[One, Two, Middlesboogie]

Yes, let's.

I'm an atheist and a philanthropist, because I was brought up as such. I have no religion whatsoever.
I believe that such people as Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, the Buddha etc. may very well have exiseted, but I certainly do not believe that they were divine. They are simply stories blown way out of proportion over hundred of years. I do not believe that anything happens to us when we die; there is no justice or punishment at the end. We die and that is it.

I do not think that we should need the fear of a wrathful deity to make us be good. We humans are intelligent and highly sophisticated creatures, and we are clever enough to judge for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. We can tell what good moral standards are without having to have them written down for us in a lengthy tome.

Religion is an insidious blight on our lives, and humans can never be truly free until we can cast aside such unrealistic notions and speak rationally about science, our real creator.

We do actually have a creator and a master, but it is not a God. It is our genes. All humans, despite our sophistication, are no more than throwaway survival machines for our genes, the immortal replicators. Pacen, you said you were not sure what 'life' actually is. All that is neede for life, however primitive or sophisticated, to arise, is a type of cell with the ability to replicate itself.

All life forms started as no more than little bits of deoxyribose nucleic acids floating around in the primordial soup. These bits of DNA evolved protein coats for protection from other foreign bits of DNA. Eventually the protein coats became so sophisticated that they became all the
creatures we see today.

(Richard Dawkins explains all this better in The Selfish Gene)

However, the DNA is no longer in a single part of our body. It is in our entire body. Every cell has metres of DNA coiled tightly inside it. We and our mitochondria are programmed to survive, not for the good of the body (which is a mere throwaway survival machine), but for the good of the individual's genes. The genes are the only part of the body that has barely evolved at all. They are not conscious, but they are still as selfish as ever, 'interested' only in surviving. Like it or not, they control us, not a God.

However, because we are intelligent enough to have realised this, I and Richard Dawkins hold out the hope that our species, alone on Earth, has the power to rebel against the designs of the selfish genes. All creatures show natural selfishness; even apparent altruism is very often selfishness in disguise. For example, an allele for saving a family member at the cost of one's life seems an altruistic one, but seeing as the person we saved is related to us, it is certain that they have some genes in common with us. Therefore it would still be beneficial to our genes to save them, since they may contain copies of the same genes, which will now survive.

We must teach our children to be altruistic, for it will never come to them naturally.

[ May 19, 2001: Message edited by: One, Two, Middlesboogie ]