Since there is/are no god(s), the only thing that matters, such as in nature, is natural selection and survival of the fittest. It's the only way humanity can logically survive... by evolving. This means that those that don't want to change will find themselves in a position of extinction. That pretty much defies communistic convention and "feel good" policies. If we continue to coddle those that will do no work, they raise children that do no work... you can see where that ends up I hope.
The argument that, if god does not exist then life has no meaning is extraordinarily bad.
You, as a conscious thinking person are free to reach for the stars and make meaning where there had been none before. That is our gift, and our curse, to be beyond the animal and capable of freeing ourselves from the endless Darwinian cycle of predator and prey, yet able to stare into the endless skies and see how vast and empty and devoid of inherent meaning the universe is. We can succumb to this nihilism, or we can create for ourselves, individually, a purpose, a role to play, however small, and find meaning within, rather than without.
That's very poetic.
A gift from nothing? Seriously. I fully understand and accept that we are random atomic particles that combined together in such a fashion that they survived all these years... The iterations of homo-[suffix] that did not reproduce, fit in our environment or succeed over the other animals in this world have been mutating and or extinct for millions of years because they have to "survive." If we discontinue this trend and accept everyone as an acceptable human being no matter what mutations or deformities they may have, we are defying this natural order of things. You call it compassion, I call it ignorance. Call me a bastard or an ass if you like. That's the way the world we know it today has become. The truth hurts. There's no beauty in that.
Except that's not the truth.
Selecting who should live and who should die (or reproduce) isn't paying homage to natural selection; it's strictly artificial. Deciding who does or doesn't deserve help or compassion, or who does or doesn't deserve to reproduce, is a
strictly artificial process. You aren't helping natural selection, you're engaging in artificial selection while calling it "natural".
Natural selection happens regardless of whether we want it to or not and regardless of who we do or don't help. Artificial selection is just a way of changing who is selected for. We can choose to select for people with "good" genes or those with "bad" genes, or neither. Either way, natural selection will still describe the process adequately, even if artificial selection is what's driving it.
Also, I hate to rain on your eugenics parade, but it's incredibly hard to even determine what are "bad genes", not to mention that the "deformities" aren't even necessarily congenital. If every "bad" genetic trait were so awful, they would have likely been selected against to a greater degree already, and genetics is complicated in ways you aren't even considering. Not everything follows a simple mendelian one-trait-one-gene dominant/recessive model. It's likely that very much of our genetics doesn't at all, not to mention how little we know of how some aspects of genetics work in general. Some genes can cause positive traits sometimes and negative traits other times, especially in conjunction with other genes or the environment, and who's "best fit" for survival in the first place depends largely on environmental circumstances.
Hell, even relatively-simple traits deserve a closer look than "is this a Bad Mutation?". Take sickle-cell disease. Nobody's going to tell you that sickle-cell disease is a nice thing to have, but it's fairly common in some segments of the population. Why? Because being a carrier for it helps protect against malaria, which is a serious problem in much of the world.
Also, you have traits which may seem detrimental to the individual but are good when the individual is considered part of a group. Example: Red-green colorblindness. Certainly, being red-green colorblind doesn't help an individual when considered on their own. However, I've heard argument that in a large group (for example, in hunter-gatherer society especially), having one or two colorblind people is actually advantageous; they perceive the world in a fundamentally different manner, so they're liable to notice a couple things the rest of the group doesn't, or more quickly. In this way, even though they have vision which is objectively "worse", they are still made unique and valuable to the group, in a seemingly paradoxical manner.
I would even argue that this applies to such traits as autism. For one thing, "autism" is such a broad term that you can never really eliminate it, since you have to draw the line somewhere at who you'd consider "autistic" and the genetic causes (if it's genetic) are probably impossible to isolate without completely screwing over something else. But let's say for the sake of argument you can; would it be a good idea? I say it wouldn't be. Yes, autism can be incredibly harmful and debilitating. On the other hand, autistic people sometimes tend to be extremely gifted in some areas (in the case of autistic savants, in a manner beyond what most people could ever achieve). Taking care of these people takes a toll on society as a whole when considered simplistically, but (aside from being, you know, humane) can also confer a benefit.
In other words, the sort of "let's decide who does and doesn't breed" philosophy you seem to prescribe to relies on an extremely oversimplified and naive understanding of a science that's still fairly young in the first place (genetics), and assumes far too much even about our ability to "eliminate" such traits.
You also sound like you'd presume that if a person has a serious congenital deformity, they aren't worth saving. This is senseless, because that same person could easily have other valuable traits, genetic or not. Stephen Hawking is a good example; if we assume (and this is a big assumption, although apparently not one you're beyond making) that his disability is congenital, and that his intellectual aptitude is also somewhat congenital, how do we decide if he's allowed to reproduce? Some sort of cost-benefit analysis based on barely-understood information?
Also: Most harmful genetic problems are recessive. The only way to eliminate these in a fashion that could be considered meaningful is to eliminate the carriers as well. Consider the fact that pretty much everyone is a carrier for several of these traits, and you realize that the only way to eliminate most negative traits is to either sterilize pretty much the entire human race, or spread some sort of magical nanovirus swarm around that edits everybody's DNA without harm. Of course, you can engage in genetic screening to make sure an embryo isn't homozygous for a recessive negative trait, but that still could be problematic in the ways I listed above, and also isn't what you were suggesting; it's a completely different argument.
Author
Topic: Atheists (Read 394624 times)