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Posted by eif on May 20, 192001 at 05:42:52:
There are a number of things about the human brain that we are only just beginning to understand. One is it's capacity for religion. Religion, in its various manifestations, has evolved in the human condition. It is neither good nor evil, true nor untrue. It is an expression of the brains capacity to relate to culture, in conjunction with inherited mechanisms and predispositions.
What many people fail to understand is that the Bible, or any other historical text, is neither true nor untrue, it is simply an expression of the relation of one society to it's time, both in inherited knowledge, and the external changing environment. Because human knowledge has grown, and society has changed, it follows that ancient texts lose their relational meaning.
The Bible records many systems of thought, all of which are epxressions of the abilities of the brain which have been inherited from evolutionary processes. Some of these abilities have been believed to come from God(eg Holy spirit), some people with dissociative, inherited neuronal thought patterns, intricately designed to be effective in a myriad of past environments, to be connected to God (eg epileptics). These conditions, and abilities, and the people who inherited them, were/are real, it is just that they do not necarily relate to any divine being. The Bible is a record of one nations journey through a changing and difficult development, in relation to their myriad inherited dispositions and capacities. These capacities are given meaning by the brain itself, regardless of their innate truth. It is the brains plasticity which enables us to create our own meaning, relational to our own times.
As such the Bible is not the unchanging 'word of God'. It is the word of our inherited dispositions and abilities, and ociated knowledge. The tragedy of any society, ancient and present, is that this knowledge can and is used for power, and the exploitation of the weak, young, or uninformed. The Bible as such, like much of history, is not a clear record of events, but an edited version of tribal struggle, power plays and random accident. It is full of human and environmental accident, relational meaning, and technical error.
It contains soulful expressions of the human spirit. It contains the travails of the oppressed, and the expressions of inherited mechanisms to deal with such oppression. These mechanisms will always be with the human condition, because they are inherited from our evolutionary past. It is the triggering of these modules and mechanisms ineffficiently and inappropriately, which cause the greatest tragedies (eg the crusades, holy wars). It is up to us to define our future selves in the light of our existing knowledge, and to modify our inherited predispositions for the benefit of all, and not leave this design to the cruel randomness of our inherited dispositions, nor incomplete ancient texts, which relate to former tribal environments.
Some useful texts on these sorts of general ideas are contained within "Why God wont Go away, brain science and the biology of belief", and others.
If anyone is interested I could further discuss the relationshiops between science, religion, and evolutionary theory in more detail.
roger mcevilly
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