The divine anxiety

There are insects which have ‘mutated’ and evolved to a specific tree, I would think of such mutations as a kind of ‘amorphous searching’ [or fluid change] of conditions and growth according to requirements. Further up the evolutionary tree the way animals think and react can also make a difference [in epigenetics], cultures can be arrived at e.g. like the monkey which has learned to crack open shellfish on a rock. Such things are not initially genetic but become genetic if kept up for long enough.

Sure but a giraffe is not arrived at in one go, there would be a very long period of change with the neck getting longer with each generation continuing the advantage in tiny increments ~ probably hundreds or thousands of generations.

Interesting. Seems a bit strange that you get a less able [in the former sense] hominid from the mix and not just another variation of the same ilk. Perhaps it has more to do with tool usage and hence differing hunting techniques. Again none of this would have occurred overnight, the MYH16 mutation [or transformation resultant of many smaller mutations] may have resulted from the weaker but slightly more intelligent hominid, having to find a way to survive beyond what its predecessors had achieved.

I thought I wasn’t arguing against evolution, so perhaps I should just butt-out here. I am going by previous debates where people made arguments against mutations being the primary factor ~ that is without the environment determining what mutations are successful.

The first image looked like a modern human so I assumed you were talking about a far more modern change in the brain, sorry.

Could you sum up where you are going with this in relation to the thread? Seems to be an argument based on genetic change without environmental influence [your suggestion], or genetic change ‘with’ environmental influence [my position]. As I say creatures are very sensitive to their environments and that would surely have an effect upon how successful they are at running away or hunting.

Dear Quetalcoatl, I think you on the verge of a great awakening in your apprciation of God. The question I would like to ask is why do you limit God? Who are you to say what God can or cannot be? Throw away what others have told you must be and what do you see?

No I’m not, been there got the t-shirt. :slight_smile: I’d ask you in return; why do you limit god, ~ the very idea [god] is a limitation.

Only the monotheist God is a limitaion. He is not God.

Nope, any idea is a limited description of reality, if your idea of god defines reality or is entire, then it’s a limit upon what that truly is.

List some definitions you have and you’ll see what I mean.

Multdimensional Mankind.

A theory that man went back into time and created himself. (Don’t take this one seriously.)

Dear quatzelcoatl, I am unaware if I led anyone to believe that I had limited God or cornered the market on what he or she is. I am fully aware that I am limited in everything I am and I think that is how I am differnt from God. What I wanted to find out was if you could free your mind from all the limitations that monotheism places on God what would you see? I say that because your statements at the beginnning of the thread lead me to believe you would see something similar to me.

Seems like a self contradictory loop to me, but fun. I think we make too much of the term ‘dimension/al, don’t you?

I expect we envision a similar thing, and I think many Christians and mystics do also. Perhaps you are right in leaving it virgin ~ untouched, and not trying to describe what is essentially indescribable. Sry I didn’t mean to sound disingenuous, more I push for ideas from people. :slight_smile:

My primary point is that we have a whole range of sense that is magnified radically beyond any other species on the planet.
Religion is a tool that has been developed to effectively control that sense by attaching senses of our empathetic emotion to identities, of conceptual or believed literal, of reality so to shape and control our own relational perspective to living.

We have gas; therefore, we have a gas regulator.

Makes sense. My objection was that everything is coincidental, as you know I don’t see things in terms of objects but that they derive from the universal world of information. We are both right [or there abouts] in terms of differing perspectives. Perhaps there is a potential refinement required those identities but that doesn’t mean they are entirely incorrect.

I don’t see it so much as coincidence.
It’s more consequence.
To me, coincidence is a human conception for saying that the factors involved are irregular of a pattern which can be identified as the motive in action.
Or, shit’s too complicated to compute.

Coincidence, to me, exceeds the physical laws so I don’t see the universe or life on Earth in that way.

Consequence, however finite, makes perfectly good physical sense with motive, cause, and effect.

Yea I am very much with you there, the term is just a vacuous way of saying; we don’t understand what’s going on.

Sure but what’s predetiminative about consequence*, surely you cannot have that* alone? …this is where info and communication come into it for me.

Predetermininative?
As in, what’s the reason the boundaries are what they are? (And we’ll just save time and take it all the way back to 0 time when it all began for this question.)

To quazelcoatl and jayson, have you ever noticed that coincidenec is really just a fortunate random experience. But random is a term that has only really entered our awareness since the enlightenment. Prior to that a random event might have been thought of as magic or divine intervention. As human awareness grew so did our ability to understand causality. Even in the stone age people were aware of linear causality. By linear I meanIf you threw a rock at something you expected it to hit it or come close. However if you wanted to hit something that was hidden behind a wall you needed luck, meaning random assistance or magic. Eventually though with the awareness of calculus, that which could only be achived by random luck became predictable. I could figure out precisely where a projectile would land even a mile away. The important thing is that as our awareness grows that which had been considered random luck became entirely known. With statistical evaluation random actually becomes a tool we depend on to make money. So there is a close correlation between awareness and the knowledge of causality.
In the modern world we generally only concern ourselves with understandable causality. Because of this when we enconter actions we cannot explain we call it evil, dark energy or a black hole. However there is probably nothing black about either. We only call them black because although we can see the effects they have on matter they are still entirely beyond our awareness. At least we don’t call them magic holes or magic energy or even random. However they are beyond our limitaion to understand because we are still extremely dependent on light to illuminate things in our mind. But the most characteristic thing about light is that it is linear (straight line) energy. When it comes to understanding causality we are still in the stone age linear awareness because of the way we have learned to be aware and depend on light. As Einstein stated light is our most fundamental relativity. Now even though I am sure one day we will overcome this obstacle, I firmly believe that God has no such limitaion. Therefor the things we call good and bad, or dark energy and light are all the same to God.

I don’t notice your observation as I don’t see things that I don’t know as evil, dark, or black holes.
What you seem to have is a perspective which gives you a personal identity with existence as you experience it and one that appears to work for you well.
Nice!

I don’t see it from that lens, however.
I don’t believe in any gods as existing entities or forces, and further, I wouldn’t care even if such do exist.
It would be akin to a vagabond’s concern for kings.

Regarding our causal perception; I don’t think we’re all that blind.
Each generation of humanity builds on the previous with the findings before them given as inheritance.
By consequence, this creates a perpetually accelerating expansion of awareness and information.
At the rate we are going right now, should nothing catastrophic take place, at 80 I’ll be unto the “current” generation of that time as my great great grandfather is to me now.

And by stating that I don’t think we’re all that blind…we’re just now hitting the forced threshold of globalization.
The last time you had a massive paradigm shift from one socioeconomic infrastructure to another you had the Bronze Age and the Dark Age (two separate occasions of confined small groups evolving into socioeconomic state nations).
If you were of the “old” way, the new social paradigm of state-nations was quite often “your” peoples death.

So far…we’re not rushing off to this level yet.
The EU has taken place without massive war.
Instead, this paradigm shift seems to be more economically impacting rather than physically impacting (borders, city building concept development, etc…).

As such, I would venture to suggest that we, today, have a massive range of lateral causal attention due to a forced requirement of global connection and high sensitivity between networked socioeconomic infrastructures beyond any in recorded history.

In fact, one could argue that the very nature of the merging globalization age in its beginning stages today is the very reason and center of contention between core debates of humanity between isolated solidarity (any construct of society which wedges a strong devotion to an “us” of a small group against a mass range of the world as “them”) vs. globalized utilitarianism (all being seen as needing consideration with respect to choice and impact of choice therein).

Meanwhile, during the Bronze Age, isolated solidarity reigned supreme and was the fuel by which successful civilization was accomplished at all.

Jayson I must not be communicating as well as I thought. I never said anyone had casual knowledge or awareness. Really I do not use philosophy with politics although I have no criticisms of those who do. I am trying to relate causality to the main theme of this thread of divine anxiety.I think quazelcoatl was expressing the age old perplexing question of where do good and evil come from. It is an anxiety because it has never really been resoLved since socrates began wondering. I do confess to have a belief in God but I do not think that should disqulalify anyone from any philosophy. From a philosophical standpoint it is still a very valid concept for a first cause. Granted science aand religion do not really communicate on this. Both camps are entrenched in the rightreousness of their position and the falseness of the other.I was trying to associate dark and evil with things that are beyond our awareness of causality and that alone. Really I was saying I don’t think they exist either, its just the names we give our fear of the unknown. In this way science and philosophy reflect the pigheadness of our congress in the USA. I am happy at my age to have finally come to some beliefs that I think are very reasonable and I thank you for acknowledging that. I respect your interest in socio political realms as many of the greatest philosophers have. Probably because at the age of 56 I have learned to do without much of what others worry about and yet delight in the goals of my kids and their similar ideas. The whole vietnam era was enough for me I leave all the rest to you younger folks and like to reatrict my philosophy to first causes as well as cosmology.

To cut right down to the meat of it:

From push and pull of our amygdala which never, never, never stops.
Again, religion is the attempted control method of this…ergo the analogy I keep using of gas and a gas regulator.

They are the same energy. They only appear different because we see them with different perspectives from the same center point. Much llike past and future or up and down.We attach different names to the same energy depending on how we see it. Coming and going is the same energy as it moves past my center point. Cause and effect are names I give to same energy from my perspective.

Chemically, our emotions are radically different physically.
Conceptually, we can manufacture levers that are useful, such as what you are saying, but biologically - such is not the case.

There is diversity in all things. But chemicals and biology have never had the potential to be even recognized as good or evil. An animal is not evil when it kills for territory it is presumed to be acting withour much ability to choose. Good and evil have always been considered to need choice. And that is kind of my point. I am not judging choice I am only saying that they are names I give to my usefullness of an energy as it enters my awareness. But the energy is nothing but energy.