#biology and religion

[thewordenreport]

Biologically, experiences of awe, whether religious, moral, or in Nature, can render a person less self-centered. https://thewordenreport-religion.blogspot.com/2024/12/overriding-selfishness-by-experiencing.html

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened, and the fossil record and the molecular biology all confirm it. And yet, in this country, the United States, which is the leading scientific country in the world, we have people who are not only ignorant of science, but who are actively hostile to it and to the scientific method. And that is a serious problem, because science is not just a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. It's a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility." -- Carl Sagan

[pigswithwings]

this'll be the last oceanblr post. promise. is everyone here familiar with niche aquatic events btw

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🐋 simplecetacean Follow

haha might fuck around and let my body become an unidentifiable mass that washes up on several shores and won't decay and will be mysterious to scientists for years upon years

🐋 simplecetacean Follow

might fuck around and bite off a man's leg but leave the rest of him alive, kickstarting a violent and all-consuming battle between us

🐋 simplecetacean Follow

might fuck around and absolutely troll this guy named jonah

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🦑 strawberry-squidz Follow

Squids that destroy ships and squids that have never seen a ship shouldn't be fighting. They should be kissing. That's why this pride month,

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🌑 greatbitesharkof87-deactivated Follow

lol im floating by this sandbar and theres sooo many humans gathered near the shore. looked out of the water earlier and theres a big old whale body just sitting on the beach, hope nothing bad happens lmaooo

🎣 marlingardens-deactivated Follow

top ten posts that make you feel like it's the 1970s in Florence, Oregon

🐙 ask-an-argonaut Follow

HELLO???

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🌿 misc-manatee-mutters Follow

pacific ocean superiority this & indian ocean superiority that. when will you guys focus on the real problem, the blood ocean

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🔍ms-magnap1nna Follow

Made a new friend today. Everyone better cheer and clap or I'm dragging you into the hadal zone

🐌 justasnailfish Follow

:}

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🌙 fishoftheabyss Follow

What do Epipelagic Zoners even do? Like it sounds ridiculous up there. Ooh, there's rain! Wow, a coral reef! I might even hop out of the waves a couple of times for funsies! Tf do you even have over Abyssopelagic Zoners. Go to shell

🌱 kelps-forests43 Follow

cranky because you've never seen the sun huh

[thebeesareback]

I'm fascinated by the way scientists interact with religion. On one hand you have Sir David Attenborough, who said "I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy". On the other hand, you have JBS Haldane who remarked "the Creator must be inordinately fond of beetles: the earth is home to some 30 million different species of them." I appreciate the diversity

[quillpokebiology]

Something I find very interesting as a researcher is the fact that all pokemon (accept Nihilego, maybe) have their own 'languages' and cultures. Weavile draw symbols on trees to communicate with other Weavile, and I don't think we tall enough how big of a deal that is. These pokenon have their own writing system, and we're NOT talking about it?

Tinkaton make little towns out of discarded metals or on mountains and even have scheduled gatherings where they trade metals with each other.

Bisharp have their own groups and may even have a writing system, just like Weavile. They make tools like baskets and use their claws to give messages.

I know it may not seem like much, but it's just so interesting to me. I tried asking Joker (my orbeetle) about it because Orbeetle are really smart and he has found ways to communicate with me via telepathy, but all I really get from him are things about pokepuffs or wanting to rewatch A Bug's Life. But, one time, I asked him about Orbeetle Culture and he said something about space. Granted, I caught him as a young Blipbug so I dont really know how much he knows, but I'll take it!

Anyways, I'm probably going to make a series explaining different pokemon behaviors and all of that, lol

[secondwheel]

An immortal cell line

[yellosnacc]

What about uniima/Fueem’s religion causes them to see Neal as a sloman?

This ask is probably a reaction to this post where I share some of Fueems thoughts if anyone wants to read it.

Here's a post about small aspect of the wider ueemic religion here.

But shrimply! Fueem's regional variant of this faith is pretty close to the one considered the "base" ueemic type. They are a follower of the heads and their rules and are knowledgeable in the ways of soul right.

In more recent years (like 30) the Eye has declared a soul right for every alien (any sophont found in the world so far) with some distinct rules for each but still similar to how uniima souls work.

Because this addition to the base religion is pretty recent, there are many versions of how this works for different people-species but nothing is fully agreed on. There's also the problem of most uniima never seeing a live sloman or knowing their biology/reproduction. So lot of the existing interpretations are based on accounts of a few ueema. Now if those guys weren't good drawers, someone else had to visually interpret their interpretation and welp. The farther from the Heads (the religion central) the weirder looking and weirder working other aliens are in art and literature.

So a recap. When a uniima dies (according to ueema belief) they release a soul. This soul in some way (depending on subculture etc.) gets attached to a person who was close to the dead person. At a point, the soul will jump to a baby at the right point in its development. This baby can be the new child of the soul wearer or just close to them. Usually, the wearer has to meet the "body" at least once. There are a lot more rules and stuff but this is long enough!

So anyway, this is probably what Fueem imagines happened to Neal spiritually.

Making Neal have the soul of once-sloman and thus being one too.

[kafkasapartment]

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A post shared by Jonny Thomson (@philosophyminis)

philosophyminis: “ What if death is not the end? It might not be the end that you want, but death will not be the end of your story. Because for Spinoza's #monism, there is more to our postmortem existence than we might think.

#Spinoza argued that the entire universe is one substance. Your body and each of your thoughts are part of this substance. Everything is part of one infinite, eternal substance. But everything that we interact with, all of the objects and the people that we see, are modes. Modes are temporary configurations of this underlying reality. So, you are just a particular composition at this moment in time. Eventually you will move on to a different mode because we are just waves in an #ocean, briefly distinct but inseparable from the whole. One day our waves will fade back into the sea.

Likewise, you are just a fleeting moment of the infinite.

You are a temporary manifestation of the mono substance.

Eventually, your mind and your body will disintegrate and you will rejoin the great ocean. But the substance won't vanish. It will transform.

Spinoza invites us to see the world from the perspective of #eternity. From this view, the distinctions we make between others and ourselves, or between life and death are illusions born of our limited perspectives.

So, you are not just a human. You are the #universe momentarily expressed as you. And one day you will rejoin the infinite substance, not as a loss, but as part of the eternal flow of modes.”

[sunsetsmakemesad]

Tbh part of the reason why I haven't done anything to hurt myself is because recently I've been studying human biology for school and if I hurt my organism on purpose I'd feel bad

[quotelr]

When Mother Nature speaks, even the Gods hold silence.

Abhijit Naskar

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Emily Yoffe

Published: Jan 20, 2025

Toward the end of the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s campaign released an unexpected ad, and one that was extremely politically effective. The tagline—“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”—could go down in history as one of the most effective campaign slogans ever devised.

The ad reinforced a promise Trump repeated at rally after rally as he toured the swing states: If returned to office, he would immediately take on the gender ideology the Biden administration had embraced. Namely, he would end policies such as allowing males on women’s sports teams and in women’s locker rooms, and the housing of male prisoners who identify as transwomen in federal prisons for female offenders.

President Trump has addressed all this and more in an expansive executive order he will sign tomorrow afternoon called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Here is what the order sets out:

The Executive Order establishes Government-wide the biological reality of two sexes and clearly defines male and female.

All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed.

Agencies will cease pretending that men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination.

“Woman” means an “adult human female.”

The Executive Order directs that Government identification like passports and personnel records will reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity.

The Executive Order ends the practice of housing men in women’s prisons and taxpayer funded “transition” for male prisoners.

The Executive Order ends the forced recitation of “preferred pronouns” and protects Americans’ First Amendment and statutory rights to recognize the biological and binary nature of sex.

This includes protection in the workplace and in federal funded entities like schools.

Asked why Trump is making sex-based policy a day one priority of his administration, an incoming senior administration official said, “This really was a defining issue of the campaign. The president is going to be fulfilling the promises he made on the trail.” The executive order puts it more bluntly: “Radical gender ideology has devastated biological truth and women’s safety and opportunity.”

It is becoming something of a presidential tradition to begin a term with sweeping directives regarding “gender identity.” President Biden, on his first day in office, demanded the federal government “review all existing orders, regulations, guidance documents, policies, programs, or other agency actions” that could impinge on transgender rights. Language and rules about transgender identities became embedded in the vast federal bureaucracy.

Now, Trump has ordered a reversal of all this. In an exclusive briefing with The Free Press, two senior officials provided a summary of the executive order. “Women deserve protections, they deserve dignity, they deserve fairness, they deserve safety,” said a senior policy adviser explaining why the order explicitly embraces the necessity of special treatment for women. “And so this is going to help establish that in federal policy and in federal laws.”

In reading the order, it’s clear that lawsuits challenging the new directives will start stacking up quickly. The order, for example, asserts that “All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed.” This is far from mere symbolism. United States passports—which since 2022 have allowed citizens to choose “X” as their gender—will revert to offering exclusively male and female options, with the proviso that what people select must “reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity.”

The executive order also “ends the forced recitation of ‘preferred pronouns’ and protects Americans’ First Amendment and statutory rights to recognize the biological and binary nature of sex.” When asked about how this would affect public universities, which are bound by the First Amendment’s free speech protections, the senior policy adviser said the U.S. attorney general will enforce these rights. The adviser cited a 2022 federal court ruling to the effect that a Shawnee State University philosophy professor was deprived of his First Amendment rights by being forced to address a transgender student using that student’s chosen pronouns.

The task of the Trump administration now will be to promulgate rules implementing the order, which will affect people’s daily lives. It is inevitable that activist organizations will take these matters to court. The policy adviser said the administration is ready for litigation, predicting Trump will be “100 percent successful.”

It’s a fight the new administration seems to relish. Both officials said the executive order has the potential to broaden the president’s support. “Just take a look at the polling,” the senior official said. “The public is broadly in favor of the president’s and of the Republican Party’s stance on gender. That there are two biological sexes is something that the public is supportive of.”

The executive order does not address one of the most contentious areas of transgender activism: “gender-affirming care” for minors, meaning putting gender-distressed young people on a swift course to transition and lifetime medication. The Biden administration ardently supported such treatments, even as other Western nations began to restrict them, and dozens of U.S. states began to ban them.

The Biden administration sued Tennessee over its ban. That case resulted in a contentious oral argument at the Supreme Court in December, after which most observers felt the court would probably uphold Tennessee’s law.

Asked about why the new executive order does not deal with this, the senior official said, “This executive order is the first of many. I would expect that anything the president said he would do on the trail regarding these issues, he’s going to be fulfilling those promises.”

The order ends with a sweeping statement about the fundamental issue the White House believes is at stake in this order: ”Men and women are equal but have obvious sexual differences,” it reads. “If federal policies promote such an obvious falsehood that men can become women, the government will forfeit all credibility. The government must maintain a commitment to recognizing biological reality to maintain the trust of the American people.”

This order is one of nearly 200 executive actions the White House is rolling out today. Among them: orders to declare a national emergency at the border; end all DEI programs across the federal government; withdrawal from the Paris climate accord; and a return-to-office directive for federal workers.

==

Go ahead and try to explain how this is unreasonable.

[ask-the-praetors]

Elesh Norn...

If you hate flesh so much, why are you the color of meat and bone?

The material that covers our exalted bodies has been thoroughly reprocessed–that is to say, blessed–by the rites of compleation. As such, it is no longer the sinful, divided meat and bone it once was. Only the spiritually blind assume a resemblance, but all will share the vision before long–even you.

Phyrexia elevates and transforms. What was once the biomatter of an isolated fleshling becomes sanctified with oil and cable, knitting it to the true Whole.

-E

[atheostic]

I swear to god, intelligent design proponents have the observational skills of a rock

"The universe is perfectly designed for us!"

...Most of the universe is made up of a void that has neither heat nor air, but you know what it does have? Radiation that would kill you instantly if you were to go out into said void without protection.

Not Tardigrades, though. They'd be fine. Those tiny freaks are goddamn indestructible.

...Our source of light and heat gives us skin cancer.

And that light source literally cooks our skin cells if we stay exposed to it for too long (aka sunburns).

"The world is perfectly designed for us!"

My dude, humans are only capable of surviving on 10% of the world's surface.

And that's including places where we technically can survive if we don't spend too much time outside and if you want to go outside you have to cover up every bit of skin otherwise it'll freeze.

71% of the world is water but only 1.2% of it is both accessible and drinkable.

While technically 3% of the world's water is freshwater, most of it is locked away in glaciers.

Our bodies are perfectly designed!

There is a gap between the ovary and the fallopian tube, which means the fertilized egg might implant outside the womb.

This means that the embryo is guaranteed to not survive and the person carrying it will die if it the embryo is not removed.

There is a 0% survival rate for an ectopic pregnancy without medical intervention.

Between one third and half of human fertilized eggs do not implant.

They just get washed away with the menstrual blood and the person isn't even aware they were pregnant.

We breathe and eat from the same place (the pharynx), which means it's possible to choke to death.

[yellosnacc]

Been keeping this away for long since its a very out of context specific stuff.

These are the Heads - the mostly spiritual leader of the central Foru micro-state collective. Their role is to be a guide for all the leaders (archs) in central Foru and speak for all of them on an international level. They also bless lands and people and generally are well-liked by them. They can make big decisions, but it's ultimately on the archs if they comply (but the pressure is strong).

Every head has a more specialized role, each representing a 'sense' of their one shared soul (hearing, seeing, touch, thought...) and people they are patrons to (the old, the "rich", the leaders, the priests...). Each central Foru micro-state usually has its favorite head that they want to see the most in their community when bringing them news or blessings.

here are closeups

The Heads are the center of a religion practiced in the region. In short - the Heads share one spirit that in ancient times belonged to a priest who misused their power to get to the spirit world and instead became forever stuck in the material world. After many reincarnations, the priest became a wise leader who learned to speak with the spirit world and make final peace between the worlds of spirits and the material.

I would need to go into more religion details to go over that but that can be a separate post. Let's talk about how they get their role.

A 'competition' is held to determine the best leader, most spiritually attuned, most well-thinking, and best-presenting individual. The Heads in position at the time with a few other high-ranking individuals will judge the participants and then make their pick at the choosing ceremony. Luckily there are not too many to choose from, there are many requirements to participate.

However, the one picked isn't one that will become a head, they would be far too old at the time. Instead, they will force their system to make a rare phenomenon happen. This means making more of themselves with cloning (having babies grow out of diploid cells with no need for another person). This is usually achieved when under high amounts of stress and loneliness.

The uniima egg naturally holds 4 larvae but usually only 1-2 develop fully while the rest becomes food for the surviving ones. This clone egg has 4 identical whites (pre-babies) in them that get special care to ensure at least 3 survive. There have been heads with one member before and with 2 and 3, but 4 is a miracle as the bottom corner larva almost never develops enough to hatch. This egg is very lucky.

The identical quadruplets are given to be raised in different environments. These environments will decide what they represent as adults. It will also give them better perspectives of the world, making it easier/more difficult to make big decisions when the time comes.

Additionally, because there are 4 heads this time, a new environment had to be introduced. This environment was that of small communities, minorities, and generally people living in poorer conditions (yes, for the past Heads, war was more important than their people suffering (it's a very central Foru thing)). Unfortunately for The Ear, they are not respected everywhere, and many people assume them to be a fake among their siblings.

You can also see the heads have each their own signature and each Head generation has their own symbol that is recognized outside their writing systems.

[lenbryant]

Show us your talking snake, and then we’ll show you the talking donkey.

[solace-philosophy]

These atheists, like Christian fundamentalists, corrupt evolutionary biology. They assert that evolutionary biology implies an absolute materialism that banishes the role of religion.

The Christian fundamentalists do this to discredit science and defend their absurd biblical myths. The new atheists do this to discredit religion and justify their faith in the cult of science.

These atheists use science the way religious fundamentalists use religion: to arrogate to themselves moral authority over all creation including those of their own species who are too dim to see the truth. They alone, they think, understand how to bring about collective salvation and redeem the human race.

— Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists