Re: Confused on Religion! Need Insight
NumbFaint wrote:I'm attending college this year and am a still in the youthful "question" phase of my life. My parents have never really instilled religion in my life, they let me believe what I want to.
So far I'm confused about religion; I've heard stories on creation of Adam and Eve from the Bible but they don't add up. What I mean is, how can we discredit science? There are dinosaur bones, findings of new types of cavemen that bridge the link of evolution. Humans have tailbones, and nature to this day is still evolving.
Right now I believe that people believe in Religion to make worth in their lives. To believe in a god gives one hope that someone is always there. I deeply respect any form of god because they instill values and principles to better life.
What bugs me the most is when other religions denounce other religions. I believe that any sort of god that one believes in, whether it be a shoe still gives the person a meaning to life.
Right now, I think Buddhism is a great religion.
What are your guy's feelings about religion?
I view Christianity somewhat the way Churchill viewed democracy, i.e. as the worst religion there could possibly be, except for all those other religions, including evolutionism.
Nobody defends any scientific theory the way evolution is defended, i.e. at all cost, to the last man, despite the overwhelming evidence of the fossil record and all other relevant facts, etc. Only religions are defended like that.
The two big hangups most people have with religion are one evolution, and two the problem of evil.
Evolution has been overwhelmingly disproven and discredited over the last century. At present, it is being defended by second-raters; nobody with brains or talent is defending it any longer.
And then there's "the problem of evil", i.e. how does an omnipotent and loving God allow the hardships which we see in our physical world. There are several similar and related problems, such as if the son of god actually came to this world 2000 years ago, how did the American Indians go 1500 years without ever hearing about it? Again, how does an omnipotent and loving God create the creatures of Pandora's box, biting flies, mosquitos, ticks, fleas, chiggers, and disease vectors?
There are a few others. All such questions basically hang on the question of what the word "omnipotent" is supposed to mean. Most people view it as meaning "having all the power which anybody could imagine", and it is that definition which leads to conundrums and breakdowns of logic. A more rational definition would be "having all the power that there actually is", and THAT definition does not lead to conundrums.
That view says that the spirit world and our physical realm are strongly separated, at least in our age of the world, and that the two are orthoganal to eachother and that the spirit world actually has little if any real power to act within our realm; that we in fact might have originally been put here to PROVIDE the spirit world with some degree of instrumentality in this physical realm. THAT of course would require solid and reliable communications between the two realms, which we do not presently have.
That view also says that on the day that Christ was born into our physical realm, he was subject to all of the same physical laws which we are subject to, including not being able to get from Israel to Mexico or Kansas without airplanes.
That view also says that a loving God simply did not create the creatures of Pandora's box. The best evidence we have at present is that the engineering and re-engineering of complex life forms was some sort of a cottage industry or something like that in past ages and that more than one pair of hands was involved, and that whoever was responsible for the existence of biting flies, ticks, and chiggers, is not anybody we need to worship, to say the least. There is solid evidence of genetic engineering and re-engineering even in our own genome:
Quote:
Henry Gee
Monday February 12, 2001
The Guardian
The potentially-poisonous Japanese fugu fish has achieved notoriety, at least among scientists who haven't eaten any, because it has a genome that can be best described as "concise". There is no "junk" DNA, no waste, no nonsense. You get exactly what it says on the tin. This makes its genome very easy to deal with in the laboratory: it is close
to being the perfect genetic instruction set. Take all the genes you need to make an animal and no more, stir, and you'd get fugu. Now, most people would hardly rate the fugu fish as the acme of creation. If it were, it would be eating us, and not the other way round. But here is
a paradox. The human genome probably does not contain significantly more genes than the fugu fish. What sets it apart is - and there is no more succinct way to put this - rubbish.
The human genome is more than 95% rubbish. Fewer than 5% of the 3.2bn As, Cs, Gs and Ts that make up the human genome are actually found in genes. It is more litter-strewn than any genome completely sequenced so far. It is believed to contain just under 31,780 genes, only about half as many again as found in the simple roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (19,099 genes): yet in terms of bulk DNA content, the human genome is almost 30 times the size.A lot is just rubbish, plain and simple. But at least half the genome is
rubbish of a special kind - transposable elements. These are small segments of DNA that show signs of having once been the genomes of independent entities. Although rather small, they often contain sequences that signal cellular machinery to transcribe them (that is, to switch them on). They may also contain genetic instructions for enzymes whose function is to make copies and insert the copies elsewhere in the genome. These transposable elements litter the human genome in their hundreds of thousands. Many contain genes for an enzyme called reverse transcriptase - essential for a transposable element to integrate itself into the host DNA.
The chilling part is that reverse transcriptase is a key feature of retroviruses such as HIV-1, the human immunodeficiency virus. Much of the genome itself - at least half its bulk - may have consisted of DNA that started out, perhaps millions of years ago, as independent viruses or
virus-like entities. To make matters worse, hundreds of genes, containing instructions for at least 223 proteins, seem to have been imported directly from bacteria. Some are responsible for features of human metabolism otherwise hard to explain away as quirks of evolution - such as our ability to metabolise psychotropic drugs. Thus, monoamine oxidase is involved in metabolising alcohol.
If the import of bacterial genes for novel purposes (such as drug resistance) sounds disturbing and familiar, it should - this is precisely the thrust of much research into the genetic modification of organisms in agriculture or biotechnology.
So natural-born human beings are, indeed, genetically modified. Self-respecting eco-warriors should never let their children marry a human being, in case the population at large gets contaminated with exotic genes!One of the most common transposable elements in the human genome is called
Alu - the genome is riddled with it. What the draft genome now shows quite clearly is that copies of Alu tend to cluster where there are genes. The density of genes in the genome varies, and where there are more genes, there are more copies of Alu. Nobody knows why, yet it is consistent with the idea that Alu has a positive benefit for genomes.
To be extremely speculative, it could be that a host of very similar looking Alu sequences in gene-rich regions could facilitate the kind of gene-shuffling that peps up natural genetic variation, and with that, evolution. This ties in with the fact that human genes are, more than most,
fragmented into a series of many exons, separated by small sections of rubbish called introns - rather like segments of a TV programme being punctuated by commercials.
The gene for the protein titin, for example, is divided into a record-breaking 178 exons, all of which must be patched together by the gene-reading machinery before the finished protein can be assembled. This fragmentation allows for alternative versions of proteins to be built from
the same information, by shuffling exons around. Genomes with less fragmented genes may have a similar number of overall genes - but a smaller palette of ways to use this information. Transposable elements might have
helped unlock the potential in the human genome, and could even have contributed to the fragmentation of genes in the first place (some introns are transposable elements by another name). This, at root, may explain why human beings are far more complex than roundworms or fruit flies. If it were not for trashy transposable elements
such as Alu, it might have been more difficult to shuffle genes and parts of genes, creating alternative ways of reading the "same" genes. It is true that the human genome is mostly rubbish, but it explains what we are, and
why we are who we are, and not lying on the slab in a sushi bar.
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