Shocking evidence is clearly and calmly presented here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2023320890224991194

I regretfully must bring this message to humanity, and it isn’t good news. Not by choice but as a function of my genetic code. For some unknown reason my preprogrammed genes have opened a “window� (I’m speaking metaphorically using simple computer terms) and brought to the forefront of my “operating system� a message as bleak as bleak can be. The message ironically has to do with the Edge question of 2006.

Science is on the verge of discovering what we are. It will use all kinds of fancy terms and complex mathematic formulas and tests which will be empirically proven. The bad news is; the implications of such will ultimately destroy who we are. Maybe this is something that our ancestors, the leap frogs, discovered 600 billion years ago and as a result of their discovery, found themselves back in the pond. I fear our fate is sealed to such an unfortunate outcome. Because when we finally discover what we are we will have no choice but to systematically dismantle who we are and how we define existence. In other words, the one discovery science so desperately seeks, when achieved, will seal the fate of all humanity. I’m talking about the extinction of the species, the extinguishing of man kind!

Let me put it this way. When you’re sitting across from that person at the banquet table and you look them square in the eye and you both realize that which is so obvious it requires no elaboration. You look at each other the same way that the people on the Titanic looked at each other moments before they were nothing more than a ripple on the surface of the ocean.

What does all this have to do with the Question proposed? The most dangerous idea can only come from the most dangerous question. What if?

AG

The State is a Church, and can be nothing else. Religious freedom can exist only if government is restricted to the proper use of force, securing rights. The February issue of Liberty (libertyunbound.com) has a great article about it, “The Opiate of Almost Everyone,” by Robert H. Nelson. Nice to see other thinkers saying what I’ve been preaching for 15 years.

The “red shift” in light from stars, taken to be a doppler effect, is actually an intrinsic quality of light that is measurable only at interstellar distances. Light loses energy, and therefore frequency, as it travels. Truly, it’s hard to believe that it wouldn’t.

How do we get more people on board,those who are wrapped up in taking care of their daily lives ( getting and spending, pushing on ) to stop and think, no less think in a more enlightened way and from a larger perspective? Most people are not participating in this dialogue. How DO we integrate our social contract into our “commerical worlds”.

Do we need to discuss what the social contract is?

Danile Dennet came up with the most captivating concept, for me at least. The thought that the political right and left might be able to find common ground to rally against corporate-driven consumerism tickled me pinker than anything else I heard. What if the idea that commercial speech cannot be permitted to undermine moral, family, educational, ethical, civic, and environmental values took root in our culture? Suppose conservatives and liberals started to take aim at corporate mentalities instead of one another’s? Wouldn’t this mind shift help us to zero in on root causes of some of our most troubl;ng concerns?

Were this to happen, might not be necessary to to (re)regulate industries; citizens at large could simply learn how to regulate their desires to achieve a more balanced and satisfying moral, ethical and sustainable future. Since Pinker didn’t make such a comment, I had to chime in.

Great show! Do it again!

If our dangerous idea was to put the health, education and welfare of a child at the heart of every government’s core development strategy, wouldn’t that begin to evolve our societies in all cultures into socio-economic growth. Over time, wouldn’t this kind of strategy also resolve so many of the issues and contradictions inthe world because we would have an educated and knowledgeful citizenship. Wouldn’t those citizens over time and through generations begin to emerge as more aware of how to handle and transform the world instead of trying to conquer it?

TEchnology-enabled human communications and social media are already using dialogue to build new kinds of communities, which are democratizing publishing and organizations. This kind of evolution has the chance to really transform the world.

Aren’t we already participating in one of the most daring and dangerous ideas – building communities with shared common purpose.

i don’t agree with the details of what bering is trying to get at, but, have you ever heard of the normal distribution? of natural = modal +/- 2 standard deviations, yeah, we might be unnatural (speaking as another unbeliever).

“Since all peoples (except the Buddhists and atheists, but they don’t count, right?) have gods, religious belief must be hard-wired.�

operationally buddhists do believe in gods, their religious elite simply rejects the creator god (in thereavada buddhism buddha becomes a god on the popular level). even atheists can believe in gods, the cult of leader that you saw in stalinist russia or maoist china seems nothing so much as a god-king phenomenon. the cult of leader in north korea, where the birth of kim jong il was reputed to have resulted in flowers blooming in winter, has the same features.

Anyway, Dorian thanks for your post above regarding “the science of evolution” ( or “evolutionary science”) the proper term, not “Darwinism”. We got caught once again. We do have to be careful about our language these days.

Great show… worth another listen! Thanks!

I have to say that I find Jesse Bering’s idea that the human belief in god(s) is genetic not merely ‘dangerous’ but ‘daft’. I guess my lack of belief (and my hope that others besides me will learn to see through the hoax) therefore makes me, what — unnatural? A miscreation? A freak? An abomination? Satan?
Thanks, Jesse. Check, please, waiter.

To paraphrase: “Since all peoples (except the Buddhists and atheists, but they don’t count, right?) have gods, religious belief must be hard-wired.” (And there’s that absurd man-is-a-machine/computer metaphor again. Ugh.) It reminds me of older (and thankfully discredited) notions that since all women used to be consigned to home, they were obviously ‘natural homemakers’ (i.e., servants of men). Or any other number of seemingly ‘nature-based’ stereotypes that racists and elites (like slave-owners) employed to prop up their heirarchies and atrocities.
Sheesh.

Disabuse me someone, please. Tell me that I’m misunderstanding the idea. I’m not joking: I hope I got it wrong, and will welcome a correction.

I haven’t listened to tonight’s show yet, but a lot of these ideas seem to connect to each other in telling ways. My particular spin on the dichotomous suggestions (free will is an illusion, we are all different, we are out of control, we are animals like everything else) is that they may seem to work on very simple and complex levels, but they actually have just as much application smack-dab in the middle. The “what if there was a war and no one showed up” comment drew this out: clearly, observable behavior suggestions that a failure to show up for war, on some level, is going to work out pretty badly for the Merkin Muffly character. We can understand consequences in general, and yet we also know the searing helplessness when “some part of ourselves gets the best of us.”

Perhaps it isn’t a dangerous idea at all, but this set of topics seems to ask, “in which direction– toward hopelessness, the degradation of civilization, and irresponsibility, or towards austerity and optimism– does these fundamental queries push us?”

The mind is only one of the human functions. The emotions of humans seem to get more and more uncontrolled and immature in this world.

We need to return to that integration of mind and emotional progress one finds glimpses of in ancient Egypt (cf. Schwaller de Lubicz),, or the issues of human mechanicilty raised by PD Ouspensky (cf. Gurdjieff). This isn’t a return to an antropomorphic or doctrinal God, at all. Egypt, for instance, had an integration in the very language, which is too rigid for these days, but that yet clued a young mind to the principles behind reality. The word for weaving– the notion that something stayed stationary and something else moves thru it, is almost the same word for writing.

I agree w/ those who deplore the growing dominace of ‘la machine”– and I have to work online often. Techonology is a growth of mechanicality. It is not science. It is not art. It is not passion. It is not the development of ral joyous will. The power that comes from blind materialist manipulation, leads to hubris, of course. That is only reasonable. Of course microbes would be bred by rogue states (large or small).

In short, core small groups have to develop their own ways of being as precise, creative and conscious about emotional and spiritual development, which is as strong and counterbalancing as the tech. Some willbe agnostic, some mystic. Anything that will counter the mediocrity, the lack of nobility (because the subtle assumed goal, by refault is always comfort)

There is good evidence now in holosync technology to speed brain changes. For past lives and out of body projection. THe stuff coming out of plant spirit medicine. But the Enlightenment (the first new speak, if ever there was one) leaves its bias still on what research is acceptable.

I’m a writer who lives of little resource, out of the intellectual loops. Out in the provinces, there is less and less soul food– whether among biz owner or the poor. When the culture dies (and continues as the undead), people get restless and violence is next. Let’s hope everybody’s country music and blues keep going.

Other note– the guy looking for genetic bases to intelligence needs to check the research which looks at the interrelatedness of the worlds races. E.g. Czech and South Sea Islanders more closely related than Czech and anyone else in Europe. To return to my first comment. The paradigm shift necessitated by the dethroning of rationalistic thought would have to mean environmental and even human intentional effect on what it is we call genes– the latter being, after all, only well organized patterns of energy.

I tried calling… but the phone lines in are closed tonight, it appears.

No dissing — only noting impracticality. And, as you right assert (which I did earlier when my idea was challenged) — the point of the original question is WHAT IF.

If fact perhaps we should simply divide all the earth’s resources (energy, food, real estate) per capita?