-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy Bates <tbates@karri.bhs.mq.edu.au>
To: extropians@extropy.com <extropians@extropy.com>
Date: Thursday, February 25, 1999 11:25 PM
Subject: Re: Extropianism & Theology
>Aaron Davidson said
>> Since myself and many others do not seem to feel this instinct, I think
it
>> must be more of a conditioned factor.
>
>Well try the same logic out in this sentence
>"Since i myself do not have brown eyes, I think it must be a conditioned
>factor"
>
>I think that God-believing is a heritable neural module present in the
minds
>of the great majority of human brains.
>
>A module which evolved around 150,000 years ago and which served the
>valuable purpose of enabling teleological reasoning (reasoning about
>purposes).
>
>I think myself, with no evidence whatsoever, that about 3,000-5,000 years
>ago, either a mutant variant entered the population or perhaps merely
chance
>selective breeding in a small tribe (of Ionic Greeks for instance) created
>an emergenic phenotype which lacks this neural module.
>
>Those of us on this list who believe in the kind of extropy that I have
been
>discussing lack this module.
>
>I think also that the majority of principles which I espouse follow very
>directly from simply being incapable of explaining events in terms of
>"spiritual" happenings, being constrained instead to operate solely in the
>materialist reductionism space.
>
>I think that we learn Occam's Razor. We learn the fragile culture of
>science. But we are born either able or unable to use immaterial events as
>explanations.
>
>tim
Scott B.