Religion 101: DNA as a Crown of Thorns—God Genes, Gay Genes, Devils in Blue Jeans
crown of thorns
There has long been scuttlebutt about some so-called ‘God Gene’… but none has ever been found. And there has long been scuttlebutt about some so-called ‘Gay Gene’… but none has ever been found. Now there is even talk of a ‘travel gene’ predisposing us travelers to lengthy peregrinations and various unnamed (unmentionable?) and unrequited desires. So what? Why does it matter? Why bother even asking the question? Thus the debate rages, long after Calvin, long after Hobbes (no, not the cartoon characters; where do you think they came from BTW?).
Free will vs. determinism is one of the major debates of the post-classical pre-modern Christian religio-philosophic phase, long after St. Augustine incorporated Plato into the mix, and St. Thomas added Aristotle. This is closely contemporaneous with the Western philosophical tradition’s division into two opposing camps: the British Empiricists and the Continental Rationalists. For those of you unschooled in that history, that was a preference for either experience or rationality as the basis of knowledge.
And it was no passive intellectual preference, the roots of it likely going back to Gothic pragmatic feudalism in the decentralized European countryside after the downfall of Roman hierarchical imperial cities, and continuing in the sprawling US/UK suburban piecemeal planning vs. centralized European cities to this day. (More …)
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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…
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… 
Esther Fabbricante, and 
streaming consciousness... 
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