Atheists... Your life is pointless

conditioned religiosity which codifies behaviour and even tends to dangle celestial carrots would imply that humans are subject to synthetic social forces.

I don't accept that there is such a thing as "natural compassion". Something natural has no exceptions.

Humans are born totally self-centered

On the contrary. From the biological point of view, humans are the species which require an inordinate amount of nurturing by carers.

Atheistic "selves" merely have a negative or zero relationship with "the God concept".It is not a requirement for their self-integrity.

What I also believe though, it that western culture has been so heavily permeated with Christian thought and ethos that their behavior (if it aligns with their society's) is at least residually a by product of a specific set of moral imperatives- and it's interesting that many of those reference the teachings of various god figures - in western societies- those most readily associated with Jesus Christ.

I've always wondered why people that are so adamant about the non-existence of God, debate morals and what is right and wrong. If there is no God and this world is truly just a cosmic fluke, than your life and everything that happens in it are of no consequence whatsoever. Why not just do whatever you want and not care about others. After all, survival of the fittest is the name of the game right? Love of others is just some accidental emotion that means nothing. So do whatever you want. Your life, your children's life, and your children's children's life will all be over soon and nothing will be remembered.

CONSUMING PASSIONS by Philippa Pullar. 278 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.


There are still those who believe a civilization travels on its stomach. Now they have their theorist, their Toynbee of the gourmets, in Philippa Pullar, a perfectly smashing English girl with a Cordon Bleu Certificate of Cookery and a graceful prose style.

In chronology and scope, Miss Pullar's bibliography runs from Juvenal's Satires to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Tracing the vagaries of English appetite from the Roman occupation to the present, she has written a history of taste in the fullest sense of the word.

Straight off, the Romans illustrate one of Miss Pullar's pet theses, which Americans, engulfed in cookbooks and cholesterol, might ponder: gluttony is the consequence of another sin, boredom "acedia. Affluent Roman days, according to Miss Pullar, were "great plains of monotony punctuated with affairs and mealtimes," often conducted simultaneously. (In a special appendix the twin hungers for food and sex are related by Miss Pullar, who is now at work on a biography of that priapic trencherman, Frank Harris.)

The Romans may have been better engineers than cooks. They concocted trick buns that squirted, fitted wings to cooked hares in order to impersonate Pegasus, and rigged dining-room ceilings to rain flowers. Every meal a production number. But the recipes themselves, Miss Pullar maintains, have been underestimated by culinary historians. She favorably compares Roman sweet-and-sour contrasts with Chinese cooking, their well-sauced meats with Creole dishes.

When the Romans introduced their rich ways to England, the Britons scorned these foreigners "who bathe in warm water, eat artificial dainties." This establishes a motif that runs through Miss Pullar's history: puritans v. orgiasts. But gradually the natives came round. By the time those other invaders, the Vikings, had introduced their rollicking ways, canons had to be published forbidding drinking in church.

Still, Anglo-Saxon palates were hearty rather than decadent. Lots of meat broths and stews were the order of the day. Salt was obligatory in cheese and butter as well as on meat, making home-brewed ale equally obligatory. All lips smacked through the age of Chaucer.

What would have happened, Miss Pullar speculates, if the Puritans had not forbidden spices as exciters of passion, and generally brought to a crisis the English gourmet's problem, which she defines as "the neurosis between the soul and the body"? The English tradition, she thinks, "might have blossomed as richly as that of the French." After Cromwell, mourns Miss Pullar, "nothing was ever quite the same again." "Mighty Roast Beef" became the national dish.

For Miss Pullar, her history, and history in general, goes downhill after the Industrial Revolution. "Not since Imperial Rome can there have been so many signposts to gluttony," J.B. Priestley wrote of the Edwardians. (Edward VII's breakfast: haddock, poached eggs, bacon, chicken and woodcock.) Yet coexisting with gluttony, comparatively unimaginative gluttony, was malnutrition. Only one of three Englishmen of military age was found fit for World War I.

The welfare state, Miss Pullar complains, has leveled things out, but only at the price of turning England into a giant supermarket. She writes: "There is no excellence any more, or very little," looking far beyond her cookbooks to a civilization she judges tragically out of tune with nature. "Sterility, not fertility, is the great cry," she protests. " 'Life is one animal,' Samuel Butler said. And slowly we are killing it."

Today's Englishman, Miss Pullar concludes, has come full circle and ended up like the Romans, with bread-and-circuses. But what she finally cannot forgive him is the poor quality of the bread.

Melvin Maddocks.

To be continued

DID human community preceed the invention of gods? or was the concept of gods a prerequisite for community ?

crude biological definition

"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Macbeth (Act V, Scene V).

On the "no exceptions" rule, leaving out hysterical reactions, I don't think there is a maternal instinct.

The ubiquity of a maternal attitude results from integration in a system of codified human interaction.

And a maternal attitude can be faked as well.

the fact hat you need fear of punishment to have morals speaks for itself.

have a good day sir.

DID human community preceed the invention of gods? or was the concept of gods a prerequisite for community ?

Justin L Barrett guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 25 November 2008 08.00 GMT Article historyWhy do the majority of people – across cultures and throughout history – believe in gods?

One way to address this question is to look at why it is that children acquire beliefs in gods. If an idea cannot be easily learned by children then it is relatively unlikely to survive into the next generation and will die out. So if we can explain why children are so ready to believe in gods, we will be a big step closer in understanding religious beliefs more generally. It may seem that the answer is simple: indoctrination. Children believe because their parents or other adults teach them, right? Unfortunately, the story is not that simple. Fortunately, it is far more interesting.

Children will believe a lot of what their parents teach them, but not everything. Try to convince a child that a tarantula is harmless, that broccoli is a better food for them than crisps, or that Paul McCartney is a better musician than Miley Cyrus and you'll likely get nowhere. Likewise, teachers have difficulty teaching many scientific insights such as evolution by natural selection or that solid objects such as tables are composed almost entirely of space. Children learn things that their minds are tuned to learn more readily than things that go against that natural tuning.

Developmental psychologists have provided evidence that children are naturally tuned to believe in gods of one sort or another.

• Children tend to see natural objects as designed or purposeful in ways that go beyond what their parents teach, as Deborah Kelemen has demonstrated. Rivers exist so that we can go fishing on them, and birds are here to look pretty.

• Children doubt that impersonal processes can create order or purpose. Studies with children show that they expect that someone not something is behind natural order. No wonder that Margaret Evans found that children younger than 10 favoured creationist accounts of the origins of animals over evolutionary accounts even when their parents and teachers endorsed evolution. Authorities' testimony didn't carry enough weight to over-ride a natural tendency.

• Children know humans are not behind the order so the idea of a creating god (or gods) makes sense to them. Children just need adults to specify which one.

• Experimental evidence, including cross-cultural studies, suggests that three-year-olds attribute super, god-like qualities to lots of different beings. Super-power, super-knowledge and super-perception seem to be default assumptions. Children then have to learn that mother is fallible, and dad is not all powerful, and that people will die. So children may be particularly receptive to the idea of a super creator-god. It fits their predilections.

• Recent research by Paul Bloom, Jesse Bering, and Emma Cohen suggests that children may also be predisposed to believe in a soul that persists beyond death.

That belief comes so naturally to children may sound like an attack on religious belief (belief in gods is just leftover childishness) or a promotion of religious belief (God has implanted a seed for belief in children). What both sides should agree upon is the scientific evidence: certainly cultural inputs help fill in the details but children's minds are not a level playing field. They are tilted in the direction of belief.

Justin L Barrett will discuss his research today at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion seminar, "Born Believers: the Naturalness of Childhood Theism" at St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge

Children tend to see natural objects as designed or purposeful