Posted: Sep 17, 2019 1:05 pm
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:Cito di Pense wrote:What is it that makes you think there's a significant predator-prey relation to develop? Your observations of modern humans and modern hyenas?
Your evasive reply shows that in your opinion there wasn’t a significant relationship between our ancestors and predators like hyena. That is my point, that (rightly or wrongly) the atheist ideology drives towards visualising our ancestors “evolving” like actors on an empty stage. You express that position extremely.
I don't, JJ. That's your beef and your bigotry, and (ultimately) merely displays your obsession with atheism. You are now stuck leaving no middle ground between your strawmanning of "atheistic" evolution theory as positing early humans "evolving like actors on an empty stage" and early humans subject to a variety of conditions, only one of which is predators, but along with, and of considerable significance, for example, their sociality (including reproductive strategies) and their diet. You'd say avoiding predators drove sociality, but that's your obsession with predator-prey relations and your myopic rejection of anything that doesn't support your creotard god-bothering. You've had this explained to you multiple times, so I'll leave you to your obsessions and your bigotry on this point.
Actually I wouldn’t say that avoiding predators drove sociality; rather, it seems to me that the human faculty of speech has enabled huge social organisation, obscuring any underlying animal socality we might have.
Cito di Pense wrote: Please understand that the idiotic posturing in which you're engaged isn't enhancing my regard of theists. I've had civil conversations with at least a few theists; your bigotry and obsession makes such an outcome at least unlikely. I don't know what I should do to appease you, except to genuflect to your creationist masturbation fantasy. It can't be that you take yourself so seriously as an evolutionary biologist. Evolutionary biologists, theist or otherwise, would treat you as a caricature of a biologist as which you present yourself.
The last authority I quoted to make a point about human origin story, was a professor of geography (Maslin). I have as much right to use and discuss findings by biologists as he does and as you do.
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote: I didn’t express a terror of hyena, just that their appearance would naturally have grabbed the attention of an animal the size of Australopithecus, appreciating that they didn’t have guns. If your sneer means anything it is that hyenas would not have grabbed their attention.
It's just my opinion, JJ, but I do think you're projecting your own terror onto early humans. Terror by itself is disabling. You know nothing about how frequently early humans confronted predators and what strategies they employed to minimize the danger when they appeared. All you are doing is projecting your own responses onto them, and that's in service, ulitmately, of your (idiosyncratic) theist ideology. You're still stuck being a kind of loner in your obsessions with both predator-prey relations and with atheism in general. I wish I knew why you find atheism so disturbing, because it is such a minority position, but more on that coming up shortly.
Again, you impute a position to me that I have never expressed. I’m not “disturbed” by atheism, I just think that atheist ideology has messed up the human origin story, and that the human origin story is important and interesting.
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:That’s most personally offensive. I actually developed my understanding of the effect of atheist ideology on the human origin story, from attending to what people like you say about human origins.
Your obsession with atheism, unjustified, and your disgust are not useful weapons for you in this debate. Take all the offense you like. You still need to get past your obsessions with atheism and with your idiosyncratic ideas about early human evolution. I don't expect you ever will, and you will just die someday, and your place will be taken by some theistic idiot or other. You don't believe death is the end, though, so I hope you find your beliefs comforting in the face of all the offense you're taking.
What I found personally offensive was your text :” ”Are you afraid something is going to bite off your dick? By my estimation, you're too old to do much but wave your hand at your dick. You developed that technique from concocting your theories of human evolution”.
Humans are distinctively enabled, in having speech and a symbiotic-like relationship with objects. How these faculties were created is a guide to how creation has worked in general.
Cito di Pense wrote: If humans are created, then their destructive potential was created. So your story has to deal with that. Why do you separate speech and tool use from every other characteristic of humans, including their over-active endocrine systems? Sometimes that just leads to being terrified, and sometimes it leads to strong pair bonding and procreation. Each is a factor in producing the destructive effects you're now obsessing about.?
I was talking about the creation of the distinctive human faculties of speech and symbiotic-like relation with objects; at one time these didn’t exist, now they do, that is creation. I don’t know about our over-active endocrine systems; I suppose endocrine levels of activity are controlled by circumstance, these systems are shared with many other species and were created a long time ago.
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:What I learn from past catastrophes is that the ability on this planet, for creation to continue, has recovered with notable power: see the red curve in this graph which I have put up before:
Creation will continue, regardless, even if it's back to microbes on the deep ocean floor. Somebody should ask you why you think it cannot recover after human activity has done its thing. Well? Do you want to give us some more nonsense about humans as the intended ultimate product of creation?
That graph I posted demonstrated exactly that the creation will probably continue regardless. Where it will lead is radically unpredictable.
”Men have knowledge of the present.
As for the future, the gods know it,
Alone and fully enlightened” (Cavafy)
NOT knowing the creative future is the human condition, distinguishing us from gods.
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:I know plenty of atheists who feel just as responsible, guilty and worried about the 6th extinction as theists. Some Christian denominations do foreground the principle “God is in charge”, which can imply “just let go”, like you say. Maybe humans are in the same condition as a culture in a petri dish, consuming all the resources then they die. Or maybe the appearance of speech, “the Word” in the mouth and minds of our troublesome species, is a game changer there also. I don’t know, and that radically unpredictable feature of the Creation, together with it’s marvellous products hitherto (cf the movie microcosmos) is the point I want to make now.
Well, after all the words you've written, I can see you've thrown in your lot with the Word. Words, of course, cut both ways, and I can write a lot of them, too, as you see. I'm actually better with words than you are, but that's partly a function of our genetics and partly a function of the environments in which we have operated.
Crumbs.
Yes words are important, truth is important, truth is expressed in words that lock into our minds whether we like it or not.
Cito di Pense wrote: Frankly, JJ, just stow it, because you haven't managed to discover why your rant isn't working. Blame it on ideology, but repeating yourself continues to be ineffective.
What, in all the words you have written Cito, would incline me to believe that it is other than ideology that is driving you? Consider the words you fling around. A sample: idiotic creationist diatribes, rant, fucking dead, masturbation, fantasy.