12-28-2021, 10:37 PM
(12-28-2021, 05:16 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(12-26-2021, 04:31 PM)David Horn Wrote:(12-26-2021, 02:25 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(12-24-2021, 05:41 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-24-2021, 03:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Nature is, indeed. But Darwinism is not. It explains life through death.
Darwinism as a scientific theory is hard to argue with. Species thrive to the extent that they fit their environment. Darwinism as a moral philosophy and practical tool is something else. When you start meddling with the environment to make it fit better with your group and less well with other groups, you loose me right quick. It rapidly becomes a justification for immorality.
Evolution is how life adapts to its environment and unfolds it potential through time. We need better theories than Darwin's basic attempt to explain it, since by itself that explanation snuffs out our awareness of what lives. And these revisions are indeed appearing, and deserve our attention. But the moral imperative to adapt to and fit into rather than destroy our environment for our own narrow purposes is a positive interpretation of evolution.
The concept is 'survival of the fittest', and that still applies. Dinosaurs were the fittest in their day ... then they weren't. Adaptability gets species a long run, but not an infinite one.
There's more to Darwinism than survival of the fittest. But even as usually conceived, the concept does not account for the cooperation and the mutual dependence and aid that plays such a large role in life and evolution. The life of Nature certainly involves the occasional death of species and predation, but predation in the right balance; and predation is not what drives the system. Life happens and evolves because it wants to; because it desires to unfold. It can't be explained from outside itself only. Life is self-moving. It is not a mechanism; it's an organism. And that's different. Life expands and grows from within outward all at once. Machines are made or put together by humans from without inward. But Darwinism is mechanical. It is based on the science that was given permission by Descartes to view everything except the religious realm according to a fully-automatic model. But the model is a false myth.
Is the coronavirus a challenge to the survival of the human species? So it seems; and climate change too. But whether we are fit to survive depends on whether we use the abilities that we certainly have to deal with these situations.
There are species on the planet today who have survived since the earliest paleozoic eras. I imagine they will continue, and if we use our abilities we will survive and transform ourselves into post-humans right up to the time when the Sun gets too hot for life. By then, a billion years from now, we need to realize our spiritual nature and move on up into the Other Side, and also retain our ability to come onto this side wherever in the universe we wish.
I believe the Celestine Prophecy! As I understand it, but is not often explained outside the Redfield books, is that this is what we are destined to achieve if we fulfill it. This book I haven't read yet, but I read the first two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret...th_Insight
We should not limit the horizons of what evolution is leading us to, by how we think we got to where we are today. Just as early hominids, or our shrewlike ancestral survivors of the asteroid, could not have conceived of cathedrals, symphonies, missions to Mars and the worldwide web.
Our fundamental notions of how we westerners view the world influence us more strongly than we realize. These are the two main "myths" or images through which we understand the world. They are both inadequate, even according to current science. Explained by Alan Watts.
Quote:Is the coronavirus a challenge to the survival of the human species? So it seems; and climate change too. But whether we are fit to survive depends on whether we use the abilities that we certainly have to deal with these situations.
Agreed. Just had a discussion about this somewhere else.
What we do now have great bearing on whether any of us will be here come the 22nd century. We do at present have great power at the tip of our fingers. We have technology, we have brilliant scientists, we have humanitarians, we have climatic event forecasts, engineers, new materials, etc.
We seem to lack the will however. This is what concerns me.
Also let me say, I found the Fourth Turning book after reading both of yours Eric. Then found this forum, where I have been lurking for awhile.
By way of introduction, I'm nobody special. Not an economist, historian, scientist, or astrologer. Just a history & astrology obsessed person living through our times & seeking to make sense of it.
I like this forum. Important things are being discussed.
Eric--astrologically speaking, and also using the Turnings; when do you think this virus thing will have ran its course?
PS: Nice to meet everyone
TatteredX ?
~TatteredX
