Rational Religion


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So, Where the Hell Are We?

It goes like this:

 

Fundamentally, we are a gene pool.

 

For a gene-pool-protective society, almost anything works as long as it is sufficiently organized;

 

And nothing works very well!.

 

It makes logical sense for as many individuals in the pool to be as comfortable as possible during their term of service.  Otherwise, they may decide too early on that it isn't worth it.  (This erodes the quality of the pool, not only by reducing its diversity but by depriving it of an unusually intelligent and perceptive component.)

 

The organism has evolved to exercise great curiosity, to appreciate individual freedom and to pursue an intangible called happiness.  For most people, pleasant association with others is necessary.  The greatest possible exercise of all these elements for the greatest number of people is desirable. (It keeps them stimulated and distracted from the fact that nobody gets out alive.)

 

The aesthetics; art, literature, music, are all ornaments, but their value is inestimable since they contribute to happiness and individual sense of purpose.  Along with pure recreations, they help to make life worth living; and anything which makes life worth living supports the gene pool.

 

There is absolutely no evidence that human intelligence, by itself, has any long-term survival value.  As a matter of fact, all of recorded history attests to our self-destructive, careless poisonousness.

 

We are marvelously adaptive, certainly.  We can live on the Moon or at the bottom of the sea for short periods; above the Arctic Circle or in the middle of a desert for generations.   But we are pretty casual about how we muck up our surroundings. 

 

However, given our present and immediately foreseeable technology, we aren't liable to foul much more than the surface of our own isolated planet.  We will almost certainly leave no scars beyond the planets and satellites of our solar system.

 

One can hope--if not trust-- that by the time we are capable of doing more cosmic damage we will have evolved beyond the penchant for inflicting it.  It's a fairly safe hope.  If we don't reach that point we will have long since ceased evolving; or inflicting damage.

 

(On the other hand, the evidence is that we haven't evolved, as a species, for a long, long time.  Our Cro-Magnon minds have been sufficient to deal with all the manageable contingencies of our environment, up to now.   And for as long as we have records, there have always been a few people who were adapted to following the Golden Rule.)

 

Look at the surfaces of all the uneroded bodies in the solar system.  Four billion years of hard-edged cratered record attest what happens to anything which does not conform to the clockwork balance of the Universe.

 

Splat!   Your molecules, right down to your quarks and gluons, become part of something else!