Seeds of Rebirth

Sorry my brain is jumping around at the moment - I could be losing it .. I worked on NetView 390 back in the 90's and R.O.D.M (a big part of NetView back then) was what a few of us called Hillary Clinton on account of her weird middle name and er, thus the title of my previous post.

Thanks for explaining what happens in these "primaries", so I take it then that Republicans could be allowed back in, just not with George Bush at the helm? I infer from your commentary that there is no law that says "2 terms of party x means we now need to switch to party ¬x"?

Also I sense some kind of excitement in you about these elections? Or at least a lot of interest, where does that come from in you? You actually give a damn and I want to know why :) Plus who do you want to win?

Yeah I was linking the comments you quoted about boredom in my brain like this:

1. You quoted "Mankind's nervous system evolved during millions of dangerous years" .. therefore evolution crept into my mind

2. Then you mentioned a lot of sinful stuff happens as a result of boredom

3. Then you proferred ""Idle hands are the devil's workshop?""

So it my addled state I linked avoiding boredom with being virtuous, and for some reason being virtuous with evolution.

Having made the connection I thought, "what the hey?" could there be some some survival advantage in being religious?

Immediate thoughts are that religion can make you happier and happiness can make you live longer, therefore giving you more chance to breed. Religion can offer solace to the bereaved and comfort to the frightened. I got to thinking could it be that religion evolved as a mechanism to cope with our all-too-brief span of existence?

I had read somewhere:

No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what some call the tragedy of human cognition.

"Yearning for the supernatural" vs "Yearning not to be bored" got mixed up in my mind.

+++

Plus, I've long held that all issues of evolution and our mind and our beliefs and our perceptions of God are utterly irrelevant to the question of God himself. He either is, or isn't.

Of course. But God is a special case, because he falls into the category of non-falsifiable. It's like a conspiracy theory, the best conspiracy theories are those that cannot be disproved. God cannot be disproved, therefore a healthy debate can ensue.

Something else that has been bugging me - I'm also wondering if belief in God is sensible but belief in a particular denomination is not sensible? (Hmmm ... is "sensible" the right word or is "rational" a better word?) What I mean is, if one decides to believe in X, then one can look at "the real world" and try to get confirmation .. ie. do an experiment.

If you do this experiment for "belief in God" you will find that more than 50% of humanity (in the real world) believes in a "God" but less than 50% believe in any particular denomination or sect (I include Christianity and Islam in that description).

So from a non-emotional standpoint, given that the existence of God is not falsifiable, it is rational/sensible to believe in God and irrational/silly to believe in a particular sect, or something else?