Patrick Elliott wrote:
> No it wouldn't, since the moment someone worked out that spirits where 
> not real, one of two things would happen. You "morally upstanding" kook 
> would have the guy proving it put to death, to protect their position, 
> or people would start questioning if any of it was valid at all, no 
> matter how "moral" the system was that you came up with.

That paragraph is far more future-tense than it needs to be.

> Only something 
> based on an understanding of what it is to be human, an animal, and what 
> you *want* to make better, will give you a real moral system. Anything 
> based on nonsense and invisible creatures falls prey to people making 
> shit up that isn't moral, denying it *based* on the fact that the thing 
> in question isn't real, or just flat out failing to come up with a moral 
> system that is "actually" moral, even in the sense of what humans are.

Well said.

> was a guy named Lemark, who "did" advocate such an "evolution advances 
> towards a single goal", but like Hitler's version, it was based on the 
> religious ideal that man was "above" everything else, not equal to it. 

He also didn't know how it actually worked, thinking it was conscious guidance.

> In reality, Darwin had nothing to do with Hitler at all, the ideas 
> Hitler followed where more like Lemark's than Darwin's, and they existed 
> for centuries prior to either of them writing about evolution.

And it still wasn't *natural selection*. It was, at best, eugenics.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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