falls within the Theodorus group.

==========================================

C.E.

8. KNUTZEN

Mathias Knutzen, who described himself as the first "Conscientist" in a series of path-breaking pamphlets written in German in the 1670s, wrote:

"We declare that God does not exist, we deeply despise the authorities and also reject the churches with all their priests. For us Conscientists the knowledge of a single person is insufficient, only that of the majority is sufficient, as in Luke, 24,39: "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me and see for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have" (because a single person cannot see everything) and the conscience in combination with the knowledge. And this, the conscience, which the generous Mother Nature has given to all humans, replaces for us the bible -- compare Romans, 2, 14-15: (14)"For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:" (15)"Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another" -- and the authorities; it is the true judge, as Gregory of Nazianzus testifies ("On his Father's Silence, Because of the Plague of Hail," paragraph 5: "Under what circumstances again is the righteous, when unfortunate, possibly being put to the test, or, when prosperous, being observed, to see if he be poor in mind or not very far superior to visible things, as indeed conscience, our interior and unerring tribunal, tells us"), and is valid for us instead of the priests, because this teacher teaches us "to harm nobody, to live in honor and to give everybody what is his". When we fail to do this, I maintain, as this life is for us the only one we have, our entire life will seem like a host of plagues, even as a hell. If, however, we behave in a just manner, it will be like heaven. This, i.e. the conscience, comes into existence with our birth, and it also dies when we pass into death. These are the principles that are innate in us, and whoever rejects them, rejects himself."

When we research these ethical principles of his -- and their nub is (and actually presented in italics in the original German) "to harm nobody, to live in honor and to give everybody what is his" -- we find that Knutzen, in setting this off in italics, is unabashedly and frankly adopting another's code that he sincerely admires rather than conceptualizing an original groundbreaking one of his own. He is borrowing here from the ancient Roman jurist Ulpian, a polytheist whose writings formed the backbone of the Justinian code. It would have been nice if Knutzen had put some individual and original flesh on the bones of the Ulpian injunction. He might have had a bigger impact then; but as it is, he's again, essentially, a "Theodoran".

==========================================

9. MESLIER

d. ca. 1720 c.e.: Meslier's Mon Testament

There is one more figure who, like Brhaspati and Critias, developed both a thoroughly autonomous apostasy on belief and also an equally autonomous platform on social action: Jean Meslier. At the outset of Meslier's posthumous tract, Mon Testament, he explicitly rejects the veracity of any and all concepts relating to deity, maintaining that all theism is arrant superstition and that all reality is readily observable by the humblest mortals here on Earth. He maintains there is no dimension beyond the temporal, mortal one, and all lives exist strictly within the three-dimensional universe that we already know. In the extract given here, I give a translation of Meslier's call to social action consequent to his initial declaration of non-belief:

"Well ! My dear friends, if you knew of the vanity and the foolishness of the nonsense that you are being entertained with under the pretext of religion, and if you knew how unfairly and how shamefully the tyrants that dominate you take advantage of the authority that they have encroached upon you, you would certainly feel nothing but contempt for everything that you are told to respect and worship, and you would feel nothing but hatred and indignation towards all those who deceive you, who govern you so badly, and who mistreat you so shamefully. This reminds me of a wish that was made formerly by a man, who had neither knowledge nor learning. However, that man had apparently enough wisdom and insight to judge sanely all the detestable deceptions and all the detestable ceremonies that I am blaming here. He was brilliant in the way he expressed his thoughts, and he could understand deeply enough the ins and outs of the mystery of iniquity that I have just discussed, since he could see clearly who was involved and who was responsible for that state of affairs. For all those reasons, he wished that all the great of this world and all the nobles be hanged and strangled with the guts of the priests.(1) That expression certainly sounds rude and gross, but one has to admit that it is frank and guileless. It is short, yet expressive, since it expresses in fairly few words all that those people deserve. As far as I am concerned, my dear friends, if I had a wish to utter on the subject and I would certainly make it if only it could come true I would wish that I had the arms and the strength of a Hercules to rid the world of all vice and iniquity, and to have the pleasure of braining all those monsters of nonsense and iniquity, that make all the peoples of the earth groan so miserably. Do not think, my dear friends, that I am prompted here by any particular desire of revenge, nor any particular interest or animosity. No, my dear friends, no passion is giving me those feelings, or urging me to talk and write thus. I am only motivated by my personal zeal for justice and truth that are so shamefully down-trodden, on the one hand, and by my hatred of vice and iniquity which, as far as I can see, rule everywhere, on the other hand. One can but hate and despise those people who are responsible for so many detestable evils, and who deceive their neighbours so universally. Why, would one not be right to ban and chase away from a town and a province some unashamed, deceitful charlatans who, while pretending to charitably give away salutary remedies and efficient medication, would actually sell at a high price harmful drugs and pernicious ointments? Certainly, one would be right to ban them and chase them as infamous deceivers. In the same way, would one not be right to blame openly and severely punish all those crooks and thieves who spend their time robbing, killing and slaughtering inhumanly those who have the ill luck to fall into their hands? Yes, beyond any doubt, it would serve them right to be severely punished, and one would be right to hate and dislike them; and it would even be a crime to bear that they remain unpunished for their robberies. All the more reason, my dear friends, are we entitled to blame, to hate and to dislike, as I do now, all those ministers of nonsense and iniquity who dominate you so tyrannically, using their power either on your consciences, or on your bodies and your assets. The ministers of religion, who dominate your consciences, are the greatest deceivers of the peoples, whereas the princes and the other great of this world, who dominate your bodies and your assets, are the biggest thieves and murderers on earth. All those who have come, said Jesus-Christ, are robbers and thieves. Omnes quotquot venerunt, fures sunt et latrones.(2)"

(1) Erganes, King of Ethiopia, had all the Jupiter priests of one of his towns killed, because they had spread their nonsense and superstitions all around the town (Pierre Bayle's Historical Dictionary ). The King of Babylon did the same with the priests of Bel (cf. Daniel, 14:21)

(2) John, 10:8 [KJV: All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them.]

This paragraph was circulated ad nauseum in its time, and some scholars view it as perhaps the seed for the extreme agenda followed by Robespierre in his hijacking of the French Revolution. Little known is the fact that Robespierre himself was actually a believer, not an atheist like Meslier.

===================================

10. MARX

Finally, there is Karl Marx. Karl Marx emphasized the primacy of life on this world rather than any importance in the metaphysical, and in doing so, indeed provided a new social code -- and, finally, a social code marked by a steadfastly humanist quality that some view as altruistic as well.

Was Marx -- in writing 150 years later or so later than Knutzen -- reintroducing Knutzen's atheism to an altogether innocent reading public, and thus as much a ground-breaker as Knutzen? Not really. In his youth, Marx was an avid reader of Ludwig Feuerbach, who had helped popularize atheism throughout Germany before Marx came along. And even Feuerbach did not literally introduce atheism into the philosophical "bloodstream" of Germany. Feuerbach simply brought it to wider attention. The German intelligentsia were fully aware of atheism as a fully developed philosophy for many decades before Feuerbach. The old Knutzen pamphlets never entirely disappeared from circulation. Thus, Marx emerged from a hyper-intellectual milieu in Germany that was fully aware of atheism as a vibrant and viable philosophy.

Since Marx was already brought to atheism by reading Feuerbach, many of Feuerbach's readers of that time likewise snapped up Marx -- as being an eager follower. In our tracing the German atheist tradition right back to Knutzen, Marx merely reflects a continuing tradition of some standing by the time his own thoughts are published.

Of course, while not literally an atheism groundbreaker, Marx's popularizing of atheism eventually outstripped Feuerbach's, even though Feuerbach was his senior.

As to his original social philosophy, there was a sometimes cold-hearted aspect to it that offsets his apparent humanism to a degree. An occasional "take-no-prisoners" attitude is reflected in his response to Tsar Alexander II. When Alexander was freeing the serfs, Marx remarked --

[paraphrase] "He's still a Tsar and therefore a walking epitome of an evil and doomed order".

And when Alexander was assassinated, Marx openly rejoiced at his death, as constituting a welcome blow to the "ancien regime". His rejoicing at the death of a man whom he knew full well to be a real reformer is fully documented in his own words, and that leaves him as arguably less admirable than, say, a Vanini or a Democritus. But he is fully as much a publicist for atheism as any of the other ten figures in this survey.

[continued]

[continued]

Altruists, "Self-ists", and the Human Brain

I

If someone could uncover a peer-bucking atheist who introduced her/his atheism for the first time to her/his own culture, a culture duly ignorant of conceiving of any reality without a god up to then, and who did so in tandem with a profound social reform of that culture of some kind that was equally original to that culture and fully empathically oriented rather than self-centered, the apparent monopoly that countercultural theist "spinners" have on jump-starting this seemingly natural process of evolving ethical codes throughout history would then be broken. There would then be no reason at all for explaining this "hallucinatory"(?) deity phenomenon among the most altruistic and impactful pioneers. I could simply drop this notion of deity as maybe real altogether. But right now, given the historic patterns I've observed, it would seem intellectually dishonest for me to ignore the possibility, at least, of some form of deity being real, though not necessarily the form found in any particular religion.

I should add that I don't think I have any great emotional attachment to my newest conclusions that deity is (possibly) real after all. If this described monopoly pattern were to be broken, I would then calmly conclude that I was originally correct to be an atheist. But right now, since it seems intellectually dishonest for me to stick with my erstwhile atheism, I won't do that. (At the same time, the most extensively documented figures who articulate new and deeply personal "takes" on deity and new "takes" on altruism symbiotically -- Buddha, Socrates, etc. -- are not all agreed on an afterlife. So I still feel an afterlife is unlikely, even though I now view deity itself as a possibility.)

Clearly, atheists as a whole are just as likely to feel the call of the helpless on our conscience as are any believers. The question is not Are all atheists all-good or all-bad? In fact, they show the same mix of good and bad common to the rest of the human family. Instead, the question is, Where do humanitarian atheists like Russell get their inspiration?

The key point here is that the start-ups of pioneering countercultural calls to unalloyed self-centeredness within many historic communities and cultures always seem linked with countercultural expressions of atheism, and vice versa, while the start-ups of pioneering countercultural calls to unalloyed altruism within many historic communities and cultures always seem linked with countercultural conceptions of deity, and vice versa. These curious symbiotic relationships at the start-ups of creeds on either side of the divide appear to hold firm throughout history. It's only later in the history of these creeds that positions sometimes get reversed: Hateful figures like Torquemada sometimes emerge who warp a theistic philosophy of caring (Jesus's) into a savage orgy of blood, even as peaceful and humane figures like Holbach and Ingersoll similarly tend to emerge who then transform an initially callous atheistic philosophy bent only on self-satisfaction (Meslier's) into a gentle warning that the people at large should eat something more than just cake......... (by the way, contrary to some assumptions, Robespierre, one of the most brutal of the French Revolution's leaders, actually singled out atheists for the guillotine[!], along with the royalty and the nobility, being a devout believer himself -- oh yes! -- so it's a canard that atheism was always at the back of the most brutal tendencies of the Fr. Rev. -- unless one blames everything on Meslier, of course.)

This odd symbiotic pattern that we seem to see among _originating_ altruists and theism pioneers versus _originating_ "self-ists" and atheism pioneers could be expressed in this way --

ALTRUISTS

Premise 1 -- any species dependent on socialization, such as humanity, needs an ethic of mutual caring in order just to survive;

Hypothesis 1 -- human history reveals all autonomous altruistic doctrines, advanced to reform occasional human indifference, as a positive for the species;

Datum 1 -- in their primary texts, autonomous altruistic doctrines seem to show a symbiotic relationship to autonomous formulations for the divine [Buddha, Socrates, Christ, etc.];

Hypothesis 2 -- the reason for that symbiotic relationship may be a link of some kind between pioneering altruism and some kind of deity, although indicating nothing re theists in general.

"SELF-ISTS"

Premise 2 -- humanity sows the seeds of its own destruction if too critical a mass of its members look out only for themselves;

Hypothesis 3 -- all autonomous self-centered doctrines are a negative for the species;

Datum 2 -- in their primary texts, autonomous self-centered doctrines seem to show a symbiotic relationship to autonomous formulations for atheism [Brhaspati, Critias, Meslier, etc.]; and

Hypothesis 4 -- the reason for that symbiotic relationship may be a link of some kind between autonomous "self-ism" and autonomous atheism, although indicating nothing re atheists in general.

My take is that there is some degree of evidence for deity, but the huge question is, How strong is that evidence? After all, even the evidence for deity that we may or may not have is still a "some-degree-of" proposition only. It is not proof. Furthermore, I see no clear evidence at all for deity being specifically Allah, or Yahweh, or Jehovah, or Brahma, or Ningirsu, or Baal, or Jove, or Jupiter, or Zeus, or Tian -- or what/who/ever. Whatever evidence for deity there is -- and again, such evidence is distinct from proof -- is only rooted in huge historic cycles showing cultural transformations within the homo sapiens species among various communities and societies throughout the ages, not connected with any one take on deity within any one region or any one era. Instead, it's what "goes down" in era after era and region after region -- all taken together -- that is ultimately useful to this question.

II

Since I view humanity today as staring down the barrel of "perfect storm" conditions for its imminent extinction within one or two generations at most, either through ecological collapse or WMDs run amok or something else even more horrific, it is imperative that all our available brain power be used in ascertaining as accurately as possible each and every comma of whatever was said or done by figures like Buddha, or Jesus -- or Tolstoy, or Gandhi, or Mandela, etc. We must gain a proper understanding of how these ethical insights were arrived at in the first place. Knowing exactly what was said and understanding precisely the mainsprings behind what was said is more important than anything. Knowledge is power. And is there something symbiotic between freshly minted -- or re-minted -- constructs for altruism/empathy and freshly minted -- or re-minted -- constructs for deity? Or is such an impression strictly a delusion?

When we have a closer knowledge of whatever facilitates a Buddha's or a Mandela's transformative impact on a selfish culture, we'll have a better knowledge of how we can trigger the better angels of our nature today without the jackboot (which is already a sell-out right there) and thus stave off the imminent extinction that not only seems highly likely today but totally inevitable under current circumstances within the lifetime of many of us. Wherever biological or chemical or general scientific research into the human brain leads us, that can only be to the good --

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-07-04/

http://www.autismwebsite.com/crimetimes/00a/w00ap4.htm

http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/902.aspx

http://www.slate.com/id/2165026/

-- . What this ongoing research shows is that the frontal cortex of the human brain, which happens to be the most recently evolved sector of the human brain, is heavily engaged in two predominant activities, metaphysical meditation of some kind, as uncovered in studies of Buddhist monks at prayer, and empathicizing with various fellow creatures in distress. In general, if such state-of-the-art brain research leads us to the conclusion that something other than deity is at the back of these altruistic cultural reformers, then that's fine by me. If it confirms my working conclusion that some kind of deity/presence like that described in my preamble may be the common denominator behind these altruistic cultural reformers after all, then that's fine by me too. I really don't care, just so long as we have the answer. This question is worth pursuing today because we have no other choice. The selfishness and the smallness and the violence and the stubbornness of most world leaders today have left us with no choice. We have to pursue this kind of study, whether it be of Jesus or of Urukagina (the earliest known cultural reformer of all [in ancient Sumeria]), without fear or favor. Otherwise, we can kiss our grandchildren's adulthood goodbye.

======================================================



Damasio: Early damage to prefrontal cortex linked to amoral behavior ( http://www.autismwebsite.com/crimetimes/00a/w00ap4.htm )

It's well known that adults who suffer damage to the prefrontal cortex of the brain can undergo dramatic personality changes, becoming irresponsible, impulsive, and socially inept. New research by Antonio Damasio and colleagues reveals that similar lesion ns occurring during infancy can cause much more severe impairment of moral and social behavior-impairment similar in some ways to that seen in psychopaths.

Damasio and colleagues studied two young adults, both of whom suffered prefrontal cortex lesions in infancy (one due to an accident and the other due to a tumor). In both cases, the subjects appeared to have recovered fully from their brain lesions, but l later exhibited a wide range of antisocial and amoral behaviors.

The 20-year-old female subject studied by Damasio et al. was intelligent and academically competent, but she stole from her family and other children, abused other people both verbally and physically, lied frequently, and was sexually promiscuous and comp pletely lacking in empathy toward her illegitimate child. In addition, the researchers say, "She never expressed guilt or remorse for her misbehavior. She blamed her misdeeds and social difficulties on other people." The second subject, a 23-year-old male e, was unmotivated, slovenly, and financially reckless, "engaged in poorly planned petty thievery," lied frequently, assaulted other people physically, and was sexually promiscuous. He too conceived an illegitimate child in whom he showed no interest, and d, like the other subject, he showed no guilt or remorse for his harmful behavior.

Damasio and colleagues note that their subjects' behavior problems could not be traced to environmental factors, because both came from loving, stable, middle-class homes and had devoted parents. In addition, both patients had well-adjusted siblings who e exhibited no behavior problems.

Both of the subjects performed well on measures of intellectual ability, but, like people with adult-onset prefrontal cortex damage, they were socially impaired, failed to consider future consequences when making decisions, and failed to respond normally to punishment or behavioral interventions. "Unlike adult-onset patients, however," the researchers say, "the two patients had defective social and moral reasoning, suggesting that the acquisition of complex social conventions and moral rules had been impa aired." While adult-onset patients possess factual knowledge about social and moral rules (even though they often cannot follow these rules in real life), Damasio et al.'s childhood-onset subjects appeared unable to learn these rules at all. This may expl lain, the researchers say, why their childhood-onset subjects were much more antisocial, and showed less guilt and remorse, than subjects who suffered similar damage in adulthood.

The two childhood-onset subjects resembled psychopaths in their lack of empathy, their lack of remorse, and their destructive behavior. However, Damasio and colleagues say, "The behavior of our patients differed from the typical profile of psychopathy in that our patients' patterns of aggression seemed impulsive rather than goal-directed, and also in the highly transparent, almost child-like nature of their transgressions and their attempts to cover them."

-----

"Impairment of social and moral behavior related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex," Steven W. Anderson, Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 2, No. 11, November 1999, pp. 1032-10 037. Address: Antonio R. Damasio, Department of Neurology, Division of Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City, IA 52242, antonio-damasio@uiowa.edu.

=====================================================



Survival of the fittest? Anthropologist suggests the nicest prevail ? not just the selfish ( http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/902.aspx )
June 9, 2004
By Terri McClain

Are altruism and morality artificial outgrowths of culture, created by humans to maintain social order? Or is there, instead, a biological foundation to ethical behavior?

In other words, are we inherently good?
Social Animals

The prevailing view in popular and scientific literature is that humans and animals are genetically driven to compete for survival, thus making all social interaction inherently selfish. According to this line of reasoning, known as sociobiology, even seemingly unselfish acts of altruism merely represent a species' strategy to survive and preserve its genes.

But Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that this is a narrow and simplistic view of evolutionary theory that fails to explain many aspects of sociality among mammals in general and primates in particular.

"The 'selfish gene' hypothesis is inadequate," he says.

Sussman is a consultant to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER), which brings together scholars from various disciplines — including anthropology, biology, psychology, genetics and ethics, among others — to explore the biological roots of human nature from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Sussman and Audrey R. Chapman, Ph.D., director of AAAS' Science and Human Rights Program, co-edited the first book developed from DoSER's workshops and symposia.

Titled "The Origins and Nature of Sociality," the recently released book presents a new paradigm for understanding sociality that seeks to synthesize data from a variety of disciplines.

"We believe that, instead of being genetically predisposed to competition and aggression, humans — and perhaps other animals as well — have a biological foundation for unselfish social interaction," Sussman says.

"There are many examples of nonselfish altruism," he adds. "How do you explain firefighters running into a burning building to save strangers at the possible expense of their own lives? There's no biological imperative for that."

Sussman mentions the many examples of courage and cooperative and altruistic behavior in response to Sept. 11. "The predominant theories in ethology concerning cooperative and altruistic behavior, claim that social animals, including human and nonhuman primates, are cooperative and altruistic only if they have something to gain from their actions," says Sussman.

"However, the reaction of millions of people to the Sept. 11 event does not fit this paradigm. As The New York Times reported: 'Hearing of the tragedy whose dimensions cannot be charted or absorbed, tens of thousands of people across the nation storm their local hospitals and blood banks, begging for the chance to give blood, something of themselves to the hearts of the wounded.'

"We are social animals," he continues. "We derive pleasure from positive social interaction. It's part of our brain chemistry. And far from being inherently violent, humans demonstrate a natural abhorrence of violence and conflict. We have to train soldiers to kill. It's not instinctive."

Sussman's study of primates has shown that aggressive behavior is extremely rare, even among baboons, which have a reputation for aggression.

We are horrified by terrorism, he says, because violence, particularly indiscriminate murder, is a social aberration.

Rethinking natural selection

Most of the current discussion of evolutionary theory focuses on individual selection or, as it is sometimes phrased, survival of the fittest. Only the most successful individuals will pass on their genes to further generations, thus weeding out over time (or selecting "against") genetic traits that do not enhance an individual's chances of survival.

This sociobiological view explains "selfish" altruism, which generates reciprocal acts or otherwise facilitates survival within a group.
Robert Sussman (left) works with a student.

Robert Sussman (left) works with a student.

"But sociobiology and individual selection do not explain 'unselfish' unselfish behavior. By this I mean behavior that benefits others but potentially leaves the individual no opportunity to pass on his own genetic legacy," says Sussman. "To explain that, we must give more consideration to group selection * and the benefits of sociality."

Charles Darwin himself believed that morality plays a role in human evolution by natural selection. A high standard of morality may give the individual and his children no advantage over other group members, Darwin wrote, yet it works to give his tribe an advantage over other tribes.

Thus, over time, groups whose members value morality or practice unselfish altruism are more likely to survive and thrive, passing on the genetic traits that encourage ethical behavior such as empathy, fairness and generosity.

Brain scans have shown this genetic legacy in humans, Sussman says, and it's probably present in other mammals as well. Unselfish behavior stimulates pleasure centers in the brain sensitive to dopamine, which is associated with addictive behavior, and oxytocin, which is associated with mother-child bonding.

"It feels good to be nice," he says.



* [following up on this reference by Terri McClain to group selection, the reader is invited to peruse a whole series of articles on the current state of play respecting the group-selection concept at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 53696.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 54660.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 55769.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 57711.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 60688.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 72402.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 77941.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 85590.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 88176.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 88707.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 90008.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 02753.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 06248.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 66316.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 92114.html ]



===============================================



God Is in the Dendrites ( http://www.slate.com/id/2165026/ )
Can "neurotheology" bridge the gap between religion and science?
By George JohnsonPosted Thursday, April 26, 2007, at 7:23 AM ET

Looking back, it was the intellectual high point of my summer: Ten science and religion reporters sitting inside the divinity building at Cambridge University, contemplating the essence of a raisin. As the hypnotic voice of the speaker, an expert on Buddhist meditation, lulled us from the here and now, I placed the wrinkly thing on my tongue, exploring its peaks and valleys until, all of a sudden, I broke through the linguistic cellophane. The raisin ceased to be a raisin or anything with a name. It had no history as a fruit grown on a vine and shipped to market; it evoked no memories of the little Sun-Maid boxes my mother packed in my lunch pail or of a particularly good glass of cabernet sauvignon.* It just was.

My colleagues—we were in England for a journalism fellowship sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, which hopes to find God in science—were having their own quiet epiphanies. After days of talks by physicists and theologians seeking cosmological justification for their spiritual beliefs, the close encounter with the raisin brought us back to earth. God was not to be found in the perfect wheeling of the cosmos, the quantum ambiguity of the atom, or the fortuity of the Big Bang, but in the electrical crackling of the human brain.
Related in Slate
Science editor Daniel Engber chatted with readers on washingtonpost.com about the special issue on the brain. Last year, Daniel Engber reviewed the Newberg study of speaking in tongues. In 2005, he listened to the Dalai Lama's lackluster speech to the Society for Neuroscience.
Related on the Web
Watch Slate contributors John Horgan and George Johnson discuss the "Brains!" special issue at Bloggingheads.tv.

If recent findings in "neurotheology" hold up, our meditating neurons, locked in the state called mindfulness, were radiating gamma waves at about 40 cycles per second, beating against the 50-hertz hum of the fluorescent lights. At the same time, parts of our cerebral cortex were growing infinitesimally thicker—another effect that researchers have associated with trancelike states. In the neurological search for the spiritual, there is no shortage of data. But pile it as high as you like, and you're left staring across the same divide. Depending on your predisposition, you can interpret all these experiments in two different ways. The believers take them as scientific evidence for the reality of their visions, while the atheists claim more proof that God is all in your head.
Advertisement

Two years ago, Sara Lazar, at Massachusetts General Hospital, used magnetic resonance imaging to show that the brains of longtime meditators were different from those of a control group: They had slightly bigger regions devoted to attentiveness and the processing of sensory information. What the study couldn't say was which way the causal arrow points. Does meditation fatten brain tissue, or are people with beefier cortexes more likely to meditate? For that matter, the changes might have been caused by something else altogether—maybe meditators are less likely to drink Pepsi One and more likely to eat their vegetables. But even if contemplating a raisin does pump up your neurons, that should come as no surprise. London cabbies have been found to have unusually large hippocampuses, a piece of the brain important for making mental maps. So do mice trained to run mazes. If the mind is what the brain does, any kind of exercise is bound to leave a physical trace.

Other studies have been more specific. In an ecumenical breakthrough, Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania found that praying Franciscan nuns and meditating Buddhist monks generate similar brain scans: The frontal lobe, associated with focus and concentration, lights up. At the same time, the parietal lobe, which integrates sensory information, goes dim.

This high-tech imagery has a way of stating the obvious: As you fix your thoughts on the otherworldly, you lose contact with your immediate surroundings. Likewise, Newberg discovered stirrings in language regions for the nuns, who were meditating on a Bible verse, and in visual regions for the monks, who were imagining a sacred object. When he scanned Pentecostals speaking in tongues, both the frontal lobe and the language center blacked out as they abandoned themselves to a proto-linguistic frenzy. If he'd lit a stick of incense, the olfactory bulb would have joined the show.

Reductive as these studies are—that is the whole point of neuroscience—there has been no loud objection from religious believers. They just take the results as evidence that the gods designed brains to be efficient spiritual resonators. Hence the eagerness of Tibetan monks, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to participate in brain-wave experiments at Richard Davidson's lab at the University of Wisconsin. Donning chain-mail hoods of electrodes and contemplating universal peace and love, the monks show EEG patterns that appeared to be laced with higher than normal levels of gamma waves—even after they stopped meditating. These higher-frequency vibrations have been proposed as a mechanism for synchronizing separate brain modules—auditory, visual, etc.—to produce a unified perception of the world. How the brain does this is what philosophers call "the binding problem." Maybe the monks can bind these parts so tightly that everything seems like one—a mystical short circuit.

Out of politeness, perhaps, or a hope for future Templeton grants, neurotheologists tend to play down the most direct implication of their research—that religious ecstasy is an illusion. Harder to finesse are studies suggesting that the visions of mystics like St. Paul and Sister Teresa are a kind of brain damage—temporal lobe epilepsy, or TLE for short. The disorder found its way into literature as long ago as 1869 when Dostoevsky, in The Idiot, described epileptic feelings of "a wonderful inner light." In his novel Lying Awake, Mark Salzman tells of a cloistered Carmelite nun who must decide whether to let a neurosurgeon go after the cerebral misfirings that caused disabling headaches, while letting her talk with God.

For those not prone to seizures, Michael Persinger of Laurentian University promises to induce similar symptoms by scrambling the brain with magnetic fields. After donning a helmet wired with electromagnets, some subjects reported experiences they described as mystical, or at least misty. When Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, put on the hood, it only made him a little dizzy. Persinger was quick to note that Dawkins had scored way below average on a psychological questionnaire measuring temporal lobe sensitivity—hints of a neurobiological correlate for atheism. (Click here for a Slate writer's first-hand account of Persinger's "God machine" and other mystical neurotechnologies.)

Persinger hypothesizes that the electromagnetic disruption causes one hemisphere of the brain to cut loose from the other and sense it as a separate presence, your invisible friend. Those who remember Julian Jaynes' 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, may read this with a sense of déjà vu (possibly another temporal lobe disorder). Jaynes, who taught psychology at Princeton, proposed that as recently as 3,000 years ago, the left and right hemispheres were like two separate beings. Signals from the right brain were interpreted by the left as the voice of God. It was a merger between these cranial cohabitants that formed the self with its inner voice of reason. Maybe a spontaneous reversal of this great leap forward gives us holy men. Then again, maybe the gods created the right hemisphere for use as a spiritual transceiver.

So it goes, round and round. Either the brain naturally or through a malfunction manufactures religious delusions, or some otherworldly presence speaks to homo sapiens through the language of neurological pulses. Hot in pursuit of this undecidable proposition, neurotheology will keep on churning out data—but when it comes to the biggest questions, it will never have much to say.

Correction, April 26, 2007: This piece originally misidentified Sun-Maid as "Sunkist."

======================================





CHOOSING GODS?

Again, I don't necessarily believe in deity as conceptualized in any one creed. If forced to choose, I feel more comfortable choosing particular individuals as models of ethical fitness rather than institutional creeds. And if forced to choose certain individuals, then I'd say that the most closely vetted individuals via modern secular scholarship who appear to have genuine interaction with deity of some kind, and whose ethics also seem to stand up to the strictest scrutiny, are the ones I'd start with in making any choice among different gods. We probably come closer to the essence of any deity that's out there by restricting ourselves to the earliest textual strata on the most closely vetted individuals, courtesy of modern secular scholarship, than we do by adherence to any one creed.

For one thing, I would tend to weigh the individual _human_ factor in each case far more heavily than many others whom I know. This is why one crucial factor that matters most to me is the earliest and least "tweaked" textual stratum and what it indicates about the specific founder involved at each creed's outset.

There is sometimes a lot of heavily tweaked textual material that tends to emerge roughly around four or five hundred years or so after each known founder is long gone. But, though heavily manipulated, that later material (sometimes within each creed's canon for sometimes bogus reasons and sometimes not) often tends to overshadow, in the minds of each creed's believers, the earlier material/information on an original founder duly available in much earlier (and more reliable) strata.

In plain English, since I depend on first knowing what each human founder was personally like and the status of his ethics, social/cultural/personal etc, before viewing any one creed as superseding any other, that means I depend heavily on the most modern, most secular scholarship to determine which texts in a creed's canon _most_ _likely_ reflect the earliest record on that founder's virtues and/or vices. Maybe one can't always be certain that such-or-such a textual stratum is definitively earlier than some other textual stratum. But I still feel it's more sensible to seek out the most up-to-date "guesstimate" on that instead of just swallowing a whole creed's canon and traditions wholesale.

I do deal here with whatever documentary evidence we have as to the various ways in which deity concepts have been introduced by individual human beings through the millennia. Those ways appear to often involve new social norms involving a raising of consciousness/conscience respecting the more vulnerable among us. That's what I basically focus on here. I focus less on the unfortunate fact that "followers" frequently take over at later stages and subvert the concepts from individual human pathbreakers into religious institutions that are wholly geared toward maintaining power and wealth instead. That later stage, though, does not address the context in which counter-cultural "takes" on altruism and theism are first advanced autonomously by some lone individual. It's that earlier stage for which we also have some documentary evidence, and it's now up to the brain researchers of the 21st and the 22nd centuries (if there will be a 22nd century at all) to scrutinize all of this further, with more scientific rigor than has so far been the case. Is the brain -- particularly the frontal cortex, which is the most evolved sector of the brain -- just playing mean tricks on the however well-meaning and path-breaking altruists and founders who strike out in ever-newer "takes" (however delusionally?) for a re-minted empathy of some kind and a re-minted theism of some kind? Or are these founding pathbreakers' brains genuinely awake to something real that others can only dimly glimpse?

We don't know -- yet. But I am definitely one of those who reposes considerable trust in science and in scientific research -- both in analyzing the workings of the brain and in analyzing other pertinent aspects here as well -- to answer these and related questions some day.

In evaluating the founders behind these creeds and the earliest texts on them, my chief parameters are

A) Do we have relatively early accounts that the most skeptical scholars would place no later than three centuries or so, if that, from the time they actually lived?

B) Did these founders introduce brand new ethics paradigms that exerted a maximum culture-changing effect on entire cultures thousands of years later?

C) Did they introduce brand new ethics paradigms that seemed wholly taken up with some basic empathy/compassion for others?

D) Are there a number of accounts about their personal lives that, no matter the perspective, seem to uniformly suggest they really did _walk_ their elevated and pioneering empathy-in-ethics talk 24/7, once they had their revelation that made them ethics pioneers?

Let's now look again at some of these founders in the light of these four parameters, A through D.





Creeds & their Historical Strata

I

1. Getting down to cases, The Rigveda is the earliest Hindu religious text -- the bulk of it from the mid-second-millennium b.c.e. It's a series of devotional poems. Author unknown, but a certain Lord Krishna of the late fourth millennium b.c.e. is sometimes reckoned the immediate inspirer of the traditions reflected in the poems. One highly symbolic account of Krishna's life can be found in a much later text, the tenth Canto of the S'rimad Bhagavatam, from the early Mediaeval period, although his story first appears in much sketchier form in the Mahabharata, ca. the middle centuries of the 1st millennium b.c.e. Like many a founder in many a belief tradition stretching back ages, there are countless questions concerning how much of what we read of this figure can be taken at face value. While I don't take all the stories as being history -- since it's clear that highly symbolic myth is also involved -- the actual names of those human players who impact on an entire community might still be partly historical. So I'm ready to accept the possibility that someone like Krishna really played some kind of foundational role ca. 3100 B.C.E., even though the events that swirled around his assuming that role were very likely different from those described in the first-millennium-b.c.e Mahabharata (where the Bhagavad-gita is also found) and elsewhere. Essentially, the Hindu tradition, the oldest tradition still practiced by millions around the world, appears to have been partly inspired by Krishna, and one important detail may possibly be historical: The love Krishna inspired may have been partly due to his having reportedly replaced a vicious tyrant (called Kamsa in Indian tradition). In other words, read this way, Krishna brought freedom to his people (do you recall Urukagina in ancient Sumeria?). Ironically, in the tenth and latest book of the Rigveda, assembled at least a century or so after the bulk of the collection, the Purusha Sukta became a Scriptural justification for the noxious caste system! So we see right here a clear example in which a later text has adversely impacted a creed to its ethical detriment. In addition, the earliest direct description of this creed's founder is a couple of thousand years later than the time he lived, so we may not be on very solid ground in establishing the status of his ethical probity. Given all this, the integrity of this creed, with all its textual imponderables, could be somewhat nebulous, while the stance of its founder is only preserved thousands of years later. This creed, then, falls short on parameters A and D.

2. The earliest extant example of caring for the vulnerable among us comes from the third millennium B.C.E. in ancient Sumeria. Urukagina, the pioneering lawgiver and first (known) social and religious reformer in our modern sense, is the first to coin the phrase "widow and orphan" as symbolic of those unjustly (and/or inadvertently) prey to the powerful and better-off. Urukagina couples that with a solemn claim that his own god, Ningirsu, mandates that he care for the vulnerable above all others. This marks a distinct break with the prior understanding of deity as a safeguard for the mighty instead. It is probably the first instance of someone making any such connection at all. Some scholars today view Urukagina as the precursor for the 2nd-millennium-B.C.E. laws of Hammurrabi and Moses. Not only is Urukagina the first known human being to introduce the concept of "freedom" ("Amagi"), his reforms also include radical measures aimed at relieving families of crushing debts, at leaving humble citizens free to name their own price for goods previously yanked summarily out of their hands by the financial and royal elite, at allowing key resources throughout the realm to be used in common rather than confounding the roles of superviser and owner as had previously been the case, at rebuilding temples where the ministers had strictly pastoral duties and much less power over any properties than they had had previously, and so on. Texts preserving his reforms are found on Sumerian clay tablets of the third millennium b.c.e. It would appear that the textual record for Urukagina is somewhat more reliable than that for Krishna. Given all this, we're probably on solid ground in viewing Urukagina as checking off on all four parameters.

3. The Ten Commandments remains of incalculable importance to the history of jurisprudence. Whether assembled in its final form by Judaic writers in the first millennium B.C.E. or by Moses himself in c.1300 b.c.e., the achievement itself is significant enough for its author to be included in a survey like this. The only human name associated with this code is Moses, and although the Pentateuch or Torah describes Moses's death, much of the rest of its narrative is traditionally ascribed to Moses. Be that as it may, and however we take the Torah, it remains a superb literary achievement. If Moses was indeed the author of most of it, that is yet another reason to include Moses in this survey of human giants. Finally, of course, he is a foundational figure in Judaism, so his contribution is as much bound in with the spiritual as with the judicial. The earliest stratum of text in both Exodus and the Torah as a whole is generally taken to be the so-called J passages, distinguished chiefly by the term(s) applied to deity. The J passages in Exodus deal with certain aspects of Moses' story, but not all. The E passages -- the next-oldest layer -- provide the full text of the Ten Commandments, for instance. What emerges from these texts, preserved in a collection of books roughly three hundred years after the best "guesstimate" of Moses' dates, is a man who does understand what injustice is, but who, as a youth, is not above killing someone: Horrified by an Egyptian slave-driver's wanton cruelty, he kills him out of a sheer sense of outrage. Since this episode is right there in a J passage, we can only infer that this episode was associated with him from the earliest days of the Judaic tradition. What's striking is how ethically rigorous he is with himself, once he has his revelation. The written record seems to show that once he has his revelation, everything about him checks off on all four parameters.

4. Wen Wang is generally assumed to be the writer of the I Ching, of the 12th century b.c.e., a set of Chinese aphorisms, primarily significant for having introduced the concept of yin and yang and for having helped cement the usage of the term Tian for both heaven and deity interchangeably. There are some vague indications that the I Ching may have been written in prison, although a few scholars have doubted that. Beyond that, the I Ching continued to shape Chinese sensibilities some thousands of years after it was written. Of Wen Wang himself, not much is known beyond his authorship of the I Ching. Thus, this creed falls short on parameter #D.

5. It's Hesiod, from the eighth century b.c.e., who presents the classic "picture" of the early cosmos as conceived in ancient Greek tradition, his Theogony. In addition to the centrality of his Theogony, Hesiod, according to one account, directly influences the Constitution of Orchomenus, whose designers view him as "hearth-founder". He may thus be the earliest extant designer of a government Constitution who is known by name. But another account places the Constitution of Orchomenus as post-Hesiod, the term "hearth-founder" referencing the place for his ashes instead. Beyond that, his biography is shrouded in uncertainty. This creed falls short on #D.

6. Zarathustra is an even more shadowy figure. We know he was probably responsible for composing the Gathas central to his creed. But beyond that, scholars are not even sure of his dates, which could range anywhere from the 6th century b.c.e. back to the 12th b.c.e.! Thus, this creed falls short on A and D.

7. Matters are practically as murky for Daoism, in which the chief text, the Tao-te-king, is sometimes ascribed to a certain Lao-tze and sometimes not. Here, then, we have a case in which even if there were detailed information on a "founder" (and in Lao-tze's case there isn't), we can't even be sure that that's where the creed is really "coming from". The dates for this figure range widely, from the 6th century b.c.e. to the fourth or possibly even later. So this creed falls short on A and D.

8. Prince Siddhartha Gautama was called Buddha by his followers -- ca. 560 - 480 b.c.e. -- and is the founder of Buddhism. The number of Buddhist texts are endless. The earliest collection is the Tripitaka in the Pali language. In that collection is a book of sermons, the Digha-Nikaya, that is usually viewed as the earliest and directest record we have of Buddha's own "voice". What sets Buddha apart from his contemporaries is his utter repudiation of any violence, plus the apparent complexity of some of his thoughts. He rejected the caste system altogether. He also is the introducer (for his culture) of the idea "that (from time to time) a Tath¤gata is born into the world, an Arahat, a fully awakened one, abounding, in wisdom and goodness, happy, with knowledge of the worlds, unsurpassed as a guide to mortals willing to be led, a teacher of gods and men, a Blessed One, a Buddha". The worst that's said of him in his own era is that he inadvertently made a number of young men lose interest in getting married and raising a family, they were so taken up with the Buddha lifestyle of preaching non-violence and living as a wanderer. And even the most indifferent accounts appear to validate his personal probity and genuinely peaceful ways 24/7. The earliest accounts of this man's reflections (in the Digha-Nikaya) seem no later than a couple of centuries, if that, from Buddha's lifetime. So he would be the third who checks off on all six parameters.

9. Confucius's world was politics. He came up in a particularly violent time -- c. 551-479 B.C.E. -- and there may have been moments, especially toward the end of his life, when he may have thought his lifelong efforts at reining in the arrogance and violence of those in power whom he met were pointless. But after his death, there was a remarkable resurgence of interest in the reciprocal and considerate way of public life that he had espoused. Confucianism thus arose despite the attempts of some to destroy Confucian texts after his death. The earliest text reflecting his thoughts is now taken to be Chapters 4 through 8 of the Analects, emerging two centuries at most from the time he lived. Considered China's greatest philosopher, as well as a rallying point for political reform, his example may have partly helped foster one of the most stable cultures that humanity has yet seen, starting with the Han dynasty. As with Moses, Confucius's stature as effectively the founder of Confucianism ties him in with a tradition that is as much involved with the spiritual as with the secular, although, unlike Moses, the secular component in Confucius involves the political more than the judicial. No accounts ever question his rigorous consistency and integrity in walking his talk at all times. So he is the fourth who checks off on all parameters.

10. Philosophy itself has sometimes been described (hyperbolically, of course) as "footnotes to Plato". But there would probably have been no Plato at all without Socrates -- 470 - 399 b.c.e. If we're talking of ethics, if we're talking of self-knowledge, if we're talking of right and wrong, if we're talking of the very nature of reality itself, it seems impossible to discuss any of these things without either Socrates or Plato eventually coming up. Socrates is the godfather of the Peripatetic school, and Plato and Aristotle's influence, huge as it has been, owes its (sometimes "Puck-ish") spirit of inquiry to the endless teasing, sometimes in jest and sometimes in deadly earnest, that Socrates initiated 2,500 years ago. That is a loooooooooong time, and for a solitary eccentric to remain a household word for all that time may be a unique accomplishment in and of itself. Most scholars assume that the texts that come closest to Socrates' "voice" are probably Plato's earliest dialogues, when Plato was not yet using Socrates routinely as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. Among those earliest dialogues are the Apology and the Crito, written scarcely a generation after Socrates' death (very possibly sooner), which are usually taken as about the closest we can hope to get at grasping what happened during and immediately after Socrates's trial. The Apology purports to be a direct representation of Socrates's own defense on the very day he was condemned. Another possible source, and one that differs from the Apology and the Crito in various ways, is the account of the trial from Xenophon. No serious account of this man seems to throw doubt on his having had tremendous personal integrity at all times, however irritating he may have sometimes been to others. And his experience of the divine, the voice that he habitually heard from childhood on, indicates an experience of the divine that is extremely intense and close. Like the other four, Socrates too checks off on all four parameters.

11. Service/living for others was spotlighted by Jesus -- 4 b.c.e. - 30 c.e. -- more than by anyone else -- even one's enemies were to be loved. Called Christ by followers, his impact led to the founding of Christianity. He also changed the way years are reckoned. Scholars take the three Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, as the earliest texts relating to his life, coming approximately a generation after he died. Written from a strongly devotional point of view, they contrast with the somewhat more noncommittal Josephus, whose recollections include two references to a Christ: one that may reflect later tampering -- the form we have it in and a quote of it in Arabic diverge -- and another that refers to Jesus's brother James, and that one seems better confirmed by a less divergent and much earlier quote elsewhere. In the three Synoptics, while Mark seems the earliest, there appear to be fragments of an even earlier sayings tradition, sometimes termed "Q", embedded in Matthew and Luke. Jesus's Sermon on the Mount/Plain seems largely drawn from the earliest "Q" material. This early material also appears to confirm that Jesus Christ personally claimed God as "my father", although there is controversy as to what precisely that is supposed to mean. Since, though, this personal claim of his appears in the very earliest textual strata, one must conclude that his experiential claim for closeness with the divine was as intense and close as Buddha's or Socrates'. Like those other two creeds, this one too appears to check off on all four parameters.

12. Mohammed -- 570 - 632 -- prophet and founder of Islam, the most recent faith tradition to be adopted by millions, was an extremely influential political and military leader. Reckoned the author of the Koran, he, like Buddha, advanced the idea of recurrent sages with special wisdom, although Islamic tradition characterizes them specifically as "prophets of God". Mohammed started as a simple believer and propounder of a new creed, but when family members were threatened, he withdrew to Medina, where he became a military chieftain. Rough raids by his followers immediately outside Medina alternated with acts of uncommon kindness on his part. His is a checquered odyssey, ethically, until he becomes the chief peacemaker of his time. Before then, he would even agree, at one point, to one lowly soldier's request that all the defeated combatants in a victorious battle at Qurayza(sp.?) be summarily executed! He eventually journeyed back to Mecca to talk with his biggest enemies, journeying there with no weapons, successfully starting a peace process involving all the area's feuding tribes. But soon after his death, strife resumed, even though the ecumenical idea of many "prophets of God" did bear fruit in tolerant places like the surprisingly pluralist Andalusian Spain in the Middle Ages. This man certainly made himself some enemies in his lifetime, although it is surprising just how many of them would later became his friends once he initiated his peace-making odyssey. Still, some later accounts from those whom he had offended make it clear that he could be very tough and ruthless on certain occasions. Accounts of him in the Hadith, compiled within our three-century mark, present a man of some complexity, ready to be amazingly generous and forgiving on occasion, but also recognizably a military chieftain above all else when needed. This creed falls somewhat short, then, on D.

13. Bahá’u’lláh -- 1817 - 1892 -- was the founder of the Bahai faith and an advocate for world peace. He conceived of the entire globe as a single village long before others took up the idea in the political realm. For this alone, he has to be reckoned one of the most far-sighted sages of the past few hundred years, even though his impact so far has not matched the cultural impact of others in this retrospective, and thus this creed's record is incomplete on B. Check back in a thousand years or so............ The fundamentals of the Bahai faith are preserved in two written books written by Bahá’u’lláh himself and issued in his lifetime, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and the Kitáb-i-Íqán. There are contemporary accounts of him from a number of different perspectives, and they all seem to show a person of great forbearance and insight. Thus, this creed only falls short on B.

From this retrospective, Urukagina, Moses, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, Socrates and Jesus Christ emerge as possibly the nearest to God -- or whatever this "presence" is that slowly nudges/prods social conscience along. The others all have varying question-marks over them. If you want me to further rate the various levels of those remaining ten, I'm not afraid to attempt that and let the chips fall where they may. But this is already too long, so I'll only do that by invitation.

II

In the meantime, whatever ingredients Urukagina, Moses, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, Socrates and Jesus Christ agree on when it comes to their "ingredients" in "God" are the only "ingredients" that I might provisionally ascribe to God. To begin with, there are certain "ingredients" I would _not_ ascribe to "God" --

You see, Buddha says that God is not a creator, so I'd put the creator notion to one side.

You see, Socrates never makes a strong claim for there being an afterlife, so I'd also put the afterlife claim to one side.

And so on and so forth.

What all six of these figures seem to agree on is what I stressed in my preamble: consciousness-raising -- or conscience-raising, if you will -- God purely as a mental prod to our social conscience, in other words. That makes God neither male nor female; it makes God neither spirit nor body. It does make God, though, an active presence in our most evolved brains.

And this could hark back to the four web-pages that I cited earlier, and also the focus on the prefrontal cortex, the most evolved part of our brains, and the part that modern research shows is the most engaged part in both the act of A) empathizing with our fellow creatures in distress and the act of B) Buddhist meditation.



Provisional Conclusion

My provisional conclusion, that a random series of social doctrines -- often driven by this or that one's equally random social conscience -- have now brought us to a point where we seem to glimpse the possibility of a finer social norm than currently prevails, is strictly that: provisional. Likewise, my perception of an uncommon coincidence, the coincidence that -- when first advanced -- the earliest self-centered philosophies tend to come first out of equally pioneering doctrines of materialism/atheism, while the earliest altruistic philosophies tend to come first out of equally counter-cultural "takes" on deity, is also provisional. It should be theoretically possible to show that these patterns don't always obtain. Surprisingly, after having assembled the originals of all these opposing doctrines for 20 years or so, I've yet to see this apparent pattern broken. Now I don't rule out coincidence. But since I'm dealing with probabilities only -- for now -- the probabilities seem to point in the direction of a conclusion that a 5,000-year coincidence like this is more unlikely than not. There seems, more likely than not, to be no coincidence at all here but some kind of direct symbiotic relationship of some kind between _originating_ "self-ism" and equally _originating_ materialism/atheism, on the one hand, and _originating_ selflessness and equally _originating_ theism of some general kind, on the other.

Some may respond, "So what if the most path-breaking altruistic doctrines coincide invariably with the most path-breaking "takes" on deity? It's all a series of coincidences." At the same time, shouldn't one ask if such a high degree of coincidence can so easily be written off that glibly ........ a 5,000-year coincidence? If it can be written off so easily, I'd frankly like to know the nuts and bolts of such an argument. So far, no one has bothered to show me those.

We're faced with two possible answers, either one flouting the principle of Occam's Razor. To suppose a deity is to suppose an entity with certain attributes that might equally well be attributed instead to the cosmos as a whole -- i.e., if one can suppose a continually present and uncreated god, then why not just accept a continually expanding and crunching cosmos instead, something we all know, and just get rid of a middle man?

On the other hand, to suppose no deity at all is to suppose a coincidental pattern among the most egalitarian cultural revolutionaries that has prevailed for 5,000 years, a pattern complemented by the rather consistently disconcerting contexts of the most self-centered social doctrines during the last 3,000. There is _probably_, instead, more of a likelihood that what the Urukaginas and the Buddhas and the Jesuses are responding to is more real than not, particularly in light of the disconcerting pattern from pioneering materialists advancing precisely in the opposite direction. From this, I conclude that some form of deity may be likely, though still hardly certain.

While I still don't believe that there is anything purposive to the process whereby altruistic counter-culturalists sometimes arrive at a vague -- or not so vague -- sense of deity, I do now guess that a tendency is innate in all of us, depending on random conditions, to grow more aware of an altruistic alternative through a higher awareness of some presence (deity?) as well, once certain dire environmental or social pressures are applied. That awareness does not happen through prior "design" but through a stumbling, random process whereby social and altruistic consciousness is sometimes raised barely in time to forestall social disaster, as in the case of Confucius, or not at all, as seems likely to be the case in this century, possibly humanity's last century on Earth.

I recognize that the notion that human beings come at the discovery of "deity" -- or whatever this "presence" really is -- through the individual initiative of pioneering path-breakers under random conditions that have nothing to do with a "design", or with any purposive plan from that deity at all, may offend both atheists and theists alike. But hey, I can't help that.

My thanks to those here with the persistence to read through this whoooooooole thing!

Thoughts?

Stein

Thanks to the moderators for placing the fullest statement of my views on all this here -- which is why I have no desire to post it in any abbreviated form again. Here, I say about as much as I can say (plenty!) on all this. It's in its own thread, and since it's the completest statement I could possibly assemble, I'm happy to let it speak for itself here and be subject to scrutiny by those patient enough to read it, finally, in its entirety.

Cheers,

Stein

Do you think RealityRules wanted you to write a book?

THWOTH wrote:Do you think RealityRules wanted you to write a book?

Probably not. But it was just as well that RealityRules learned sooner rather than later that some things don't have a pat answer.

Patly,

Stein

Is your deism true?

THWOTH wrote:Is your deism true?

My type of deism as outlined here is more likely true than any alternative I know. It is not certain.

What makes this sort of deism more practical than any other construct I know is its easy falsifiability. If any historian should find but one antitheist and social observer who pioneers her/his antitheism in a culture that is wholly innocent of anything but theism and who is as original in her/his pioneering social ethic as it is wholly empathetic rather than self-centered, then this deist construct can be readily jettisoned and one would have to look for some other unifying characteristic behind altruistic social innovators instead.

Stein

Do you consider the idea that the antecedent influence of selection pressures on our evolved cognitive and behavioural endowments is an insufficient explanation for altruism, for our seemingly innate aspiration to the good, and for who and what we are as a species, as individuals, and as societies?

Are you not simply asserting that the source or root of human virtue lies beyond the immediate, local circumstances (our existence on a ball of compressed matter orbiting a massive fusion reactor etc) - that there is an ultimate source of virtue and goodness which exists somewhere, or consists in something, regardless of our existence?

Didn't we do this whole thing at RDF a few years ago?

THWOTH wrote:Do you consider the idea that the antecedent influence of selection pressures on our evolved cognitive and behavioural endowments is an insufficient explanation for altruism, for our seemingly innate aspiration to the good, and for who and what we are as a species, as individuals, and as societies?

I have considered the idea, but it has struck me that it may be premature to suppose that we can view it as insufficient, and that any urge to view it that way may be premature. Let's wholly seek to understand those selection pressures first before dispensing with them too readily in establishing our model. If we suppose it is an insufficient explanation, can you suggest an alternative?

THWOTH wrote:Are you not simply asserting that the source or root of human virtue lies beyond the immediate, local circumstances (our existence on a ball of compressed matter orbiting a massive fusion reactor etc) - that there is an ultimate source of virtue and goodness which exists somewhere, or consists in something, regardless of our existence?

That depends on what our brains are really like and on just how our frontal cortex processes empathy. Today, we don't know. In a couple of centuries or so, we may. While it is clear that empathic urges and metaphysical urges are emerging as closely related in the frontal cortex, we still don't really know why that is, nor do we know if the symbiotic relationship between the two is due to internal or external factors.

Stein

Stein wrote:

THWOTH wrote:Do you consider the idea that the antecedent influence of selection pressures on our evolved cognitive and behavioural endowments is an insufficient explanation for altruism, for our seemingly innate aspiration to the good, and for who and what we are as a species, as individuals, and as societies?

I have considered the idea, but it has struck me that it may be premature to suppose that we can view it as insufficient, and that any urge to view it that way may be premature. Let's wholly seek to understand those selection pressures first before dispensing with them too readily in establishing our model. If we suppose it is an insufficient explanation, can you suggest an alternative?

No, I think evolution can fully account for our existence.

Stein wrote:

THWOTH wrote:Are you not simply asserting that the source or root of human virtue lies beyond the immediate, local circumstances (our existence on a ball of compressed matter orbiting a massive fusion reactor etc) - that there is an ultimate source of virtue and goodness which exists somewhere, or consists in something, regardless of our existence?

That depends on what our brains are really like and on just how our frontal cortex processes empathy. Today, we don't know. In a couple of centuries or so, we may. While it is clear that empathic urges and metaphysical urges are emerging as closely related in the frontal cortex, we still don't really know why that is, nor do we know if the symbiotic relationship between the two is due to internal or external factors.

Is that a yes or a no? I think you are asserting that goodness is something bestowed upon humans by some external force or factor.

THWOTH wrote:

Stein wrote:

THWOTH wrote:Do you consider the idea that the antecedent influence of selection pressures on our evolved cognitive and behavioural endowments is an insufficient explanation for altruism, for our seemingly innate aspiration to the good, and for who and what we are as a species, as individuals, and as societies?

I have considered the idea, but it has struck me that it may be premature to suppose that we can view it as insufficient, and that any urge to view it that way may be premature. Let's wholly seek to understand those selection pressures first before dispensing with them too readily in establishing our model. If we suppose it is an insufficient explanation, can you suggest an alternative?

No, I think evolution can fully account for our existence.

As do I. At the same time, some of those I've discussed this with have stressed the difference between evolution versus adaptation. David Sloan Wilson remains the most cogent and proficient in this distinction, and you have to go to him for a clearer exposition. Bottom line, though: Adaptation still cannot proceed without various mechanisms -- if not necessarily identical ones throughout -- in play that are also in play in evolution. That's why it makes sense to start with evolution, first and foremost. To go from there and take on board the intricacies of what could be at play in developing empathy entails a sequence of discrete steps through a scientific minefield that is candidly beyond my capacities since my mind has always gravitated toward the liberal arts and never toward science. My layman's fascination with science was a very late development after my synapses were pretty much set. One simply cannot learn a whole new way of thinking at 55 as readily as one can at 25. It's just not possible. Unfortunately, all the real scientific types I've encountered in discussing this subject are so doctrinaire and nauseated at the mere thought of such a thing as empathy that rather than showing me where my reasoning might be faulty, they've simply told me to go jump off a bridge instead. (Could their nausea at the mere notion of empathy be due to their being all Republicans? )

The fact that there are real scientists -- and evolutionary biologists at that -- like David Sloan Wilson and E. Wilson (not related) -- who do take this quite seriously, and who are intensely studying possible adaptive/evolutionary mechanisms behind both empathy and theism, makes no impression on such types as I've encountered because they don't make it their business to stay abreast of the newest professional research. Like it or not, research like Wilson & Wilson emphatically reflects the newest professional research, but it will probably take a while for the more lay-oriented scientific community to catch up.

Unfortunately, I may be dead by then.

THWOTH wrote:

Stein wrote:

That depends on what our brains are really like and on just how our frontal cortex processes empathy. Today, we don't know. In a couple of centuries or so, we may. While it is clear that empathic urges and metaphysical urges are emerging as closely related in the frontal cortex, we still don't really know why that is, nor do we know if the symbiotic relationship between the two is due to internal or external factors.

Is that a yes or a no? I think you are asserting that goodness is something bestowed upon humans by some external force or factor.

As far as the paper trail is concerned, that does seem to emerge as -- marginally -- the greater likelihood. But that is hardly a certainty. So I guess it's a guarded Yes only. It is still possible that the uniform symbiosis of both counter-cultural brands of empathy and counter-cultural brands of theism is due to mechanisms lodged wholly in the frontal cortex without any engagement in external factors. But there are some problems with that involving both the documented way in which the frontal cortex appears to respond to demonstrably external stimuli in other respects, as well as the demonstrable fact that a lifestyle of empathy really does seem to interact with the realities of the outside world much more efficiently. In other words, there does appear to be a productive negotiation of some sort being transacted here with external facts on the ground in the empathy end of the spectrum, making it awkward -- though still not impossible -- to suppose that the identical processes connecting counter-cultural brands of theism are somehow purely internal instead.

Again, only a proper scientist can really unravel this knot. And while I'm happy that researchers like Wilson/Wilson are finally giving this a start, I'm unhappy at the very real probability that I'll be long dead before the fruits of this research percolate to the general public. You see, there are ways -- authentic scientific ways -- in which the line of inquiry found in Wilson/Wilson can readily coordinate with much in the standard evolutionary model as found in basic works of today like Kuschner's and so on. But the thing is, I'm simply not equipped to articulate all that cogently, and I never will be.

Stein

Agrippina wrote:Stein, two things, thank you for all the information, I've stored this up for rereading again later. And the other thing is the Critias bit. I'm pleased to see that here. A very interesting read.

Thanks very much Agrippina. Much appreciated............... BTW ........... er ......... I've been wondering .......... I appreciate you're from South Africa, and I'm consequently ignorant of certain ................ well, that's to say ............ ummm ......... well ............ your .......... uhhh ............. your i.d. says here ............... the thingie on the side of your posts says that you're ..................... Are you really ................. really 100..........???

<should I have, should I haven't, should I have, should I haven't, should I have, should I haven't, should I have, should I haven't, should I ....................>

Stein

What? You never as a gentlelady her real age. Let's just say that Aggie is the Queen Of The Board.

Hi Stein

Could you provide a potted summary of Wilson's distinction between evolution and adaptation argument please?

I'm aware of him through his championing of group selection, which I find uncompelling, particularly as it pertains to the development of altruism and religion. Are his views on the difference between adaptation and evolution distinct or a part of his group selection thesis?

Apologies if this is too far OT, might make an interesting discussion on it's own merits though, and there are a couple of posters here who I suspect would have interesting and informed opinions.

Fenrir wrote:Hi Stein

Could you provide a potted summary of Wilson's distinction between evolution and adaptation argument please?

I'm aware of him through his championing of group selection, which I find uncompelling, particularly as it pertains to the development of altruism and religion. Are his views on the difference between adaptation and evolution distinct or a part of his group selection thesis?

Apologies if this is too far OT, might make an interesting discussion on it's own merits though, and there are a couple of posters here who I suspect would have interesting and informed opinions.

All I can tell you is that the distinction he makes between evolution and adaptation is unrelated to his work on group selection. In fact, the distinction he makes is the standard distinction that all professional evolutionary biologists make. What's special about his exposition, though, is how elegant and clear it is to a hopeless layman like myself. I've read Kushner's(sp.?) book and at least three of Gould's, EOWilson's Consilience, and a fair number of other articles in various professional journals by now, and I still find much of them heavy going. Yet it's in that context that I've found DSWilson so very striking. His lucid and methodical presentation takes the reader along step by step while being also truly energetic and absorbing at the same time. He is a born teacher as well as an indefatigable researcher who takes nothing for granted. If every scientist wrote like him, we might not have so many scientific morons in this country -- unfortunately including myself!

Stein

This is one of the reasons that I can't take anything that D. S. Wilson says or writes seriously.

If you can't stomach the whole thing just skip to minute 20.

Oldskeptic wrote:This is one of the reasons that I can't take anything that D. S. Wilson says or writes seriously.

If you can't stomach the whole thing just skip to minute 20.

With respect, it's time you tell us, please, just what it is that troubles you about DSWilson's distinction between factual reality and practical reality. They are simply modules he uses to work through another distinction: the distinction between beliefs versus behavior. And if it's not the distinction between factual reality and practical reality that bothers you, then what is it that does? Thank you.

To other readers here: We are profoundly indebted here to Oldskeptic for alerting us to this video. It could not be more on-topic. Thank you, Oldskeptic! I urge anyone here who's the least bit interested in this topic to view this video right away.

Cheers,

Stein