Nice guys finish first
A 1985 video produced by Richard Dawkins. The film is about 45 minutes in length.
To monitor comments posted to this topic, use
.
To monitor comments posted to this topic, use
.
"A Sabbatical?" or "My Anti-Testimony"
I first posted this "testimony" to the web on July 27, 2001. If you too have found Christianity specifically, or religion generally, to be less than satisfying for any reason, please consider posting your own "testimony" to this site by clicking here , or message me by clicking here. I t is invariably a shock to Evangelical Christians to come across someone who has turned his or her back on the “faith was once delivered unto the saints.” Most believers will quickly dismiss an ex-Christian by piously pointing out that anyone who turns away from Christ was never a real believer. Or, as an insider might say it, “They were never born again.” There is Biblical support for the assertion. 1 John 2:19, which addressed the problem of First Century apostates, states that: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us....
It so happens that an article in the Metamagical Themas regular column in Scientific American, in which this computer tournament of repeated-Prisoner's Dilemma was detailed, is/was the single most influential few pages on my way of life and worldview. After reading the article and thinking about it for a while, I also got the book "The Evolution Of Cooperation" by Axelrod. Near the end of the book, he gives a number of suggestions for how conditions that favour the evolution of cooperation can be set up. e.g. you start with trifling, low-consequence, low-payoff encounters, and gradually increase the consequence/payoff load as the "prisoners" build up, if not a rapport, at least a rewarding modus vivendi.
ReplyDeleteWe can see the same process in action on this very messageboad, with the various passing Xtians. A fairly recent one, who will go nameless, is nice, and has been well-received by all, in spite of the fact that s/he is not deconverting, nor is s/he making any re-converts among the population here. Meanwhile, there is no _need_ to name the Xtians who do a one-off drive-by "Jesus loves you, but you're all gonna fry" before scurrying off to brag about how they ventured right into the lions' den. Or the small-spirited self-hating misanthropes who, judging others by themselves, welcome an approaching self-fulfilling doom. (There should be a name for the tendency of stationary objects to cause the objects around them to also become stationary...)
Certainty-of-re-encounter was one of the conditions that Axelrod named as fostering the evolution of cooperation amongst populations made up of individual self-interested cells. I recommend the book very highly.