(fascist, fundamentalist, fandangoist, freemasons!!!!!!!!)

“Although Darwinism and religion can coexist (as it does for many believers of many faiths),”

My post could just as easily have been made by a non-fundamentalist Christian Conservative as well as an agnostic Liberal. The only philosophically “partisan” suggestion I implied was that in “in the USA, (not in Great Britain) Christian fundamentalism and fascist politics are highly correlated”.

But there are clearly sufficient counter-examples that no one can claim they are equivalent.

It is emblematic of the hard left, that there can be no disagreement with their established dogma. Thanks for demonstrating that inflexibility.

I believe the universe is nothing but matter and energy interacting in space and time, and NOTHING ELSE. No spooky forces or shadowy personalities pulling strings in the background and making things happen. But that is not the world I live in and my mind has to perceive and influence.

I don’t deal with the universe at the quantum level, or even at the chemical level. The kind of activities where I deal with the universe involve things like choosing a career, running my household, conducting my business, managing my social relationships, maintaining a harmonious relationship between myself and the universe around me. The rules are very different from what lies beneath, electricity, gravity, chemistry, etc. But they are just as real.

But every now and then I have to remind myself that nothing I see, do or think means shit to a tree.

There is the objective reality of the physicist, a mysterious world of fields waves and particles which only makes sense as a mathematical abstraction. At different scales of time and space we see different realities:, the chemical, the biological, the environmental, the psychological, the social,
the cultural, the political, the economic, the historical…and I’m only talking about human affairs here, there are other directions we can probe as well. They are all equally valid, and all understood with different methods and disciplines.

All humans are undoubtedly bags of chemicals, but a knowledge of chemistry does you no good in running a country, or a business, or an infantry platoon, or even in raising a child. Maybe there is only one reality, but it looks very differently depending on which temporal or spatial scale you are operating at.

I mean, I love rock and roll and hate the New York Yankees like any decent human being should, and I put up with crap from my relatives I wouldn’t take from anyone else; but I don’t wish death or bodily injury to those who disagree with me. People do get into fights at ball games.

The problem is not about what we believe in, everyone believes in a lot of things we can’t prove to be true, even things no one can prove to be true. The problem lies when we need our belief to be a universal truth because it fulfills some psychological or social need, when denying that belief attacks or threatens us. And when the need to believe manifests itself as hatred for those who do not, look out. That’s the lizard brain at work.