Why are the religious so sensitive?

[Alan]

First of all, the property of "being alive" is very foggy and arbitrary, same problem as with transitional forms in evolution: we talk of "species", so it's either one or the other, not in between. If it IS in between, the species model is revised to allow the new one to be categorised as well (think of it as being a visitor to an alien world and ignorant of colours but trying to categorise all the colours he meets, adding to the list whenever he encounters a new one). So it's not "magical" that non-life eventually GAVE life -- the two states are just defined arbitrarily because we never had to mess with transitions before (in fact, abiogenesis isn't something you'd see often in your daily life).

The definition of being "alive" in a philosophical sense, i.e. as opposed to simply being "animate", is even more foggy and arbitrary. According to some definitions some mentally retarded and many animals aren't really "alive", but does that make them "non-alive" in the practical sense? I think the better labels are sentient and sapient, even though these qualities are even harder to recognise and describe rationally (although neurobiology is making a huge progress lately, despite the religious and cultural opposition).

On the "I can speak German in sleep" bit: "bitten" is an infinitive form of "plea" or "ask for". The German word for "please" (as in "Please don't kill me") is "bitte" -- you've likely bumped into it at one point or another, whether you were paying attention or not. It's certainly not a word that would magically turn a German heathen on his heels, though -- especially after you tried to "speak in tongues", as you said.

ALL of those things you said boil down to "a voice in my head told me". You probably have a mental or neurological condition you should see a doctor or psychiatrist about. The phenomena you describe are no different from what someone with a history of severe drug abuse might experience -- it's a rather odd wiring that's pretty common in very strong believers apparently; so common that the part in the brain that can instantly cause hallucinations was termed the "God spot" or something like that. It's just more active in some people, who then often mis-attribute it to divine intervention and think they are prophets or something and might eventually go on a killing spree when their voice happens to say something inappropriate.

[starbucks]

I'm lost here. Are we all concluding that from non-life LIFE became?

According to the Bible, that's not far-fetched at all. It did say that God breathed life into Adam who was just a lifeless, inanimate, "non-living" (so to speak) body of flesh fashioned from the Earth. And only then did man become a "living, breathing, being".

[Alan]

We're not talking about claymen here. We're talking about chemical reactions.

If you look at very simple cellular "life", you'll notice there's not much to it but a large chain of chemical reactions. Multicellular life isn't much different, though several orders of magnitude more complex. Same with all other lifeforms, essentially. It's just that at some point the reactions become so complex that it isn't very useful to talk about them on the same scale anymore and instead we move to larger scales like neurology and biology (and once we talk about the interaction between organisms, eventually, ecology, etc).

What I'm saying is that the concept of "life" doesn't make any sense the further you "zoom in" on it. It's the same problem with all such concepts, really. If you look at individual genetics, "species" suddenly becomes less helpful than you'd first expect instead parent/sibling/child relations become more relevant than, say, when looking at ecologies.

[starbucks]

If we go that route, then one may add that even dirt/soil/clay is made of up organic matter containing micro organisms and whatnot.

But anyways, I concur with you about the last paragraph.

[Alan]

Whether there's life in clay doesn't really matter. A clayman is no more complex than a clay pile. A human body is much more complex than a lump of human flesh, though -- mostly, because human bodies consist of more than just flesh, but the main difference is that a human body has a STRUCTURE which creates a complex meta-organism from all the little ones (in fact, it's like a Russian doll in that respect: meta-organisms of meta-organisms; although most scientists these days think it of little use to look at it like that as most of the meta-organisms we could define don't have any of the attributes required for something to be considered an organisms that's alive).