The Reptile-Brain, the Atheist, and the Jew.

[John D. Brey]

See Edward O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of the Earth.

Or, Consilience.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

More importantly, however, you have neglected something of potentially enormous importance -- and that is that many (actually the vast majority of) species have gone extinct, even while evolution continues to act as it always has.

Your last statement, that evolution continues to act as it always has, is what Dawkins, Dennett, and their brood, are admitting is no longer the case.

Man's freewill, his ability to think past the desires of the gene, and biology, represent something completely new on the planet.

For billions of years, the gene dictated evolution. Alas, its days are now numbered. And what was once thought of as mindless evolution, is now completely mindful of where it's going, what it is, and where it came from.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

If evolution is not going to be the end of us as a species it will be because evolution takes that next step -- and let's us see ourselves not as this group or that group, this colour or that colour, this religion or culture or language but as all just HUMAN. If evolution can get us there, we have a chance. If it cannot, I do not see much future for humanity.

Evolution is now a tool under our control. We are now endowed with the spirit that guided evolution to its final grand creation: the Jew, and the Christian.

Sit back and watch. We'll take it from here.



John

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Your last statement, that evolution continues to act as it always has, is what Dawkins, Dennett, and their brood, are admitting is no longer the case.

Man's freewill, his ability to think past the desires of the gene, and biology, represent something completely new on the planet.

For billions of years, the gene dictated evolution. Alas, its days are now numbered. And what was once thought of as mindless evolution, is now completely mindful of where it's going, what it is, and where it came from.



John

No, the gene has been responsible for our cognitive abilities, too. And the gene, if some alteration makes it conducive to gene survival, can take those abilities away.

Even if only through making us the very instrument by which it accomplishes that. Feedback at its very finest.

 

[lukethethird]

The Reptile-Brain, the Atheist, and the Jew.
...walk into a bar and the bartender says, is this some kind of a joke?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Or, Consilience.



John

Consilience is a book in which I think that Wilson stepped too far over the edge. It does so because in it, Wilson was seeking "moral rules" where there aren't any -- in evolution itself. Evolution isn't in the slightest interested in such concerns (or wouldn't be, if evolution was itself conscious enough to take interest in anything).

 

[John D. Brey]

Consilience is a book in which I think that Wilson stepped too far over the edge. It does so because in it, Wilson was seeking "moral rules" where there aren't any -- in evolution itself. Evolution isn't in the slightest interested in such concerns (or wouldn't be, if evolution was itself conscious enough to take interest in anything).

I hadn't read, The Social Conquest of the Earth. But I just ordered it and am looking forward to reading it next week.



John

 

[Samael_Khan]

Dawkins and Hawkins note that evolution first presents the "reptile" brain, which in Dawkins and Hawkins nomenclature, represents something nearly identical to what Paul, and the Apostles of the Epistles, refer to as the "old man" or the "carnal man."

In Paul's letters, this carnal man, this old man (Dawkins and Hawkins literally speak of the "old" brain), is obsessed with sex, murder, passions, thievery, arrogance, and whatever brings stimulation and joy to the individual and his personal progeny. Dawkins and Hawkins notations concerning the "old," "reptilian," brain, are almost identical to Paul's rendering of the "old man." Hawkins and Dawkins claims concerning the reptile, prehuman brain, is something every Christians would related directly to Paul's "old man."

Hawkins then comes to the new brain, the cerebral cortex, which is no longer trapped in the trappings of mere gene survival, lust for sex, personal advancement, so much as it produces, and is most at home, in the replication of knowledge, for the sake of knowledge, technology, knowing, as the means for a new kind of replication, which has little care for the genes, sex, or the mere triflings of the flesh.

Hawkins explanation of this new brain, which only humans posses, is, once again, gross plagiarism of Paul's teaching concerning the "new man," the new species (2 Corinthians 5:17), who must put off the lust of the flesh, and greed of the eyes, and the desires for personal gain, and seek only truth, virtue, knowledge of good, and truth, and peace for peace sake, truth for truth's sake (in Judaism, "lishmah").

For four thousand years Jews and Christians have been teaching their offspring that their natural, evolutionary desires, are bad, satanic, i.e., that they must use the God given free will (associated with the cerebral cortext coming fully online) to say no to the gene-machine their soul and spirit is imprisoned in for a time.



John

I don't think that is plagiarism at all, and it isn't specifically christianity that discusses denying the flesh. Eastern religions have discussed rejecting the material world of base desires and transcending it for millenniums.

Also, there is a huge difference between what Dawkins is saying and what the Bible says. Dawkins is saying that we have evolved beyond the reptile brain, so we can overpower base desires because of our brains. The Bible doesn't mention the state of the brain. Even with the full brain humans are sinful and can only overcome this by the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Dawkins is talking about self transformation. The Bible concerns itself with the spirit shaping you.

 

[RestlessSoul]

We are surely the only creature on earth, capable of defying or amending it’s own nature. Neither a cat nor a crow can hold itself accountable for cruelty - cruelty is in in’s nature, and it must respond to the world according to it’s nature. Only humans can choose not to respond to the impulse towards cruelty; only humans can consciously choose unselfish love over naked self interest.

 

[Clara Tea]

It is the glory of the human cerebral cortex that it -----unique among all animals and unprecedented in all geological time ---has the power to defy the dictates of the selfish genes. We can enjoy sex without procreation. We can devote our lives to philosophy, mathematics, poetry, astrophysics, music, geology, or the warmth of human love, in defiance of the old [reptile] brain's genetic urging that these are a waste of time ---time that "should" be spent fighting rivals and pursuing multiple sexual partners: "As I see it, we have a profound choice to make. It is a choice between favoring the old brain or favoring the new brain. More specifically, do we want our future to be driven by the processes that got us here, namely, natural selection, competition, and the drive of the selfish genes? Or, do we want our future to be driven by intelligence and its desire to understand the world?"

Richard Dawkins, introducing Jeff Hawkins, One Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (bracket mine, based on earlier comment in intro. Last quotation is Dawkins quoting Hawkins).​

Notwithstanding the fact that the paragraph above appears to be trying to sneak its way into Judaeo-Christian terminology, theology, conceptualism, through the back door, nevertheless, there's something even more important about what going on when sworn atheists attempt to adopt these quasi-theological metaphysics without bowing before the spirit of the metaphysical assumptions involved.

Long ago, Dawkins set the stage for Hawkins hawking Dawkins' ideas when he, Dawkins, said:

We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are build 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.​

John

I am deeply offended by your antisemitic assertion (and many past antisemitic assertions) that Jews or atheists are reptiles. Jews are not subhuman.

If you can't win an debate using facts, you should not insult others.

 

[Clara Tea]

We are surely the only creature on earth, capable of defying or amending it’s own nature. Neither a cat nor a crow can hold itself accountable for cruelty - cruelty is in in’s nature, and it must respond to the world according to it’s nature. Only humans can choose not to respond to the impulse towards cruelty; only humans can consciously choose unselfish love over naked self interest.

Cruelty is obviously in human nature, as well.

Cats can be taught to leave mice alone.

 

[Clara Tea]

. . . They share the same genes, and the survival of the brood is a goal of the genes in the brood.

What bother's educated evolutionists is that WEIRD humans act in ways that are deleterious to their own genes, and the genes of their brood, to genes in general. And they act in ways threatening to genes, for the sake of memes, which, in the current day and ages, are (memes are) beginning to act as though they know they won't require genes for much longer.

This is something found throughout the Bible. I.e., the idea that genes are mortal, are sexually depraved, and will not for long be endured by the righteous of the earth.

To see Dawkins and Hawkins beginning to act as though they're the first purveyors of these concepts (meme's discarding their allegiance to genes) is beyond laughable. It's been thought, and taught, and practiced, by Jews and Christians for four-thousand years. And it's only coming to fruition because of the WEIRD people in the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, part of the world. I.e., that part of the world influenced and controlled by Judeo-Christian thought, memes, indoctrination.




John

Jews are human like everyone else. Take your antisemitism elsewhere, Nazi.

 

[Clara Tea]

Evolution is now a tool under our control. We are now endowed with the spirit that guided evolution to its final grand creation: the Jew, and the Christian.

Sit back and watch. We'll take it from here.



John

What is your Nazi idea of evolving Jews? Death camps? Gas chambers? Do you assert that the cruelty of Jews makes them subhuman?

 

[Clara Tea]

The Reptile-Brain, the Atheist, and the Jew.
...walk into a bar and the bartender says, is this some kind of a joke?

Hitler was a problem (6 million Jews horribly murdered with torture and starvation). Yet, Hitler was the tip of the iceberg. Hitler's philosophy is still with us.

In the newspaper, yesterday, was pictures of students with huge Swastika tattoos (Wheatland High School, just north of Sacramento). But this is spreading, as it always does in hard times. Jews get blamed for everything (now the economy is bad and there is a pandemic).

As long as we allow the ilk of John Brey to continue Breying, we will see the spread of Nazism. We must speak up to oppose the spread of this abomination. People's lives are at stake (terrorist bombing, murders). The weak minded are duped into hating Jews.

Take, for example, the weak minded of the Philippines, where the al Qaeda made a home base. They convinced most Filipinos that Jews are evil. They also convinced them that the al Qaeda should be put in charge, and, once they were, they took over and made things miserable.

Abu Sayyaf: Target of Philippine-U.S. Anti-Terrorism Cooperation

The website, above, is about the al Qaeda invading the philippines.

The al Qaeda grows with propaganda, and that propaganda is so powerful that it convinced terrorist bombers to give up their lives in the 911 attack. Did the US do anything to offend them? Perhaps some minor thing was done. But such a horrible terrorist attack was unwarranted.

Arguments of the al Qaeda and John Brey don't have to make any sense. They just have to spread antisemitism no matter how ridiculous their statements. Clearly Jews are as human as anyone else, but in Brey's statement, they are an entirely different species, one that is toxic to the human species.

The only toxicity is Brey's and the al Qaeda's propaganda.

I worry that Hitler lives on in his propaganda, and Jews will continue to be harmed.

We must speak out whenever we see such vicious and dangerous speech.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Did I not distinguish between a quotation versus my own prose?

John

Well I knew this but it might be better to put such quoted writing in italics or quotation marks.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Cruelty is obviously in human nature, as well.

Cats can be taught to leave mice alone.

Yes, cruelty is in our nature; but we can consciously choose to circumvent our nature. Seemingly no other fauna nor flora, nor inanimate object, can do this. This, perhaps, is what some religious people mean when they say humanity is, of all living things, closest to God.

As for the cat, who teaches it to leave the mouse alone?

 

[RestlessSoul]

Hitler was a problem (6 million Jews horribly murdered with torture and starvation). Yet, Hitler was the tip of the iceberg. Hitler's philosophy is still with us.

In the newspaper, yesterday, was pictures of students with huge Swastika tattoos (Wheatland High School, just north of Sacramento). But this is spreading, as it always does in hard times. Jews get blamed for everything (now the economy is bad and there is a pandemic).

As long as we allow the ilk of John Brey to continue Breying, we will see the spread of Nazism. We must speak up to oppose the spread of this abomination. People's lives are at stake (terrorist bombing, murders). The weak minded are duped into hating Jews.

Take, for example, the weak minded of the Philippines, where the al Qaeda made a home base. They convinced most Filipinos that Jews are evil. They also convinced them that the al Qaeda should be put in charge, and, once they were, they took over and made things miserable.

Abu Sayyaf: Target of Philippine-U.S. Anti-Terrorism Cooperation

The website, above, is about the al Qaeda invading the philippines.

The al Qaeda grows with propaganda, and that propaganda is so powerful that it convinced terrorist bombers to give up their lives in the 911 attack. Did the US do anything to offend them? Perhaps some minor thing was done. But such a horrible terrorist attack was unwarranted.

Arguments of the al Qaeda and John Brey don't have to make any sense. They just have to spread antisemitism no matter how ridiculous their statements. Clearly Jews are as human as anyone else, but in Brey's statement, they are an entirely different species, one that is toxic to the human species.

The only toxicity is Brey's and the al Qaeda's propaganda.

I worry that Hitler lives on in his propaganda, and Jews will continue to be harmed.

We must speak out whenever we see such vicious and dangerous speech.

I think you have completely misunderstood Mr Brey. Not that I always understand his posts myself, his thought processes are nothing if not idiosyncratic; still, he is certainly anything but anti Semitic. He clearly has great reverence for Hebrew knowledge and scripture.

 

[Colt]

It is the glory of the human cerebral cortex that it -----unique among all animals and unprecedented in all geological time ---has the power to defy the dictates of the selfish genes. We can enjoy sex without procreation. We can devote our lives to philosophy, mathematics, poetry, astrophysics, music, geology, or the warmth of human love, in defiance of the old [reptile] brain's genetic urging that these are a waste of time ---time that "should" be spent fighting rivals and pursuing multiple sexual partners: "As I see it, we have a profound choice to make. It is a choice between favoring the old brain or favoring the new brain. More specifically, do we want our future to be driven by the processes that got us here, namely, natural selection, competition, and the drive of the selfish genes? Or, do we want our future to be driven by intelligence and its desire to understand the world?"

Richard Dawkins, introducing Jeff Hawkins, One Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (bracket mine, based on earlier comment in intro. Last quotation is Dawkins quoting Hawkins).​

Notwithstanding the fact that the paragraph above appears to be trying to sneak its way into Judaeo-Christian terminology, theology, conceptualism, through the back door, nevertheless, there's something even more important about what going on when sworn atheists attempt to adopt these quasi-theological metaphysics without bowing before the spirit of the metaphysical assumptions involved.

Long ago, Dawkins set the stage for Hawkins hawking Dawkins' ideas when he, Dawkins, said:

We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are build 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.​

John

It's inevitable that Atheist plagiarize morality by acknowledging its existence but denying its origins. As if they thought it up in the animal brain.

It is by design that we have selfish instincts which we must transcend and overcome in the experience of growing up spiritually. "He that overcomes himself is greater than he who conquers a city."


"Man could not dynamically choose the divine life if there were no self-life to forsake."

Paper 102 - The Foundations of Religious Faith

102:7.3 (1126.3) Those who would invent a religion without God are like those who would gather fruit without trees, have children without parents. You cannot have effects without causes; only the I AM is causeless. The fact of religious experience implies God, and such a God of personal experience must be a personal Deity. You cannot pray to a chemical formula, supplicate a mathematical equation, worship a hypothesis, confide in a postulate, commune with a process, serve an abstraction, or hold loving fellowship with a law.

102:7.4 (1126.4) True, many apparently religious traits can grow out of nonreligious roots. Man can, intellectually, deny God and yet be morally good, loyal, filial, honest, and even idealistic. Man may graft many purely humanistic branches onto his basic spiritual nature and thus apparently prove his contentions in behalf of a godless religion, but such an experience is devoid of survival values, God-knowingness and God-ascension. In such a mortal experience only social fruits are forthcoming, not spiritual. The graft determines the nature of the fruit, notwithstanding that the living sustenance is drawn from the roots of original divine endowment of both mind and spirit.

102:7.5 (1126.5) The intellectual earmark of religion is certainty; the philosophical characteristic is consistency; the social fruits are love and service." UB 1955

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

We are now endowed with the spirit that guided evolution to its final grand creation: the Jew, and the Christian.

Judaism and Christianity are not the products of biological evolution. The are cultural artifacts, like secular humanism, which has surpassed both of them in its epistemology and ethics.

I'm not at all clear what your point for this thread was. Are you trying to promote the prescience of Christian scripture by pointing out that some scripture foreshadows this modern formulation of a mind in conflict with itself? It's the basic human condition. So Paul or whoever noticed that he struggles within himself, a theme that appears in all cultures and literatures. It's the foundation of morality fables, where a character often gives in to his lower (reptilian) nature and regrets it. It's Freud's id and superego. It's Plato's horse and rider. In Western culture, it is depicted as an angel one one shoulder and a demon on the other arguing through the ears.

So, if that was your point - that the Bible anticipated modern evolutionary neuropsychology - just about everybody did, including you and me. You didn't need anybody to tell you that you were witness to internal tugs-of-war. But you probably did need science to tell you why, to frame it terms like brainstem, the limbic system and the neocortex, to point out to us that we still have these reptilian structures, which are the source of survival and reproductive urges and instincts. Retiles don't think in terms of rape or theft or murder.

And their legacy still plays out in modern man, who has since added a mammalian mind (parenting) and other more complex brain functions than mere fight or flight including emotions beyond fear and lust, followed by the evolution of the human mind, which adds the well-developed moral and reasoning faculties (symbolic thinking as with language) and even more complex behavior, like launching telescopes into space. This shows it graphically:

Anyway, if you purpose was to promote a particular faith, perhaps you could have stated so explicitly. If your purpose was to announce that you've come to see this matter in terms of distinct parts of the mind in conflict, then congratulations. That is a good way to visualize the matter, although I wouldn't drape it in religious finery. The idea is best understood in terms of evolution and the structure and function of the brain.

It's inevitable that Atheist plagiarize morality by acknowledging its existence but denying its origins.

Secular humanists have no interest in theistic ethics. None of my moral values come from reading a holy book or listening to a sermon. Where there is overlap, still, the ideas weren't received moral imperatives, but the result of the application of reason to conscience. If my ethics came from the Christian scriptures, I'd still be justifying slavery and absolute monarchy rather than advocating for human and civil rights.

I'm certainly not taking advice on abortion from people that make decisions by faith. Those people let a priest or pastor tell them what "God" thinks and wants, and defines morality that way. Whatever clergy can convince a deity says or does is moral by definition. That's a wrong-headed way to determine right and wrong. Jesus doesn't want people to have abortions? How about Brigit, the Celtic goddess. What's her command on this matter? I don't know or care. Do you?

But here's where we part ways: Jesus, too. That god (or Yahweh) is no different to me than the Celtic gods or any other god.

A secular humanist is going to use rational ethics to decide this matter like all others. Whereas the theist frames the issue in terms of commandments, sin, when a fetus becomes a child, if it is considered human or a person, pleasing a deity, etc..

None of that is relevant to the rational ethicist. Why does calling the fetus any of those terms change the ethical calculus? Pleasing somebody's idea of a god or what they are told is sin is also not a factor. The question becomes, who should decide whether a pregnant woman delivers a baby, the woman, or the church using the power of the state? My secular humanist values tell me that the church deserves no say in the matter in a secular state. Let the church have dominion only over those who willingly subject themselves to its will, and be disentangled from the lives of the rest of us. Let the Christian forego the choice by choice, and let others choose as they see fit as well.

 

[John D. Brey]

I don't think that is plagiarism at all, and it isn't specifically christianity that discusses denying the flesh. Eastern religions have discussed rejecting the material world of base desires and transcending it for millenniums.

While it's correct to note that for a very long time Eastern religions have discussed rejecting the material world, I don't think it's correct to say that it isn't Christianity "specifically" that discusses denying the flesh. In other words, though Eastern religions may also preach the denial of the flesh, it's nevertheless the case that Christianity specifically, if not singularly, discusses denial of the flesh.

Also, there is a huge difference between what Dawkins is saying and what the Bible says. Dawkins is saying that we have evolved beyond the reptile brain, so we can overpower base desires because of our brains. The Bible doesn't mention the state of the brain. Even with the full brain humans are sinful and can only overcome this by the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Dawkins is talking about self transformation. The Bible concerns itself with the spirit shaping you.

Dawkins concedes that the new replicator associated singularly with the cerebral cortex, i.e., the meme, is free from the dictates of the gene. It's no longer a slave to the gene. It has its own priorities, which aren't beholden to the gene.

In a Judeo-Christian context, Dawkins gene/meme dichotomy is akin to the body/soul dichotomy in Christianity. In Judeo-Christianity, the soul is the mediator between the body, and the spirit of God. The soul is torn between the body and the spirit, as Dawkins' unnamed "we" is able to free itself from the body and the meme.

But Dawkins doesn't name the third entity he calls the "we." It's clearly something like "spirit" since it's not beholden to the body (gene) or the mind (meme).

Again, who, or what, is Dawkins' "we" that's separate from body and mind? It seems like a modern pagan form of divinity to me.



John