The God Of Big Whales and Chimp Water Rides

[JW Frogen]

This link was posted on another forum I go to and is an interesting assertion religion exists totally due to imagination rather than trancendant experiece. (The same could be argued for non sexual love or art.)


http://www.newscientist.com/article/...8_head_dn13782

"Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination."



How does he know that?

How does he know that whale songs are often not some ancient hymn to a long remembered cetacean God?

Jane Goodall claims chimpanzees have at least transcendent experience (a prerequisite to religion), that there is a waterfall where a chimp group she observed would regularly go to, they would go for no utilitarian purpose, but rather just arrive and then start displaying the body language, making the sounds that chimps usually use paying homage to dominant male, swaying back and forth in honour of the water fall.

Religious experience may be indeed the first spark of conciseness itself, the first step to self awareness, to even knowing one is alive in the first place.

A sea sponge may live in a Darwinian vacuum of meaning, as well as Richard Dawkins, but I would wager most evolved and higher life forms experience some form of the transcendence of religion.

[freediver]

meaningless transcendence?

You posted a broken link. You can't copy and paste shortened links.

[JW Frogen]

Freeby, you will have to make better arguments that.

Einstein expiernced it working in pysics, Babe Ruth swinging a bat, Saint Francis preaching to birds, there are many ways to unite for a moment with the infinate that is God. (Though you are never really seperate from God. You just think you are.)

To deny this is like saying love is meangless.

But then I suppose for one who has never experienced it, maybe it is?

[freediver]

What exactly do you think my argument was?

[boxy]

Wishful thinking, numbnuts.

[JW Frogen]

Yes Boxy, Jane Goodall knows nothing about Chimpanzees.

I often think the facile arguments (if that can be dignified by the term) I find from atheists almost universally on forums is really more a sign of fear, an reflexive, almost primitive inability to address the subject because to be wrong as an atheist is to have betted not only against existence having meaning, but your own life having meaning.

Forums are not Plato’s academy, but even intelligent Atheists such as Richard Dawkins play this same childish, glib game.

He argues almost exclusively with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious traditions (easy targets all) but ignores the larger spiritual questions posed by questions such as the universal historical need for religion, or the direct experience traditions. Or how people find transcendent God experience in many other ways beyond religion.

As chimpanzees do at the great waterfall.

[JW Frogen]

What exactly do you think my argument was?

Gratis Downer, you should really be thinking about what your argument is.

Really.

[freediver]

It was a question Frogen, hence the question mark on the end. I had no intention of making an argument.

Unless of course it is my position on broken links you have a problem with.

[JW Frogen]

It was a question Frogen, hence the question mark on the end. I had no intention of making an argument.

Oh an exitentialist eeeeeyyyyyyy?

Nyunk, nyunk, nyunk.

[freediver]

Frogen, you will have to make better arguments that.