Once Andrei Pleșu, who was for a time the foreign minister of Romania, he said that if we could handle the political elites we had (it was about international politics), then there is God. The current economic crisis would contradict Pleșu's statement, our corrupt and limited elites are beginning to fail.
But anyway, the idea is that the gods, whatever they are, could exist. Sounds strange coming from an evolutionist's keyboard, however. What are the gods?? Notions accepted by many people, which have certain well-defined meanings for them, often with deep affective implications. If people believe in an abstract notion, if it influences their lives, it can be said that it exists. There is democracy? Exist! Because people believe in it. It can also be said that gods exist.
A proof that gods exist is the way religion rules the lives of millions of people. The Vatican recently issued "the most authoritative statement on bioethics in recent times 20 year old" (source: NEWSPAPER daily).
As shown in the article, The Vatican reaffirms its hostility to fertilization in vitro, embryonic stem cell research, the morning-after pill or the antiprogestin RU-486 (I would really be curious if this is recommended in Romania instead of mechanical abortion, when possible). The last two are included under the "sin of abortion".
I am not in a position to discuss the ideology that led to such decisions, but I am in a position to discuss the health effects of some of them on millions of people. Ideas like this, such as discouraging condom use in Africa, have led to thousands of people getting sick and dying from AIDS. Also, the prohibition of abortion for religious reasons has led to the death of thousands of women in many countries of the world.
Denial of human nature
I am for freedom of religion, but also of expression. Anyone can say anything, anyone can invent whatever ideology they want, but when you try to impose it, then things should change. If someone invents an ideology by which wearing a seat belt while driving is a sin, probably many would be scandalized. Likewise, if an ideology would prohibit insulin treatment for diabetics or the use of sun creams for light-skinned people.
But when someone says this under the authority of the traditional Churches, other standards apply. Some recommendations do a lot of harm or even deny human nature and the laws of nature. Homosexuals will always appear, certain conditions will lead to homosexuality just as certain conditions will lead to diabetes. If type II diabetes could be prevented through a certain behavior (movement, avoiding obesity etc.), homosexuality is not known how it could be prevented. Only the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that there is no homosexuality in his country. If it's true, and the absence of homosexuals is not the result of killing them (that is, of artificial selection), then Mr. Ahmadinejad deserves the Nobel Prize for knowing the mechanism of the emergence of homosexuality and its prevention.
Like communism, often the Christian religion denies human nature. Just as it declares sex for a purpose other than procreation a sin, so could walking on two legs or not having body hair a sin. Because sex for pleasure, not only of reproduction, sex outside the fertile period, but also certain aspects of sexual pleasure are typically human characters, same as walking bipedally, lack of fur or gigantic brain in relation to the body. As is known, it is very difficult to accurately determine the fertile period in humans, also, human fertility is very low, so a recommendation of sex for the purpose of procreation is something extremely difficult to follow, not to mention unrealistic.
Also, to condemn homosexuality as a sin, tantamount to condemning people with blue eyes or people who like sweets. Homosexuality also exists in animals, and the percentage of homosexuals, which in humans are attested from Antiquity, it is relatively constant in populations. A few years ago, a percentage of 10% of the male population as having homosexual orientation in the United States. We do not know what this percentage is here, although the Băsescu source indicates approximately 20%. I doubt the scientific value of this figure, probably the President was generalizing the situation on commercial ships to the entire population. Anyway, homosexuality is so present in human populations, so socio-biologists wonder what its evolutionary advantage is.
Only socio-biologists do not revolt when they hear of the condemnation of homosexuality, how anthropologists do not revolt when they hear of the condemnation of abortion and contraception. Instead, everyone is outraged when they hear about cultural aberrations that lead to the sexual mutilation of children, to the stoning of some people, but with one condition: be in other cultures, that is, to be in the garden of others, not ours.
An equivalent religion
If a current guru were to create a new religion, which would deny human nature to the same extent as these recommendations of the Vatican, this might recommend, among others:
1. Avoiding biped walking, which can be considered a sin. Bipedal walking causes all kinds of health problems in humans, but also the difficult birth.
This recommendation would be similar to banning contraception and abortion, which represent effects of deviating from sex for the purpose of procreation. Both are typically human characters, although pleasure sex exists in other species, such as bonobos and dolphins, that is, it is even harder to deny from a biological point of view.
2. Stigmatizing people with white skin, which is in itself a sin. And if they happen to get melanoma, because they sat in the sun, when this could be avoided, these sinners must die. Anyway, sunscreens should be banned.
The last one seems like an aberration, but it is similar to the stigmatization of homosexuals. Also, it also resembles some of the reactions some have had to the HPV vaccination campaign. I saw on a forum how someone said that if the development of cancer caused by HPV infection is a measure of promiscuity, then «the sinner must die!». But a melanoma developed as a result of unconscious exposure to the sun can much more easily be said to be a consequence of sin, of hedonistic behavior. For thousands of years people have protected themselves from the sun, until fashion forced us to tan excessively and forget about the dangers. But people have always had sex for pleasure. Who would say about a person with melanoma: «the sinner must die?».
Condemnation of behavior by the Church is done under threat of hell, the eternal prison of sinners. But here on Earth there are and have been much more tangible hells. If people were aware that without democracy, human rights, science, and other discoveries of sinners, they are going to North Korea-like hells, China or Africa (that is, they also create them in the places where they live), then perhaps he would know what he had to fear first, whose recommendations to give more importance.
