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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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- Wired 14.11: The Church of the Non-Believers
 Nov 13, 2006 3:04pm  (2 reviews) religion, rationality, worldviews http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11...- The Church of the Non-Believers
 via Arts & Letters Daily, in Wired Magazine by Gary Wolf
The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban.
 The Church of the Non-Believers
This is a good example of an article without any substance. The subject of atheism is without any doubt one that is central to our late Modern-Times' quest for truth about reality. But treating Dawkins and others, who affirm their stance without doubt, as being fundamentalists as Gary Wolf writes is pure non-sense and reflects a total absence of knowledge about the nature of religion and of rationality.
For having a chance to make any sense of the place of religion and of rationality in a societal evolutionary perspective I'm afraid that the question has to be replaced, into the more globally encompassing framework of what is humanity and how it does operate. What I mean to say is that the reproduction and then the evolution of humanity necessitates a balancing mechanism in order to keep in check its polarities: societies and individuals.
Individuals tend to push the envelope of individualism which leads to change while societies tend to preserve the existing against change. With the start of civilization physical force appeared insufficient to keep in check populations scattered over enlarging territories. When the men of power awakened to this reality they understood that the only way out for guaranteeing the reproduction of their power over their subjects was to find some psychic glue, in the form of the sharing by all of a common worldview, and impose it on their subjects.
In the Middle-East the men of power recoursed to religion as the shared worldview. But the religions of the word got their biggest boost from the Roman Emperor Constantine's decision to impose Christianity as the official religion of the empire. This is what brought Christianity to become the shared worldview of all of Europe and all of Europe's outposts around the world.
Force here is to observe that in other geographic areas the men of power did not recourse to religion but used the existing animist philosophies of life: Hinduism, Taoism, ... to unite their subjects.
What is slowly starting to sink in our consciousness is that:
1. individuals can't survive without belonging to societies
2. societies can't survive without the sharing by the individuals of a common worldview.
Religions, philosophies and rationality are "worldviews". In Western late-modernity religion can only be considered as a reliquary of history while science and rationality are the "worldview" of the men of knowledge of modernity.
On the doorstep of post-modernity we vaguely sense that the worldview of modernity, rationality, will necessarily be overtaken by a more globally encompassing knowledge system... See this comment reworked in an article.
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