Recently I read a facebook status which sparked a bit of a religious debate. Religious debates always seem to be a touchy subject. Some people find it too deep of a topic that they don’t want to delve into it because it forces them to re-evaluate their lives, their beliefs or possibly because it requires a great deal of thinking. Awhile back I watched the movie “Religulous” and what I remember so much from it was the aggressive, dominating, unintelligent, unsubstantiated answers towards questions about religion. Some reactions were so aggressive and frightening; it was so disturbing to see how religion can ignite so much fear, aggression and hatred towards other individuals. Some people are fixed into believing what they have been indoctrinated into believing. Aggression, denial, refusal to understand alternative reasoning becomes a defensive mechanism when beliefs are come into question.

I remember Richard Dawkins interviewing a priest and was asking him valid questions about religion. The priest answered ambiguously, poetically, just plain airy fairy. He just answered with some poetic jargon which he himself admitted to not understanding his own answer. Believing in answers that are fanciful, irrational, superstitious and unsubstantiated is dangerous; it hinders the growth of our intellect, it hinders our quest for true knowledge. It’s our intellect; our thirst for knowledge, the reason why human species have prospered.

This brought me back to thoughts on Eamonn Healy’s talk in the movie “Waking Life” (which is a brilliant movie and by far one of my favourite movies of all time), the future of human evolution and which direction would it take. Eamonn Healy is a chemistry professor predicts the evolution of a neo-human manifesting traits of truth, loyalty, justice and freedom. He talks about when we look at the evolution of the human organism and the development of its interaction with the environment we begin to see the further telescopic evolutionary time.

EVOLUTION AS WE KNOW IT

For example we have 2 billion years of life, 6 million years of the hominid, 100 thousand years for mankind as we know it, then further on we get agriculture, scientific revolution and industrial revolution, hence you are looking at 10 thousand years, 400 years and then 150 years. Evolutionary time becomes shorter and shorter. What this means is as we go to the new evolution, it’s going to telescope to the point where it is going to manifest itself within our lifetime, within a generation.

NEW EVOLUTION

Healy talks about the new evolution stems from new information, 2 types of information which are digital and analogue. Digital is artificial intelligence and analogue results from molecular biology organisms and this is then combined with neurobiology.