Perhaps, but religion, itself, has done most of the distructiver spadework.

@Allamanda Are you talking about the mental states we can induce?
OR
Some supernatural Idea?

Mental states have useful features, if only to help a conciousness to cope with existential dread.

@Allamanda Mental states have functionality, some have been annexed by religions and imbuded with a higher meaning by the religion.
I Zen breathe through pain everyday. I use flow states driving all the time. Music induces mental states and emotional states which of course overlap.

@Allamanda I think it's about RELIGION, not spirituality.

@Storm1752 Can you define "spirituality", without resprting to emotive language?

Spiritual

1. relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things:

(Got the weight of a soul, evidence of one? Nope, this usage of that term is ALL the NON MATERIAL, IE, how you feel, or emotions.)

2. relating to religion or religious belief:
   (this is religion)

However I do not see how ANYONE uses this term without implying the non material soul, or spirit. I find it is always used to describe emotions, wonder, awe, ie, mental states which religion has taught for centuries are evidence of a soul;.

It is why I avoid the term, and above I was quoting the OP.

I think the two go hand in hand. You can't GAIN power unless you truly believe what your supporters believe.
This is what makes the Donald unique. He's not a true believer
This is why I'd rather he not be fired now---a REAL true believer--Pence--will take his place and be a much more formidable foe.

@Storm1752 Generally I agree with that. And I certainly include deciet as an alternative not a necessity, but I think there are a lot of exceptions to any rule which says that you have to be a true believer to use religion to advantage.

For a long time, the Romans actually permitted the people they conquered to retain whatever gods or practices they had held, in order to gain faster control over them. They'd insert a Roman official or two to run the place, but leave most things status quo, except for now paying Roman taxes. Things wouldn't be noticeably different until the taxes became overwhelmingly impossible to pay. Some smaller places were "conquered" just by the armies showing up at the gates, offering no resistance to Roman rule at all. Hey, they'd get running water and new roads! They often didn't see the downside.

Sort of the precursor to corporate takeovers today, maybe?

@LisaFultonave Very perceptive.

????????

Explain, please. It is possible that evolution will destroy us if we do not behave in a more rational and responsible manner. But, if that is the case, the cause is human stupidity, not evolution, itself.

@t1nick Things of evolutionary processes, such as preditor and prey co-evolve, can be complicated to explain and understand. How this interaction of human-on-human interactions work on a grand human animal scale is even more so complicated to understand. Religions, and governmental terrorism, taxation, control of subjects or capitalism slave laborers and intellectual control of knowledge avaliable to subjects of a particular society all plays part in "world problems " or conflicts.

The smarter , stronger, or more popular governmental officials get to kill off the lesser soldiers, subjects and such to where they reproduce less than the smarter stronger more popular.

For example:
The following from: [evolution.berkeley.edu]

2. There is differential reproduction.
   Since the environment can't support unlimited population growth, not all individuals get to reproduce to their full potential. In this example, green beetles tend to get eaten by birds and survive to reproduce less often than brown beetles do.

4. End result:
   The more advantageous trait, brown coloration, which allows the beetle to have more offspring, becomes more common in the population. If this process continues, eventually, all individuals in the population will be brown.

@wordywalt The Sun is supposedly going to expand, explode into a Red giant star in a few billion years. If people are not smart enough to get far enough away from Earth and the Sun, it will kill people off.

@wordywalt

I teach evolutionary science and have no idea what you are alluding to?

@wordywalt Natural selection=survival of the fittest=capitalism=war. Unfortunately we are not (yet) programmed for group survival, which is only for the top leadership and their families. We will need benevolent aliens to intervene, with our Homo Sapien survival threat.

@t1nick
Why am I trying to explain, when you should understand this better than me?
@wordywalt
Religion and Government is very much synonymous such that most people do not understand that the United States of America is the secret religion of the Masonic lodge secret religion racist devil worshippers since their freedom from England July 4th, 1776 after the European invasion of 1492. They are following the "religious " dictates of biblical text written in metaphor and riddles that require a higher level of intelligence capabilities to understand. Or, it could be viewed as the Masonic lodge secret religion racist devil worshippers are being lead by "lord of host most high worshipful, lucifer the devil a.k.a. Jesus the Christ".

Just for example of understanding the riddle and metaphor: It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name. Rev. 13:16-17

What we actually see now since the Masonic lodge secret religion racist devil worshippers freedom from England July 4th, 1776 is the development toward identification for taxation and government control. Requiring everyone worship government, and its laws, submit to Authority-666 pay taxes , guaranteed income, health care, retirement, and housing for governmental officials. "God Bless America " and "In God We Trust" capitalism wage slave labor. No freedom for people or original indigenous inhabitants to have their own brick home built by true masons free from mortgage, free from rent, free from taxation and free from governmental terrorism and free from religious oppression.

@Allamanda maybe chuck off homo sapiens to where homo superduperious evolves and just like the predecessor to homo sapiens are extinct, homo sapiens may work out to extinction as homo superduperious rises into existence.

@blahblah

I hate conspiracy theorists. Your rant has nothing to do with evolution. It's clear you have absolutely no idea what evolution is or how it works.

Ypu might as well join Trump and his cabal. They're all conspiracy theorists as well.

Deep State, Illuminati, Masonuc control; all bs.

@t1nick Not conspiracy theories, not specifically a trump supporter and for sure not a Masonic lodge secret religion racist devil worship supporter. If you are not understanding enough then you could call it conspiracy theory erroneously.

I post the pic just show I am not a supporter but rather the opposite.

@blahblah

Conspiracy theories by their very nature cannot work and do not work in 99% of hypothetical existence.

Conspiracy usually (not always) , but usually involve large numbers of individual players all keeping a secret. E.g. Derp State, Area 51, the famed moon landing. This condition is almost impossible for the human species.

Secrets are power. Once you have a secret you have power over those that do not. However, you cannot wield that power unless the other party knows you have a secret.

Once the cat is out of the bag, the other parties will demand proof that you have a secret as human curiosity is generally unquenchable. The only way to offer proof is to give up oart or all of the secret. Once that is done, it's no longer a secret and no longer a conspiracy.

Sure many individuals can keep a secret, but not all. Human weakness to prove one specialness, and out comes the secret. Power is covered, but do easily given away in proving you had the power you claimed. Conspiracy theories do not hold water under scrutiny.

@blahblah

Because one case in Whichita Falls is connected to Masonic Lodge does not make it a widespread conspiracy.

@t1nick I am not claiming any secrets.

@t1nick United States of America (the government and its laws) are European oppression of the origional indigenous inhabitants of their land calling it America is not a conspiracy theory, it is a well documented fact.

@t1nick I do not claim expertise on all the evolutionary details like genetic drift, natural selection, allele change mutation and other such things but I have had biology classes, years ago high school and college, and have a general understanding for most of what I can remember.

@t1nick A way I see it might be more analogous than specifically scientific explination. I see people as a top of food chain organism (I know, a shark could eat a person, but sharks are not specifically endangering or threatening the entire human population). So, then, considering an analogy people- on- people interaction as compared to the predator- prey relationship people are like the predators and prey of themselves because they are at the top of the food chain, at least to say on top intellectually speaking superior to all other know creatures. So, it might be like intellectual predator-prey interaction. Which has evolutionary connections to the continued development of peoplekind, their societal structure, governmental evolution, so on.

@t1nick Do you know anything about psychological meme?

The term was famously coined by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene, as a cultural corollary to the biological transmission of genetic information via genes and genetic recombination. Dawkins, however, is not the first to consider the meme. The German zoologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Wolfgang Semon, for one, wrote about mneme, from the muse of memory Greek goddess Mneme, in the early 1900’s. There’s an argument that memes evolve via natural selection, just as in biological evolution, with less successful memes dying out, or becoming extinct. [psychologytoday.com]

I am not dealing with conspiracy theories it can be understood thru understanding the evolution of a psychological meme in people.

Out of Egypt, thru Israel, into Rome/Europe and across the Atlantic to build up this U.S. of A.

Come on. We already have far too damned many weird conspiracy theories muddying the water and diverting attention from what is real. I am sick of such crap. @blahblah

@soquel I Biology was a focus of my undergraduate work. Your perception of evolution is a weird distortion.

@blahblah What in blue blazes does this have to do with the focus of this post?

@blahblah

If you want to use biological analogies to represent the human condition, then use a virus. Viruses modify their environment by modifying the cells of their host (equivalent to modifying their environment). They do this until they've modified so much of the host that they burn up all their host's resources (cells). Akin to humans and the Earth.

@t1nick @wordywalt

Again it is not about conspiracy theories. However you are close in your understanding Here is an illogical atheist website that does do a part of explaining things, not that I agree with 100% of what they say.

Christianity Meme is an organization of people who wish to expose Christianity for what it really is--a mind virus that controls human behavior to facilitate its own survival. [christianitymeme.org]

@t1nick @wordywalt see how illogical atheist web site gives verfication to biblical text. ... But we have the mind of Christ.1 cor. 2:16

Psychological meme

@blahblah I don't own a bible and have not for well over 40 years. Perhaps you can enlighten me?

@wordywalt enlighten as to what?

@blahblah What the Bible verse you cite says.

@wordywalt it says what I cited. Religion defined as helping widows etc.

Over the past 2,000 years, Christians have killed millions of people in the name of religion. Know your history!! The fact is that any fundementalistic religion which sees others to be enemies will inevitably wage war against them.

@wordywalt And how many over the last 50 years?

@Allamanda well, no, because surveys say what they're designed to say. i do not doubt the honesty of the best countries report and its methodology seems meticulously planned; i don't know whether it's WELL planned, but it bespeaks honesty at any rate. it seems more designed, though, to find national characteristics than other things here is the survey source (albeit not that survey itself, so we still don't know much about that); [usnews.com] i do not consider u.s. news and world report to be the most scientific of sources, and it is that entity's own survey in question. you may certainly disagree with my opinion of the whole thing, but i would never challenge you with "happy now?" or any other such thing. that question makes me quite unhappy as it seems rather rude. i don't think i did or said anything to deserve that.

g

@Allamanda Greed for Power and Riches is Older than religion. Religion is a tool to be used at convenience, to maintain control and to justify the means.