Last night, Aron Ra summoned a team of crack anti-creationists to deal with the chaotic incoherence of a demand/set of assertions he had received from a creationist. I sympathize. I looked this over and cringed deep down at the raging, arrogant absurdity of someone so ignorant thinking they had multiple gotchas to refute evolution.
I wanted to send you a quick message about a mistake that was mentioned in your recent ” donald johnson’s, lucy ” video. I’m the person that sent in the comment at the beginning of the livestream mentioning three things, one of which was how don said the leg was found more than a mile away from lucy in a letter, but dons response was that i was spouting nonsense. The issue is, I’ve literally read the letter before. Don flat out lied on your stream, so i wanted to make you aware of that. Here’s a video of a creationist mentioning that letter in one of his videos, and showing the letter as well, so the letter does indeed exist. Its not the best source, but that’s largely due to evolutionist’s trying to censer anything that can be used against evolution. Here’s the video. youtube.com/watch?v=6kf5JII6sIQ&t=294s
I’m a yec Christian that wanted to send you a quick message about some of the reasons why people are hesitant in believing stuff like the tree of life and a 4.5 billion year old earth, because like you’ve mentioned in your videos before, people deserve to know what’s true. The age of the earth boils down to 5 main issues. 1: there’s never been a rock of known age successfully dated via radiometric dating. If we date something like recent volcano reputations, like mount saint Helens, the rocks are dated to millions of years. If something like happened with any other subject, it would have been thrown out a very long time ago. 2: since we don’t use something of a Known age to calibrate it, then what do we use? The decay rates themselves? Nope, its evolution. 3: how can you ignore radiometric dating results, but other people can’t? For example, we have found diamonds that contained 6 billion years worth of argon decay before. Its claimed those received an extra 2 billion years worth argon contamination. How can you ignore like 2 billion years worth of decay but other people can’t? And even more importantly, how can you tell which dates are correct and which aren’t? The answer is evolution. There’s millions of other out of place fossils like the diamonds that were redated as well, like skull 1470, which is a 230 million year old human skull. 4: radiometric dating automatically dates young rocks to millions of years by default. That’s the excuse I’ve read before to discredit the old ages we found at saint Helens. My point is, your old ages don’t disprove a 6,000 year old earth because you’re dating methods can’t give numbers that low, so it defaults to being millions of years old. That still matters even if we were to ignore all of the yec stuff and even assume the earth is old as well, because that still leaves the question on what age the fossils are. We still wouldn’t be able to accurately date the fossils due to this issue. 5: I’m sorry but I forgot what 5 was, but I’m mention it later if i remember it. Anyways.
I don’t think the tree of life is true, because there isn’t much evidence for it, and something people don’t seem to realize it’s so contradictory that it couldn’t of happened. For example. Genetics doesn’t form the tree of life you think it does. its claimed we are 98% genetically similar to chimps, but mice and pigs have gene’s that are 98% similar to humans. Its claimed dolphins are 98% similar to humans as well. Chickens are 60% to humans while mallard ducks are 80% similar to humans. Cows, the platypus and mallard ducks are 80% similar to humans. A sea Turtles genome is claimed to be more closely related to birds than reptiles. There’s a 500 million year old worm that 70% similar to humans. How’s that work when stuff closer to us on the tree of life is less similar? For example, mice are either 60% or 70% ( I’m forgetting which). We’ve even found a virus with the letter z DNA basepair, which means it doesn’t fit on the tree of life. I’m typing this out on my phone, and this message is getting pretty long so I’ll wrap this up. There’s a lot of issues with the chromosome 2 fusion site, but I’ll ignore those and focus on the most important point. There’s 13+ other sites just like it In our genomes, which means we have 14 fusions in the past, which means humans had 74 chromosomes, while apes had 48. We literally can’t be apes. It doesn’t really matter if the fossil record is in a evolutionary order or is out of order because even if the evolutionary sequence did exist worldwide, then geology would still disprove it. The questions evolutionists ask are cherry picked because there’s like a thousand other questions that need to be asked before hand, but aren’t. A quick example of what I’m talking about is how fossil footprints could have stayed around for tens of millions of years without eroding away. Thanks for reading and take care!
We went over this jumble of poorly understood claims (seriously? He thinks zDNA is a base pair rather than an alternative configuration of the helix?) and tried to sort them out. You’ll have to judge whether we succeeded.
I shouldn’t have bothered, since the creationists are clearly in denial of the science and won’t listen, and also because that tore up my evening enough that now my lecture, that I have to give at 11:45 this morning, is incomplete and I have to stitch it together fast.
There’s a 500 million year old anything from which we have DNA? Ha.
You actually read all that shit??
HistoneB is conserved across deep time but it is not DNA.
As for genes, they maintain some semblance of their evolutionary past but they are not identical with that of some last common ancestor that lived in the early Cambrian. Good luck putting worm DNA into your genome. Best case, it makes no difference as you have a working modern copy from the other chromosome.
.
BTW did he mean 500 million year old fossil DNA? That would be some claim..
I’m sure that was the silver bullet right there…
The written format is not this creationist’s strong suit. He knows he can wait until he remembers what he wants to say before sending this, right?
Dendrochronology, which is VERY easily understood refutes a 6000 year old Earth all by itself. Granted, it only gets back around 14Kyr, but that’s more than 6K. (It’s also used to calibrate C-14 dating.)
“I dont think the tree of life is true, as there isnt much evidence for it”. There’s the Gotcha. QED.
Where a protein is highly conserved, we should expect that synonymous mutations still occur, while nonsynonymous mutations are rare. This is the sort of specific prediction that evolutionary theory makes, and that creationism does not. And of course, it is supported by the evidence.
@5, “Dendrochronology, which is VERY easily understood…”
Whilst I myself concur, I do recall an incident were someone literally didn’t grasp it, apparently thinking that to date something as, say, 8Kyo, you need a single tree with 8K rings. (Apologies for the lack of references, but I cannot recall where, or even too precisely when, I ran across that example.)
Dendrochronology. The Black Sea has an anoxic bottom layer, so driftwood coming down the rivers during the glaciation should be preserved in the muck, even if the sediments hide the logs.
I keep dreaming of some teraherz scanner that could spot hidden driftwood under a submersible and dig up ultra-old trees.
Then you use isotope signatures to locate their places of origin.
In theory you could get a tree-ring record from around the Black Sea catchment area as far back as you can use C14 to fit “floating” chronologies into each other in the right order.
“Rock of known age, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.”
There were too many misconceptions jumbled together to even understand what he was getting at. His argument about genetics seems to be that he knows intuitively how similar various animal species are, and if genetics doesn’t fit his assumptions, then genetics must be wrong.
While he may think he can refute scientific claims, one thing I notice completely lacking is any attempt to provide a positive argument in favor of YEC. His logic is basically: Your age measurements disagree. Therefore the answer must be 6000.
Living in Scandinavia really makes it easy to rebuff young-earth creationists. Signs of the last glaciation are everywhere, the coast is still receding slowly but steadily as the litosphere is bouncing back after being pressed into the mantle by the weight of the glacier.
The mountains are clearly assymmetric as the glaciers wore down the mountain side facing the oncoming glaciers.
The sandy glacial deposits are everywhere and if you dig in the right place you can find paleosols predating the last glaciation. Everything shows a continuity going back from the present to bloody incredibly long ago.
Why is there no Mr. Gumby figure next to that post? Incidentally, sea turtles (all turtles, really) are more closely related to birds than to reptiles, if by “reptile” you mean anything other than crocodylians.
@11 they will just claim it was all caused by the flood.
Religion is poisoning western civilisation.
nomdeplume @14:
The implication is “take out this one thing, and we’re poisoning less”. We’re humans. We do fire, we do agriculture, we do tribalism, we do religion, we do cities, we do science, we do hydrogen bombs and social media (thanks to science!). How do you “take out” any one of those things? “Civilisation” is a synthesis of all that shit.
Much more accurate simplistic slogan: Big brains are poisoning the biosphere.
@15 Well, I certainly think taking out religion would poison less! And I am not sure about your list which seems to consist of very different categories to each other.
@16: Great. How do you “take out” religion? I’m all ears. “Taking out” male aggression would be great too! Any ideas on that?
I don’t think evolution is the answer they think it is.
Also, volcano reputations aren’t what they used to be. ;)
@15 & 17.
The way I did it. I have been an atheist for my adult life (I’m 63 now), and as time goes along and I learn more and more, I’m even less convinced that any religion is anything other than utter absurd and stupid nonsense.
I do quite well without any religion, as do most of my friends. It’s not difficult at all.
Heck, even though I grew up with the Montreal Canadiens, I am happy to cheer on any Canadian team in the Stanley Cup playoffs. As up here, hockey is our secular religion. :-)
andrei613 @19: Good for you! I’ve been an atheist since I thought about what I heard in church and Sunday school, age about 11 (so 56 years ago). So, yeah, I “took out” religion for myself. But that’s not the issue, is it?
Rob:
Without being smug about it, yeah, it is, pretty much.
Why do you imagine creationists are creationists?
(The topic at hand)
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andrei, you’ll come to realise Rob is a bit of a religious apologist.
(The religious must be respected irrespective of their religiosity, is his view)
Rob Grigjanis@15 I think hydrogen bombs could be “taken out” in the sense that they’re expensive to build, increase the risk of sudden global catastrophe, and don’t appear to serve a purpose other than as a deterrent. Cold War proliferation may be more of an historical one-off than a deep-seated human desire to devote a large part of the economy to weapons of mass destruction. We don’t “do” chemical warfare for the most part either, since WWI. (So we couldn’t eliminate them entirely, nor the knowledge of making them, but we could pare down the immediate threat by orders of magnitude.)
Taking out religion is more interesting question, which I thought you might be getting at, because myth-making, story-telling, and (I’ll go out on a limb and say) spirituality in the broadest sense are things humans really “do”, and taking them away would reduce the human experience. When Carl Sagan said “we are star stuff” he was expressing a spiritual urge, and he didn’t make a secret about it. I suspect that you would see similar patterns of brain activity when people consider matters of deep symbolic importance to them, whether these surface as “religion” or some other devotion, as to art, music or mathematics. (That’s testable, and no I don’t have any data.)
I think we could do without literalism, dogma, and enforced ritual (if you enjoy the ritual, that’s up to you). Especially, we could do without confusing the things that seem important for “spiritual” reasons with observable facts. It would also make a good start if could stop killing each other over religion. While that’s very “human” I don’t think it’s a defining property of human existence.
PaulBC:
Bah. So are pedophilia, torture, domestic abuse, bullying and crime. Cruelty in general.
Me, I can’t tell the difference between religion and superstition. Can you?
(Wouldn’t want to take those away and reduce the human experience, would you?)
No need to go to killing; shunning is a thing.
But sure, taking that away would, as you put it, “reduce the human experience”.
(Me, I’d not mind at all if my human experience were reduced to the good and neutral things, losing the bad things)
John Morales@21
And yet… somehow it was anyway.
If the issue (as I understand Rob) is individuals coming around to atheism on their own, that isn’t the same as “taking it out.” For that, you do need a world in which there are no impediments in the way of it, and social support for those who choose it. I don’t think anyone posting here is opposed to that.
Possibly, but I don’t see much evidence in this thread unless he is also a hydrogen bomb apologist. I think he was addressing the apparent infeasibility of enforcing any kind of society-wide prohibition. Humans also use mind-altering drugs. I use caffeine and alcohol and might well be better off without either. But the last time the US tried to make alcohol illegal, it didn’t turn out so well. Is there any reason to think it would be easier to remove religion?
@22 “Spirituality” Is not a real thing but an invented concept to justify pretending that religion is “innate” to humans. “Story-telling” is probably innate in some sense related to himan language as a whole. “Myth-making” is just a pre-science and pre historical studies activity.
PaulBC:
You are confused. No. I’m not talking about removing it, I’m talking about no longer privileging it or respecting it or its adherents, as if it were some sort of neutral thing. I’m talking about not getting shirty when people say stuff that is not approbatory about it.
And, hey, what about this creationism thing? Did you see the question I posed Rob?
(Wanna have a go at it?)
John Morales@23
To be clear, I don’t claim any meaningful distinction. Some superstitions are so idiosyncratic that you could make the case that they’re not religions, but widespread folk beliefs are indistinguishable from religion as far as I’m concerned.
So why not use the criterion of whether some human activity causes harm to others? Torture is a good example. You don’t have to be a psychopath to appreciate why it happens. If you hate someone enough, you want to cause them harm. Aside from hatred, you may have ideations about power that come, not from pathology, but from a primate brain working as it’s adapted to do. Also, different societies have taken very different stances on the intentional delivery of pain, including turning it into a public entertainment, whether you are talking about Roman gladiatorial fights, or packing a picnic lunch for a southern lynching. There is no “DSM” for that behavior. These were regular people.
So yes, torture is “normal” and “human.” How would we “take that out”? I would start by acknowledging that there is an innate human urge that leads to it, abolishing its directly harmful consequences through the coercive power of the state, and working on how to redirect those urges along healthier channels. My prescription for religion is roughly the same.
nomdeplume@25 I don’t really want to choose “spirituality” as my hill to die on, but I am a little curious what you’re dismissing here. When a science fiction fan praises a work for its “sense of wonder” as oppose to, say, plot, characterization, world building, or writing, do you think that’s a real thing?
Personally, there are times when I feel in awe of existence (the diversity of life on earth, the sheer scale of the universe), or in awe of possibility (science fiction ideas, also a great deal of mathematics: infinity, self-similarity, recursion).
Do I get to have a term for feeling that awe? It strikes me as very different from other emotions.
John @21:
Every fucking thing you write reeks of smugness. And yes, I’m well aware of your puerile ‘argument’ that accusations of smugness (at least when applied to you) must be hypocritical. Based on the sophisticated philosophical school of ‘he who smelt it dealt it’.
The issue, you fucking twit, isn’t how any one person takes religion out of their own life. The issue, as you well know if you read the preceding comments, is how to “take out” religion from society at large. Do feel free to offer your constructive suggestions at your leisure. But you don’t do ‘constructive’, do you?
You’re a fucking liar, Morales. Fuck off.
Paul,
Sure, why not? “It would also make a good start if could stop killing each other over religion.”
Ahem. “No. I’m not talking about removing it, I’m talking about no longer privileging it or respecting it or its adherents, as if it were some sort of neutral thing. I’m talking about not getting shirty when people say stuff that is not approbatory about it.”
Um, you do realise you’ve just written “abolishing its directly harmful consequences through the coercive power of the state”, right?
(Again: I’m not even slightly talking about regulating it or abolishing it, merely about no longer lauding it or privileging it or respecting it or contributing to it.
In short, I am evidently more tolerant and moderate than you are)
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I note Rob has recused himself from my, um, “smoke and mirrors”.
Anyway, creationism. What is its impetus, I wonder? ;)
Ah, Rob weighs in.
Pray tell, how would I express myself without it “reeking” of smugness to you?
Ahem. “No. I’m not talking about removing it, I’m talking about no longer privileging it or respecting it or its adherents, as if it were some sort of neutral thing. I’m talking about not getting shirty when people say stuff that is not approbatory about it.”
Yeah, I do. I just did, even!
(Have you considered it may be you just don’t recognise it when I do so?)
OK. So it follows you do not think that. So, what exactly is your problem with my lack of respect for them, then?
Yes, you can do that in a thread on an atheist blog. Congratulations! How do you do it in the big bad world outside your bubble?
Jebus you are a clueless twit.
John Morales@26
This seems unusually imprecise for you, but maybe you can convince me otherwise. If it something is neutral, then why would you privilege it? I consider stamp-collecting to be a neutral and harmless activity, but I wouldn’t expect a US government-endorsed “Philately Breakfast” as there is now a National Prayer Breakfast. I would be enthusiastically in favor of eliminating the latter if it were politically possible.
I respect most other human beings as my default position on the value of human life, as well as out of humility, since I have many faults of my own and would still like to be respected. I only require that in their “pursuit of happiness” they minimize the hardship they cause to others. That’s it. I don’t especially respect religion, and I am absolutely opposed to giving it the privileged status it now has. For that matter, it is not neutral, though I think its impact is not as simple as you think. (People do swear by AA, for instance, and that’s better than being an alcoholic in my view, though a secular empirically proven alternative would be a lot better.)
It’s unclear what I would even start doing differently if I agreed with you. Most “white” people I know (for lack of a better term) are not religious, so there’s not much to debate. I work with many Indians who celebrate Diwali and return to India for traditional weddings. What do they actually believe? Very interesting question, but none of my business. Likewise for Muslims and Buddhists who I know. Should I treat their practices as anything other than neutral? I think they would all do fine to be atheists, but it’s their choice as long as they are not doing harm (or more harm than the average rampaging human does anyway).
PS John, are you saying you don’t privilege or respect any religious adherents?
Rob:
Exactly! I wouldn’t last long elsewhere, would I?
Religion is considered to be a good thing, a thing to be respected and so forth, pretty much anywhere else.
Pretty well; thanks for asking. I can fit in anywhere.
(I too became an atheist when I was pubescent, but I was an altar-boy until I was 15, being prudent and stuff)
Maybe, but at least I’m neither religious nor respectful of religiosity. Unlike some.
(Nor, not entirely coincidentally, am I a creationist)
@28 Not sure why you need a separate term for feeling awe about something. And I’m not sure how, in the examples you give, how “awe” is different from “wonder”, nor how you think these emotions belong in some separate mental compartment labelled “spirituality”. And if you do think there is a separate compartment are we then into the domain of “soul”, for which there is of course absolutley no evidence whatsoever. This slippery slope is why I object to the use of invented terms like spiritual and sacred and holy.
nomdeplume @36:
Do you object when First Nations people use terms like that about their lands or culture?
Just poking in here in case people don’t know yet – Russia’s war on Ukraine has begun.
Rob, thanks for the exchange.
Ah, a compound question. Yes to the privilege, no to the respect.
What I don’t respect is their religiosity, nor their apologetics towards it.
Nor do I respect their religious proscriptions or prescriptions or mores unless those can be secularly justified.
(It’s not complicated)
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In passing, when I was in South Africa, I had a chap pester me for money. He made a big point of how he was a Christian and very goddish and stuff, seeing me as a white person.
It was supposed to appeal to me. Nonetheless, I gave him my change, since I was going to the airport anyway.
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PaulBC:
I don’t know, I can only speculate. Did I make it insufficiently clear that I do not privilege it [religion/religiosity]? Better to ask those who do.
But you wouldn’t write ““It would also make a good start if could stop killing each other over
religionstamp collecting.””, would you? ;)I myself respect those who are worthy of respect, and merely human is not a sufficient criterion.
Me too.
They’ve etiolated the concept of “higher power”, in order to stay relevant. And I think you will find that AA achieves no better (at best) outcomes than other systems. I mean, people swear by the Atkins diet, too — turns out that any dedicated diet of whatever sort can help, because the person becomes diligent.
Seems to me you mostly do — leaving aside your conceit of various versions of Roman Catholicism.
I think this point is eluding you; your respect (or lack thereof) for them as they are is not the same thing as your respect for their religion or their religiosity.
(I mean, one of my best friends is/was a Scientologist. I did not hold back from my opinons — and we argued for 14 hours one time — but, to give them credit, Scientologists can hack the disputation. Part of their Scientology training, actually!)
But then, you could say exactly the same thing about creationists. So, do you think creationism is a good thing?
nomdeplume@36 I’m baffled as to how “spirituality” is more of an invented term than any other word. I mean, it never occurred to me that it would be a neologism, but anyway, a quick search turns up this from Wikipedia:
Assuming this is roughly correct, is late Middle Ages old enough for you?
“Animated”, yes, in the sense that my anima or spirit is moved in a particular way–though I don’t believe it is by God. Nor do I believe in mind body dualism, but I can understand the emergent property of self-awareness that has led many people to think of the “spirit” as something separate.
For the same reason it is easier to write “carburetor” than “that thing in old cars that mixes air and fuel, as now usually done with fuel injection.” Words are pretty handy to have, and I would guess that carburetor is a newer word than spirituality.
The point is that I am trying to identity a subjective human state and give it a name. I don’t think my subjective experience is all that different from religious people. It just has different triggers. Thus, if I see externally that others “get something” out of religious belief (or, say, something I have even less interest in like professional sports) my working assumption is not that they are so different from me, but I’m getting it some other way.
I could be wrong, though in the case of religion I have more positive evidence. Being raised Catholic, I think I developed the subjective experience of Catholic devotion. My subjective experience is similar but stronger when pondering the vastness of the universe, or oddly of considering my eventual dissolution as my borrowed matter is returned to form new patterns–which is quite appealing to me and fitting as an innately finite being. So I think the same term applies. I could call it me “awe-for-stuff-I-think-is-cool” but honestly, I don’t see why “spirituality” is such a terrible term for it.
Note that some people may be less prone to feel this way at all, and clearly, that’s fine too.
John Morales@39
Irrelevant. You wrote:
The notion of “privileging as if neutral” raises a pretty obvious question of “why would anyone privilege something that’s neutral?”
I would if people were killing each other over stamp collecting. Though I wouldn’t consider this a problem of stamp collecting as such. (Any more than “breaking your competitors knee” is a problem of figure skating.) Religions are more likely to result in conflict than either of these, but it’s not a given.
Anyway… I think I’m done. No offense. I just need to avoid sinking into this particular vortex.
John Morales@39
Sorry, not quite done. Creationism does harm when it is presented as science to impressionable minds. So, no, it’s not a good thing. But if someone is stuck with it as their belief, it doesn’t necessarily matter, e.g. if I am paying for their services as a plumber. I have a simple criterion: does the harm justify any lack of respect I show them?
Paul, OK. Done and done.
I already said I had no answer to it, not being in that manner benighted. Seems (at best) rather silly, if not perverse, to me.
Fact remains, it’s a thing. Look at religious exemptions for an example.
(And I already told you: “Better to ask those who do.)”
Exactly. So right there is a salient difference, the which vitiates your spurious would-be analogy.
Sure; you’re neither like me nor like a Scientologist, and disputation is not something in which you like to indulge.
Point being, this all started with creationism, and (though both you and Rob declined to concede the point) it is religion which is its impetus.
Sure. And, if someone believes Blacks and women and Jews are inferior people, it doesn’t necessarily matter, e.g. if you am paying for their services as a plumber.
(Good reasoning there!)
Well, there you are. So, given you could say exactly the same thing about creationism as about religion, what does that indicate? ;)
@37 I wouldn’t “object” as you put it, I’m sure they think it is real.
@40 I didn’t doubt that “spirituality” as a term and a belief was invented and extends well back into the early Christian Church. So what?
“I am trying to identity a subjective human state”. But I am objecting to using an additional name for this, in addition to “awe”, “wonder”, “curiosity”, whatever, which don’t carry religious overtones.
nomdeplume, Carl Sagan used the term ‘numinous’. FWTW.
Back briefly (caught up on the war and some unfinished work).
John Morales@45
Sure. That’ll do.. though at the risk of sending people to the dictionary, myself included.
nomdeplume@44
It depends on the goal. In this case, I am explicitly trying to find a commonality between my feelings and some of the appeal of religion (it has other components such as ritual, hierarchy, and behavioral control that have more obvious non-religious analogues, and also interest me a lot less). I think “awe” is more general than, uh, numinosity. It’s a particular kind of awe. Curiosity, by the way, isn’t the same thing at all. (And unfortunately is often discouraged by religion.)
Maybe I’m blowing smoke and there is no commonality, but there seems to be. Actually, it’s easier for me to understand how you fill a cathedral than how you fill a stadium. If I worked a little harder at it, maybe I could understand sports fans too. I did watch my own kids’ soccer, softball, and water polo games with interest, though I suspect there’s still something I didn’t get about it.
@45 @46 Yeah, but numinous is essentially a synonym for spiritual, I don’t think it takes us any further on the argument. It also seems to bring in the concept of “supernatural” which I also object to. Just as there is no such thing as “medicine” and “alternative medicine” just “medicine that works” and everything else, so I don’t believe in the dichotomy between natural and supernatural. There is just stuff that exists and stuff that doesn’t (except in the imagination).
Paul – I’m not into full cathedrals or stadiums. I think you are grasping at needing something that isn’t actually there.
Anyway – interesting discussion, but we have strayed far from the post. Cheers.
@29 You tell him.
nomdeplume@47
I am not suggesting you should be. I’m trying to understand my own reaction here. It definitely does not extend to an interest in sports, but that is still “something humans do.” I also said nothing about “need.”
The existence of both religion and spectator sports is empirically demonstrated across cultures. Personally, I think that’s enough to hint at the possibility that each engages the human brain in a certain way that is not merely invented. Particular religious beliefs and game rules are another matter, and can often be traced from their origins.
Rob G started by enumerating things humans do. I agree that religion is one of them in practice. Maybe it can somehow be eliminated, but my view is “Good luck with that.” It seems intractable to me.
Anyway, yeah, far from the topic. On that I have nothing to add to what I said in @10. Creationist word salad. Go figure.
I couldn’t get past the first paragraph cuz he apparently thinks the guy from Miami Vice has something to do with “Lucy”?
PaulBC@46,
It would be interesting to know how religiosity and interest in sports correlate at individual and cultural levels. Like you, I lack interest in both, although I was somewhat more interested in spectator sport as a child – probably influenced by my father.
KG @51:
My interest in sports began when I discovered I loved kicking a ball around. It could absorb me for hours. Likewise, and at about the same age, for mathematics. Those interests continue unabated. If my body allowed it, I would still be playing soccer.
Spectating is different, of course. I do enjoy watching soccer played well. But I also have a visceral attachment to certain teams, from childhood; Leeds United and the England teams. This obviously has little to do with “playing well” (though both sides have had their moments). Outcomes of matches involving those teams can make me feel happy, or sad, or angry, for a short time. But I’ve never felt anything that could be described as ‘spiritual’ about that.
The closest I’ve come to such feelings has come, sporadically, from doing the things I love; playing soccer, doing maths or physics, listening to music, reading poetry, paying attention to the beauty in the world.
If a term has to be used, I don’t mind ‘transcendent’, since it can refer to something out of the ordinary.
“Loss of self” might work too.