Do you need religion?

[MasterJedi]

I would prefer to live my life like there was a God and die and find out there isn't one, then live like their is no God and die and find out there is!

[A18]

No, but I'm religious anyway

[angus]

I'll say yeah.  it's tricky though.  Kinda like asking "Do you need agriculture?"  For we existed for several hundred thousand years, in more or less our present form, without resorting to agriculture, religion, science, or any of that civilized stuff.  For example the fossil record indicates that many millenia passed between the first homo sapien death and the first true burial, replete with deer spirits and cave bear guardian angels and and deceased wrapped up with a tooth from the saber-tooth cat that killed him.  Yet all those instances of caveman, without interest or confusion, allowing his unflinching foul-smelling brothers to rot in the spot where he expired didn't impede our survival on a grand scale.  So, clearly you don't actually need religion any more than you need agriculture.  Hunting and gathering and soullessness is adequate, but I'm a modern man who enjoys his jacuzzi and electric lights and motorcar, and I know it was that first spark of sentience, that first utterance of per aspera ad astrum that allowed the self-ordained most highly evolved species to rise above rest.  To assign to himself, and only himself, a soul.  A raison d'être.  Aristotle of Stagira didn't quite "get it right" by putting Earth (and therefore Man) at the center of the "sublunar" universe, but his physics stood a complete explanation for every observable phenomenon for nearly 2000 years!  And why did Aristotle--who learned from Plato and indirectly from Thales of Miletus, the man who first attempted to explain his physical world without resorting to mythological gods--resort to such a geocentric or anthropocentric physics with a Prime Mover responsible for all creation?  Because it was natural for him to assume a special relationship between Man and whatever forces created him.  What the romans called aspera we call Hope.  This the thing that Captain Picard has, but Lieutennant Commander Data does not.  This is Man.  Man is religious by nature, and his religiosity is not the cause of his evolution, but rather its effect.  I also note, as an aside, that religious folks tend to be happier and less stressed than irreligious folks like myself.  Thus, religion is not really necessary, but we often use words loosely.  If you asked whether we *need* agriculture I'd say the same thing:  Well, not really, but I'm voting Yes.  So it's cheesey, but I'm sticking with Yes.

[Rin-chan]

I'd survive without it, but, being the stubborn person I am, I can't imagine there not being life after life.  Whether that is reincarnation or heaven, I believe it's there.  I think that in order for me, personally, to do anything with my life is to know that everything I do will not be in vain.

In conclusion, I'd survive without it, but I'd rather have it.

Rin-chan

[KEmperor]

Without religion or the exisitance of a superior being, then I see no point for us to exist.

That's a very sad life you must lead, if you aren't living it for yourself.

[Lincoln Republican]

Yes, religion and faith is a very important part of my life.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Without religion or the exisitance of a superior being, then I see no point for us to exist.

Well, there's a lot of stuff in the universe.  Without a being with the ability to reason, there would be nothing to experience it, I think that's our reason to live.  Also, the greatest things in the world are human feelings and emotion.  Neither of those things require a god. 

Personally, no, I don't need religion. 

I see it as two options...You can be religious, and you'll feel like you know all the answers, that your life will have meaning, etc. etc.  Those things can be very comforting.  But a true belief ina  religion can brings very negative aspects.  Rejection of reality and rationality, close-mindedness, never open to any other possibilities, you can end up thinking the only possible truth is something you have ZERO proof of.  (Beings me to the worst thing I've ever heard, that someone on this board actually said that it is absolutely impossible for Jesus, a man they've never met, seen, heard, and only have accounts of in a book written by men thousands of years ago when people thought lightning was caused by the thunder God, to NOT be the son of God..............insane)

Or, you can be atheist or agnostic.  Do I distress over the big questions more than others? oh yea.  Is it disturbing to know as smart as I am that, in the big scheme of things, I know nothing? definetely.  But what are the positives?

-My good deeds come from me and my desire to do good things for other people, not because I want to go to heaven, or my priest says so, or that it's in that book.  Because I want to.  Religion promotes a form of selfish morality.  If religous people didn't have their religion, most of them would be the most selfish bastards on this planet.

-I'm open to all forms of theories, weird, spritiual, scientific, whatever

-I sleep in on Sundays

-I don't tie myself down with stupid man-made morality systems.  These religious ers.  Cursing is bad.  Nudity is bad.  Drinking is bad.  If God thought they were so bad, why would they be here?  Hmmmm?

-Free of these morality systems, I don't judge people.  I accpet everyone for who they are. 

-I don't disspoaint myself with useless prayer that will go unanswered.  If there's a God and it wants to help me out, I doubt it matters if I get on my knees and meditate. 

-I act for myself, not how I'm told

could go on and on.....

[Keystone Phil]

Without religion or the exisitance of a superior being, then I see no point for us to exist.

That's a very sad life you must lead, if you aren't living it for yourself.

Yeah, it's ashame that people think that selfishness is the only way to be happy.

[Keystone Phil]

I would prefer to live my life like there was a God and die and find out there isn't one

If there is no God, I'll still be more than happy with the way I have lived my life (thus far). You don't have to be extremely religious to be proud of living a moral life.

[TeePee4Prez]

Without religion or the exisitance of a superior being, then I see no point for us to exist.

That's a very sad life you must lead, if you aren't living it for yourself.

Yeah, it's ashame that people think that selfishness is the only way to be happy.

How do you figure people that don't have religion are "selfish"?  

[Keystone Phil]

Without religion or the exisitance of a superior being, then I see no point for us to exist.

That's a very sad life you must lead, if you aren't living it for yourself.

Yeah, it's ashame that people think that selfishness is the only way to be happy.

How do you figure people that don't have religion are "selfish"?  

If you're only living your life for yourself then that is selfishness. Why is it "sad" to live your life for God, too?

[Gabu]

Without religion or the exisitance of a superior being, then I see no point for us to exist.

That's a very sad life you must lead, if you aren't living it for yourself.

Yeah, it's ashame that people think that selfishness is the only way to be happy.

How do you figure people that don't have religion are "selfish"? 

I don't think he's talking about all people without religion, only KEmperor, based on KEmperor's implied statement that he lives his life purely for himself.

[Keystone Phil]

I don't think he's talking about all people without religion, only KEmperor, based on KEmperor's implied statement that he lives his life purely for himself.

It doesn't necessarily have to do with religion either. You can be non-religious and live your life for someone you love. I hate people who think that it's all about themselves, all the time.

[Joe Republic]

I hate people who think that it's all about themselves, all the time.

Welcome to commercial capitalism, my friend.

[Keystone Phil]

I hate people who think that it's all about themselves, all the time.

Welcome to commercial capitalism, my friend.

And I obviously have some serious disagreements with some of my fellow capitalists.

[angus]

Or, you can be atheist or agnostic. 

logical fallacy.  atheism and religiosity are not mutually orthogonal.  atheism, like monotheism and polytheism, is just one of the forms of belief.  Our tendency is to classifiy religions according to the number of deities worshipped.  Thus the mono-, poly-, and atheistic classifications.  Ancestor worship and some forms of animism are fine examples of atheistic religions.  (I'm sure you don't need me to provide examples from the other two classes of religions.)  Actually, Buddha never postulated the existence of any gods, and, strictly speaking true unadulterated buddhism is an atheistic system (although mosts buddhists you meet in this country are either 3rd or 4th generation cantonese-americans or japanese, and the easterners bastardized buddhism much the same way the romans bastardized christianity.  so most modern buddhists are actually polytheistic, although in its purist form buddhism is an atheistic religion)  But bear in mind that there were more atheistic religions than poly- or monotheistic ones for a very long time.  Only in the past several thousand years have polytheistic religions come to outnumber atheistic ones, in terms of the number of extant belief systems of each.  And, for sure, it takes at least as much faith to be a good atheist as it takes to be a good mono- or polytheist.  Perhaps more.  I'm not among the faithful myself, and have not claimed to be mono-, poly-, or atheistic.  I reckon I'm what you'd call irreligious, or more precisely unspiritual.  Nevertheless, I still argue that religion, whatever its classification, was an important step from Beast toward Man.  And in that sense one "needs" religion in the same way that one needs agriculture.  Whether it is necessary in our subsequent evolution from Man to Whatever Comes Next remains to be seen, of course.  My guess is the ability to communicate nonverbally (e.g., via electromagnetic radiation or ESP) will be a major step forward.  It would relieve our mouths from the dual tasks of consumption and communication, and thus allow stomatic dedication to consumption alone!  imagine the possibilities.  Any religion that encourages nonverbal communication might well be an integral part of that evolution.  And it would be "needed" in the same way that the early religions (mostly poly- and atheistic) religions were needed for man to cope.  And in the same way modern monotheistic religions were needed for the evolution of our great centers of learning:  The University.  (which owes its very existence to monotheism)

I also think a good deal of the other stuff you wrote is total bullsh**t as well, but that was the most demonstrably false.  Nudity is bad?!  where the hell did that come from.  Some religions not only accept nudity, but in certain situations encourage it.  Think Arizona Kivas.  You are taking one interpretation of some small subset of all religions and concluding from that that religions have something to say about nudity.  This is at best inductive reasoning only.  And more likely it stems from utter confusion.  And by the way, not all priests are drunks who screw whores at the rectory all night long while preaching celibacy.  Just like not all Santa Clauses are closet pederasts who like playing "Hey little boy do you like lifesavers?  'Cause I got a roll of 'em for you in my pocket.  Reach down there and getcha some.  Ho Ho Ho."  You have a warped view of religion, imho.  That doesn't bother me so much as the fact that you are also very confused about religion, its nature, its structure, and its evolution.  I mentioned above that buddha never postulated the existence of any gods.  On the other hand, not only did Jesus postulate the existence of a god (well, he was a Jew, so he assumed the existence of a god that had been postulated long ago), not only its existence, but he went as far as to say he was its incarnate child.  How disparate is that?  Yet, remarkably, the Conclusions of Jesus and the Buddha (or their disciples, priests, and scholars actually) are almost exactly the same!  Read the The Noble Eight-Fold Path to Enlightenment and the Truths of sufferings and pain of man.  Then read of Jesus teachings.  How similar their conclusions even starting from wildly disparate postulates!  In fact, there are tons of books written on this, usually with Buddhist and Catholic monks co-authoring.  You'll probably find many in your local public library, except you strike me as the sort of chap who doesn't spend much time in his local public library.  Religions are remarkably similar in this regard, no matter their classification.  Most attempt to explain things, or provide comfort.  And wisdom.  Pigmeat goes nasty in the tropics pretty quickly.  It's not a bad idea for the god of Mohammed to have the desert people avoid it.  Think Diana was the only goddess who sprung forth from her mother's womb fully armed?  Turns out that thousands of miles across the Atlantic Huitzilopochtli did as well.  And, unlike Diana, had a pretty significant role in creating all the stars in the sky.  (Like Saint Mary, Huitzilopochtli's mother had a child of a man she wasn't married to.  Also famiar, the child Huitzilopochtli became a major god.)  Also, speaking of the poster who never met or heard or saw Jesus:  I've never seen, met, or heard Thales of Miletus, and only have accounts of him in books written by other men (Thales didn't keep notes) thousands of years ago when people thought lightning was caused by the thunder god.  But I have absolutely no doubt of his significance to modern science.  I suppose I have a little faith, then, not in gods.  But an inkling of understanding of faith in general. 

you're not buying?  okay, I thought of a better parable.  Suppose you are awakened in the middle of the night by a loud noise:  my voice.  And you open your eyes to find you are in a strange room, a dungeon.  And you're bound and gagged and I'm standing above you with a huge knife in my hand shouting, "Do you need your nuts?!"   Of course your first thought is "Hell yes!"  It's only natural.  For most men, the nutsack is a dear part of his identity.  I read somewhere that the average man touches his sack seven times per minute.  Okay, I'm making that last part up.  Still, I'm guessing your immediate reaction is, "Oh, man you're crazy!  Of course I need those.  Untie me you bastard."   See what I mean?  You don't really need them.  Several posters here, Rin-Chan, Texasgurl, Everett don't have them, and they seem to do just fine.  And in China in the Qing Dynasty if you wanted to be a servant of the Emperor you had to go under the knife.  Commit to being a eunuch, so as to remove any temptation of sleeping with any of his four thousand wives.  And it Italy in the early renaissance the best male singers were always the castrados.  They were not only adored by fans everywhere, but lived luxurious and pampered lives.  My point:  You don't need your nuts, but that's not the proper reading of the question, is it?  Especially when you wake up in the middle of the night, face to face with a big knife being held by a maniacal stranger.  Same here:  If you think too long and hard about the question, you'll conclude that you do not need religion.  But take it in the spirit of the nutsack question!  You'd not have that computer in front of you without religions and without all that nifty enlightenment it inspires:  Aristotle's anthropocentric universe, with its failures which would lead to challenges which would lead to Newtonian physic, with its failures which lead to Quantum Mechanics, which even now leads to yet-unanswered questions.  We will probably never be able to explain our world in total, but it's the striving for enlightenment that has the side-effects of providing all the wonderful consumer devices to which you are now addicted.  Don't think you need religion?  Well, you don't need the semi-conductor either, or the photons it brings to your screen, so why the hell are you busy reading this code?  Nothing better to do on a cold Thursday night, I suppose.

[Alcon]

angus, you really must write a book one of these days.

However, I must note that "ancestor worship" is more or less a myth - I am not aware of any worship of ancestors, but rather use of ancestors as a proxy through which the diety is reached.

[Beet]

...Thursday night, I suppose.

Wow, and interesting post. There are a number of things going on here.

There is one aspect which is highly problematic, angus, from my reading, which could be wrong. The issue here is operationalization, when you transform this subject into an operation, into some instrument like agriculture is. You seem to compare religion to agriculture and say that despite being irreligious that you then still need religion in the way of agriculture.

The problem here is that agrilculture does not parallel religion, agriculture is one of many results of the process of empirical thinking, what we today call science and philosophy, though in our somewhat narrowly prejudiced terminology we wouldn't consider the early agriculturalists as scientists, so perhaps empircist would be the better label. Religion rather is a method, (though many early theologists were certainly also empircists since to them spiritualism and rationalism were just two types of philosophy). Whether the question is faith in the atheist, monotheist, or polytheist universe, as you point out, one cannot speak of a separate concept of "religion" without defining it as something distinct and separate from rationalism.

I think this is important because of the positive nature of rationalism. One can embrace rationalism and nothing else, and in the sense that Aristotle, Newton, and the Quantum mechanists were scientists they were embracers of the empirical, whose journeys led them to respective conclusions about the world; to the extent that Aristotle were a scientist, if confronted with the evidence of his successors, certainly he, too, would abandon his own worldview of metaphysics in favor of theirs.

Faith on the other hand is an entirely separate matter; practitioners in faith do not call themselves disciples of the same temple because there is no school that is built on the rejection of reason for its own sake, for reasons relating to human psychology, such as our learning and memory, which feeds our natural tendency to act in accordance of our own reasoning abilities. Rather, the foundation of faith lies not in the method but in the ends: it is the ends that pulls the method away from the reason, whereas in empiricism it is the method that pulls the ends. Hence, is why your western and eastern theologists came to remarkably the same conclusions despite beginning with such different propositions; while Aristotle and Einstein both began with the search from truth yet arrived as such different conclusions.

And therein lies the problem in the operationalization of religion, in the reduction of the religious process to a benefit unrelated to its ends: to do so is to destroy the essence of religion. To do so is to shunt aside Ends, or true religion, in favor of religion-as-science, religion-as-social process. It leaves the question of "what is it all for?" wide open. Yet because of the nature of religion, this is impossible in the standard sense-- the great religions of Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam do not claim, like Newton, to derive their authority, they claim to be the source of authority. The operationalization is only consistent in two other senses, one trivial and one more interesting.

If you mean that without religion you would not be here today, well certainly. Without religion, your mother would not have been born, because your grandmother would not have been born, and so on. The world would be a very different place, because world history would have taken a very different course. What kind of place, is hard to tell, but that is exactly the type of counterfactual that can go on forever.

The more interesting twist that is necessary to "consistentize" the operationalization of ends-based value must shift the inconsistency from internal contradiction to external contradiction: that is, you, yourself, remain the rationalist, while millions of others adhere to faith; furthermore this arrangement could be beneficial to the ends that you value in life. A religious, is less likely to steal your wallet, and more likely to return it if you lose it. A religious, perhaps, is more likely to set up a university, and to set up social institutions that provide benefit. A religious, perhaps, will aid in the transformation from Beast to Man: there is utility in the lie. Now that is a different argument, a very interesting one, and a very complex one. Yet that is a very different sense than most people take the premise of question when it is asked "do you need religion?" But to take this view, one must distinguish the self and the other, and that is not trivial distinction.

[Ben.]

I think it fair to argue that religion is a very effective means by which we place in perspective those thoughts, be they moral, philosophical or spiritual that perplex us from time to time and have no clear empirical explanation, even if we reject there being a genuine transubstantial aspect to these issues.

But in answer to the question I don’t think we need religion… but it is certainly useful, a better term to use might be spirituality, I mean I know plenty of spiritual or at least philosophical atheists… do we really need to think about these abstract notions of “meaning”, “purpose”, “virtue” etc… thinking about it practically, NO… but we still do and I know that I and the vast majority of people give varying amounts of time in our daily lives to thinking about such “big questions”… so if the question is do we need to think about these issues in general then the answer is clearly YES!             

[angus]

random rantings.  yeah, it's a bit of a stretch.  it is taken by some that the words of the Great Writers are unbreachable.  Prefaces of books, in whatever age, talk about their rational approach, ascribing to earlier generations of myth and metaphysics.  This is interesting, but even in every age there's a geocentric, or anthropomorphic description, which is subjective, which may be a little off-topic, but if Invention is there, then it's Mother can't be far behind.  Necessity of a purpose I think.  The pure physics should be separated out from philosophy and/or religion (another thread has dealt with that), but my point there was only that whatever purity exists in Western constructions of motions and bodies seems often to attempt to explain or exploint our current apparent enlightenment.  But that was an aside so I won't quibble, sure operalization of religion is maybe a stretch.  I think the bigger stretch was in the reading of the word "need"   That whole ends-based value thing is a bitch.  somewhat irrational, I'll admit.  Stranded in a forest, I suppose, I'd look for food first if I were hungry, and a house and maybe fire.  At some point I'd look for something resembling religion after more pressing matters were attended to.  Don't know whether I'd invent a science, but whatever engineering I'd learned might come in handy.

"Anyone can be taught to guide a starship, Wesley, but -- religion and philosophy -- those are the real challenges."
   Captain Picard

[Beet]

"Anyone can be taught to guide a starship, Wesley, but -- religion and philosophy -- those are the real challenges."
   Captain Picard

What an ironic quote, how easily turned on its head.

[angus]

irony for you maybe.  (The French name with the pseudo-English accent is the most ironic part about the Captain.)  I generally tend to add "history" to the list, and change "to guide a starship" to "the finer points of quantum mechanics" when I misquote it, but I felt that the original was appropriate here.  It's a fine quote and one that I have remembered since I first heard the Captain make it some fifteen years ago. 

To more important things.  My son turned 11 months and 2 days old yesterday.  And, he walked.  He walked at first only about 4 steps, from me towards his mama.  Then he was so excited about his new game that he began practicing, walking in short bursts all evening.  Sleep didn't seem to cause him to forget his new game either, as he was walking in short (~20 second) bursts all morning as well.  Unfortunately, he also has learned new ways to bang his head on furniture.  He is now 11 months, approximately 78 centimeters, and approximately 22 pounds.  Thus he is ~80 percentile in height and ~50 percentile in weight, when compared to all US babies born in the last 20 years.  (Which may mean that his weight isn't gaining fast enough, though he looks fine to me, babyfat and all, so I think maybe US babies are just on the chunky side in general, so when a h/w proportionate one comes along who's a bit tall, he seems skinny by comparison.  Anyway, the docs all say he's doing well.  Oh, and we did a Flu Shot as well.  I think I mentioned that.)  We still haven't taken him to a priest, rabbi, guru, mullah, or oracle yet.  It's not that I want him to end up an unsophisticated bumpkin (indeed, I read to him every night and have already started attempting to teach him to play the piano and the guitar, with little success, and his mother regularly works with him in Mandarin), but religion, history, and philosophy are simply much deeper than mechanics, and require much more cerebral capacity to master, don't you find? 

[J-Mann]

irony for you maybe.  (The French name with the pseudo-English accent is the most ironic part about the Captain.)  I generally tend to add "history" to the list, and change "to guide a starship" to "the finer points of quantum mechanics" when I misquote it, but I felt that the original was appropriate here.  It's a fine quote and one that I have remembered since I first heard the Captain make it some fifteen years ago. 

To more important things.  My son turned 11 months and 2 days old yesterday.  And, he walked.  He walked at first only about 4 steps, from me towards his mama.  Then he was so excited about his new game that he began practicing, walking in short bursts all evening.  Sleep didn't seem to cause him to forget his new game either, as he was walking in short (~20 second) bursts all morning as well.  Unfortunately, he also has learned new ways to bang his head on furniture.  He is now 11 months, approximately 78 centimeters, and approximately 22 pounds.  Thus he is ~80 percentile in height and ~50 percentile in weight, when compared to all US babies born in the last 20 years.  (Which may mean that his weight isn't gaining fast enough, though he looks fine to me, babyfat and all, so I think maybe US babies are just on the chunky side in general, so when a h/w proportionate one comes along who's a bit tall, he seems skinny by comparison.  Anyway, the docs all say he's doing well.  Oh, and we did a Flu Shot as well.  I think I mentioned that.)  We still haven't taken him to a priest, rabbi, guru, mullah, or oracle yet.  It's not that I want him to end up an unsophisticated bumpkin (indeed, I read to him every night and have already started attempting to teach him to play the piano and the guitar, with little success, and his mother regularly works with him in Mandarin), but religion, history, and philosophy are simply much deeper than mechanics, and require much more cerebral capacity to master, don't you find? 

He walked!  Awesome -- must be pretty exciting, huh?  And that's great you're trying to teach him so much.

And yes, I agree with you that religion and philosophy are deeper, mostly because of their unknowns.  Using the quote (and the hypothetical existence of a starship), yes, practically anyone can be taught how to fly the Enterprise.  It's probably complex, just like quantum mechanics, etc., but there are limits to how to pilot it -- at some point, one can learn all their is to know about piloting a starship.

Not so with religion; there are so many unknowns, so many questions and gray areas that no one can truly master knowledge of religion or faith.  And new advances in the secular realm are always sparking new debates within the religious realm -- who would have thought 100 years ago that we'd be debating the ethics of face transplants today? 

It makes perfect sense to me.

[Beet]

irony for you maybe.  (The French name with the pseudo-English accent is the most ironic part about the Captain.)  I generally tend to add "history" to the list, and change "to guide a starship" to "the finer points of quantum mechanics" when I misquote it, but I felt that the original was appropriate here.  It's a fine quote and one that I have remembered since I first heard the Captain make it some fifteen years ago. 

To more important things.  My son turned 11 months and 2 days old yesterday.  And, he walked.  He walked at first only about 4 steps, from me towards his mama.  Then he was so excited about his new game that he began practicing, walking in short bursts all evening.  Sleep didn't seem to cause him to forget his new game either, as he was walking in short (~20 second) bursts all morning as well.  Unfortunately, he also has learned new ways to bang his head on furniture.  He is now 11 months, approximately 78 centimeters, and approximately 22 pounds.  Thus he is ~80 percentile in height and ~50 percentile in weight, when compared to all US babies born in the last 20 years.  (Which may mean that his weight isn't gaining fast enough, though he looks fine to me, babyfat and all, so I think maybe US babies are just on the chunky side in general, so when a h/w proportionate one comes along who's a bit tall, he seems skinny by comparison.  Anyway, the docs all say he's doing well.  Oh, and we did a Flu Shot as well.  I think I mentioned that.)  We still haven't taken him to a priest, rabbi, guru, mullah, or oracle yet.  It's not that I want him to end up an unsophisticated bumpkin (indeed, I read to him every night and have already started attempting to teach him to play the piano and the guitar, with little success, and his mother regularly works with him in Mandarin), but religion, history, and philosophy are simply much deeper than mechanics, and require much more cerebral capacity to master, don't you find? 

Congratulations on your son, angus. 11 months... It's never too early for the piano and guitar, you know.

In any case, I think we tend to expect too much from religion, history, and philosophy, that is why we find it so difficult. It is frightening to think that we can "master" religion or philosophy or even history, yet many would still seek it out in a serious way in our modern world, while none would still seek out mastery of science similarly. Each type of endeavor could easily consume an entire lifetime, or a thousand lifetimes. To say one is more challenging than another is merely a matter of ambition.

So, to answer, we don't know how much cerebral capacity it takes to master the truths of either philosophy or physics, of psychology or science, because we haven't mastered any of them, and perhaps never will. At the other end of the spectrum, even the most dimwitted can grasp the basics of each.

J-Mann- If piloting a starship were to be compared with the subject of religion, the former a specific task quite narrowly defined by human design, and the latter quite open ended with all the strange workings of human psychology and metaphysics, then of course there is no comparison. But if piloting a starship were to be compared to having a religion, then it can easily be said that far more people have had religion than piloted anything, let alone starships. As you suggest yourself, if we can learn more about the ethics of face transplants, it is only because we are simultaneously also learning more about the mechanics of face transplants.

[angus]

My wife is very protective, and she'd not let him go.  Ironically, I'm the more faithful, or optimistic, between us since my natural tendency is to let go and assume he'll take the four or five steps to his Mama.  It seems the most natural thing for a mammal to do.  We have all sorts of iconography in our apartment.  I have a crucifix from my mother's casket, handed to me by the monsignor at the conclusion of her requiem mass.  Mostly it has tremendous sentimental value, though I do not imagine supernatural powers exist.  The power is in the sentiment, I've always thought.  Confidence and aspiration.  The faith that a man-child will walk, given the freedom to do so.  My wife keeps a little statue of the buddha on the curio shelf, along with an incense burner.  She kept the buddha near and dear, touched it often, I understand, as she followed me in our mercedes-benz sedan, me driving a 23-foot UHaul truck, from CA to MS in the summer of 2004.  The faith that she could, in a new country and only a few months after her 30th birthday and even fewer months after obtaining her first driver's license, manage the 2300-mile trip alone in a car, has a sustaining power in and of itself.  (This required much coaxing and the purchase of a walkie-talkie system, and maybe the pantheistic religio-philosophic system of pre-Mao china provided some comfort as well.  Maoists cannot stamp out five thousand years of ethnoreligious philosophy any more than Marxists can, n'est ce-pas?)  I also keep a souvenir Sun Stone, given to me many years ago by a very special female police officer from Mexico City I knew well, but briefly, and jade replica of the Maya diving god from Tulum on the wall above my fish aquarium.  Perhaps he watches over me when I'm scuba diving, as I often do while on vacation.  His power lies in the confidence he inspires in the diver to dive.  My encounters with sharks below and speeding motorboats on the surface have been peaceful thus far.