Simple question really, do you believe that the human race is special, or of higher significance than the [b]rest of the universe?[/b]
Now with my last social experiment, it seemed that I did not word it clear enough, and therefor my results were flawed, and my conclusion was not as drastic as presumed from these flawed results, so I want to be as clear as I possibly can be.
If you are wondering why I ordered the poll as I have, splitting the yes' and no's into creationist and non-creationist categories, that is the point of the experiment. So to reiterate and hopefully dispel any possible confusion, THIS IS THE QUESTION I AM ASKING:
[u][b]Do you believe that the human race is special as compared to the rest of the universe, and why? Please answer the poll question, and explain your thinking in the comments.[/b][/u] Many possibly things can be accounted for, such as biology, society, philosophy, etc, so please explain yourselves. If you do not mind also mentioning your stance on faith in your comment, this will also help the experiment. [u]Also, this is not meant to be judgemental to any specific faith, this is simply an experiment that may or may not show a correlation. Logically, correlation =/= causation, however I am attempting to see an average of faith and the belief of humans being special versus non faith.[/u]
[spoiler]Also, I would like to reassure you that this social experiment is not as dependent on wording as my last one, and so we will not suffer the same misunderstanding that occurred previously. If something is unclear, please let me know. [/spoiler]
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Agnostic. While the overall universe is great and all, large and mysterious, it kind of represents a religious view of heaven for me in that its impact on me is relatively small. My feet are planted on Earth, and while I absolutely love reading and learning about astronomy, I like to keep my head on where I currently am. That being said, everyone has great potential to accomplish something in their lives and have an effect on those around them. In that way, we are special. Are we anymore special than anything else around us? Not really. There are things in nature that are more spectacular (not necessarily special, just great), but I'm not part of those other things. I'll never see the scale of nebulae in person, it's damn likely that I'll never set foot on another planet or celestial body, so my focus isn't on that. It's on myself those around me, IE humanity. That is my observable 'universe'. It's kind of like how it's difficult to map the universe from any other perspective but from Earth. To us, we are the center of the universe. It's hard to shift your purpose to live from an alien perspective. We can sympathize with different viewpoints (such as, "Hey if we were over here we might be able to see more"), but actually living that perspective is another matter. So, to me, humanity is special in a lot of ways. But that view has obvious bias. We are so small in comparison to everything out there, but everything plays a role. We either accomplish balance or imbalance (depending on how you see it) on one of seemingly infinite celestial bodies. We're just as special as anything else out there.