Religion 101: God as Superhero, & a Case of Species Exceptionalism to go, please…
American Exceptionalism? Meh, I’ll pass on that, sounds like a weak concept from the get-go, the definition of ‘American’ subject to the shifting southwestern sands of borders and politics and vaguely articulated definitions… to say nothing of the continents from which we ALL came: Asia, Europe, and Africa. But ‘species exceptionalism’? I’ll buy that. We are certainly exceptional, for better or worse, all contradictions considered…
We are the love monkeys, we are the hate monkeys, we are the smart monkeys, we are the stupid monkeys, we are the happy monkeys, we are the sad monkeys, we are the f*ck monkeys, we are the abstinence monkeys, we are the drunk monkeys, we are the abstinence monkeys, we are the drug monkeys, we are the sober monkeys, we are the music monkeys, we are the sober monkeys, etc…
Cut the DNA deck, re-shuffle, and the results would likely never be the same—humanity. Re-arrange the continents and it would’ve all been different. Out of nowhere comes a butterfly to flutter by and there goes the neighborhood—pure chaos. Cue Mandelbrot. This is something routinely overlooked in almost all discussions of extra-terrestrial life: the odds of intelligent life on THIS planet are infinitesimally small, yet—here we are. Cue Darwin. (More …)
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EMPATHY: the feeling you get knowing that you’re basking in the Arizona sun at temps of 72f/22c while the rest of the country is still digging out from the latest snow…
I don’t know why kidney stones make me think of math any more than I know why the word ‘calculus’ is named for pebbles, BUT: I think the two are connected. I think all language is connected if you go back far enough, only question is whether it was assembled from the ground up or whether it came down from priests and scholars up above (on the pyramid). I’m going to suggest that basic naming words may have been created and shared amongst the peasant populace first, but the priests and scholars likely did all the rest.
Atheists are lucky. They get all the benefits of religion with none of the sacrifice: no long dark nights of the soul, no wrestling with questions of good and evil, or right and wrong, no giving to unnamed charities and the nameless homeless simply because ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I.’ No God = no grace; or not much, anyway. True, some secular humanists have adapted the same play-list without the figure-head, but still: more later on that…. 
Kc are discussing. 
We all know what it’s like to be in love: that crush—of feelings and desires and… and… suffering, yes, suffering (we’re talking about passion, remember, as in the Passion of Christ OR the passion of hot steamy nights). There’s nothing like it in the world, absolutely nothing. It will make you do the craziest things or go to the craziest lengths, all for love, or the act thereof…
t’s an amazing world in which we live, this slow cool world down here, up here, of molecules making love, and atoms doing time, of spatio-temporal flows and eddies, with dervishes and rock bands and salad greens and rocket science all swirling and whirling at less than the speed of light, more like the speed of sound defining this dimension with all its percussion and repercussions, quarks tachyons leptons Higgs bosons and an infinite number of other particles all holding hands… 
People are desperate; people are starving; people line boulevards scrounging for crumbs and morsels; the homeless drift through the streets of nameless cities like zombies on life support, more and more keep coming and coming, without end middle or beginning, living in the moment like animals in search of pleasure and pasture; office workers adjust their ties and tie up their arms in expectation of junk, mail arriving from the four corners of the earth in bits and bytes, accounts payable and receivable in silver and slivers of pie-charts and Boolean logic… 
streaming consciousness... 
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