I'll look for the morals once I find the beef.

Oh shit. I had the morals in my back pocket, forgot and sat on them. Pretty sure they were the universal and objective ones too. Oh well.

Quote:Study meiosis and mitosis. Try to understand what role both these processes play in the division of cell and building of a tissue and organ. Study how variations in similar population occur. There you will find how a man can be tall or short and why parents have not similar children.


At least Adam and Eve are a solid logical foundation on how human race began on earth. It is not like guessing under the hood of abiogenesis how life began and how first life form looked

Adam and eve is not logical in the slightest, it's a laughable myth, it belongs with other myths. abiogenesis is only a hypothesis, but is still much more genuine, honest, less laughable than getting information from an ancient arabic book.
The theory of evolution as the name suggests is a reliable scientific theory.
It's quite easy to spot the odd one out when you put a scientific theory in with a group of ancient myths.

Ancient myth

Quote:Faro created all the world that mankind has come to know from the descendants of Mangala's original egg seeds. He caused the land to flood to wash away the impure seed of his brother, Pemba. From this flood, only the good were saved, sheltered by Faro's ark.

Ancient myth

Quote:The goddess Nüwa then used clay to form humans. These humans were very smart since they were individually crafted. Nüwa then became bored of individually making every human, so she dipped a rope in clay and the blobs that fell from it became new humans. These new humans were not as smart as the original ones.

What modern day Muslims actually believed happened and is definitely not an ancient myth.

Quote:He created Adam from clay and He breathed life into him. He created Him from dust; then He said to him, "Be," and he was. From Adam he created a mate, and from both of them many men and women.

(Oh and I don't need to study meiosis and mitosis at all, I have good old trusty Islamic hadith explanation as to the diversity of human kind on the planet.)

Hadith transmitted by one of Muhammad's companions.

Quote:"Allah created Adam from a handful of dust taken from different lands, so the children of Adam have been created according to the composition of the land. Therefore, from mankind we have white, red, black and yellow ones; we have good and evil, ease and sorrow, and what comes in between

Ok and now......

Scientific theory.

Quote:Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.
All life on Earth is descended from a last universal ancestor that lived approximately 3.8-3.5 billion years ago. Repeated speciation and the divergence of life can be inferred from shared sets of biochemical and morphological traits, or by sequencing shared DNA sequences. These homologous traits and sequences are more similar among species that share a more recent common ancestor, and can be used to reconstruct evolutionary histories, using both existing species and the fossil record. Existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped both by speciation and by extinction.

I'm not saying everything about evolution is definitely 100 percent right and I believe in it religiously, or that I even understand 100 percent everything about it because I'm not a biologist.
BUT I think I can see the difference between an ancient myth and a genuine, honest scientific attempt to try and discover the truth about something.

(November 1, 2014 at 2:17 pm)Harris Wrote: Study meiosis and mitosis. Try to understand what role both these processes play in the division of cell and building of a tissue and organ. Study how variations in similar population occur. There you will find how a man can be tall or short and why parents have not similar children.


At least Adam and Eve are a solid logical foundation on how human race began on earth. It is not like guessing under the hood of abiogenesis how life began and how first life form looked.

Yes. Fairy tales are often simpler than reality-- "logical" is not the right word, though-- "simple" is.

The problem is that your simple story lacks evidence, any explanatory value of how we have become what we are, any predictive value for possible future states of humanity, and it's tied into a mythology about a Sky Daddy who punishes children, "even to the fourth generation," for the sins of their fathers. And then, after all this baby-torturing, sends messengers to tell us that God is pure good and perfectly all-loving. Yeah-- totally logical.

Did I just read the phrase, "rapist is atheist"?

I think atheism may be the most misunderstood concept in today's world. Atheism certainly doesn't achieve any of these arbitrary goals, since it makes no attempt to.

However, generally atheism is more likely to lead to personal accountability, so if you rape someone, you have to live with it. You don't get a free pass thanks to sucking up to someone, and not the person you raped, later.

Holy books are a bunch of crap as far as morals are concerned. The bible for example is just one long story of atrocity, and we have had to make secular laws to stop people doing most of it. Do you think we were wrong to do so? Should we still be stoning people to death for gathering sticks on Sunday? If something is moral because someone says its moral and you just follow blindly, you have no morals at all. You are just being obedient to someone who may or may not actually be moral.

Morals = empathy + reason

If something is moral and happens to be in some old book, then it's not moral because it's in some old book. You could write a book about morals, and it could be wonderfully accurate as far as possible, without it having anything to do with gods or mythology.

I have heard many times that people think if they gave up religion they would just go around murdering and raping. This is the result of brainwashing. People are more moral than the religions they follow preach (at least most people are) because they apply their own morality to it to pick and choose what is and isn't right. There may be a few severely mentally unstable people for which the idea of accountability to god is the only thing keeping them from pillaging, but I would be fairly certain this is a tiny minority of people with such fears.

As children, we need a level of guidance because we don't yet have the full mental capacity to make good decisions. But once you are an adult, you should be able to figure it out for yourself.

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Wow, OK I just can't let this go. Barbarians and creative writers 2000 years ago know stuff about morality that we don't?

Also, religion teaches morality in a very black and white way. This good, that bad. Don't do that, I'll stick a spike in you if you do. Real life is in the grey area, and such bold statements can only act as a very rough guide. And generally not a good one. Did you know "thou shalt not kill" isn't even in the ten commandments? I know most people think it is, but it isn't. Are they all gonna start killing each other now they know this? (It made god's first draft of over 200 commandments, but he decided to leave it out for the final draft onto the tablets to make more room for his ego and stuff about boiling goats in milk. Oh, and stealing didn't make it either.)

So... really? Not so long ago gay people were illegal because of religion.

I asked the cousin marriage thing cause I thought someone else can post some evidence that it isn't really a good idea. And Zakir Naik is an idiot, I thought you'd like him

And I didn't leave Islam because it's immoral nor because it was (it isn't btw), I left because it didn't convince me anymore and it contradicted science (especially the Hadiths)

Dude, guys, seriously: Harris is literally posting links about the things we're talking about because they contain negative words, regardless of the context. He's not reading his own stuff, why should any of us think he's reading ours?

I thought you were pretending to sound scientific before by talking about meiosis and mitosis, now you have gone back to believing the diversity of humanity is due to them being made by different coloured clay.

It could just be that clay was used to create things in lots of cultures and that's why god created man from clay in many primitive myths.

Each myth is not distorted, they're just fictional, created by locals and so therefore reflect the mentality of the locals.

Notice how each nation had a prophet that was speaking the true message of Islam, some of them remembered the bit in which they were made from clay, but most of them forgot about the specific rules of Islam. And then there were others who made their own completely non related creation stories completely independent of Islam too.

Superstitious drug dealers will believe in a god of drug dealing, superstitious people living near the nile will believe in a god of nile. Superstitious people living near clay will make myths about clay. That's the only connection here.

And you also believe biologists believe in evolution because of conjecture.

You haven't still haven't convinced me yet that it's more logical that the diversity of mankind is due to different clay being used during our creation. I still believe in evolution and natural selection. I feel the compulsion to side with the professional biologists and paleontologists and such. Rather than the ancient clay myths.