GOD, SURVIVAL, AND THE TASTE OF SALT

The obvious problem is that some people confuse an innate belief or sense, something we feel about ourselves, with something we have learned. A deity of some sort and religion may be related but they are two different things. Creationists and their religious beliefs are nonsense; they are schemes made to fit their own ideas of self-grandeur or something like that. As a mental exercise, equate this innate sense of this “something influential” in your life with the well-known sense of the taste of salt. Define the taste of salt. Ask yourself, does it exist?  Is it real? How do you respond to the taste of salt? Does it taste good when you have a need for salt?  Do you sense needs and excesses of salt?  Does it taste bad when you have too much? Am I justified introducing the words “good” and “bad or evil” when we talk about the taste of salt? People have studied all of this empirically.  It is my contentions that you can name an innate sense anything you want such as God or a Devil. Is it God when you need salt or when it tastes good and the Devil when you don’t or it is bad.  A name does not change the fact that there is a sense of “something” about on salt. Unfortunately, the geneticist’s mind, like that of the creationist’s, seems to turn off at the suggestion of anything smacking of evolutionary psychology; something that ties sensed physiological needs to action; ties genetics to behavior?

I can find nothing about life (biota) that stands in conflict with the idea that a sense of survival is the synergistic result of all genetic loci. Everyone knows the self-cleansing effect of billions of years of “survival of the fittest” has had on our accumulating genetic make up even in light of the virtual flood of current epigenetic revelations.  It is my contention that the sense of survival—the sense of self-preservation—is a pangenetic derivative equivalent of the lesser sense of the “taste of salt”. Name the sense of survival what you like. Let it drive you to foolish action or let you respond to it in a ridiculous way, but it is a very real sense; you are responding to something. Even when you call yourself an atheist, you are responding to something. Your response has nothing to do with the scientific fact that there is such a sense—unless you think a “sense” of the taste of salt is not a scientific fact. Paint pictures of it “in the image of man”. Hang it on a cross; bake it into unleavened bread; do what you will to it or with it; it is no more than a sense and you cannot change the fundamental nature of it. Unless you are prepared to deny that the taste of salt exists, you cannot deny that a sense of survival exists.  I chose not to call that sense God; therefore, I am an atheist; so what if someone else calls it God—go for it. Now, about religious: that is a different matter. Religious leaders have in the past done many things in the interest of their own greedy survival but counter to survival of humankind and will continue to so. Religions beliefs are altogether too often destructive, that is they promote beliefs counter to survival, while survival must stand or falls on it own merit.