From: RFaussette@aol.com
Date: Wed Jul 09 2003 - 15:19:45 EDT
In a message dated 7/9/03 11:09:29 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jwburgeson@juno.com writes:
> I, and most others on this list, have concluded, and you need to assume
> that we have done so on the basis of our own serious study, that the
> Levitical laws* do not all apply to us. We may be wrong. But so far I
> have not seen any persuasive arguments that suggests we are wrong.
>
> Peace.
>
> John Burgeson (Burgy)
>
> * eating pork, embracing our wife after childbirth, presenting our
> disobedient child for public stoning, etc. are a few of these which seem
> problematical.
>
>
Burgy,
None of the examples you mentioned are in Leviticus 18 which I have confined
myself to and which is complete into itself and as the scripture specifically
says are life sustaining laws to prevent the people from being spewed out of
the land which I have been saying repeatedly. I don't care what you or any of
your liberal friends accept or do not accept, the biology is sound and the
religion is sound. If you engage in those practices your population is "spewed out
of the land," consumed by fire or as they say now, rendered extinct. I have
no prejudice toward you and your friends for your liberal views but they do
not constitute religion. with all your studies you should take a look at the
precursor of Christianity, Judaism. Why did I do that? Because the Jews are
smarter, more organized and have been a distinct people for thousands of years
while other civilizations go extinct. I studied to see if the secret of their
success was in the religion.
IT IS. And most Christians don't know anything about it.
You are wrong! The arguments are not mine. They are in the scripture you
choose to ignore.
WORDS OF AN ECOLOGIST:
"Tribal peoples who have survived to our own times exist in a matrix of
custom, ritual and taboo. The things all the people do,
from gathering food to going to war, are done by the rules of custom; they
are learned. Yet to the ecological eye all these
learned things fit the people to get their livelihoods and persist as tribes
down long spans of generations. The habits serve each
individual of the tribe as the programmed food search of a bird species
serves the individual bird. Custom and ritual define the
boundaries of these tribal niches. We know that ritual and taboo can help the
family produce the optimum number of children.
In a like manner can taboos shape the everyday activities of the niche. It
does not matter what people or their elders and witch
doctors thought they were doing when they followed the tenets of taboo; it is
only the effect that matters. If the effect of a
custom is to keep people alive, or to refine their breeding strategy, then
the people who practice that custom will flourish: and
people who avoid the practice may fare less well."
From The Fates of Nations, A Biological Theory of History by Paul Colinvaux
Simon and Schuster, New York, 1980 (ppgs. 50-51)
WORDS OF A SOCIOBIOLOGIST:
"...beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival. Religions, like
other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the
persistence and influence of its practitioners."
From On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass., London, England, 1978
WORDS OF AN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST:
If society is an organism can we then think of morality and religion as
biologically and culturally evolved adaptations that enable human groups to
function as single units rather than mere collections of individuals?” David Sloan
Wilson says we can. In his introduction, titled Church as Organism, Wilson
writes, “The purpose of this book is to treat the organismic concept of religious
groups as a serious scientific hypothesis....”1 David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's
Cathedral
THE WORD OF THE LORD:
You shall observe my institutions and my laws: the man who keeps them shall
have life through them. I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 18:1-5)
WORDS OF AN EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGIST:
The fact that religion is so pervasive, despite the fact that science has
shown so many of it's surface claims
to be wrong or even silly suggests that it must serve some adaptive
function. The particular case I have
examined and which has elicited concern and even anxiety on the part of some,
is that of Judaism. I'd
probably have been better off to have stuck to the Hutterites or the Ancient
Spartans, but the 3,000-year
record of Judaism at least gave me a lot of data. Let me just say that I
can't see how the religion and the
people could have survived 3,000 years, despite the best efforts of others,
from trying to kill Judaism with
kindness and conversion, to killing Jews on a massive scale (the Holocaust
and earlier pogroms) if it didn't
raise some important issues of human adaptation. Kevin MacDonald, Amherst
College 2000
MY WORDS:
I had, however, come to a startling realization. If the theory of natural
selection operated in human
populations, if the scientists were right, then the people who are most
gifted must possess the attributes that
ensure success in the struggle for survival and they must pass those
attributes down from generation to
generation.
Who were these gifted people and what were the attributes they passed
down? Though I often found
myself irrationally resisting the revealed truth, I found evidence everywhere
suggesting that Jewish people,
wherever they were found, were over represented in most fields of achievement
and had had an impact on the
history of the world far out of proportion to their numbers in the
population. I also learned that every people
they’d lived among had persecuted them. Yet paradoxically, they were spread
out over the whole earth in
independent congregations. What did they all have in common that could
account for their startling success and
the universally negative reaction to their presence?
In addition to their success and their notoriety, the Jews were an
ancient people. What is more germane to
real “evolutionary” success than the ability to survive and prosper while
others only survive in textbooks and
museums?
The Jews called themselves God’s "chosen" people. Moses had given the
Laws of God to them. I
wondered -- were the Jewish laws of God and natural law the same thing? I
began to read the Bible. It was
only the monolith of tradition found in its pages that all Jews had in
common. Not in a scholarly journal but here
In the Bible -- I would find the key to unlock the contradiction between
science and religion.
from Natural Selection and the Nature of God 1998 richard faussette
There is science in the religion. You can't take out what you don't like
without consequences.
rich faussette
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