caseydorman

@caseydorman – “The two subsets can be seen to correspond.”

– we could say that this is the “overlapping magisteria”.

@caseydorman – “to modify the concept of god beyond what is captured by known religions, so that it becomes some natural force that is, in principle, describable by mathematical or scientific terms, is to remove the concept of god from the equation of explanation”

– what is describable by mathematical or scientific terms is a subset of the…[Read more]

@caseydorman – I’m not talking about the process of evolutionary change over aeons.  I’m talking about the process of individual beings living their lives.  Each one experiences a pressure to thrive, survive and reproduce.  This arises from 1) the fact that DNA reproduces; 2) evolution and natural selection.  If we put these two together, then ove…[Read more]

@Reg – the religious people that caseydorman was talking to, defined spirituality as

“transcendental force”

“some belief in a force higher than oneself, which provided an insight into the the true nature of humans and the world they lived in“.

It’s easy to see why people think this refers to something that doesn’t exist, because until now, no…[Read more]

@caseydorman – does your definition of spirituality motivate people to be nonviolent?

When people have complained to you that as an atheist, your lack of spirituality prevents you from having a nonviolent philosophy, what is their type of spirituality that they claim does make them nonviolent?

@caseydorman – you could technically say that if you like, but it seems perverse to deny the elephant in the room, it’s like trying to deny the colour blue, it’s an integral part of the picture, which is not complete without it.

I think you’re trying to squeeze reality into an atheist-shaped box: to start with a premise (“classical atheism is…[Read more]

@caseydorman – “archaeological studies from 1999-2007”

– see also “How Compassion Made Us Human – the evolutionary origins of tenderness, trust and morality” by Penny Spikins.  She goes over all the archaeological evidence in depth, and concludes that the Killer Ape thesis is just fashionable nonsense.

This ties straight into what Michael Tomase…[Read more]

@caseydorman – the book seems interesting, I had a quick look through it.

You state that “modern scholarship suggests that mutual aggression was the natural state of our hunter-gatherer predecessors”, but it seems that even more modern scholarship has shown this to be a myth.  It’s based on a cherry-picked selection of evidence.  If the t…[Read more]

@caseydorman – I can’t get the ebook because I’m in the UK.  Do you have a pdf?

How do you go about designing a culture?