₦airaland Forum

A Thinking Man: http://de-conversion.com/2007/08/11/a-coming-out/


I used to be an evangelical Christian. In the summer of 1966, I got ’saved’. I literally came out - I got up out of my seat in front of family and friends at a Billy Graham rally at the age of 13, and decided to follow Jesus. That faith and commitment lasted for a long time, at least until 2000. I was a lay preacher, a pastoral counsellor, a church leader, and a Christian author. I was in hook, line, and sinker. However, over the past 7 years I have slowly abandoned that faith.

Of course, I know that if my Christian friends were reading this they would say that I am trying too hard. That the fact that I am having to write about it just proves how insecure I am in my new atheism. I would argue that since so many of them ask me about what has happened to me I have had to think things through, for their benefit, and to make sense of the massive change for myself. It didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen in any neat, logical order, but it has happened, and what is written below is a poor attempt at an explanation after the event.

Although a degree of general unease and doubt had been happening over a number of years (Does God really answer prayers? He doesn’t seem to answer mine. What is the point of singing hymns? Why am I struggling to make a book written in a series of foreign cultures over thousands of years relevant to my life today? How long can I go on doing mental gymnastics about apparent inconsistencies?) the change really took off when I was ill for a year. During that time I spent a year virtually at home, unable to go out and face crowds, and certainly unable to go to church. To someone who had believed that my life would fall apart if I didn’t go to church, I discovered that I was actually enjoying the absence. I certainly wasn’t missing the two Sunday services, the leaders’ meeting on a Sunday afternoon, the midweek meeting, various other meetings with groups or individuals. I started to enjoy the freedom and realise that my faith was not helping my enjoyment of life or blood-pressure.

Over a number of years I had been doing more and more training as a counsellor which involved me in reading more about human beings in an attempt to understand them better. As this happened, I became more and more uneasy with the template for humanity that I had inherited from my Christian faith. If I was honest with myself, I knew how difficult (and superficial) change really was, and that neat Christian solutions to change often only tackled the surface leaving deeper issues untouched. It no longer seemed good enough to exhort people (and myself) to stop doing things because they were wrong. I started to question the wrongness of some things, and certainly questioned the ability of people to stop despite the apparently available divine aid.

Because of my background in church I initially used to receive a lot of requests for counselling from people within the Christian community. As a counsellor I started to see more of the Christian underbelly. From within the Christian community I have personally come across ’senior’ Christians involved in multiple affairs, anal rape, child sex abuse, cottaging in the local toilets, visiting male and female prostitutes, physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse, wife beating, and bullying. Need I go on? I write this, not in judgement, but simply to make the point - if Christianity did work, and if it did significantly change people at a deep level, that wasn’t always apparent from some Christians. Their tragic experiences, and my own inner struggles and powerlessness, just confirmed my own doubts about efficacy.

As part of my counsellor training I did a 3 year course that forced me to confront a very difficult issue that I had been wanting to avoid. Up until this point I had taken an evangelical view of homosexuality. Homosexuality was wrong because the Bible said so. I was to be compassionate towards gays, but not condone their practice. That was easy as I didn’t personally know any gays. On my course, two of the three tutors were gay. During the three years I got to know them, deeply respect them, and grew increasingly confused and ashamed as I listened to their stories of their inner struggles. I also started to read up-to-date research on homosexuality (Wilson, G. and Rahman, Q. (2005) Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation. London: Peter Owen) and concluded that I could no longer toe the party line. And if my party line was wrong on this, it could no longer be trusted and was probably wrong on lots of other things as well.

I know that many Christians would argue that I am rejecting the package and that I should not necessarily reject Christ himself. At the moment I cannot see a meaningful way of separating the two.

Writing this marks a kind different coming out. I am declaring myself a tentative non-believer. It feels slightly odd, but at the same time much more comfortable than where I was 7 years ago.

- A Thinking Man

I am going to start a series of threads about people whose conversion from Christianity and other religions I with interesting and inspiration. I shall gather these stories essentially from the web, So we go with Lee Randolph;


Source: http://debunkingchristianity..com/2007/03/lees-deconversion-story.html

I deliberately tried to keep this to under five minutes reading time. I hope it is adequate.
I grew up in a more or less religious background. I Attended church occasionally and also at Christmas and Easter like a lot of other people. One of my grandfathers was a Baptist preacher. My other two grandparents formed a church about sixty years ago that has grown into something like a mega-church today. About fifteen years ago I got serious in the church and went Baptist Fundamentalist. My reasoning was that since God exists, and he wrote the book, then I should accept my responsibility to have a relationship and assumed the Bible must necessarily be the literal word of God. With this literal viewpoint in mind I got involved in all sorts of conundrums relating to theology and comparing my observations to the way I understood the world should and does work and the way god is described to work and the promises it allegedly made to us.

In an attempt to reconcile problems that I noticed, I started to study the Bible, apologetics and lexicons very hard. I became a staunch apologist, and I could quote chapter and verse like a pro. But I kept running into these people that had really good points about why I was wrong, but I just minimized it using 1 Corinthians 2:14 which supports the idea that because they don't have the holy spirit they can't understand. But even that poses a problem in logic that I didn't bother to reconcile. I just didn't know enough to deal with their questions so I kept studying deeper. I was told that I should go to seminary and seriously considered it, but I wasn't motivated to figure out how to do it.

The more I studied the harder it was to take the Bible literally, so I started sliding into the more metaphorical style of belief. At this point I reconciled the question of how do you know what is metaphor and what is not by believing that praying and the holy spirit would solve that problem. And to take my mind off those kinds of problems, I got involved in "Spiritual Warfare". Having read a book about Earl and Lorraine Warren in my youth called "The Demonologist" and "The Exorcist" I was sure that this kind of thing really went on, and I was going to get in the fray. I sought out Wiccans and people I was convinced were being bothered by an evil spirit and tried to "help" them. In the midst of all this I had some personal crises that convinced me that the demons were fighting back. I prayed and prayed to no avail, and started to try to think of a time when I could say that a prayer actually worked. I couldn't think of many and I started to think that maybe I was just being forsaken like Jesus in the last minutes. I heard from well meaning people that God won't give you anything you can't handle. Well, that meant that I was not devout enough for his tastes or that I was too weak. I didn't buy into either option. After I got to where I couldn’t take it anymore I made a deal with God that he should leave me alone, and I would leave him alone. I was betting it all on my acceptance of Jesus and my baptism to keep the door open, but my advocate days were over.

While I was 'floating through life' I saw the odd news story with the person saying "God saved he/she/me/it from dying or anything worse happening". From my perspective it made more sense for God to have prevented it if he was going to do anything about it all. Away from the Rhetoric of Church, some questions came to mind. Some of them from the church days and some from comparing my observations to how I understood the world was supposed to work with a God around. It didn't add up. Since I am a network engineer and electronic technician, I had some rudimentary critical thinking skills. I began to reflect back on my walk with God, and I realized that my experience in the Church and personal relationship with God was a lot like chance or luck. Not being interested in pursuing that line of reasoning seriously, I just let it go.

After Sep. 11, the Islamist fundamentalists started saying that God answered their prayers, I was wondering why he didn't answer the prayers of the people stuck in the WTC before they collapsed, or the people in the planes, or any reasonable prayer that I ever had in my life. This idea about prayer that "God answers in his own time, sometimes the answer is no, you can't test prayer or God" didn't fly with me anymore. So I decided to apply the same kind of logic, reasoning and research necessary to troubleshoot electronics and networks to reconcile this question of "Why does it seem to me that my personal experience with God was so much like depending on Luck."

I went back to studying the Bible but this time I wanted to know where the Bible came from and this time I was going to use secular and academic texts. I wanted to resolve some obvious problems in the Bible that weren't adequately addressed in my mind and so I studied physics, biology, archeology, psychology, informal logic, and reasoning. My first milestone was to discover that God didn't work the way that everyone thought he did. Why was that? I stumbled onto Robert M. Price's Bible Geek podcast and he said something that sounded like "the Old Testament is a collection of Sumerian and Babylonian Myths". I decided that was a plausible hypothesis so I decided to validate it. I have concluded to my satisfaction that most likely the Bible is a compilation of Near Eastern myths. I am sure the Bible was put together over time through socio-political pressures in the near eastern region in an attempt to establish an identity for a community of people that wished to be unique. The implications are that it puts the Bible on equal footing with all the other scriptures in the world, which means that we don't really know anything about God including if it exists or not. Once I realized that I became interested to know how this could go on for so long. That is when I bought the book "Why People Believe Weird Things" and learned about "Skepticism".

Skepticism is a nice buzz word, but I don’t ascribe to being a member of the skeptical movement or a 'Bright' because I am not comfortable with what I consider oversimplified ideals of schemes of reasoning, persuasion and deception. I won't get into it here, but in looking into how people reason including how to influence, persuade and deceive them, it is easy to see how religious belief has gone on for so long. But now I am confident that I have an understanding of what went on with me and is going on with other people. I want to help them answer some of those questions that cause them cognitive dissonance and to be mentally uncomfortable.

things that go bump
Once Born, Twice Shy
by James Alcock

Source: http://www.humanistperspectives.org/issue154/once_born_twice_shy.html


Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, He cannot see the kingdom of God. (John, 3.3)

Heaven is restricted. Being kind, decent, law-abiding, caring and helpful is not enough to gain admission. Seek no entry here, all ye Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, atheists and other non-Christians, no matter how upstanding you may be as citizens, parents, friends and neighbours. Even belief in Christian doctrine and adherence to Christian morality is not enough. To get into Heaven, you must be Born Again.

To Roman Catholics, one is ‘born again’ through baptism, in which the stain of Original Sin is cleansed away as one repents for personal sin and is transformed through God’s grace. Unless one is baptized, then, one cannot go to Heaven. Consequently, infants who die without having been baptized, even though free from personal sin, have no hope of ever entering Heaven. Instead, their souls are assigned permanently to Children’s Limbo (limbus puerorum), a state of happy oblivion somewhere between Heaven and Hell.

To fundamentalist Christians, however, Heaven has tougher entry requirements, and baptism is not enough. They interpret being Born Again as the active acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, although this concept is not without ambiguity. And there are even more rigid limitations for some Christian sects. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, believe that only a total of 144,000 souls will be ‘born again’ in the Resurrection and admitted into Heaven. Given the six and one-half billion people alive today, not to mention all those who have gone before, this means that the vast majority of people will never get to Heaven if the Jehovah’s Witnesses are correct.

Born Again Christians constitute a large and growing segment of the population of the United States, a group with considerable collective political clout that can count amongst its members some of highest political powers in the land, including the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State and Attorney-General. A 2004 Gallup Poll reported that 45% of Americans are Born Again Christians, while fewer than 10% of Canadians describe themselves in this manner. This reflects a substantial difference in general religious belief between the two countries: according to another recent poll, while 59% of Americans consider religion to be important to them, only 30% of Canadians feel the same way.

Born Again Christians in the United States are leading an attack on reason and science. For example, more and more states — approximately half of them at present — are imposing limits on the teaching of evolution in science classes, as creationism and its dressed-up cousin ‘intelligent design’ make their way into science classes.

What is it like to be Born Again, to believe fervently that the Holy Scriptures are infallible and literally true, to believe that God and Jesus are constantly watching over you, to believe that you will one day go to Heaven and be reunited with your (Born Again) loved ones, to believe that there is Satanic evil always present in the world that must be opposed, to believe that we are soon coming to the end of worldly existence as predicted in the Book of Revelation? I can tell you what it is like from first-hand observation, although for the record, I have only been born once, as was documented in the family Bible of one of my uncles. Inscribed in that Bible was a list extended family members and two columns of dates labelled ‘Born’ and ‘Born Again.’ I noted that dates were inscribed in both columns for most family members, even for grandchildren as young as two or three years, but for my siblings and myself, dates appeared only in the ‘Born’ column. My aunt saw me looking at the list and expressed the hope that she could soon add a date for me under the second column as well. (That never happened).

I was reared in a very tolerant and loving home. I was encouraged to think, but I was also taught to believe in Christianity, and was an active Christian until my late teens, at which time, over a period of two or three years, I wrestled with my faith, struggled with the resulting guilt elicited by questioning it, and eventually became a non-theist (a term I prefer to ‘atheist’ because of all the negative connotations that term can elicit). My father had been reared as a Baptist in England, but never showed any indication of having any religious faith whatsoever. He never spoke of religion, never attended church and never even closed his eyes when my mother said Grace at each meal! However, neither did he attack religion. Live and let live.

My mother was a member of the United Church of Canada, and this is the church in which I was reared. As most Canadians recognize, this is a generally tolerant, socially-progressive church which has often been on the forefront in promoting social justice. It was comfortable with intellectual inquiry and, at least in retrospect, seemed to be generally low in dogmatism, and rather practical in many ways. I vividly recall that when I was about 14, my Sunday School teacher, who also happened to be the school principal in my little town, told my friends and me that we were now old enough to take Communion. However, he cautioned that we should only do so if we were prepared to make every effort to stop sinning, and he went on to tell us that he was not yet ready to make such a promise, and therefore would not be taking communion himself! Shades of St Augustine in his Confessions: “Oh Lord, make me pure. But not yet!”

My mother’s family of origin was very religious; all but one of her siblings had been Born Again. Moreover, one of her brothers was an ordained evangelical minister, as was his wife. I had regular contact with my aunts and uncles, and one of my aunts lived just doors away. Thus, my everyday exposure to the spectrum of religious belief went from no religion (my father), to tolerant religion that encouraged intellectual inquiry (my mother and the United Church), to fundamentalist religion that rejected any questioning of a literal interpretation of the Scriptures.

Should I change jobs? Pray, and let God guide the decision.

To my fundamentalist relatives, as for other fundamentalists that I have met later in life, religion was the central core of daily existence. Virtually every picture on the walls of my relatives’ homes involved a religious theme. No decoration of the human body was allowed: no lipstick, no jewellery. Christmas trees were of course pagan and to be eschewed. Movies were considered sinful. (My uncle counselled my older brother that he could not attend church and go to movies as well. My brother elected to stop going to church!) Every decision my relatives made involved God in some manner. Should I change jobs? Pray, and let God guide the decision. Should I buy this house? Put in an offer, and if God wants you to have the house, it will be accepted. Why did the airplane crash? God in His wisdom ordained it, for some reason beyond our comprehension. Further exposure to Born Again religion came several years after my father’s death, when my then septuagenarian mother remarried, to a very strict Born Again Christian. He practised his faith to a fault, even saying grace over doughnuts at the doughnut shop. He fervently believed that the United Church was satanic and made my mother feel guilty for having brought us up in that church.

"their absolute certainty about what is right and wrong, produces intellectual rigidity, if not intellectual rigor mortis"

What has always struck me about my religious relatives, and other Born Again Christians whom I have encountered since, is the righteous certainty they have about their beliefs. Their absolute certainty that the Bible is literally true, their absolute certainty about what is right and wrong, produces intellectual rigidity, if not intellectual rigor mortis, for no reflection or discussion is necessary when one knows the truth. This intellectual rigidity in turn leads to intolerance of those who do not share the fundamentals of their belief system, an intolerance that contrasts sharply with the message of Christian love and acceptance of all that was taught to me in the United Church. Such intolerance leads sometimes to emotional abusiveness, as when, the day my father died, another aunt told my mother with some apparent sadness that since my father was not Born Again, his soul would already be in Hell. Even other Christian denominations are rejected as false religions. One of my aunts described to me how she was working to bring a number of unfortunate sinners to the Lord — a pregnant unmarried teenager, a young drug addict and a Roman Catholic. I asked her if I had correctly heard ‘Roman Catholic’ in the same list as drug addict and pregnant teenager. She replied that I had heard correctly, for all are outside God’s Grace.

Religion in general to some extent, and all-encompassing fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist religion in particular, constitute a belief system from which it is difficult to extricate oneself, even when motivated by reason to do so. Being reared from infancy in a religion generally makes it all the more difficult, for one has come to accept the basic tenets of the faith before intellect has fully developed. The intrinsic control mechanisms in religion are barriers to reason, and the more fundamentalist and dogmatic the religion, the more powerful are these mechanisms.

Barrier to Reason #1: Faith must not be questioned. If religious teachings do not make sense, or even if they seem absurd, they are nonetheless true and are to be accepted on faith. A simple example: When quite young, I was puzzled about the Bible. How could it be, I asked my Born Again aunt, that with only four human beings extant in all of creation — Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel — and leaving only three after Cain killed Abel, Cain left his parents and went away and got married. “Whom did he marry?” I wondered. It is wrong to question, I was admonished. You must accept it on faith. (I was subsequently interested to learn that in the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925, prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, who was defending Christian faith against godless evolution, was unable to answer the same question about Cain’s wife put to him by defence lawyer Clarence Darrow).

Barrier to Reason #2: Guilt. If questioning one’s religion is wrong, then to ask such questions means that one is even more of a sinner, and this leads to guilt, which severely dampens one’s enthusiasm for further inquiry. Personally, I continued vainly to search for evidence to support my childhood faith. Once, I even devised a way to show God’s existence. My father arose early every morning and set out cereals for breakfast, and he always put the cereal boxes at the same end of the table, day after day. I prayed to God that, as a sign, could he please have my father put them at the other end of the table the next morning? I did not want to ask for anything that would interfere significantly with the laws of nature, but this seemed eminently doable without any untoward effects on the way the world works. No such sign was forthcoming, however. My father did not vary from his routine, or perhaps I would now be writing for a religious organ rather than Humanist Perspectives. Did I lose my faith? One cannot escape that easily and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, my guilt level increased, for I had been taught by my aunt that God does not like to be tested or trifled with. I was guilty of wanting proof for that which should be accepted on faith.

Barrier to Reason #3: God is watching, and sees into our hearts. While those who are not religious may enjoy their ‘guilty pleasures’ from time to time, it is not so easy for the deeply religious, for God is always watching. Even examining religious precepts in a critical manner will not escape divine attention, and one will have to account for these unfaithful thoughts on Judgment Day. There is no escape.

Barrier to Reason #4: Ignore contrary evidence. There is little discussion or true debate within a dogmatic religious group. Views contrary to the orthodox position are easily dismissed either because they are misguided or because they are inspired by Satan, who always lurks, waiting to tempt people to stray from the path of righteousness. And of course the views of any people who have left the faith are discounted: either they have answered Satan’s call, or they ‘obviously’ never had the true faith to begin with. While I respect people’s rights to their religious views, I regularly find that many Christians, and fundamentalists in particular, reject the value of anything I have to say as an ex-Christian, telling me that obviously I have never experienced the true faith. Inded, Born Again Christians go even further, rejecting the notion that I was ever a Christian to begin with. First of all, I was never Born Again. And secondly, “The United Church, you say…”

Barrier to Reason #5: Social pressure. Threat of social rejection by people you care about is a powerful deterrent in religious and secular settings alike, but all the more so, I believe, in dogmatic religious settings. Straying from the path will bring considerable pressure from those around you to return to the flock.

Barrier to Reason #6: Much to lose. Religion involves carrots as well as sticks. In accepting the doctrinal beliefs and not questioning them, and in living one’s life according to the dictates of the faith, there are undoubtedly many rewards. For Born Again fundamentalists, these rewards include being one of God’s chosen, knowing that you are in God’s hands and being watched over, knowing that you will go to Heaven when you die, and having certainty about what is right and wrong in life. Leaving the faith means giving up these comforts.

These barriers to reason make it very difficult to leave a religious belief system, especially one that is as all-consuming as Born Again Christianity. This is not to say that Born Again Christians are not good and decent people, but it does mean that they are very restricted in their willingness and ability to give fair consideration to points of view that conflict with their doctrinal beliefs. Moreover, because of the conviction that they are living in the manner intended by God, they need not draw a distinction between secular and sacred. They believe that their faith should rule, even with regard to the secular concerns of daily life.

Of course, not all Born Again Christians are cut from the same cloth, and my relatives were undoubtedly amongst the most conservative and doctrinaire. My aim is not to stereotype those who claim to be Born Again, but to point out just how hard it is because of these barriers to reason to leave a religious belief system, especially one that is as all-consuming as Born Again Christianity. I am not threatened by religious faith in general, and I certainly respect and admire the devotion of many religious people to great humanitarian causes. Moreover, there are many people who are both religious and intellectual. However, there is danger when religious fundamentalists — of any religion — try to shape the world to suit their literal interpretation of ancient texts. This ultimately leads to a division between believers and non-believers, not just on a religious level, but also on a political and emotional level. Such a schism has been at the root of much human carnage across the ages. Unfortunately, the earth is rumbling and the cracks are becoming wider.

James Alcock is Professor of Psychology at York University in Toronto and a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He has written or co-authored many books, including Psi Wars (Imprint Academic, 2003); and A Textbook of Social Psychology, 6th Ed (Prentice-Hall, 2004).

rednow:
Have any of you guys watch the movie “Bruce Almighty” at all

Anyways that’s besides the point, here’s a quick chip in - will follow up later.

Mull this over. For starters, our sensory organs have a threshold – there is more that meets the proverbial eyes better still more than it presently can see. There is a limit that our degraded and degenerated brain/body can process, as with Man’s imitation - the computer; without a beefed up specs, too much data crunching can overload and blow it up. There is also the need to be wary of GIGO. Robocop was and is susceptible to malfunctioning

It is confidence that permits a Creator to make a creature and literally let it loose to free-will caprice and self-whim(s) without any sense of insecurity and knowing well that “Yeah I can handle it”.

Christianity is not about religion but rather about relationship and fellowship

Imagine a talking and philosophy furniture thinking it knows it all than the Carpenter ,

Pardon me, but there's simply no sense in what you have just written. Can you come again?

We Are All Africans
Pat Shipman

Source:  http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/28338?&print=yes

Nice hypothesis, you may say, but is it true? The heart of the scientific method lies in that skeptic's simple question. A merely plausible explanation of what we observe will not suffice, nor will a hypothesis bolstered only by some expert's endorsement. Modern science is wonderfully egalitarian, and it demands proof that all can see: measurements, objects or evidence of some kind. Scientific hypotheses must be both well-defined and firmly supported, preferably by several different types of data.

If a hypothesis meets these requirements, does this mean it is true? No, according to the philosopher Karl Popper, who believed that hypotheses could never be proven true—only false. Frederick Nietzsche claimed that the great charm of hypotheses was that they were refutable. While Nietzsche may be correct in the abstract, my experience suggests that scientists do not gleefully bury hypotheses in which they have invested many years of research.

In the study of human evolution, dueling hypotheses are commonplace because of long-standing, frequently erupting feuds about the interpretation of the fossil record. The field is so argumentative, in part, because the theories reflect directly on the nature and origin of humans. There is immense room for giving and taking offense when the subject is oneself. Too, the primary data of paleoanthropology—fossilized remains of our ancestors and near-relatives—are rare and difficult to obtain. Hence, it is not a simple matter to collect more evidence to clarify or support hypotheses. Fossil hunting requires tremendous knowledge and effort, good organizational skills, substantial grants, and a huge dollop of luck. New theories are, sadly, easier to come by than new primary evidence.

Thus it is a joyous occasion when my paleoanthropologist colleagues appear to resolve one of the most bitterly debated questions in the discipline: the issue of when, where and how modern humans evolved. For simplicity, I use "modern humans" or "recent humans" to denote the species to which I (and all the readers of this magazine) belong, but the formal term is either "anatomically modern Homo sapiens" or "Homo sapiens sapiens." Humans who lived in the past and did not have modern anatomy are often referred to as archaic or primitive.
Opposable Theories

For decades, paleoanthropologists have argued over two competing theories about the origin of our kind. The older notion, which owes its crude beginnings to Charles Darwin, is the Out of Africa hypothesis. This theory maintains that modern humans evolved in Africa and then spread around the world. Boiled down to its essence, the hypothesis states that modern humans are both relatively recent (100,000 to 200,000 years old) and African in origin. A major prediction of this hypothesis is that the earliest remains of modern humans will be found in Africa, dated to an appropriate time period.

The rival Multiregional hypothesis argues that modern humans evolved in many locations around the world from a precursor species, Homo erectus, approximately one to two million years ago. According to this school of thought, these regional populations evolved along parallel paths and reached modernity at roughly the same time. Because the populations were largely isolated from one another, they developed distinctive regional features, which people recognize today as "racial" differences. The Multiregional hypothesis predicts that the fossilized remains of the earliest modern humans will be found all over the Old World and that these scattered fossils will all date from about the same time. Furthermore, the theory requires these early populations to show anatomical and genetic continuity with the current inhabitants of the same region. For example, Multiregionalists believe that Neandertals, an archaic human form, are most closely related to modern indigenous Europeans.

Unfortunately for adherents of the Multiregional hypothesis, recent results are weighing heavily against them. Three very different strains of evidence have converged to offer convincing support for the rival theory.


Evidence for "Eve"

In April of this year, Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and a team of coworkers reported genetic analyses of more than 600 living Tanzanians from 14 different tribes and four linguistic groups. They analyzed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)—the tool of choice for tracing ancestry because it is inherited only through the mother as part of the ovum. The number of mutations that have accumulated in mtDNA is a rough measure of the time that has passed since that lineage first appeared. The owner of the first modern human mtDNA (by definition, a woman) is often referred to as "Eve," although many women of that time are likely to have shared similar mtDNA.


click for full image and caption
Figure 1. Genetic diversity

Tishkoff and her colleagues chose to investigate East African peoples for specific reasons. The number of linguistic and cultural differences is unusually high in the region, as is the variation in physical appearance—East Africans are tall or short, darker-skinned or lighter-skinned, round-faced or narrow-faced, and so on. This observation suggested that the genetic composition of the population is highly diverse, and as expected, the team found substantial variation in the mtDNA. In fact, members of five of the lineages showed an exceptionally high number of mutations compared with other populations, indicating that these East African lineages are of great antiquity. Identified by tribal affiliation, these are: the Sandawe, who speak a "click" language related to that of the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert; the Burunge and Gorowaa, who migrated to Tanzania from Ethiopia within the last five thousand years; and the Maasai and the Datog, who probably originated in the Sudan. The efforts of the University of Maryland group reflect a substantially larger database and more certain geographic origins for its subjects than earlier mtDNA studies. Further, the work by Tishkoff's team reveals that these five East African populations have even older origins than the !Kung San of southern Africa, who previously had the oldest known mtDNA.

"These samples showed really deep, old lineages with lots of genetic diversity," Tishkoff says. "They are the oldest lineages identified to date. And that fact makes it highly likely that 'Eve' was an East or Northeast African. My guess is that the region of Ethiopia or the Sudan is where modern humans originated."

By assuming that mtDNA mutates at a constant rate, Tishkoff's team estimated that the oldest lineages in their study originated 170,000 years ago, although she cautions that the method only gives an approximate date. Nonetheless, this finding is neatly congruent with new fossil evidence.


Idaltu Means "Elder"

This past June, an international team headed by Tim White and F. Clark Howell of the University of California at Berkeley, and Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa announced the discovery of three fossilized human skulls in the Herto Bouri area of Ethiopia. Volcanic layers immediately above and below the layer were dated to 154,000 and 160,000 years using radioisotopes, meaning that the owners of the skulls lived sometime between those dates.

The most remarkable of the three specimens is an adult male cranium: With the exception of a few missing teeth and some damage on the left side of the skull, the fossil is complete. There is also part of another male skull and an immature cranium from a six- or seven-year-old child.

Once these specimens were cleaned and pieced together, the team was able to make some telling observations. Like modern humans, the owners of these skulls had small faces tucked under capacious braincases, making the facial profile vertical. The cranial volume of the most complete specimen, designated BOU-VP-16/1, is 1,450 cubic centimeters—large even for modern humans. The braincase of the other adult skull may have been even bigger. Although the African Herto skulls are longer and more robust than those of recent humans, the team considers the Herto specimens to be the earliest modern Homo sapiens yet found—direct ancestors of people living today. In an unknowing echo of Tishkoff's genetic findings, Tim White concludes, "We are all, in this sense, Africans."

Because the discoverers of the Herto skulls were unable to find convincing links between these fossils and archaic humans from any single geographic region, they put the three specimens into a new subspecies, Homo sapiens idaltu. The subspecies name idaltu comes from the Afar language of Ethiopia. It means "elder."
click for full image and caption
Figure 2. A close-up view of the reconstruction

Even paleoanthropologists who were not associated with the finds overwhelmingly agree that the Herto skulls are the earliest securely dated modern humans yet found, meshing with the Out of Africa hypothesis. The Herto fossils also fit neatly into an African succession: Older skulls from the region include Homo erectus fossils from Daka, dated to about 1 million years ago, and the archaic Bodo skull, estimated to be about 500,000 years old. Meanwhile, fossils from Omo Kibish, also in Ethiopia, are more recent than the Herto skulls, according to a reanalysis of those remains. For a long time, the Omo Kibish specimens were regarded as ambiguous: They were fragmentary, making their anatomy less clear, and the site was originally dated using older, less reliable methods. However, a recent relocation of the site turned up new pieces that glued onto specimens found in 1967, and the site was re-dated to about 125,000 years using modern techniques. Further evidence comes from the Qafzeh site in Israel—on a plausible route from Africa—where there is a 92,000-year-old modern human skull.

These findings establish the earliest modern humans in Africa, but they do not exclude the simultaneous evolution of modern man in other parts of the world, as suggested by the Multiregional hypothesis. The most pertinent test of Multiregionalism focuses on Neandertals, which are a uniquely European form of primitive humans. According to Multiregionalists, Neandertals (which lived between about 200,000 and 27,000 years ago) are a transitional form that connects European Homo erectus to modern Homo sapiens sapiens. Could the Herto skulls simply be the regional, African equivalent of Neandertals?

"No," says co-leader Berhane Asfaw definitively. "The Herto skulls show that people in Africa had already developed the anatomy of modern humans while European Neandertals were still quite different." Indeed, the Herto skulls, though robust, lack many of the diagnostic anatomical features of Neandertal skulls. Asfaw states, "We can conclusively say that Neandertals had nothing to do with modern humans based on these skulls and on the genetic evidence."


Neandertals as European Ancestors?

The genetic evidence to which he refers has accumulated over the last six years, but the most dramatic advance came in 1999, when a team led by Svante P??bo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, became the first to extract mtDNA from the original Neandertal specimen. His group's success was a spectacular tour de force of meticulous technique and solid research design. The ancient mtDNA was compared with mtDNA from more than 2,000 people living in various regions around the world and differed from each of the modern regional groups by an average of 27 mutations (out of a possible 379 that were examined). Contrary to the predictions of the Multiregional hypothesis, the mtDNA of Neandertals was not closer to that of the modern Europeans. The work was a strong blow to the theory that humans evolved in several places simultaneously.

Multiregionalists Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan and Alan Thorne, then of Australian National University in Canberra, challenged the conclusions. They urged an investigation of mtDNA from additional Neandertals, in case the single individual used by Paabo's team was particularly unusual. They also suggested that Neandertal mtDNA might be closer to samples from the fossilized remains of early modern humans in Europe than from living Europeans.

Since these criticisms were levied, several teams have carried out additional studies of mtDNA from Neandertals and fossilized modern humans. All have shown that Neandertal samples differ significantly from modern mtDNA, which is indistinguishable from fossilized modern human mtDNA. Giorgio Bertorelle of the University of Ferrara in Italy led one of these teams, which published important results last May. Bertorelle's team compared mtDNA from two early modern humans (Cro-Magnons) from Italy, dated to 23,000 and 24,720 years old, with four mtDNA sequences of Neandertals from 42,000 to 29,000 years ago. The chronological proximity of the Neandertal and modern fossils was key because it increased the likelihood that Neandertal mtDNA would strongly resemble the early modern human mtDNA—if the former evolved into the latter, as the Multiregional hypothesis states.
click for full image and caption

Figure 3. 23,000-year-old remains of a woman

Bertorelle and colleagues found that the Cro-Magnon mtDNA was unlike the Neandertal samples, differing from them at 22 and 28 sites out of 360. Instead, the Cro-Magnon mtDNA sequences fell squarely within the range of variation of living humans. One of the Italian Cro-Magnons had a sequence shared by 359 (14 percent) of 2,566 modern samples in Europe and the Near East, and the other differs by only one mutation.

"The early modern humans had sequences that living individuals still have," concluded Bertorelle, "they [have] ,  nothing to do with Neandertal sequences." He and Asfaw might chime in unison that Neandertals cannot represent a regional European transition from Homo erectus to modern Homo sapiens.

The identity between Cro-Magnon and modern human mtDNA sequences in this study and others is striking, and it has caused some researchers to worry about the possibility of mtDNA contamination from researchers or others who have handled the fossils. Although contamination is a major problem in such studies, Bertorelle asserts spiritedly that his data are clean, stating that his group performed nine different tests to check for contamination and followed the most stringent procedures and methodology. He also points out the irony of questioning the validity of the mtDNA of a prehistoric human only because it is identical to that of modern humans.


Compelling Congruity

The Out of Africa hypothesis has become compelling because these different studies have all yielded congruent answers. Tishkoff's work points to East Africa in general, and Ethiopia/Sudan in particular, as the region where the oldest modern human lineages are found—and probably evolved. Studies of ancient mtDNA by groups led by P??bo, Bertorelle and others emphasize the genetic discrepancies between Neandertals and modern humans and demonstrate that some early anatomically modern fossils were also genetically modern—undermining the Multiregional hypothesis.

Despite the power of these genetic studies, only the fossils can tell us what our ancestors actually looked like, what they actually did and where they actually lived. It is singularly satisfying that the White-Howell-Asfaw team has discovered fossilized human remains from the right place (Ethiopia) and time (about 160,000 years ago) that also have the right (modern human) anatomy. The authors of the Out of Africa hypothesis are celebrating.

I don't expect that the subscribers of the Multiregional hypothesis will be waving a white flag of surrender, although they have lost the great majority of their supporters. At least one of the theory's most ardent proponents, Wolpoff, is still steadfast in defense of the hypothesis he has so long espoused. While it remains possible that new findings will shift the balance in favor of the Multiregional viewpoint, the consilience of such evidence creates a powerful testament. It would take many new fossils and many new genetic studies to resculpt this intellectual landscape.

© Pat Shipman
Bibliography

    * Caramelli, D., C. Lalueza-Fox, C. Vernesi, M. Lari, A. Casoli, F. Mallegni, B. Chiarelli, I. Dupanloup, J. Bertranpetit, G. Barbujani and G. Bertorelle. 2003. Evidence for a genetic discontinuity between Neandertals and 24,000-year-old anatomically modern Europeans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America 100:6593–6597.
    * Barbujani, G., and G. Bertorelle. 2003. Were Cro-Magnons too like us for DNA to tell? Nature 424:127. [CrossRef]
    * Krings, M., A. Stone, R. W. Schmitz, H. Krainitzki, M. Stoneking and S. P??bo. 1997. Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans. Cell 90:19–30.
    * Tishkoff, S. A., K. Gonder, J. Hirbo, H. Mortensen, K. Powell, A. Knight and J. Mountain. 2003. The genetic diversity of linguistically diverse Tanzanian populations: A multilocus analysis. American Journal of Physical Anthropology Supplement 36:208–209.
    * White, T. D., B. Asfaw, D. DaGusta, H. Gilbert, G. D. Richards, G. Suwa and F. C. Howell. 2003. Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia. Nature 423:742–747. [CrossRef]

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Source: http://www.humanistperspectives.org/issue154/we_are_all_african.html


Christopher diCarlo is a philosopher and an educator. His job is to teach such courses as Critical Thinking and the Philosophy of Medicine. Dr diCarlo, who received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, is a charming and challenging man. A strong mind and a sharp wit help make him extremely well-suited for his profession.

Recently, while performing the very duties that define his occupation, Dr diCarlo became involved in what many would consider an unjust controversy. In fact his position, and future, at Wilfrid Laurier University may be in jeopardy.

It begins with a shirt — a unique t-shirt designed by Dr diCarlo himself — which states in eye-catching print ‘We are all African’ (diCarlo, it should be pointed out, is a Caucasian man).

Last June, I attended a Humanist Association of Canada conference entitled ‘Humanism Now!’ held in Ottawa and featuring the presentation of the HAC Humanist of the Year award to the highly-deserving Evelyn Martens. Dr diCarlo was one of the many intriguing and thought-provoking speakers at the conference. It was there that I heard the story of this shirt, and its intended anti-racist message of the shared ancestry of humankind. He told how his message was perceived by some, in a disturbingly contradictory twist as both racist and, due to its foundation in scientific methodology, Eurocentric.

I had the opportunity to speak to Dr diCarlo, both at the conference and a few days later over the telephone. When I first called, he was in the middle of making lunch for his sons, Jeremy and Matt, so I phoned back a little while later. My first question was about his original reason or reasons for having the t-shirt printed. He explained:

“I think philosophers, and academics in general, need to be more, rather than less, vocal about issues which affect all of our lives. The shirt was printed to generate a forum for discussion. It’s not so much, ‘Look at me, I’m right. Hear what I have to say!’ but rather it’s an avenue for dialogue.”

At the Ottawa conference Dr diCarlo had mentioned that he’d worn the ‘We are all African’ shirt while in Texas. I asked him why he had gone there, and whether or not he’d received responses to the t-shirt.

“The Human Behavior and Evolution Society was meeting in Austin. What better place, I thought, to introduce the concept that we all have a common lineage, than in the buckle of the Bible belt. I did get some bad looks … the worst was from a police officer in the Alamo. It was what you’d call a sideways glance — sort of stared me up and down.”

Discouraging certainly, but not all of his shirt-related encounters in Texas were unpleasant. He tells me of another incident in San Antonio:

    all evidence clearly points to a common ancestry, from Africa.

“Now, I did have a great response from an African-American woman. She said, ‘I love your shirt! And I want to thank you for wearing it.’ She wanted to know where I’d bought it. I told her that I’d made it myself. I would have given it to her if I had another shirt to wear at the time, but we were quite a distance from our hotel.”

Considering fossils, migratory patterns, tool and material manipulation patterns, and the National Genographic Project, Dr diCarlo says that all evidence clearly points to a common ancestry, from Africa. During one lecture in his course on Critical Thinking he was explaining this to his students. An aboriginal woman was firmly opposed.

Here is how Dr diCarlo remembers the exchange:

“How do you really know that?” she asked him. “Some people say that, others refute it. Carbon dating is flawed. And now there’s evidence that there may have been people before then … My people don’t believe in what you’re saying.”

After recognizing the validity of a portion of the student’s arguments, Dr diCarlo spoke to her final statement:

“I understand that some of your people do not — would not — accept this, and I would maintain that they’re wrong.”

Considering the fact that he was teaching a course on critical thinking, Dr diCarlo then made a suggestion that nicely illustr-ated what the course was about:

“If you will accept evidence, then I will bring in the evidence that I have now, and you could bring in your evidence, that counters it, from an Aboriginal point of view. Then we could put it all on the table, and this would be a great basis for debate.”

The tone was not sarcastic but, rather, a sincere attempt to perform the function for which the University employs him — to teach students about critical thinking. The woman never returned to his classroom. Instead, she complained to the University, along with two other students who were opposed to his “religiously insensitive” position on evolution. The objections apparently focused on Dr diCarlo’s comments on religion and evolution, but also indicated concern about fair grading and “talking about sex in class.”
Christopher diCarlo’s T-shirt closeup.

Dr diCarlo told me about being called into a meeting with the Associate Dean, where he was confronted, in what he calls a “vague manner,” about the students’ complaints. The concern about his talking about sex during a lecture baffled him. “I knew I was being pulled for something pertaining to religion, but what was this talking about sex about?” Later, while talking about the incident with a colleague, it came to him, “I think he must have been referring to homosexuality.”

Dr diCarlo had explained to his class that evidence seems to suggest homosexuality to be, in part at least, a genetic propensity, and that this could possibly provide a better understanding of this aspect of human nature — that it is not a ‘life choice’ but inherent, and therefore should not be considered morally problematic.

The meeting with the Associate Dean ended without any explicit details at all. The three students also wrote letters of complaint to the Associate Dean.

As the person at Wilfrid Laurier with seniority teaching the subject, Dr diCarlo is a suitable and deserving candidate for the currently-available position of full-time Professor of Critical Thinking. He had been previously short-listed for such a position. Under normal circumstances, he would be a very strong candidate. But he is no longer. As it stands it seems he is to be passed over, apparently because of the complaints. Although the Administration denies that the letters from the three students affected their decision, the Union became involved and the matter is now the subject of a grievance under the Collective Agreement.

And so this educator and author of How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass awaits further word on whether or not his career is to be hindered for the crime of being a strong-minded and free-thinking teacher of philosophy.

Socrates was the same sort of pain in the ass, as were/are Galileo, David Hume, Rosa Parks, Noam Chomsky, Henry Morgantaler and of course, Charles Darwin, whose pioneer work in the field of evolutionary theory has helped us to learn that we are all of a shared origin. Some day the name Christopher diCarlo, or perhaps someone he taught, could belong on that list.

He deserves the support of all humanists.

Did Jesus and Mo know that we are all Africans?  What have these two characters done to benefit mankind, other than sow the seeds of bigotry?

Thanks to our own sheer endeavours we humans are uncovering the secrets of nature, in spite of religious impostor who claim to have all this knowledge but said nothing about it which could improve the human condition.


References;

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/28338?&print=yes
https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-120880.0.html
http://www.humanistperspectives.org/issue154/we_are_all_african.html

We Are All Africans
                                                                      Pat Shipman


Source: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/28338?&print=yes

Nice hypothesis, you may say, but is it true? The heart of the scientific method lies in that skeptic's simple question. A merely plausible explanation of what we observe will not suffice, nor will a hypothesis bolstered only by some expert's endorsement. Modern science is wonderfully egalitarian, and it demands proof that all can see: measurements, objects or evidence of some kind. Scientific hypotheses must be both well-defined and firmly supported, preferably by several different types of data.

If a hypothesis meets these requirements, does this mean it is true? No, according to the philosopher Karl Popper, who believed that hypotheses could never be proven true—only false. Frederick Nietzsche claimed that the great charm of hypotheses was that they were refutable. While Nietzsche may be correct in the abstract, my experience suggests that scientists do not gleefully bury hypotheses in which they have invested many years of research.

In the study of human evolution, dueling hypotheses are commonplace because of long-standing, frequently erupting feuds about the interpretation of the fossil record. The field is so argumentative, in part, because the theories reflect directly on the nature and origin of humans. There is immense room for giving and taking offense when the subject is oneself. Too, the primary data of paleoanthropology—fossilized remains of our ancestors and near-relatives—are rare and difficult to obtain. Hence, it is not a simple matter to collect more evidence to clarify or support hypotheses. Fossil hunting requires tremendous knowledge and effort, good organizational skills, substantial grants, and a huge dollop of luck. New theories are, sadly, easier to come by than new primary evidence.

Thus it is a joyous occasion when my paleoanthropologist colleagues appear to resolve one of the most bitterly debated questions in the discipline: the issue of when, where and how modern humans evolved. For simplicity, I use "modern humans" or "recent humans" to denote the species to which I (and all the readers of this magazine) belong, but the formal term is either "anatomically modern Homo sapiens" or "Homo sapiens sapiens." Humans who lived in the past and did not have modern anatomy are often referred to as archaic or primitive.


Opposable Theories

For decades, paleoanthropologists have argued over two competing theories about the origin of our kind. The older notion, which owes its crude beginnings to Charles Darwin, is the Out of Africa hypothesis. This theory maintains that modern humans evolved in Africa and then spread around the world. Boiled down to its essence, the hypothesis states that modern humans are both relatively recent (100,000 to 200,000 years old) and African in origin. A major prediction of this hypothesis is that the earliest remains of modern humans will be found in Africa, dated to an appropriate time period.

The rival Multiregional hypothesis argues that modern humans evolved in many locations around the world from a precursor species, Homo erectus, approximately one to two million years ago. According to this school of thought, these regional populations evolved along parallel paths and reached modernity at roughly the same time. Because the populations were largely isolated from one another, they developed distinctive regional features, which people recognize today as "racial" differences. The Multiregional hypothesis predicts that the fossilized remains of the earliest modern humans will be found all over the Old World and that these scattered fossils will all date from about the same time. Furthermore, the theory requires these early populations to show anatomical and genetic continuity with the current inhabitants of the same region. For example, Multiregionalists believe that Neandertals, an archaic human form, are most closely related to modern indigenous Europeans.

Unfortunately for adherents of the Multiregional hypothesis, recent results are weighing heavily against them. Three very different strains of evidence have converged to offer convincing support for the rival theory.

Evidence for "Eve"

In April of this year, Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and a team of coworkers reported genetic analyses of more than 600 living Tanzanians from 14 different tribes and four linguistic groups. They analyzed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)—the tool of choice for tracing ancestry because it is inherited only through the mother as part of the ovum. The number of mutations that have accumulated in mtDNA is a rough measure of the time that has passed since that lineage first appeared. The owner of the first modern human mtDNA (by definition, a woman) is often referred to as "Eve," although many women of that time are likely to have shared similar mtDNA.
click for full image and caption

Figure 1. Genetic diversity

Tishkoff and her colleagues chose to investigate East African peoples for specific reasons. The number of linguistic and cultural differences is unusually high in the region, as is the variation in physical appearance—East Africans are tall or short, darker-skinned or lighter-skinned, round-faced or narrow-faced, and so on. This observation suggested that the genetic composition of the population is highly diverse, and as expected, the team found substantial variation in the mtDNA. In fact, members of five of the lineages showed an exceptionally high number of mutations compared with other populations, indicating that these East African lineages are of great antiquity. Identified by tribal affiliation, these are: the Sandawe, who speak a "click" language related to that of the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert; the Burunge and Gorowaa, who migrated to Tanzania from Ethiopia within the last five thousand years; and the Maasai and the Datog, who probably originated in the Sudan. The efforts of the University of Maryland group reflect a substantially larger database and more certain geographic origins for its subjects than earlier mtDNA studies. Further, the work by Tishkoff's team reveals that these five East African populations have even older origins than the !Kung San of southern Africa, who previously had the oldest known mtDNA.

"These samples showed really deep, old lineages with lots of genetic diversity," Tishkoff says. "They are the oldest lineages identified to date. And that fact makes it highly likely that 'Eve' was an East or Northeast African. My guess is that the region of Ethiopia or the Sudan is where modern humans originated."

By assuming that mtDNA mutates at a constant rate, Tishkoff's team estimated that the oldest lineages in their study originated 170,000 years ago, although she cautions that the method only gives an approximate date. Nonetheless, this finding is neatly congruent with new fossil evidence.

Idaltu Means "Elder"

This past June, an international team headed by Tim White and F. Clark Howell of the University of California at Berkeley, and Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa announced the discovery of three fossilized human skulls in the Herto Bouri area of Ethiopia. Volcanic layers immediately above and below the layer were dated to 154,000 and 160,000 years using radioisotopes, meaning that the owners of the skulls lived sometime between those dates.

The most remarkable of the three specimens is an adult male cranium: With the exception of a few missing teeth and some damage on the left side of the skull, the fossil is complete. There is also part of another male skull and an immature cranium from a six- or seven-year-old child.

Once these specimens were cleaned and pieced together, the team was able to make some telling observations. Like modern humans, the owners of these skulls had small faces tucked under capacious braincases, making the facial profile vertical. The cranial volume of the most complete specimen, designated BOU-VP-16/1, is 1,450 cubic centimeters—large even for modern humans. The braincase of the other adult skull may have been even bigger. Although the African Herto skulls are longer and more robust than those of recent humans, the team considers the Herto specimens to be the earliest modern Homo sapiens yet found—direct ancestors of people living today. In an unknowing echo of Tishkoff's genetic findings, Tim White concludes, "We are all, in this sense, Africans."

Because the discoverers of the Herto skulls were unable to find convincing links between these fossils and archaic humans from any single geographic region, they put the three specimens into a new subspecies, Homo sapiens idaltu. The subspecies name idaltu comes from the Afar language of Ethiopia. It means "elder."
click for full image and caption

Figure 2. A close-up view of the reconstruction


Even paleoanthropologists who were not associated with the finds overwhelmingly agree that the Herto skulls are the earliest securely dated modern humans yet found, meshing with the Out of Africa hypothesis. The Herto fossils also fit neatly into an African succession: Older skulls from the region include Homo erectus fossils from Daka, dated to about 1 million years ago, and the archaic Bodo skull, estimated to be about 500,000 years old. Meanwhile, fossils from Omo Kibish, also in Ethiopia, are more recent than the Herto skulls, according to a reanalysis of those remains. For a long time, the Omo Kibish specimens were regarded as ambiguous: They were fragmentary, making their anatomy less clear, and the site was originally dated using older, less reliable methods. However, a recent relocation of the site turned up new pieces that glued onto specimens found in 1967, and the site was re-dated to about 125,000 years using modern techniques. Further evidence comes from the Qafzeh site in Israel—on a plausible route from Africa—where there is a 92,000-year-old modern human skull.

These findings establish the earliest modern humans in Africa, but they do not exclude the simultaneous evolution of modern man in other parts of the world, as suggested by the Multiregional hypothesis. The most pertinent test of Multiregionalism focuses on Neandertals, which are a uniquely European form of primitive humans. According to Multiregionalists, Neandertals (which lived between about 200,000 and 27,000 years ago) are a transitional form that connects European Homo erectus to modern Homo sapiens sapiens. Could the Herto skulls simply be the regional, African equivalent of Neandertals?

"No," says co-leader Berhane Asfaw definitively. "The Herto skulls show that people in Africa had already developed the anatomy of modern humans while European Neandertals were still quite different." Indeed, the Herto skulls, though robust, lack many of the diagnostic anatomical features of Neandertal skulls. Asfaw states, "We can conclusively say that Neandertals had nothing to do with modern humans based on these skulls and on the genetic evidence."

Neandertals as European Ancestors?

The genetic evidence to which he refers has accumulated over the last six years, but the most dramatic advance came in 1999, when a team led by Svante P??bo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, became the first to extract mtDNA from the original Neandertal specimen. His group's success was a spectacular tour de force of meticulous technique and solid research design. The ancient mtDNA was compared with mtDNA from more than 2,000 people living in various regions around the world and differed from each of the modern regional groups by an average of 27 mutations (out of a possible 379 that were examined). Contrary to the predictions of the Multiregional hypothesis, the mtDNA of Neandertals was not closer to that of the modern Europeans. The work was a strong blow to the theory that humans evolved in several places simultaneously.

Multiregionalists Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan and Alan Thorne, then of Australian National University in Canberra, challenged the conclusions. They urged an investigation of mtDNA from additional Neandertals, in case the single individual used by Paabo's team was particularly unusual. They also suggested that Neandertal mtDNA might be closer to samples from the fossilized remains of early modern humans in Europe than from living Europeans.

Since these criticisms were levied, several teams have carried out additional studies of mtDNA from Neandertals and fossilized modern humans. All have shown that Neandertal samples differ significantly from modern mtDNA, which is indistinguishable from fossilized modern human mtDNA. Giorgio Bertorelle of the University of Ferrara in Italy led one of these teams, which published important results last May. Bertorelle's team compared mtDNA from two early modern humans (Cro-Magnons) from Italy, dated to 23,000 and 24,720 years old, with four mtDNA sequences of Neandertals from 42,000 to 29,000 years ago. The chronological proximity of the Neandertal and modern fossils was key because it increased the likelihood that Neandertal mtDNA would strongly resemble the early modern human mtDNA—if the former evolved into the latter, as the Multiregional hypothesis states.


Figure 3. 23,000-year-old remains of a woman

Bertorelle and colleagues found that the Cro-Magnon mtDNA was unlike the Neandertal samples, differing from them at 22 and 28 sites out of 360. Instead, the Cro-Magnon mtDNA sequences fell squarely within the range of variation of living humans. One of the Italian Cro-Magnons had a sequence shared by 359 (14 percent) of 2,566 modern samples in Europe and the Near East, and the other differs by only one mutation.

"The early modern humans had sequences that living individuals still have," concluded Bertorelle, "they [have] ,  nothing to do with Neandertal sequences." He and Asfaw might chime in unison that Neandertals cannot represent a regional European transition from Homo erectus to modern Homo sapiens.

The identity between Cro-Magnon and modern human mtDNA sequences in this study and others is striking, and it has caused some researchers to worry about the possibility of mtDNA contamination from researchers or others who have handled the fossils. Although contamination is a major problem in such studies, Bertorelle asserts spiritedly that his data are clean, stating that his group performed nine different tests to check for contamination and followed the most stringent procedures and methodology. He also points out the irony of questioning the validity of the mtDNA of a prehistoric human only because it is identical to that of modern humans.


Compelling Congruity

The Out of Africa hypothesis has become compelling because these different studies have all yielded congruent answers. Tishkoff's work points to East Africa in general, and Ethiopia/Sudan in particular, as the region where the oldest modern human lineages are found—and probably evolved. Studies of ancient mtDNA by groups led by P??bo, Bertorelle and others emphasize the genetic discrepancies between Neandertals and modern humans and demonstrate that some early anatomically modern fossils were also genetically modern—undermining the Multiregional hypothesis.

Despite the power of these genetic studies, only the fossils can tell us what our ancestors actually looked like, what they actually did and where they actually lived. It is singularly satisfying that the White-Howell-Asfaw team has discovered fossilized human remains from the right place (Ethiopia) and time (about 160,000 years ago) that also have the right (modern human) anatomy. The authors of the Out of Africa hypothesis are celebrating.

I don't expect that the subscribers of the Multiregional hypothesis will be waving a white flag of surrender, although they have lost the great majority of their supporters. At least one of the theory's most ardent proponents, Wolpoff, is still steadfast in defense of the hypothesis he has so long espoused. While it remains possible that new findings will shift the balance in favor of the Multiregional viewpoint, the consilience of such evidence creates a powerful testament. It would take many new fossils and many new genetic studies to resculpt this intellectual landscape.

© Pat Shipman
Bibliography

    * Caramelli, D., C. Lalueza-Fox, C. Vernesi, M. Lari, A. Casoli, F. Mallegni, B. Chiarelli, I. Dupanloup, J. Bertranpetit, G. Barbujani and G. Bertorelle. 2003. Evidence for a genetic discontinuity between Neandertals and 24,000-year-old anatomically modern Europeans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America 100:6593–6597.
    * Barbujani, G., and G. Bertorelle. 2003. Were Cro-Magnons too like us for DNA to tell? Nature 424:127. [CrossRef]
    * Krings, M., A. Stone, R. W. Schmitz, H. Krainitzki, M. Stoneking and S. P??bo. 1997. Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans. Cell 90:19–30.
    * Tishkoff, S. A., K. Gonder, J. Hirbo, H. Mortensen, K. Powell, A. Knight and J. Mountain. 2003. The genetic diversity of linguistically diverse Tanzanian populations: A multilocus analysis. American Journal of Physical Anthropology Supplement 36:208–209.
    * White, T. D., B. Asfaw, D. DaGusta, H. Gilbert, G. D. Richards, G. Suwa and F. C. Howell. 2003. Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia. Nature 423:742–747. [CrossRef]
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Source: http://www.humanistperspectives.org/issue154/we_are_all_african.html

Dr Christopher diCarlo is a philosopher and an educator. His job is to teach such courses as Critical Thinking and the Philosophy of Medicine. Dr diCarlo, who received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, is a charming and challenging man. A strong mind and a sharp wit help make him extremely well-suited for his profession.

Recently, while performing the very duties that define his occupation, Dr diCarlo became involved in what many would consider an unjust controversy. In fact his position, and future, at Wilfrid Laurier University may be in jeopardy.

It begins with a shirt — a unique t-shirt designed by Dr diCarlo himself — which states in eye-catching print ‘We are all African’ (diCarlo, it should be pointed out, is a Caucasian man).

Last June, I attended a Humanist Association of Canada conference entitled ‘Humanism Now!’ held in Ottawa and featuring the presentation of the HAC Humanist of the Year award to the highly-deserving Evelyn Martens. Dr diCarlo was one of the many intriguing and thought-provoking speakers at the conference. It was there that I heard the story of this shirt, and its intended anti-racist message of the shared ancestry of humankind. He told how his message was perceived by some, in a disturbingly contradictory twist as both racist and, due to its foundation in scientific methodology, Eurocentric.

I had the opportunity to speak to Dr diCarlo, both at the conference and a few days later over the telephone. When I first called, he was in the middle of making lunch for his sons, Jeremy and Matt, so I phoned back a little while later. My first question was about his original reason or reasons for having the t-shirt printed. He explained:

“I think philosophers, and academics in general, need to be more, rather than less, vocal about issues which affect all of our lives. The shirt was printed to generate a forum for discussion. It’s not so much, ‘Look at me, I’m right. Hear what I have to say!’ but rather it’s an avenue for dialogue.”

At the Ottawa conference Dr diCarlo had mentioned that he’d worn the ‘We are all African’ shirt while in Texas. I asked him why he had gone there, and whether or not he’d received responses to the t-shirt.

“The Human Behavior and Evolution Society was meeting in Austin. What better place, I thought, to introduce the concept that we all have a common lineage, than in the buckle of the Bible belt. I did get some bad looks … the worst was from a police officer in the Alamo. It was what you’d call a sideways glance — sort of stared me up and down.”

Discouraging certainly, but not all of his shirt-related encounters in Texas were unpleasant. He tells me of another incident in San Antonio:

all evidence clearly points to a common ancestry, from Africa.

“Now, I did have a great response from an African-American woman. She said, ‘I love your shirt! And I want to thank you for wearing it.’ She wanted to know where I’d bought it. I told her that I’d made it myself. I would have given it to her if I had another shirt to wear at the time, but we were quite a distance from our hotel.”

Considering fossils, migratory patterns, tool and material manipulation patterns, and the National Genographic Project, Dr diCarlo says that all evidence clearly points to a common ancestry, from Africa. During one lecture in his course on Critical Thinking he was explaining this to his students. An aboriginal woman was firmly opposed.

Here is how Dr diCarlo remembers the exchange:

“How do you really know that?” she asked him. “Some people say that, others refute it. Carbon dating is flawed. And now there’s evidence that there may have been people before then … My people don’t believe in what you’re saying.”

After recognizing the validity of a portion of the student’s arguments, Dr diCarlo spoke to her final statement:

“I understand that some of your people do not — would not — accept this, and I would maintain that they’re wrong.”

Considering the fact that he was teaching a course on critical thinking, Dr diCarlo then made a suggestion that nicely illustr-ated what the course was about:

“If you will accept evidence, then I will bring in the evidence that I have now, and you could bring in your evidence, that counters it, from an Aboriginal point of view. Then we could put it all on the table, and this would be a great basis for debate.”

The tone was not sarcastic but, rather, a sincere attempt to perform the function for which the University employs him — to teach students about critical thinking. The woman never returned to his classroom. Instead, she complained to the University, along with two other students who were opposed to his “religiously insensitive” position on evolution. The objections apparently focused on Dr diCarlo’s comments on religion and evolution, but also indicated concern about fair grading and “talking about sex in class.”
Christopher diCarlo’s T-shirt closeup.

Dr diCarlo told me about being called into a meeting with the Associate Dean, where he was confronted, in what he calls a “vague manner,” about the students’ complaints. The concern about his talking about sex during a lecture baffled him. “I knew I was being pulled for something pertaining to religion, but what was this talking about sex about?” Later, while talking about the incident with a colleague, it came to him, “I think he must have been referring to homosexuality.”

Dr diCarlo had explained to his class that evidence seems to suggest homosexuality to be, in part at least, a genetic propensity, and that this could possibly provide a better understanding of this aspect of human nature — that it is not a ‘life choice’ but inherent, and therefore should not be considered morally problematic.

The meeting with the Associate Dean ended without any explicit details at all. The three students also wrote letters of complaint to the Associate Dean.

As the person at Wilfrid Laurier with seniority teaching the subject, Dr diCarlo is a suitable and deserving candidate for the currently-available position of full-time Professor of Critical Thinking. He had been previously short-listed for such a position. Under normal circumstances, he would be a very strong candidate. But he is no longer. As it stands it seems he is to be passed over, apparently because of the complaints. Although the Administration denies that the letters from the three students affected their decision, the Union became involved and the matter is now the subject of a grievance under the Collective Agreement.

And so this educator and author of How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass awaits further word on whether or not his career is to be hindered for the crime of being a strong-minded and free-thinking teacher of philosophy.

Socrates was the same sort of pain in the ass, as were/are Galileo, David Hume, Rosa Parks, Noam Chomsky, Henry Morgantaler and of course, Charles Darwin, whose pioneer work in the field of evolutionary theory has helped us to learn that we are all of a shared origin. Some day the name Christopher diCarlo, or perhaps someone he taught, could belong on that list.

He deserves the support of all humanists.

Derek Kaill, President of the Humanist Association of London and Area, is an orthodox agnostic and father of one.

Ujujoan:
I beleive that with God, all things are POSSIBLE!! I beleive in the immaculate conception and I beilev in the death and ressurestion of Chirst. All these, I beleive based on faith and not but sight (or reasons)!!!

By the same token, the claims of the mosl-ems, buddhist, pagans are also worthy of believing, don't they. Therefore, who hold the upper ground? You should not be able to dismiss any of the other religious claims then because you have no mechanism of distinguishing myth from truth.

Of course, I am using the word "truth" in the lousest possible sense here. But which of the various Christian denomination holds the "truth" about the Christian belief?

I see Christians on this forum bashing each other in the face with verses from the bible and demanding interpretations for the opponents, only to be bashed back again and again with the same or similar stuff.

In my experience, the evangelicals do not consider other Christians as "saved" and in fact despise other Christians who are not "born again" or evangelical. So who really hold the Christian truth?

simmy:
if ure a female bisexual then if ure male then please stay far away !!!!!!!

What difference does it make whether you are a female or male bisexual? Why would you favour the female and be horrified by the male? Do they not engage in exactly the same act?

Desperation can be a very damaging sentiment, sometimes pushing people to seek the most inane and unwise measures for solutions to their problems. Such desperation come in the form of finance, health, family and salvation.

So it is that some conmen have positioned themselves to exploit just this calibre of the desperate. The evangelical pastor, Gilbert Deya, is a case in point. He runs a ministry based in the UK. In fact, one of his larger churches is located less than three miles from my residence, in Manchester. Pastor Deya is currently under investigator for deception and child smuggling charges by the British authorities.

Now, imagine by disgust upon learning how Deya deceitfully promised a local African woman with fertility problem with a surefire route to pregnancy. No sooner had she joined the Manchester congregation than she began to gain bodily weight. Deya reassure the lady that God and worked miracles and made the lady pregnant. Upon consulting with her doctors, she was informed that there were no signs of pregnancy. Nonetheless, her body shape kept changing as though she was pregnant, as was reassured many times over that modern medical science is not capable of detecting God-miracle pregnancies.

More than 15 months later, with no labour motions in sight, this lady got extremely concerned and contacted Deya, who tried to pursued her to going to Kenya to have her baby. Her friends and family were not convinced. They asked her to seek expert medical advice, which she did. Guess what, what did the doctors find this time? A massive fibrous growth developing within her. She was rushed to surgery to have the growth removed. I do not know if she is still a member of the Deya ministries.

BTW, all(most) the claimed miracle births from the Deya ministries have been found to be cases of deception. Deya awaits extradiction to Kenya to answer these charges.

So much to the epistemology of FAITH.

What is the Apocalyst and when is it expected to occur? How many people do we expect to see saved during this event?

The following might be useful. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Genes-Show-it-We-Have-All-Come-From-Africa-79306.shtml


This study is the most impressive research so far tracking our evolutionary journey. The new research published in the Nature journal confirms that modern humans emerged in Africa and then spread into Asia to reach Europe, the Pacific and Americas. The team focused on 650,000 genetic markers
in about 1,000 subjects from 51 populations worldwide, the largest study of this type so far.

"You get less and less variation the further you go from Africa," said co-author Marcus Feldman, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University in California.

This confirms the idea that Homo sapiens left Africa about 100,000 years ago. Each small group of individuals founded a new population in each new colonized region, using a smaller sample of the originally African gene pool, in a phenomenon called genetic bottleneck. Diversity clearly decreased during the migrations.

"If you keep sampling like that, then mathematically you must lose variation," said Feldman.

Other researchers looked at a maximum of 1,000 genetic markers, comparing just 3-4 populations.

"It's sort of like looking at Mars with the naked eye versus with a big, very powerful telescope," said co-author Richard Myers, a geneticist from Stanford University.

The detailed analysis revealed a shared portion of genes between the Yakut, indigenous of northeastern Siberia, and Native Americans, matching the archaeological findings of migration across the Bering area. The research also showed a clear racial distinction between the northern and southern Chinese populations and between different European populations.

"But perhaps even more striking is how similar humans are to each other. Some 90 % of the genetic variation occurs within populations, not among them. That turns out to be very profound, because it's not like we've got these 51 populations that are different species. We're really, really close to each other," said Myers.

The team found that racial types were characterized by thousands of genetic markers.

"Those genes which we classically use like skin color and eye color and hair structure to differentiate what we commonly call races is a tiny fraction of all the variation there is," said Feldman.

"In particular, the pattern of variation shows that the route of migration out of Africa was into the Middle East and then to the rest of Eurasia, the Americas, and Oceania. That tends to agree with what we're seeing on the Y-chromosome side," said Spencer Wells, a population geneticist and director of the Genographic Project, which is charting the migratory history of humans around the globe.

The study strengthened the idea of Africans spreading into the Middle East, followed by Europe and Asia, the Pacific Islands and, finally, the Americas.

"Populations in the Middle East have a unique signature of African, European, and Asian characteristics. It looks like a gateway. You see a lot more mixture there , that's one of the types of findings you get by looking at this level of detail," said Myers.

The research also showed that sometimes a person's roots can be traced to a small group specific to a geographic area.

Grouppoint:
@TPaine,
Whilst your assertions may be true, how does that refute the claim that Africans came from Ham? Quite possibly, the Aborigines and Indians also came from Ham.

Also, this does not prove that Ham himself was white or black. It just means that whatever colour pigmentation they possesed was gradually gained or lost as a result of environmental factors.

I believe that your question is aimed at proving who existed first: White or Black?
Am I correct?

Yes, you are correct in saying that it does not refute the existence of a Ham. That was not my point. My point is the original location of Ham. There is no evidence suggesting Africans descended from a "being" in the Middle East. On the contrary, the inhabitants of the Middle East descended from Africans.

Further, I am NOT making a socio-political point here at all. I don't care for the "black or white" issue. I care about the facts and am not discomforted by factual evidence.

What is baptism and is it an important part of the Christian sacrament? Can one be saved without having being baptised? Should baptism be carried out only to cognicient consenting adults or on just about anybody?

Questions still unanswered!

The Old Testament treats women in very reprehensible tones, laying the guilt for sin squarely on the shoulders of women. It also assumes women are inherently unclean simply by virtue of their gender.  The New Testament is no better. Take a look at the following verses from 1 Timothy 2;



8 I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting.

9 In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array;

10 But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.

11 Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.

12 But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

13 For Adam was first formed, then Eve.

14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.

15 Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.

This appears to me as a stunning rebuke to women, putting them in their place, as it were.  It also reproaches the woman for having introduced sin into the world.

The real questions are these; how many of the above injunctions are followed by the Christian womenfold today?  Do they not broid their hair, hear costly jewelry, teach and preach in churches?

As if that was not bad enough, it goes on to say "she shall be saved in childbearing".  What is this about? How about women who are not able to bear children? This is a most bizarre doctrine.

rednow:
@ Tpaine
- Oh no! Against my better judgement I have succumbed to logging back in instead of jumping in to bed for the night
- Your prompt fascinating précis is worth it
- I am only going to be in here for a few secs or a few minutes - fatigue is slipping in, I am making blunder(s) and typo errors, need to tuck in for the night thats without a doubt.

Interesting assertions in the quotes above. Yep we are the ultimate "computer" - the natural and first processing unit made. The great minds of past such Issac Newton, Gallileo etc trawled to some degree similar path(s) profess (i.e. philosophy, science, history, literature, jazz, etc). My presumption that you are an intellectual aws correct - intelligence, maturity and experience is/was sensed. However inasmuch as I genuinely respect your candid and blunt opinion(s), you might have to expatiate on a few of your estimations in such areas below:

1) The disillusion with Christianity; what was the trigger or catalyst for that?
1b) Who is a Christian, what is a Christian
2) The heuristic alternative; Science? Why science?
3) The Truth; what is the Truth, who is the Truth, where is the Truth?
4) Evolution, Darwinism hmm? How, why?
5) Which pernicous system was/is retarding human progress
5b) How, where and when was the pernicous system doing this?

Thanks for obliging mate

rednow:
The great minds of past such Issac Newton, Gallileo etc trawled to some degree similar path(s) profess (i.e. philosophy, science, history, literature, jazz, etc). My presumption that you are an intellectual aws correct - intelligence, maturity and experience is/was sensed.

This comparison seems flattering, but believe those are really great intellectual giants and am nothing compared to them. But the important thing is to realise the great men now and past and lean towards them, or start climbing on their back in the hope that you may one day see further by standing on their shoulders.

BTW, I would also like to add Darwin, Voltaire, David Hume in that list.

rednow:
[/quote][quote author=rednow link=topic=120610.msg2066045#msg2066045 date=1205794500]However inasmuch as I genuinely respect your candid and blunt opinion(s), you might have to expatiate on a few of your estimations in such areas below:

In this sort of forum, it is hard to expound in depth about one development, but will try to hit just the main points. Here we go:

rednow:
1) The disillusion with Christianity; what was the trigger or catalyst for that?

I was about 10 years old when a certain realisation of gross unfairness and injustice dawned upon me on reading the bible. This was an account in the old testament where Moses massacres many thousands of Midianites. As a 10 year old, I found this profoundly disturbing and no amount of prayer or lecture from our bible intructor coude assuage the sense of betrayal I felt. That day, something in me broke and was determined never to take anything again at face value. I also learnt never to trust the so-called intructor, teachers, preacher etc if I myself could get hold of the material and read and understand it for myself. Ever since then, I have been on a quest to understand the origin of religion and why so many people find it enticing

Five of six years later another question stirred up in my mind. And that was the question of the origin of sin. According to the classic christian tradition, sin originated from god's own kingdom, when some angels were so bad as to commit sin in god's own house. It then occurred to me that the first sin was not committed in on earth but in heaven, in god's own backyard. Why was god not able to stop sin in his own house? And that the sinning angels were cast out of heaven onto the earth.

As if that was not bad enough, we are told that also that angels have been being cast down by god ever since. Can you imagine the scenario; god matching up and down the corridors and looking for those bad angels and pushing them off into the abyss of the earth.

It then occurred to me that if this was true then this must be a very incompetent god and that his promised salvation would never solve the problem of sin since he has never been able to solve it. He has tried with the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah etc but sin persists.

By this point, I was majoring in the sciences at high school and found the naturalistic explanations a lot more intellectually satisfying. And then I learnt about the theory of evolution. Well for me this was the death knell to by christian belief. From then on, none of the biblical explanation seem satisfying. I realised the Genesis accounts were myths, the Flood account was also myth (stolen from the Babylonians - the Epic of Gilgemesh) and that most of the bible was factually inaccurate. If this book was really the work of a god, then the least you could say about him was that he was very incompetent, indeed.

When I came to England to study, I was exposed to a wealth of new ideas and material and that essentially killed off any sympathies I had for christianity.

rednow:
1b) Who is a Christian, what is a Christian

Hard to answer this one. I think you really ought to direct this one to a christian. Today, there are more than 30000 christian denominations, all professing to be the real heir to Christ. None of them meets my standards for truth.

rednow:
2) The heuristic alternative; Science? Why science?

Science is essentially the human enterprise dedicated to the unveilling and revealing of the hidden aspects of nature - of uncovering knoweledge about reality. It is also the most reliable method of discoverying knowledge, as proven by its tract record. Just think of all th eartifact of science and technology at our disposal today. Is there any of these that is the fruits of non-science, say faith, or superstition?

How does believe in the afterlife advance the human condition? How does believing that someone rose from the dead advance the human condition?

Humans have pulled human out of disease, poverty, natural disasters thanks to science and technology, not due to prayers and supplications.

rednow:
3) The Truth; what is the Truth, who is the Truth, where is the Truth?

I don't know this one. Ave just started looking into this recently. All I can say for now is that there are various types and notions of truth; Objective truth (for example, say that the earth is more than 3 billions years old is an approach to objective truth. Or that evolutions is responsible for the diversity of life on the planet)

Most forms of truth should have a valid method for verifying it. My rule of thumb is that any claim for truth must be capable of being demonstrated to be so.

For instance, to say reincarnation is true, it must be capable of demonstrating that it is so. Otherwise, the statement falls into the realms of propositions.

rednow:
4) Evolution, Darwinism hmm? How, why?

This is a massive subject. I would try and summarise it in a few sentences. About 500 to 2000 million years ago, nothing but unicellular life throve on the earth. Then from about 300-400 millions years ago, multicellular organism began to appear and more complex body plans started emerging in a period called the Cambrian explosion. Then nearly all existing life was nearly wiped out in the end-Permian extinction event 250mya. But life has rebounded, hence you and I are here. Ask yourself, why is life so resourceful and tenacious. How did it all start again after such a close brush with total extermination.

rednow:
5) Which pernicous system was/is retarding human progress
5b) How, where and when was the pernicous system doing this?

All belief systems founded on faith, supersitions and cults of authorities such as religions and totalitarianism. Reason should be the basis for evaluating all human propositions. When we depart from the path of reason, we step into the realm of darkness and superstitions.

Virginity is a bogus notion as as barbaric as the come if someone is valued more or less because of it. The only thing special about it is that it is the first time of having sex, and just like all first experience there is anxiety and it tends to be remembered most (either positively or negatively). I still have memories of the first time I boarded an airplane and much as I have when I lost my virginity.

The philosophical system that closely matches my outlook on life is what I have heard describes as metaphysical naturalism. I shall let Wikipedia do all the talking here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_naturalism

Check it out. Very interesting indeed.

rednow:
@ tpaine & imhotep (gender unknown)

First thanks to both of you for the indirectly & directly provided resource(s) of St Aquinas.

However with all due respects, what are your background(s) - you both obviously to some degree are thinkers or scholars of some sort, dare I add, truth-seekers?, hmm?

I am curious of what your motive(s) or agenda are (i.e. what makes you tick, your passion(s), excitement(s), zeal and delight(s); this is posed particularly without favoritism to Tpaine  whom it seemed stirred up the " Christianity and the Basic Bible Test" thread - Tpaine please excuse my apparent ignorance or unawareness of the past/previous  "throwing down the gauntlet literally" contribution(s) made. Put it down to been a JJC in the house J

It will be a privilege if you both do oblige ,

Well, my philosophical leaning are on the naturalistic side (metaphysical naturalism), but am a student of everything and anything. Am currently doing a degree in Cosmology in Manchester University but I also study philosophy, science, history, literature, jazz, gardening. I worked for many years as a mathematician/engineer but now my fulltime job is in Information technology (IT) with a financial Institution.

Was a Christian but abandoned the belief system when I was about 16/17 years old, for freethinking and rationalism. What motivates me particular is the pursuit of truth and the eradication of pernicious belief systems that retard human progress. In order words, I am passionate for truth from a purely heuristic perspective. For we appreciate nature better and our place in it when the quest for such knowledge is objective and unbiased. Secondly, I hate to see human progress retarded by wilful ignorance, such as we see with the opposition to stem cell research and the teaching of evolution. In summary my motivation is truth and science is the only reliable epistemic method we have for revealing the truth.

imhotep:
Jesus interpreted the law of the sabbath correctly.

What was Jesus's interpretation?

And how do you know it was correct? Was it correct because Jesus said so, or is it Jesus's interpretations that makes it correct?

4Him:
lol adaptation is a very important aspect of science. We see it in our environment everyday . . . bacteria rapidly develop resistance to antibiotics by positive selection.
Our bodies are a perfect example of adaptation, the dark pigmentation of the African most obviously developed as a means to avoid skin problems due to excessive sunlight.

The long hair for caucasians is most probably an evolutionary adaptation to the cold weather.

the native Australians, chinese, europeans e.t.c. All products of adaptation to their environment over time.

For your information, the same genetic evidence that you just used here has been used to show that humans originated from African and migrated northward and eastwards, ending up in Australia but leaving their descendant along the east Asian coastline all the way to Australia. This first wave, because they stayed mainly in the tropic did not lose their melanin pigment on their skins. Hence, the Australians and Indian generally have darker skins.

A second wave of migration again from Africa had the migrant go northward and then Westward, ending up in western Europe. Then North - eastward. This secod wave of migration saw the migrants ending up in colder climes, causing them to lose the melanin pigment, hence the lighter skin tones amongst the northerners.

It was these lighter skinned northerners who later travelled across the landbridge linking Asian and North America, thus migrating into North America and then into South America. Hence South American native, being a relatively recent arrival in the tropics have a lighter skin tone than Africans.

4Him:
tpaine, there was nothing like sickle cell in the days of Noah, it evolved as a genetic adaptation to malaria which is why it is endemic to subsaharan Africa and whites, asians, arabs do not carry the defective genes.

Taht shld explain your question.

Did you really used those worlds it evolved as a genetic adaptation ? woooow. What an epiphany?

How would you explain the Native Australians? Are they descedant of Ham?

My question about Native Australians remains unanswered

How is one Justified? By works (laws) alone or by Faith alone?

imhotep:
Jesus resolved this sabbath issue 2000 years ago. Give us a modern problem to ponder.

Did the all the people who lost their lives on account of being stoned for breaking the Sabbath die for nothing? Jesus comes along and changed the law, rendering their punishment for the crime void? Think of all the other people who in similar manner. Could they have wished Jesus had arrived earlier? When did Jesus realise that this punishment was barbaric?

How many heavens?

imhotep:
@tpaine
Ok. let me lower the standards here.

Design an experiment to prove that NOTHING else exists apart from TANGIBLE matter. In other words, the experiment should prove to us that there are no spiritual (non-corporeal) beings in existence.

What would count as evidence/proof for this experiment. How can I be sure that you are not going to reject whatever I come up with?

In science, this is called falsification. When scientist put forward a theory, they generally also propose how the theory could be falsified. For instance, if fossils of rabbits could be found in the pre-cambrian rocks, that would make the theory of evolution false.

So I need to know what you count as evidence.

imhotep:
@tpaine
I have also encouraged you to start by reading Aquinas http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/index.htm

It will take you at least 3 years to read and digest.

Then, you can start asking the RIGHT questions.

Jesus/God is Immense and cannot be trivialized.

Taking flight again from the fray, are you? Is it getting too hot?

That is why I started this thread, cuz I don't think I know what this god is. If I knew what his attributes and properties are and also the means by which we know these properties, I might be able to design an experiment to detect him/her/it.

C'mon, let us have his properties.

And this https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-120610.0.html