What is Reddit's opinion of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists?

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Fair enough. The first point here is that it's not an explanation at all, let alone the best. It doesn't have any explanatory power because it's tautological. Natural selection, survival of the fittest, is a tautological concept. It's the same as saying "survival of those that are more likely to survive", or "fitness of the fittest". This is a simplification, obviously, but it's the basic idea.

This objection has been raised since Darwin himself was alive, and it has never been addressed properly. Evolution is constantly reformulated in an attempt to make it non-tautological, but it's just a way to hide the tautology under more complex language. The only way to make it non-tautological is to actually attempt to predict evolved traits, i.e. change it from "survival of those that are likely to survive" to "survival of those that are expected to survive".

Here's an article that goes deeper into this whole problem. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233771090_The_middle_way_of_evolution

The second point here is that evolution, as everything in modern science, relies on assumptions about the nature of reality and the natural world, like that living organisms are just the sum of their material parts, i.e. naturalism, that their whole past and future history can be determined from the current state, i.e. determinism, but most importantly the assumption that nothing in the universe has an inherent purpose, everything is just the product of chaos. All these assumptions are derived or related to the Epicurean myth, which was very influential on Charles Darwin, through the works of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who was an occultist devoted to Epicurism.

There's nothing wrong with making these assumptions if you're just concerned with the usefulness of your knowledge. For instance, medical technology based on evolution as a premise can be very useful, but that usefulness doesn't retroactively make those assumptions truthful, because incomplete or even wrong knowledge can be useful. The whole problem here is when that retroactively justification is used to discard other possible assumptions as false.

Again, this is a simplification, but if you're interested in this particular point, there's this book I recommended to someone else: https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Darwinism-How-Became-Hedonists/dp/0830826661

Finally, there's the problem of evolution failing to account for formal and final causes. This is a much more complicated subject, related to the previous one, but the simplest way to describe the problem is to say that when an organism evolves, the very previous state of that organism would impose a limitation on the evolutive path, therefore that's also part of the organism's form, which transcends the sum of its material parts. I can't recommend an easy book or article on this.

It's worth mentioning these last two problems are mistakes the creationists also commit, hence why I say the dispute between evolutionists and creationists is pointless.

I understand. Too good to be true and as Mark Twain said ""Lord, save me from your followers!" Plus, as a tangent, transgenderism and austim are fairly highly co-morbid and what I'm given to understand about autistic and people with autistic traits are high systematizers, we DO NOT engage in flights of fancy or do intellectual submission, which is why autistic people tend be significantly more irreligious.

God doesn't fit in the secular paradigm, and I use the term paradigm very seriously. The wounds of the intolerant faithful, I undersand but cannot really help you with unless you want a REALLY long conversation about what they are actually opposed to.

But as to the naturalistic paradigm you and I have sewed in for so long, I have a book to recommend, something I did not find until 12 years or so after my encounter:

https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Darwinism-How-Became-Hedonists/dp/0830826661

Now the thing that gripped my soul was Hobbesian philosophy, which made me paranoid and misanthropic. I had to see the philosophic underpinnings of Hobbes to be able to reject it. What you're at war with intellectually is Epicurean philosophy, and separating naturalism from science which so many have done everything to bind them together, is a part of the walk.

And like I said, I did NOT expect to meet the God I met, even if people will say the Bible says he's like that. The Bible says a lot of stuff, which appears to contradict.

The simplest thing I can say to the wounds of the faithful is that meeting God for me is the cypher by which the entirety of the Bible can be understood. And the thing is, I'm barely a Christian, which is complicated but I put my faith in that Christianity is correct, but I could be wrong. And the wonderful part of meeting God is it's OK to be wrong. God doesn't want to burn you and he will never give up on any one of us. It's not in his character.

Most people have never met God and so they take the least charitable reading of God's functional benevolence (ie, God is good because he says he is but human standards he's a violent, cruel cunt) because theologically, that's the safest position to be in, the prepper's corner of the afterlife.

It's why I think everyone needs to see God. It's not safe to believe in his goodness and forgiving nature cause if you're wrong, into the fire you go. Evangelicals in particular are scared shitless of both the devil and the retribution of God.

And the thing is, coping mechanism? Faith is a coping mechanism, that's why I had to bargain with heaven. I had to see with my own eyes. Because I could not live with a coping mechanism. I don't know the difference between you and the others who have met God, but with me, I had to come without preconditions. Whatever God was, I would accept and believe, as long as he gave me a sign I knew was from him and only him.

And as my pastor has told my many times since 2016 (I had this vision in 2002 or 03) believing comes with responsibilities. But compared to the terror of annihilation, they are light as a feather. God doesn't want blood sacrifices or penance, he just wants us to not be shitheads. Maybe I'm saying too much here but from what I could tell, he doesn't really care about anything we did before as long as we do the best we're able now. That means we need to be devastatingly honest about our desires and what we do, but it gets easier. Light blinds at first, but as we walk in it, the better we see.