Article: Is Evolution selecting out Religion?

Is Evolution selecting out Religion?

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Over the millennia, moments of truth have confronted Darwin's Origin of the Species. Sink of swim moments, such as a nose horn that's counter productively large, or a climate change that's under oxygenated or excessively warm, etc., etc., etc.

For millions of grown up human beings, even reading that first version of Origin of the Species (almost a rough draft) carried with it the intuition that this book is talking about reality. Kudos to Darwin, of course, but that's really an irrelevance. Who cares WHO wrote the book (plus many other contemporary minds were seeing identical things); the point is "though a glass darkly" is still SEEING THROUGH THE GLASS. Darwin was writing about reality.

One vast pattern in this glimpse into the soul of nature is that when certain things are sufficiently out of harmony with the n-dimensional process of evolution, they are "selected out". Meaning: Bye, Bye; so long; extinction time!

The void of extinction is unimaginable. It's a pit so deep that you never hear a splash when a species (or whatever) falls into it. The one thing you can take to the bank is that no life forms ever crawl back out of that abyss. Why should they? They aren't needed anymore and they stopped being able to pay their own natural way. They simply "aren't" and nature continues to nature uninterruptedly.

Many (most?) humans are horrified of a nature which is their true and transitory creator. It tortures them to think of themselves as human "beans" is a soup of legumes (human beans, supreme beans, green beans, etc.). The thought of being so enmeshed in nature that ultimately they are identity-less has inspired them to invent hide out alternatives.

Psychology has millions of variation of this theme, but institutionalized religion has been for millennia the grand and glorious one up reality to nature. But if nature = reality, one wonders where this happy hunting ground could be. How do you one up reality.

Self evidently, you don't. You don't one up anything for that matter, since there isn't any "you", at least not in the sense of that ego/self/identity thing which is a mere construction of thought. Indeed, the thinking about point of view IS human identity.

Philosophically, this is all reasonably obvious. Nature is totality and it's not "one up able" by separate selves or priests or sheiks or popes or men in dresses -- the oddly favorite attire of most professional religious types.

So if religion is a happy hide out that simply doesn't exist (and is populated only by delusional "creatures"), one wonders how much longer nature is going to allow it to hang around, i.e., when is reality/nature going to select it out.

Arguably, 99% of the human agony and sorrow now torturing our planet (starting with the ad nauseam Israeli / Palestinian conflict) is the acting out of religious fanaticism. Indeed, ALL religion increasing resembles some form of religious fanaticism.

Something like Buddhism is profoundly frying other fish and really shouldn't be grouped with the Armageddon nut cases, but wherever there is murder in the name of God (Christian, Islamic, Judaic, etc.) you can be sure you are dealing with religious fanaticism. It's almost as if there is a certain righteous stench about these people. And if they aren't directly fighting, they are escaping into some form of Catholic Denial, i.e., the Catholic Church has made it a science during these last six Bush/Republican years to not acknowledge the obscenely immoral antics of what one would think they should be seeing as the 3rd millennia anti-Christ. Such "above it all" indifference to the Bush Family evils is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the teachings of Jesus Christ, but this doesn't seem to bother the dress men.

But back to natural selection, i.e., reality. It is increasingly postulated by men and women of science that "religion" (certainly, religious fanaticism, which is the rule, not the exception) can no longer be tolerated by the vast, survival processes of evolution and even though the fundamentalists may take us to the brink, more sophisticated natural processes will find a way to select religion out of the planetary game.

Of course, the price of this selecting out may well be the end of humans, since we seem to be the only species that so abandonly kills in the name of God.

However, from the perspective of the Earth in general, this might well be like healing itself from a deadly cancer.

May we leave this gentle truth with the religious fanatics? We need the Earth (and Nature) infinitely more than the Earth needs us. Trust us, the beat will go on with or without religious books and buildings.

Indeed, in the big, big picture sense of things, if the whole human enterprise does result in an Armageddon like self destruction, this will be like a planetary sneeze.

We don't "have" a problem. We ARE the problem. And we are very "select-out-able".

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W. Christopher Epler