[lit-ideas] Re: It's not God's soul

"Human beings, he writes, "have a self that seems to inhabit a separate 
universe of spiritual being. As the subjects of something so mysterious and 
strange, we humans gain new confidence and interest in our own survival, a new 
interest in other people, too. This feeds right back to our biological fitness, 
in both obvious and subtle ways. It makes us more fascinating and more 
fascinated, more determined to pursue lives wherever they will take us. In 
short, more like the amazing piece of work that humans are."" 
 
I completely disagree.  He needs to define spirituality.   If we have a new 
interest in other people, it's only to get the better of them, even exterminate 
them whenever possible.  Humphrey himself felt superior to just about everyone. 
 The vast majority of humans are determined to pursue lives of quiet 
desperation, living out their parental injunctions and prescriptions and 
repressed rages wherever those will take them.  If humans have a spirit, it 
certainly hasn't helped them to date.     

Far from having anything that resembles a spirit, this warlike, hatefilled 
species even advances Armageddon because they feel themselves so superior to 
the rest of the rabble that they are convinced the rabble will be left behind.  
 God, you see, loves them and not the other guy.  How spiritual is that?  

The idea of religion as infection of waking life does explain a lot of things.  
But, if humans are so chronically, eternally infected, then maybe the infection 
is the natural condition, and any efforts at superimposing spirituality are 
just more hubris.  Why not drop this whole spirituality nonsense and get on 
with making the world livable?  Admit that we're just cavemen who throw big 
rocks called bombs.  Even if we can't stop ourselves, at least we can be honest 
about it and stop hiding behind pretensions to spirituality.  I wonder that 
Evangelicals don't even consider that God might cuff them in the head for being 
pushy and destroying his creation on their timetable instead of his, and send 
them back to live among the ruins they created, send them to Hell somewhere 
else in the universe.  Wait a minute.  Somewhere in the universe.  Maybe he'll 
send them back to Earth ...  

 
 
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Simon Ward 
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 7/30/2006 4:54:41 AM 
Subject: [lit-ideas] It's not God's soul
 
There is a soul, says Nicholas Humphrey, but it can be readily explained 
without resort to religion.
 
A life in science: After 40 years of studying the problem of consciousness, 
Nicholas Humphrey believes it was natural selection that gave us souls. God, he 
insists, had nothing to do with it.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1831312,00.html
 
Simon

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