Is Darwinism a religion?

Discussion in 'Religion' started by birch, Apr 20, 2017.

  1. birch Valued Senior Member

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    Have you noticed that those who believe in evolution have extremists/fundamentalists among their ranks too? Because it is scientific truth in the physical sense but they take liberties to extend this further with selfish conclusions. i am here, therefore i am superior than those who did not make it, because nature selected for me etc bs.

    They assume 'survival of the fittest' equates to deserving, smartest, and assuming this equates to "quality." When in truth, the most depraved tactics/genes are also favored by nature and survive/flourish. they ignore that inferiority is paradoxically a catalyst nature supports to survive. aka dirty tactics. those shameful traits in our dna that show itself.

    the 'fit' part is what's the most laughable here. you know when humans stopped being honestly fit? when they developed more brains to "cheat". how are you more fit when you develop depraved, clever and devious mind to undermine your opponent, rather than meeting a higher standard? how are you superior or again, 'fit' when you destroy another due to jealousy because they are superior in some way to you that you are not? what this does is develop these traits stronger as survival tools but they are not 'fit' in the sense of ideals, it is fit in the sense of 'nature' because it is about survival and by any means.

    but if you survive, you become the standard of superiority so who/what is to know any difference? evidently you are the best nature produced? I think this is where the major lie is: nature does not care for ideals, the ideal may have been stomped on and murdered centuries ago because majority rules and the rule is survival.

    so is that superior? yes AND no.

    The dogmatic darwinists believe nature is 'inherently' perfect. They are in denial or blind just as religionists that believe GOD is perfect and superior when it's obvious that it's nasty and brutal and devious and cheater and also possesses inferior traits! If you can't see nature helps flourish inferior traits even naturally as well, then you are in denial or a narcissistic self-glorifying liar of a human being. That is no different than a christian who survives a plane crash while others perish citing the reason that god favored her obviously and since god is perfect/good so then by extension she is "special" as in better. Unfortunately, that god isn't and unfortunately, nature isn't so therefore, you are not either. On the same token, just because you are fuking here doesn't mean you are better or more deserving, it just means honestly and sadly, that nature is so brutal/cruel/amoral that it allows for sacrifice of others so you can exist, literally and figuratively.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2017
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  3. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    There are extremists and fundamentalists of all flavors. Not to pull a "no true Scotsman" fallacy here, but I would say that anyone who believes what you are talking about doesn't really understand evolution.
     
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  5. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    What do you mean by inferior? Depraved, clever and devious are only inferior by your personal standards of what is perfect.
     
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  7. birch Valued Senior Member

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    I knew i was going to get one of these replies. Lets now make everything meaningless. Well, bullshit vacuum logic.

    Im starting to realize atheists are no better than theists or honest or ethical.

    Spidergoat, i never want you to post a single comment on this forum that expresses any sense of right or wrong because i will harass you viciously for it. Be careful to catch yourself lest i stalk you to remind you thats your standard, end of story. that will be the standard reply. A fuck you and stfu.

    I always read this hypocritical fake bullshit on here and then when its no longer 'idea' talk but in another venue, these same hypocrites all of a sudden insisting on what's right or wrong that should be self evident to others.

    Like the classic ' there is no such thing as evil', and then the same poster will be heatedly discussing something is wrong or even call something evil in another thread. Ive seen this by several members. Dishonest or fragmented minds? Lifes a stage, eh?

    You people are full of shit.
     
  8. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    5,902
    I'd say no, because it doesn't share enough of the family-resemblance characteristics that are found in most religions and that serve to identify religions as 'religions'.

    'Darwinism' doesn't involve worship, ritual or liturgy. It isn't involved with any sort of salvation. It doesn't point towards gods or impersonal transcendental powers. It doesn't prescribe an ethics or a personal practice. It doesn't enlist art and music. And on and on...

    Sure, that's true. Several of the prominent "new atheists" would seem to fall into that category.

    I think that some people in the late 19th century tried to convert natural selection into an ethics in that way (Nietzsche perhaps among them), but we don't see it very much today.

    In biological evolution, "fittest" means 'best adapted to the ecological niche the species occupies'. So a parasite that has lost almost all of its nervous and digestive system (like a tapeworm) can be said to be highly evolved for its parasitic lifestyle.

    I think that human beings might be a new sort of organism in evolutionary terms, that isn't adapted physically for a highly specialized ecological niche such as living in a certain kind of environment or eating a certain kind of food, but instead a general-purpose being that's optimized for adaptability to a huge range of new environments and lifestyles. (From growing yams in tropical jungles to hunting mammoths on the arctic tundra, and more recently even to traveling under the sea and in outer space.) We might not be fastest, have the biggest teeth and claws, or possess the thickest fur. But we adapt with technology, with vehicles, weapons and protective clothing. And that's all attributable to our brains and to our cognitive powers.

    Our new 'adapted for adaptability' lifestyle has swept everything before it and made human beings masters of this planet. It seems to me to be something new in the history of life.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2017
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  9. birch Valued Senior Member

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    I even outlined some examples that are common to humanity/society and its justified by a clever tactic that its just an arbitrary standard and who is to say? Its like saying who is to say beating the shit out of someone is wrong when there may be people who enjoy that somewhere and somehow? Total phoniness with a defiant sense of the abstract to pretense. But lamely in another thread where the rubber meets the road its "they shoulda locked the fuker up and thrown away the key!!"

    And these same fukers would be livid, outraged and calling/demanding "justice" if it was them or their loved ones when its no longer an abstract concept.

    I guess i give too much credit to people on this forum.

    My point was more about human motivation.
    If one damages a good quality/ idea/ in another even due to simple jealousy/competition, that does not produce fitter people. Thats a regressive tactic but it also works in nature. Its simple math at this point, it just lowers the standards. The key is here then if the competition is obliterated, does that conclude you are superior? Well, if you are the one to define it. The conclusion that is winning is true in the sense there is no evidence to the contrary but why we know is because we also know nature utilizes these inferior tactics too. You'll witness this from life experience. These are those dirty secrets among dirty secrets.

    So this whole survival of the fittest and darwinistic self-congratulatory spin that its all done and achieved through honest merit is bullshit. Some do but many dont.

    This is what i mean by likening it to the bullshit of religionists.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2017
  10. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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  11. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Being smart and being tactical are the same thing genetically - intelligence. If one person uses their intelligence to take advantage of people, that doesn't mean nature prefers flawed traits. I have a moral sense, but it doesn't preclude being devious. Religions are devious in scaring people into conforming to their precepts, but because it's done for a "higher" purpose, you don't have a problem with it either. So the same trait can be considered evil or good depending on one's point of view and how it's implemented in the context of society.
     
  12. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    According to the Bible, yes. Battles were seen as an opportunity for god to choose the side he favors by guiding which side wins.
     
  13. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Nature does not

    PERIOD

    Look up antromophisum

    A far sweeping generalisation which I suspect is totally without foundation

    as well as mine might be in that

    dogmatic darwinists believe nature just is

    Pull it anyway

    Well said

    OMG I figured that out about age 9

    OMG a talking Cowpat

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    And to address the title of the thread

    NO

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  14. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Ah the Reification fallacy.

    Who is this "they" birch speaks of? She makes a lot of assumptions and assertions about what some fuzzily-defined collection of people are doing, and then goes to to judge them. Do they exist? Have they done those things?

    Or is this more tilting at windmills?
     
  15. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Definitions might be useful to figure out what this is really about....
    but why waste the time?

    Yes, Virginia, the planets orbit around the sun, not around the earth, which is more than 6000 years old, and was never entirely, but for the tip of the +/- 300th highest mountain in the world, covered in salt water. Chromosomes do carry heritable traits, and all the complex life-forms did evolve from less complex ones. Arsenic is toxic. Petroleum is flammable.
    Lots of other things are also true and observable, without becoming a religion, while most of the things that do become religions are neither true nor observable.

    So, what's the problem?
     
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  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Darwinian dogma, to the extent it exists, would make the opposite claim or claims. In Darwinian theory nature is not inherently anything, much of was established by directionless luck, and its entire population of beings is a conglomeration of qwerty phenomena. A "dogmatic" Darwinian might insist on elimination of all criteria implying purpose, goal, or ideal even in language - might insist that nature cannot even make progress in the direction of improvement except by chance.
     
    Last edited: Apr 29, 2017
  17. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    And even there, you'd first need a very strict definition of 'progress':
    improvement in what sense? complexity? adaptation?chronological change from past to present?
    from which to which environment? in what features, capabilities or competitive advantages?
     
  18. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    You're misunderstanding fitness.

    It isn't about physical fitness. It's about being fit to survive, whether that's by strong-arming your prey or by outsmarting it or by stabbing it in the back. The organism that survived to pass on its genes WAS fit, whether you think it was superior or inferior. Fitness is all in the past. You don't know what characteristics WILL be fit to survive in the future.
     
  19. Hapsburg Hellenistic polytheist Valued Senior Member

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    A belief system is not in itself a religion. Darwinism, in the sense of being a total worldview framed around (an expanding upon) Darwinian evolutionary theory, is a paradigm. It is a way of viewing and interpreting and acting in the world, but it lacks the elements of ritual and community that define a religion.
    Mind, this is completely different from Darwinian evolution. Darwin's theories on natural and sexual selection, modified by modern mathematical models of population genetics, are a scientific fact. Its truth value is unaffected by the politicising of Darwin's theories. People who assert the truth of the modern evolutionary synthesis are not fitting necessarily to any paradigm other than a general scientific one.

    What the OP is referring to, I believe, is the political and social co-opting of Darwin's basic concepts that occurred at the turn of the century.
     
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  20. Ted Grant II Registered Senior Member

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    188
    I really don't like the word "darwinist". What does it mean? Someone who has studied the many books that Darwin wrote? For example, we wrote a great deal about barnacles. Am I to think a darwinist has a liking for barnacles ? I certainly can't imagine anyone being dogmatic about barnacles. I can't remember Darwin saying that "nature" is inherently perfect. It seems to me that his controversial idea (natural selection) includes the concept of mutations (or "variations" to use his word), which, to my mind, doesn't sound like perfection.

    Having recently examined modern advanced school books used by students of Biology, which appear to use his idea extensively, without any suggestion that it is controversial, perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "controversial".
     
  21. Ted Grant II Registered Senior Member

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    "fukers" is a new word to me. As you are clearly highly educated, I'm sure you can provide a definition.
     
  22. Ted Grant II Registered Senior Member

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    I tried, but didn't find it.
     
  23. Ted Grant II Registered Senior Member

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    188
    Surely, you you don't literally mean "full".
     

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