Happy Darwin Day!

daizi

I'm not aquainted with Blaise Pascal, is he the founder of pascal lollies? anyway, by the sound of it he was onto something. So he called it a wager! i call it insurance.

Dunno if I have posted this elsewhere on Chinesepod ... Sorry, if I did.

tvan: If looking beyond the material means thinking about non-observables, then this doesn't have to be religion. It's what science does, too. Big difference is the - at least partial :-) - willingness to admit defeat and explicitly look for errors.

I do have difficulties with Platonism as well ...

daizi: Nay, I am not a Pastafarian :-) Just an agnostic, I guess ...

daizi,
and if you compare simple spaghetti with sophisticated ravioli...that is truely "macro evolution".

I sometimes wonder whether or not the religion (ID) genes will some distant day be eliminated from the human gene pool due due to a directional selection of rational behavior within modern societies.

not to hijack the thread or anything,

but i came across this little phrase

与世无争

yu shi wu zheng

to/with the worid don't struggle

is my translation right?

sounds very lao tze, yeah?

no matter how many books i read

i always feel only lao tze was onto something big

something big for humanity and spirituality

Darwin of course was onto something too

and richard dawkins. well, i dig him, for making, religious people who can handle an argument,....

have a hernia!!

go atheism day!!!

(THOUGH, i do think we need to repackage it. Education,  being controlled by religious powers for so long has made ATHEISM a bad word)

so much so, i gotta scroll above just to check how to spell the word

Joachim, are you a Pastafarian? I do love the concept of al dente. I suppose one has to attend some sort of semolina seminary to get it just right. Interesting how pasta has evolved such varied shapes.

joachim, leaving the validity of religion in general aside, it seems as though people need to believe in something beyond the material.  You may dispute the worth of such beliefs, but I challenge you to find a society where it doesn't hold true.

I find it ironic that in suppressing Buddhism Mao ultimately opened the door wider for other religions, both home grown (Falun Gong) and foreign (Christianity).

tvan: What is a spiritual void? Lack of self-illusion? Do we need spirituality if it is based on misconceptions of self and reality ?

kimik, excellent point, at least during Mao's time.

Tvan,

If you consider communism as a religion, communist China rejecting the other religions seems quite logical.

I think Marxist China was a very good place to be an atheist.  Interestingly, given the utopian nature of communism, political communism in general and Maoist communism in particular, found religion to be anathema, most likely because it represented an organization outside the government's control.  Also, of course, China has suffered numerous large scale incidents of religious unrest, mostly Buddhist, but also Christian and Muslim.

无神论:  Atheism.

唯物论:  Materialism

共产主义:  Communism

However, it seems to me that, for a significant part of China's population, the Maoist flavor of atheism left a gaping spiritual void.

吃饭前或拿食物前要洗手

If the first commandment of every religion could have been "Wash your hands before eating or touching food" (no allusion to Pontius Pilatus), it could have saved so many human lives around the word.

frognotinawell:

What is this? Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster??

"Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you" -the very basis of my morality. Being commanded to do so by a spirit in the sky does however get my back up. I've a question, people. I want to write:
 "May you be touched by his noodly appendage."
祝你被他的面条的触须触摸。
zhù nǐ bèi tà de miàn tiáo de chù xū chù mō.
Am I anywhere near being right or is the sentence a total dog's dinner?

Doh,

Every day I thank God for life and limb after which I ask him to forgive me for not being smart enough to understand him and his nature. There is only one commandment - do unto others as you would have them do unto you. End of story.

Swinging punters sounds like Blaise Pascal's "wager" that, even though the existence of god cannt be determined through reason, one should bet on god's existence since, in doing so, one has everything to gain and nothing to lose. There's also everyman Homer Simpson's philosophy that, if one picks the wrong religion then every day you're just making god madder and madder. Hah.

I'm not a religious guy, but let me confess, I always feel that the more I read about the origin of the universe/life and their evolutions, the more blur the line between science and religion seems to be. Darwin's theory of evolution and its modified versions might be "better" than Genesis, but they are still far from perfect. As far as the mysteries of the universe and life concern, I sometimes feel myself compelled to shout like this, "God knows!"

那么， 当然不信宗教的人也不会承认天帝的存在，不过别忘了他们奇怪的punters， 就是说他们 swinging punters; one who has two bob each way  by taking out an insurance policy,万一lucifer真的存在的话！

从你提供的数据分析下去，可看到美国教徒相当真诚，信仰很强， 不过因为100分之24的教徒还是承认达尔文的演变理论，就表示教徒中的swinging punters也不算少数。

And how 'bout memetic mutation. Maybe that's what happened to Michael Jackson.

Nay, don't forget genetic drift, evolution on islands, and increased diversity of species in large areas with diverse conditions and scarce resources.

Thanks, Joachim.

The offending lyric is:

讀進化論我贊成達爾文

Dújìn huà lùn wǒ zànchéng Dá'ěrwén

After reading the Theory of Evolution, I believe in Darwin

沒實力的就有淘汰的可能

méi shílì de jiù yǒu táotài de kěnéng

Without real strength, I might be eliminated by natural selection

Sort of Valentine's Day meets Darwin Day. An anthropocentric hijacking of a beautiful theory for yet more saccharin Chinese pop. Ironically, if we apply Darwin's theory of natural selection to culture (memes vs. genes), as some propose, I suppose we would have more and more milquetoast music, as "culture" has to appeal to the masses to survive.

达尔文 is Darwin in Chinese.

Probably a greater percentage than 39 don't know what a theory is (vs. a hypothesis), or what evolution even means. How many believe the Earth is only 5,000 years old, or that universe was created in a week?

At least 39 percent of United States-ians believe in the existence of an invisible friend who has nothing better to do than meddle in their daily lives, usually for the worse.

50 percent of all people (not just US-ians) are below average. It often takes fewer than 50 percent to elect a president, i.e. Bush in 2000. Bush was anti-science and anti-intellectual, or at least pretended to be to garner the ignorant vote.

Apparently, we're beginning to evolve smaller brains. I guess that's better for the planet in the long run.

However, none of this should take away from Darwin Day. What an amazing light his ideas continue to shine on ignorance.

Miantiao,

According to the same Gallop page "Belief [in the theory of evolution] drops to 24% among frequent church attenders". I will call it a regression.

I'm not directly speaking about religion here (swing to god Vs swing toward non-believers). I just notice how the "fact of Evolution" (aka the theory of evolution) proved by Science is only accepted by 39% of the population of the United States of America.

kimik

so does that represent a swing to god or is it in fact a swing toward non-believers since the last poll?

of the 39% of believers, how many choose god as their preferred leader?

what percentage of voters were happy with god's performance?

A new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they "believe in the theory of evolution".

http://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/Darwin-Birthday-Believe-Evolution.aspx