Spiritual Atheism

This is partially in response to: "Beyond ‘New Atheism’" in the New York Times - by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

"Kitcher’s secular humanism reanimates the debate, promising much needed serious reflection on whether the divine can or should be eliminated from our moral lives."

What I see as the problem is the divine as being represented by essentially a War God - the War God of the Old Testament. In these debates, many (men, esp.) do not see that that is part of the problem. The problem which many people are rebelling against.

Christianity was liberalized by people who absorbed ideas from old texts from India and other parts of Asia (during the 1800s, 1900s). Transcendence and nature have been considered more important in Asian spirituality than it has in traditional Christianity. So we have liberal Christianity which rejects the ideas of Original Sin and the idea that life and sex are bad. Some Christians, such as those who follow the Pope, and others who take Genesis Literally are more likely to be more attached to the War God - and God as a powerful Male who rules the world.

Religion cannot improve until it leaves such ideas behind - ideas which are really about establishing and maintaining power. A War God is not compatible with the spiritual side of people. The spiritual side of people (right brain thinking - see A Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, for instance) is about the loss of boundaries, unity with others, peace, love and understanding. And seeing ourselves as part of an amazing universe - not at odds with life - but an integrated part of life. Some gnostics thought along those lines before the Catholic Church put an end to such diversity of thought and spirituality.

Ideas about hell and even heaven are in effect more about the church maintaining power than anything. It is not until all of the power aspects of religions are dropped and life is affirmed - that religion as spirituality can be understood. So it is not a question of the divine being eliminated from our lives - but how we define divine. If life itself is understood to be divine, then there is nothing to eliminate.

"Forgotten Experiment May Explain Origins of Life"

Originally considered a dud, an old volcano-in-a-bottle experiment designed to mimic conditions that may have brewed the components of life might have been right on target.

After reanalyzing the results of unpublished research conducted by Stanley Miller in 1953, chemists realized that his experiment had actually produced a wealth of amino acids — the protein foundation of life.

Miller is famed for the results of experiments on amino acid formation in a jar filled with methane, hydrogen and ammonia — his version of the primordial soup. However, his estimates of atmospheric composition were eventually considered inaccurate. The experiment became regarded as a general rather than useful example of how the first organic molecules may have assembled.

But the latest results, derived from samples found in an old box by one of Miller's former graduate students, come from a device that mimicked volcanic conditions now believed to have existed three billion years ago. The findings suggest that amino acids could have formed when lightning struck pools of gas on the flanks of volcanoes, and are a fitting coda for the late father of prebiotic chemistry.

"What's amazing is that he did it," said study co-author Jeffrey Bada, a Scripps Institute of Oceanography biochemist and Miller's former student. "All I did is have access to his extracts."

Bada stumbled across the original experiment by accident when a colleague of Miller's mentioned having seen a box of experimental samples in Miller's office. Bada, who inherited Miller's scientific possessions after his death in 2007, found the box — literally labeled "1953-1954 experiments" — in his own office.

Inside it were samples taken by Miller from a device that spewed a concentrated stream of primordial gases over an electrical spark. It was a high-powered variation on the steady-steam apparatus that earned him fame — but unlike that device, it appeared to have produced few amino acids, and was unmentioned in his landmark 1953 Science study, "A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions."

But Miller didn't have access to high-performance liquid chromatography, which lets chemists break down and classify samples with once-unthinkable levels of precision. And when Bada's team reanalyzed the disregarded samples, they found no fewer than 22 amino acids, several of which were never seen by Miller in a lifetime of primordial modeling.

Perhaps amino acids first formed when the gases in Miller's device accumulated around active volcanoes, said Bada. "Instead of having global synthesis of organic molecules, you had a lot of little localized factories in the form of these volcanic islands," he said.

"The amino acid precursors formed in a plume and concentrated along tidal shores. They settled in the water, underwent further reactions there, and as they washed along the shore, became concentrated and underwent further polymerization events," explained Indiana University biochemist Adam Johnson, a co-author of the study. "And lightning" — the final catalyst in the equation — "tends to be extremely common with volcanic eruptions."

"These findings add to a growing body of literature suggesting that areas near volcanoes could have been hotspots of organic chemistry on early Earth," he said.