Humans as just another species...

Discussion in 'Religion' started by Seattle, Apr 17, 2015.

  1. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Here is a passage from John Steinbeck's "The Log from the Sea of Cortez" and I'm interested in whatever your response is.

    "Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we may find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could be only partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eyes nebulae, and universes in our cells."
     
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  3. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    Humans have willpower and choice, allowing us to deviate from our natural instincts. This loss of natural direction makes the line to the future uncertain, because it is disconnected from our natural and DNA past. This is unique to humans, and separates humans from other species. Since humans can choose to be natural or unnatural, and can even choose to call natural, unnatural or unnatural, natural, due to subjectivity, humans needed a set of guiding principles, which they could choose to learn, which can help them maintain a closer connection to natural human instinct. At that point, they can be defined as a human species following the vector of evolution.

    An analogy is, say you find an alien device in a cave. Since the device is odd shaped and made of strange materials, and you are not exactly sure what it is, or what it does. So you bring to a group of scientists, who then examine it make assumptions as to what it is, and what it is supposed to do. Since this device is alien and unique, we may or may not be right. This with the most prestige may try to sell their inference, as correct, even without knowing for sure. It is the blind leading the blind.

    If this guess is not correct, but accepted anyway, then the device is not exactly what it was meant to be. It may not have been meant to be a alien door stop. Rather is was really a transmission device for engaging advanced computer cores drives. On the other hand, if you go back too the cave and find the operating manual, which outlines its operation, the device can finally becomes what it was meant to be; another species. Religion goes to the cave seeking the operating manual.

    Humans are an apex predator that tends to overpopulate and over use resources. This tends to upset the natural balance of things. To allow the human species to coexist with nature and be part of its integration, we would need certain types of internal constraints or instincts. Willpower allows us to override these constraints, causing an imbalance in nature; become the door stop and not the core drive transmission. We become detached from species.
     
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  5. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    "I am an animal"!
     
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  7. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I don't have any argument with the idea that human beings are biological organisms. It seems to me to be thoroughly obvious that we are.

    But I will take issue with use of the word 'just' in "just another species". There's something dismissive about the value judgement implicit in the word.

    I don't think that it demeans human beings when we think of ourselves as biological, as further examples of life on Earth.

    If we are "afraid of what we might find", we probably have an unnecessarily dark concept of the 'fallen' world of nature ('red in tooth and claw'). That fear is probably just as unrealistic, just as much our own emotional projection, as the widespread contemporary idealization of nature.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2015
  8. Light Travelling It's a girl O lord in a flatbed Ford Registered Senior Member

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    so do animals, ever seen a dog who doesn't want to go inside or go for a walk.. choice


    no..humans cannot deviate from a natural direction because they are natural and they are in nature. Whatever it is you are doing that you think is is not natural... you are wrong it is still natural because something from nature is doing it.


    Yet while we are obviously animals there is something in the human psyche that sees ourselves as distinct from other animals... whether that thought is inherent to us or was put there by religion is another thing?

    Maybe all self-conscious animals are of the same opinion.
     
  9. Light Travelling It's a girl O lord in a flatbed Ford Registered Senior Member

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    and this to me, hints at saying. If we stop trying to describe and define god, we might experience god.
    Or that our evolution to consciousness (self consciousness) is akin to the universe evolving to be conscious.
     

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