From: sankar@hal.COM (Sankar Bandy)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian,soc.culture.pakistan
Subject: Re: Contradictions in Secularism
Date: 13 Aug 92 19:12:11 GMT
Organization: HaL Computer Systems, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: quality.hal.com

In article <l8l8tvINNeoo@pageboy.cs.utexas.edu> hyder@cs.utexas.edu (Syed Irfan Hyder) writes:
>In article <1992Aug12.172943.21294@cis.ohio-state.edu> chandra@cannelloni.cis.ohio-state.edu (B Chandrasekaran) writes:
>:In article <l8ia1hINNapu@pageboy.cs.utexas.edu: hyder@cs.utexas.edu (Syed Irfan Hyder) writes:
>:
>::This brings us to the fundamental basic of secularism. Religion of
>::secularism decrees that henceforth life of man has been divided
>::between "personal" and "collective" spheres. It has further
>::been ordained that henceforth any thing to do with god or religion
>::will be constrained to fit into the "personal" sphere!!!!!!
>::
>::Would any one illuminate us as to which god or gods have made this
>::demarkation? Is this god the god of logic, rationalism or 
>::utilitarianism?
>:
>:   You are asking a rhetorical question whose import is that i. secularism
>:is as much a religion as any other religion, and ii. that its separation
>:of the personal from social is open to question.  Actually, I agree in
>:some ways with part ii. but I will argue that it is necessary for us
>:to live in peace with each other.
>
>:	[rest deleted. Let's go step by step]
>
>Who has decreed that "to live in peace" is such a wonderful
>idea? After all, the concept of "evolution" predicates that
>we wouldn't have reached this level of "learning" and 
>"intelligence" unless we had overcome all the "weaklings"
>on the way. May be there is even higher level of "intelligence"
>waiting for us, if we only allow the "fittest" to survive?

The idea of 'Living in peace' does not conflict with that of 
evolution, precisely because they point to two different levels
or aspects of the same thing. Birdheads like you who don't understand
and don't try to understand the subtle features of a scientific law
try to malign it like this by presenting half-truths. The survival
questions is at two levels. 1) At the level of the human specis and 
the other 2) at the level of individuals.

The mandate of evolution is that humans as a specis should strive
to survive over other specis, by evolving to remain fittest. This
requirement of collective survival drives us to protect the whole
of humanity from external or internal threats trying to obliterate
it. This has given rise to the 'society' the 'family' the concepts
of 'ethics' and 'peacefule existence'.

At the same time, at the individual level the survival game is on,
between individual and individual. Everybody is trying to survive
himself (and his immediate family/dependents etc.) by evolving to
remain the fittest. Actually there are many such (man made levels).
They form a chain of (hierarchical)levels. So wherever my individual
survival mechanism comes in conflict with the survival of the society, the
society tries to enforce there survival by de-surviving me and so
on.

So people who decries evolution as being against human ethics(read
'religious ethics') think again. Evolution and the Law of Natural
Selection is the father of all laws of the living and it is that
which (should) determine our ethics (and not religion, which is
simply a product of the Natural Selection) for us to keep SURVIVING.

>> Sankar