Once Bitten -- (A Plea to My Friends to Take Me Out and Shoot Me!)

Posted by Eudaemonic Pie (Returned from Hell) on Feb 07, 2002 at 13:36
pppa58-resalecarsoncity1-1r7409.dialinx.net (4.16.206.87)

Please.

Someone please help.

I need my friends (non-friends too: but this is where friends come in) to please take me out in the woods and shoot me.

I have just wasted the last few days of my life in the most stagnant backwaters forum on the planet where I argued with true-believers in a theology forum. At first, I didn't know that these "beings" in the forum were theologians. They posed themselves under the title of book lovers, but they (many) were actually theologians posing as book lovers, and worse, posing as science critics. So, I need one bullet (below the belt) for being so stupid as not to use my faculty of evolved adaptive reasoning to identify the dangers of stupidity (theologians) in my environment. One bullet for ignorance. Then, some airhead true-believer asked for an empirical interpretation of religion (Paul's conversion experience). And I have a research interest in ethology / behavioral bio / social evolution, and etc., and so I, like the fool I am, I rushed in like a fool where scientists (or is it angels?) fear to tread – I rushed in the a fool thinking that he really wanted an empiricist's view of religion, when what he really wanted was to argue the empiricists are all blind fools anyway, and empiricists can't ever get the truth because we don't agree with the Authority of The Man in The Funny Hat! I didn't see that coming: doh, so please, give me yet another bullet for that – for my failure to see my own stupidity – in the head. But, spare my neocortex. Let me think about my mistake as I lay dying, okay?

Next, and finally. Please pull the trigger on this one. Just do me all the way. These people actually think that there are demons manifesting themselves in the empirical realm of their demon haunted world, and these demons morph into and out of one form or another, demons morphing in forms from talking snakes to demons in idols causing human infanticide! Including demons in me because I can't see it all!

The last bullet I deserve – one of these philosophers (aka theologian posing as philosopher) reasoned with me that the snake in the Garden of Eden was prima facie proof that something was extraordinary because the snake could talk! I reasoned back that animal expressive behavior ain't nuffin' new, and so maybe someday, somehow, we'll figure out how to talk to cetans, bonobos, parrots, and so on. But, then I went on to reason that the most extraordinary thing wasn't a talking snake, but that the talking snake claimed to interpret the words of God, and that the most delusional claim any creature (including humans) can make is the claim to interpret the words of God for another! Now theologians don't like this sort of claim because it would put them out of business and back being janitors in restrooms. And they easily discredited what I said because I am no more than a demon possessed empiricist (evil). The circle is now complete.

Someone send me into dream-time. Last bullet please.

After I left this August assembly of theologians, I re-read E.O. Wilson's little chapter, "Once Bitten," his ethological account of snake stories wherein Wilson analyzes the persistence of our adaptive instincts (avoiding poisonous things) overlaid by cultural mediation of various myths – nature/nurture mix. But of course, since I'm a demon possessed lover of biology, I likely can't understand E.O. Wilson or anything else, and since E.O. Wilson is a demon possessed lover of biology, then E.O. Wilson is wrong too about snake myths. So, we are all just going to hell in our love of biology.

What I can't understand is how the best of our adaptive instincts have interrelated with all our other cognitive faculties in order to produce the persistence in humans of such profoundest and dedicated ignorance as to claim that the belief (their belief) in the demon haunted world is justified on no greater grounds than "basic beliefs" which god or some demon just drop into their heads out of thin air?

If any of you scientists can't explain to me the reasons for the inveterate persistence of such profoundest ignorance, will you please just take me out in the woods and finish me off, just end my folly of even wasting my time reasoning with them.

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