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Some Agreement- Some Answers- Some Questions

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Posted by Richard Ruquist on January 21, 2003 04:33:54 UTC

Apparently we are in agreement about god feeding humans only what humans are ready to accept and understand, basically because humans are still in the stupid stage of development.

GE raises the serious question of whether we need a god at all for evolution. It would appear that evolution is bound to happen and the question is rather why did it take so long whereas GE takes only tens to hundreds of generations.

Cloning is used in GE- but it is called copying for PC reasons. It has been shown to speed up evolution. So cloning can have value. The problem is ethics rather than science- for to make cloning beneficial, all the ugly questions of eugenics surface. Eugenics is not evil. The problem is who gets to decide who gets mated or cloned. Leaving it to sexual attraction or chance relieves us of the ethical questions.

I do think a super genius would reveal more because that is the way the world has worked through out all history. Ordinary people are just not very revealing.

Buddhism is based on the no soul argument. Yet they firmly believe in reincarnation. The 'no soul' argument is as far as I know is a rejection of life after death as well as the possibility of rebirth. Gautama is his wisdom realized that his philosophy could be attacked by requiring proof of the existence of a soul. So he based his philosophy, and the then new concept of repeated births, on the fact that souls do not exist.

Frankly, all I care is that consciousness exists and that it will survive my physical death. However, it appears to be all downhill thereafter because if I am to be reborn, I must lose consciousness and identity with my previous life. So as far as I am concerned, I then no longer exist. My present life as I know it is gone and I am gone.

In some sense I still exist, and that is what is called my soul. It is like a higher consciousness that I am not presently aware of except intuitively. What I am aware of will cease to exist unless some higher authority intervenes to collapse my present awareness into my higher awareness. But even then I probably still lose my present sense of identity. So in some sense my soul does not exist for me at the present time.

That's the best I can do right now. But it is an interesting question.

yanniru

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