Catholic clergy definitely don't ignore sex, but that's off-topic.
Abraham didn't really cut off his male organ. But the symbolism implies, as does priestly celibacy, an underlying understanding that that's what's required to be born of spirit rather than the spit of the serpent. Kierkegaard points out Jesus' parable about knowing the price for erecting something before you start the project. By putting his blade near that erection, and by locking a chastity belt around that area, Abraham and the Roman priesthood proclaim loud and clear that they know the price of being reborn of a non-phallic conception.
Dawkins himself didn't leave the question dangling. He answered it with his well-known concept of the "meme", which is something like an idea that competes and behaves as selfishly as genes do. And we would do well to remember that "selfishness" is only a metaphor here. Hawkins' question actually contains a presupposition that there is something other than the machinery of the brain itself that gives it marching orders. As long as we are speaking metaphorically, I suppose it's reasonable to say that the brain figures out its own marching orders.
To his credit, Dawkins gets a lot right about the mind's gene (the meme). But he can't really get his head around the truth of the mind/body, the meme/gene, problem.
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 200-201.
This is so Luciferian. We can turn against our creator. We alone on earth can rebel against our creator. The animals still bound in the reptile brain, without the new brain, are slaves to the creator. We, on the other hand, share something of his freedom from the laws of physics (bound in the rote mechanics of the biological brain): we alone can use this divine gift not to serve, like the dumb beasts (animals, Jews, Christians) the creator in a new and profound way. No, we can rebel against him. What's he gonna do now that he's shared his eternal nature with us? Lock us up forever? He wouldn't dare. He'd have to be there too since we have his nature and he's One. Surely you don't believe in a suffering God who would suffer the rebels at the cost of his own crucifixion?
What does science ever really prove? It is just a methodology for arriving at the best solution among competing scientific memes, and religious memes are definitely in competition with scientific ones. My point in mentioning science was that the claim is testable and has been experimentally verified in every case where it has been tested, AFAIK. There are no mental functions that take place independently of brain activity, and there are many ways to test the claim, not just by examining blood flow patterns in living brains.
Science proves it has no humility since it's only of late been forced to acknowledge that it can't prove a thing but only make educated guess all of which will eventually be found out to be wrong when new ideas and context shred the former facts and realities. Science is doubly arrogant since theology has known, and stated, that truism, from the beginning. We walk by "faith" not scientific empiricism. "Faith" being the ability to accept non-empirical hypotheses that haven't yet been proven, in order to therein use the human ability to make propitious guesses that magically lead to science fruitfulness.
[A critical [scientific] attitude needs for its raw material, as it were, theories or beliefs which are held more or less dogmatically. Thus, science must start with myths, and with the criticism of myths . . ..
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations p. 50.
Faith provides the very dogmatism, the perception of a revelation (that's yet to be believed or tested), that's the first requirement for the scientific-method. The armchair scientist believes in induction, i.e., the idea that seeing something leads natrually to hypothesizing about it. Popper is clear that never happens even though it seems like it does. No observation ever requires a theory. That's why melanoderms are still cracking coconuts in the jungle while Judeo/Christians are sending selfies back from Mars. Nothing makes a man hypothesize except faith in the human ability to perceive things that aren't yet seen. The aborigine can't perceive the first thing about space travel and that's the end of it. We, on the other hand, walk by faith not by sight says St. Paul. Jewish/Christians memes are the foundation, the dogmatic foundation, for Western culture and science. The Abrahamic myth is the undergirding of the I-phone, space travel, AI:
We owe to Kant the first great attempt to combine a realistic interpretation of natural science with the insight that our scientific theories are not simply the result of a description of nature----of `reading the book of nature' without `prejudice'----but that they are, rather, the products of the human mind: `Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.
Karl Popper, Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, p. 3.
How does quantum mechanics today differ from what Bishop George Berkeley told us two centuries ago, `Esse est percipi', to be is to be perceived.
John Archibald Wheeler.
I'm not ruling out the logical possibility that the activities of physical brains could possibly be transferred to some other physical or spiritual medium before death destroys the brain, but I'm not ruling out a lot of things that don't actually happen, especially when there is no reason to believe that they do. My argument is a plausibility argument, not an absolute proof in a logical or mathematical sense
I quoted Karl Popper and John Wheeler just a second ago. The activities of their brains are registered in the words, which entered my brain, and conceived the memes in my brain that are a Duke's mixing of the brain-ideas of Popper and Wheeler and the brain-ideas already in my brain. The three of them (the disembodies ideas of Popper, Wheeler, and my mind) were involved in a tryst of sorts that conceived and birthed this current writing which, the writing, is me using what the pen-is, like what the penis is, which is to say in order to shoot the offspring of me Popper and Wheeler out into the memesphere to impregnate unsuspecting and unprepared readers. To reproduce Popper and Wheeler's ideas, my mind merely assumed the bottom of the missionary position so that my ideas could be made pregnant by theirs, and deliver up the ideas you're now reading.
If you're you're still reading this (knowing now the mess you've got yourself into), I don't know how you could believe the memes, ideas, thoughts, of a brain come without their own kind of reproductive apparatus, one that doesn't give a damn about a gene, or flesh, since memes undoubtedly have their own way of getting spread by what the pen-is when it spits its ink onto the virgin page in order to get it into the willing mind whose eyes are spread, or open, wide enough. They say the body is just the genes way of making more genes. I say the genes, and the body, are just the arses memes use to get around and to reproduce.
Qualia make for interesting philosophical discussions, but I don't see a coherent point that you are making by bringing them up. Do you think that they have nothing to do with physical brain activity?
Earlier in the thread I quoted Bishop Berkeley implying anyone who doesn't perceive God is "stupid." His argument was partly based on the fact that there are no qualities, or qualia, in the universe. The perception of color, or taste, or sound, don't exist anywhere in the universe. Worse, there is no law written that says such and such wavelengths of light should be experienced as the quality yellow. The same physical qualities that cause the qualia yellow could cause the taste of chocolate, or even a sexual orgasm. As Professor Norman O. Brown stated the case, the schizophrenic's problem isn't a case of unreality confusing the poor soul, it's too much of reality for one person to endure. The lawful functioning of the non-schizophrenic mind tricks the bankrupt soul into believing the qualia he's experience in a lawful and universal manner is far more real than it is: he's living in a fools paradise that will transform into a schizophrenic living hell when what the schizophrenic, Bishop Berkeley, and me for that matter, already know, forces itself upon the poverty of their soul.
John
Dawkins himself didn't leave the question dangling. He answered it with his well-known concept of the "meme", which is something like an idea that competes and behaves as selfishly as genes do. And we would do well to remember that "selfishness" is only a metaphor here. Hawkins' question actually contains a presupposition that there is something other than the machinery of the brain itself that gives it marching orders. As long as we are speaking metaphorically, I suppose it's reasonable to say that the brain figures out its own marching orders.
