Atheism and autism

Post Reply New Topic

I think I might have misunderstood your original statement. I thought you were saying God is improbable, as in you don't believe in him, but you're saying the opposite, right?

your first impression was correct.

Oh, so I'm more confused.
You don't believe in Creationism, but you also don't believe in evolution?
What is your particular belief?

I've always sided with Charles Darwin's own summary: "All the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed by the Creator".

Fair enough. I still don't believe in creationism, so we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Well, I was thinking that since the KKK leader won, it's not always the case.

Origins: On 23 August 2013, the satirical Tribune Herald web site published a fake news article titled "KKK Wins Lawsuit Against Bakery for Discrimination" (which languished in relative obscurity until April 2015), reporting that the KKK had successfully sued a baker named Elaine Bailey because she refused to provide a cake for the organization's birthday party

My bad. I apologize for posting that since further googling showed me it wasn't true. I honestly didn't know the site was a satire site Now I'm like somebody who took The Onion seriously.

Snopes explains:

http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/kkkbakery.asp

Fair enough. I still don't believe in creationism, so we'll just have to agree to disagree.

I'm not sure I technically believe in Creationism either. I'm open to how the earth was made, and how animals and man came to be, but I do believe God did it. Does that count as a type of creationism even if I understand and accept the science behind evolution?

It's weird to me that humans could have been around for so long and not developed a more advanced society. Look at all we've done in just 6000 years! What happened the other 595,000 years?

I feel like a lot of people are too rigid in their thinking because for some reason, they feel like it'll erode their whole belief system if they suddenly believe in evolution.

I myself have little doubt that in England it was geology and the theory of evolution that changed us from a Christian to a pagan nation.

Or if they believe the earth to only be 6000 years old, to realize it's not. We have to remember who the bible was written for, and how would they be able to understand all the scientific stuff God used to make the earth? What if he just told them simplistic versions instead of wasting tons of tablets and scrolls in explaining in detail how he created the world.

I've always pondered about how ancient gods like Zeus may have just be great warriors or kings whose stories grew bigger than they were, like how rumors spread around in our current cultures.

Dio [Cassius] the Roman [ad 155–236], who wrote the history of the Roman empire and republic, reports the following: One day, when Regulus, a Roman consul [3rd C. bc], was fighting against Carthage, a dragon suddenly crept up and settled behind the wall of the Roman army. The Romans killed it by order of Regulus, skinned it and sent the hide to the Roman senate. When the dragon’s hide, as Dio says, was measured by order of the senate, it happened to be, amazingly, one hundred and twenty feet long, and the thickness was fitting to the length.’

This is a very good and under-considered point. In fact this sort of argument has been cogently made for hundreds of years (i.e. since well before evolution became a serious issue in western thought). For example Richard Baxter writing in the 1660s rhetorically asked sceptics how come there was no historical record or monuments of nations more than 6,000 years ago; and although today many will say they go back somewhat further than that, it's really not by much. Everyone will accept and admit that there's absolutely no written record of any civilisation 20,000 years ago, anywhere on earth. So the ball park figure stands.

However, the Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human pre-history into sedentary (here meaning non-nomadic) societies based in built-up villages and towns. These societies radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g., irrigation and deforestation) which allowed extensive surplus food production. These developments provided the basis for densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, trading economies, the development of non-portable art and architecture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., writing), and property ownership. Personal, land and private property ownership led to hierarchical society, class struggle and armies. The first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities (c. 5,500 BP), whose emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age.

Anthropologists have made a solid case for agriculture being the tipping point. They call it the Neolithic Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

Basically, when we spent millenia as hunter/gatherers, all the things we have come to call 'civilization' couldn't happen. Hunter/gatherer is an on-the-go way of life and you can't carry much with you or specialize to the degree needed for civilization. Some cave paintings, some very small religious carved items, that's it.

I think that's why my mom was contemplating the story of Cain and Abel as being the rise of agriculture and separation of the hunters and agricultural civilizations. She also pondered if the story of Adam and Eve was an analogy for how modern humans came to be.

I also think the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden dovetails well with some aspects of human evolution. There are painful consequences to evolving a big brain and that story lays them out for you. Once Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge (evolved a big brain) they got kicked out of Eden. No more 'ignorance is bliss'. Big brains are an evolutionary advantage but they make bliss pretty hard to come by. It's hard to be in Eden when you can actually worry about where your next meal is coming from instead of just being animalistically hungry (although you are that too). It's hard to be in Eden when you know what happens next as the gash on your leg turns black instead of healing.

Then there's the painful consequence specific to Eve (women) for eating from the Tree of Knowledge (evolving a big brain). Painful childbirth. That was God's punishment and it did happen pretty much literally as a consequence of big brains. Babies have big heads to hold their big brains and women have narrow hips to make upright walking possible. Those two things had to come together for our move from primate to hominid but painful childbirth is an inevitable consequence. The other apes stayed away from the Tree of Knowledge so they aren't as smart and are super ungainly for the very short periods they walk upright but their females have easier childbirth.

Poor Adam also now has to work non-stop as a consequence.
Quote:
therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.


That actually sounds like a recounting not of evolution but of the development of agriculture, still an event millenia before the bible. Could stories have been passed down??? Hunter-gatherer is possible with a small population as long as you stay mobile. Anthropologists say it would be a less work-intense lifestyle than early agriculture. Less backbreaking work but also fewer calories so it can't support a large population. Once you settle down to agriculture (and work non stop) you get more calories from the grains and the population grows. But you can't go back. There might as well be an angel with a flaming sword stopping you.

I am a devout Christian and I have Asperger's Syndrome. I guess people have a false belief that to have autism you lack imagination or right brained creative side, that just isn't true. I think Christianity makes sense to me.
There is a belief in moral absolute truths, and I definitely agree with that. There are tons of atheists who are not autistic- in fact probably moreso.