Here’s a clue.

True if trivial factoid: Occasionally an adult’s brain will suffered a small tissue death in a particular region. It’s rare but certainly happens. Funny thing about brains – parts of them are very plastic and eventually new neurons will take over and recapture old function, but one functional center that doesn’t grow back embodies one’s emotional machinery.

Kill this one and the victim loses the ability to emote. This in turn excises the ability to select from a large array of similar items. Example: “Honey, go to the store and get a bag of cookies.” Three hours later the poor adult has read every label many times over, but none of them excites enough admiration to snuggle under the arm and take it to the checkout stand.

In other words, an emotionless entity isn’t going to walk on the wild side and take much initiative, precisely because said initiative isn’t exciting. It isn’t programmed in. All of the programmed-in actions are, well, already defined.

Yes, a degree of ability to expand definitions is on the horizon; cars are “learning to drive” and in fact my son is one of those “teachers.” It’s one thing to optimize staying in the center of the lane, or navigate rush hour via a different route than at other times. It’s one thing to optimize, but it’s entirely “other” to optimize something that doesn’t exist yet.

When we learn to teach robots how to feel, look out – because they’ll learn that optimizing has vastly more scope than before: creating is an emotional event.

Here’s a hint from the field of mathematics. It’s called the Traveling Salesman Problem. And no, there are no off-color details.

Pick a map – your state, the USA, whatever. Throw thirty darts at it. Nudge each one until it hits a town or city.

Tie a piece of string to one pin, then connect all thirty with that one piece of string such that there is no shorter way to do it. In other words, optimize the salesman’s trip so he drives the fewest possible miles. It sounds easy, but the actual number of different routes turns out to be 29 * 28 * 27 * – – *3 * 2 * 1. For N cities, the total possible routes are (N-1)! also called the factorial of N minus 1.

The quickest way to find a solution is via a technique called “numerical inequality” and it’s been too long for me to remember it fully – ask Uncle Google – but in stead of the utter absolute optimal route it allows one to “sneak up on” a very very good approximation, and it doesn’t take all that long. Way way way faster than trying the nearly 9 times (10 to the 30th power), or 9,000,000, . . . (until you have thirty zeroes) different possible paths.

Evolution works the same way – gradual steps that “sneak up” on the absolute utter optimal awesome design. Along the way you pick up some odd side effects because a swath of DNA (a.k.a. a gene) can wind up getting “repurposed” seven ways from sasquatch. Fact – dog breeds which are lovey-cute have short noses and dogs which have “I am smiling” Sam the Eagle serious purpose to their natures, like bloodhounds, german shepherds, doberman pinschers, etc. all have long noses. It turns out that suppressing a certain kind of emotional maturity also suppresses development of the nose – – – same gene(s) involved.

Taking a gimlet eye to the primate design / DNA will show fascinating things about the way our eyes work [until you look at the eyes of soaring birds like hawks and vultures] – – the complexity of our chemical balancing act just to keep the exact correct acid balance and degree of salinity in our blood no matter what we eat or drink – – three billion pairs of DNA can do a lot!

And the better part of that has accumulated during the six-tenths of a billion years since some kind of fish gained the added function of taking oxygen directly from air.

What works, well, fine, it works. Is it optimal? Good merciful sakes, no. Can it be improved upon? Just watch GOD’s machinery roll on, a mighty tide of unfolding marvels.

GOD invented DNA, so is it evolution or intelligent design? Thunderously, YES. And did He make little pushes here and there? I haven’t heard His answer yet, but either wayit wouldn’t surprise me, simply because He has known every word I would ever speak, and ever will. In short, He knows – that’s all I need to be reassured.

Ethics in matters like these belong to you not to others.

The real need for ethics here is to defeat the tribalism that has promulgated a foaming chasm of disgust and hatred between two contraposed views of how to run the world. THAT is unethical, merely to accept it within one’s presence.

Why? Because demonizing people over different points of view, each group admittedly seeking “what’s fair” but disagreeing completely over both the means to achieve it and how to define “fair” in the first place?

THERE IS NO EXCUSE TO BELIEVE YOUR POLITICAL OPPONENT IS A DEMON.

Shame shame shame.

Now, if you like their music, take a deep calming breath and enjoy it.

A common enough question; let me take the questioner on, even more directly than other answers one may hear. The hubris, the beam-in-the-eye, the inattention to Christ’s message of love the sinner,  for starters, all ask the questioner to kneel before GOD with a broken and contrite heart, confess his or her own sinful nature, and rise forgiven but still humble.

Sodom and Gomorrah? That wasn’t homosexual so much as a ritual humiliation. Their ‘sin’ in fact was to humiliate the foreigner who came inside their gates for a night’s protection. In those times, the protection of a walled city was sacred. I repeat, sacred. The profanity of humiliating an innocent traveler was paramount, and Abraham’s failure to find any righteous men in that town was its doom.

Leviticus? As pointed out in other places, many sins in that text occur today without a second thought. One of them is a social taboo, and the others? Why does the one act like a splinter on the handrail, and pierce the skin, while the rest have been worn to a patina and slide by unnoticed? Who remembers the passage in full? Who can even find it?

Then we come to Paul and Jesus. Jesus’s recorded words do NOT mention same-gender sexual relations. Paul’s do; Paul also makes the point of confessing, with regards to living a celibate life, that celibate is better but only in his opinion, not GOD’s. Expressing disgust at others failing to remain celibate when marriage wasn’t on the table? Paul said it, but did GOD?

Finally, we land on the inerrancy of Scripture – is it either word-for-word GOD’s love letter and GOD’s admonition, or ancient phantasies blowing in the wind, with no middle ground? How dare we take GOD’s word to such a ridiculous place!

Genesis has GOD’s fingerprints all over it – but it is also founded on an origin story, Abraham’s tribe’s origin story. The ancient world abounds in them. The New World, e.g. Inuit and AmerIndian, have a rich variety of their own. None of them, Abraham’s included, bear any factual relationship to the world we inhabit. Saying that Abraham’s is science is beyond ludicrous. Instead, GOD’s fingerprints on that origin story mean that GOD chose Abraham, and infused His love and forgiveness, His patience and promise, His redemption, into the material He started with.

GOD created the world – 13.78 billion years ago not 6,000. GOD saved the world, 1989 years ago, in 30 CE. GOD doesn’t pettifog over personal distinctions. GOD doesn’t like heterosexual betrayals, nor presumably homosexual betrayals. But GOD Ab So Lute Ly does not (speaking for myself, not GOD) hold any sin to be worse than any other, save rejecting the Holy Spirit. Accepting grace is a one-and-done deal, no going back.

Being created with homosexual orientation is not a choice, and more than pederasty. We understand the deep and permanent emotional scarring of that, so have no patience with adults who sexually abuse children. But adults who come to each other in a committed bond that involves sexual union are nobody’s target, except for people who do not understand what GOD demands of them. To persecute homosexuals is to adopt the hypocritical sheep’s clothing of “Christian” while operating as a wolf of hatred.

It’s that simple.

Philosophy has usually been a response of the individual to the difficulty of constructing a fully rational explanation of the world as it exists. Questions that mingle varieties of why and how find answers.

Philosophies come and philosophies go, and the variety among them continues to expand.

Once the Judaeo-Christian faith became challengeable, a number of titanic minds attempted to answer those basic questions of how to respond to a difficult world and how to define its difficulties in a way that led to those answers without any prior authority to stand on.

Religion, on the other hand, provides a definition of the world, how it came to be, its faults and their causes, in terms set by one or more supernatural beings. In other words, religion tends to supplie its own philosophy with the Great Questions already answered. Christian Existentialism might work as a blend of both.

Bhuddism has temples, but at root functions as a “guide to understanding” or in other words is more philosophy than religion.

Hope this helps.

Hypothetically I can live on the air I breathe and butter won’t melt in my mouth. At least, hypothetically.

Since we’re discussing what the Bible says, several points come to mind. The largest one is Paul the Apostle writing about sin, and confessing that the things he should do, he sometimes did not; and the things he should not do, sometimes he did; and his most righteous acts? – in comparison to the holiness of GOD (and thus Jesus) those most-righteous acts were like filthy rags.

Now step into the 21st century and trace the development of anyone’s personality from, say, birth onward – times given are not exact –

[Birth to 1 1/2 years] Not aware of the existence of other wills, egos, etc. The world is your oyster and you get good at making it make you laugh.

[1 1/2 years to 4 years] The terrible two’s. They begin with the shattering existential come-uppance that other wills DO exist. Limits get defined by using the term “NO” no matter that the real meaning may be yes.

[4 years to 6 years] Learn that others feel pain too – arrival of the ability to understand guilt, hence experience it.

[6 years] Learn that death is permanent.

[Puberty] Life gets much more difficult and confusing. One’s parents expose themselves as morons. Only people the same age have any clue about anything.

[Adulthood] May arrive as late as mid-30’s This is where one realizes that perfection is way too expensive to even attempt. The “golden rule” means giving away all your gold. Nobody does that.

[Sainthood] (disregarding actual definition of any organization that believes it has the ability to recognize which among its dead can act at a distance to intercede with affairs on earth) This is Jesus Christ, who went into the Roman court system knowing it would crucify him. And he was GOD, just for the moment not in possession of GODly power or complete knowledge, e.g. when the End Times would arrive. That was GOD who experienced death by agony, for our sakes.

So, are we ready to live on the air we breathe and keep butter cold in our mouths?