Nuttin' like good ol' Cat'lic scandal, I tell's ya…

There's nothing like Catholic offenses to generate people's long lost sense of absolute justice and morality. Nor anything which more starkly elicits the cognitive dissonance between natural-selectionism and realism, to wit, the profound but seldom faced dissonance between saying that what-is-now, distasteful or not, has successfully adapted by promoting selection vs. saying that what-is-now, and is bad, must be changed based on our selections. If "religion" is "just" a function of social epigenetics and memes, and its moral trappings are just struts for selective survival, then it's achieved selective excellence, and should be heeded as an awesome selectionist modality.

The feeble and basically incoherent efforts of someone, such as Keith Stanovich in The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin, only underscores how fickle anti-selectionist ethics is, since the choice not to "roll over" and capitulate to our pre-adapted unconscious is itself just a selective fillip bubbling up in some organism which haven't yet had all the kinks worked out in them by the Selfish Geneie, who dwells, if not in heaven then certainly in the heavens for all time and space, Amen.

If our basis for morality is what has been selected up to our present time, then we can only rely on selected moral standards to praise or pan religion (and anything else, including our approbation of selectionist ethics). If, however, religion is bad because it is just an overweening epigenetic meme, and must be destroyed for the good of the human species (ahh, creeping finality once again), then clearly natural selection can't be the only criterion we have for "natural morality." Selectionism is not, then, a replacement, nor even a fatal "acid" for traditional metaphysics and morality; it is just a particularly gross and febrile caricature of them.