[rez]

Quote by: Thanatos Dawkins has it wrong. We're not born dualists. A long, long time ago there were gods for everything everywhere on the planet. A god to make your crops grow, a god for rain and a god for thunder and a god to pull the sun about in the heavens. Gods of death, love, destruction and rainbows. Even rocks and tree had individual spirits that governed why the were the way they were. Dualism was irrelevant because people saw nothing but souls and it shows in the history.

Millions of years ago, people explained things. Because of their lack of knowledge they used ideas such as "souls" to explain events. For instance, it was the god of rain that made it rain -- they didn't know about clouds and how water accumulates inside them.

We're almost a different species. Rather than growing up praying to trees and rocks we grow up in alien worlds of plastic and carpeting and machines. This is why my calculator can outpace me in math even though I have several million times its computational potential; my brain was intended to process a world of souls instead of numbers.

Your brain was intended to sense and interpret matter. The way you interpret that matter depends on whether that interpretation is right or wrong. Usually when it is wrong it doesn't work and when it is right it does work. So praying to the rain god to rain does not work. Speaking words does not have anything to do with the atmosphere and the atmosphere doesn't listen to the words. Understanding the atmosphere and making predictions based on the knowledge gained from such an understanding does.