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>So if I understand, it is purely emotional, but that defines us as humans?

Almost. Just about EVERY human endeavor has an emotional component. If we felt neutral about each action, very little would ever get done. I don't know if we'd necessarily go crazy if we tried to stop this behavior, but most of us wouldn't feel right.

>Would you consider something like partial altruism possible, where someone is normal towards humans but not towards animals (perhaps in the future)?

I think this has already been possible, now, and moreso in the past. As humans meet more of their needs, their circle of compassion is able to widen. If you're a subsistence hunter gatherer, your ability to empathize with other groups of humans, much less animals, and to act on that empathy, is pretty minimal. If you have vegetarian options at every restaurant and disposable income to give to charity, it's a lot easier to help stop cruelty in a wider range of areas.

The book The Age of Empathy, by Franz de Waal might be if interest to you.

http://www.amazon.com/Age-Empathy-Natures-Lessons-Society/dp/0307407764

>De Waal (Chimpanzee Politics), a renowned primatologist, culls an astounding volume of research that deflates the human assumption that animals lack the characteristics often referred to as humane. He cites recent animal behavior studies that challenge the primacy of human logic and put animals on a closer behavioral footing with humans. Based on the studies of mammals, from primates to mice, de Waal proposes that empathy is an instinctual behavior exhibited by both lab rats and elephants. But de Waal's aim isn't merely to show that apes are transactional creatures with a basic understanding of reciprocity—but to reveal that the idea that humans are naturally calculating, competitive and violent is grounded in a falsehood willfully and selfishly perpetuated. Throughout the book, de Waal illustrates how behaving more like our wild mammalian cousins may just save humanity. His contention, colored by philosophical musings and fascinating anecdotes of observed emotional connections between animals, argues persuasively that humans are not greedy or belligerent because animals are; such traits are far from organic or inevitable but patently manmade.

I'm going to reply the easy stuff now, and research and reply the harder stuff.

Please bear in mind that early Christianity is an area of casual curiosity to me, that my sources are neither scholarly nor unbiased, and that the main reason I haven't gone digging through the literature in detail is that being precise is not very important to me, and I don't care to read tedious apologetics. I don't need to knock holes in literalism to dismiss Christianity.

I might as well give you a data dump of my sources:

• The book Nailed by David Fitzgerald (it's messily formatted, but informative - for example it's interesting how long the church took to become culturally prominent rather than just one competing thread).
  
  
• http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/jesus_myth_history.htm and its follow-up http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/jesus_myth_followup.htm
  
  
• A documentary I saw, that discussed how the evidence of archaeology doesn't align with a Jewish migration into or out of Egypt, a journey through the desert to Palestine, or a genocide and takeover, or a huge kingdom. On the contrary, the pre-Jewish culture fits into the region, indicating a local origin. Some of the things about the Moses story make zero sense, for example, Egypt ruled the area of Palestine back then. Running for cover thataway would be madness. But it makes a lot of sense as a historical fiction, compounded to back the newly forged monotheist religion of a shaky kingdom around the time of the return from Babylon. Alas, I still kick myself I didn't make note of the title, so it's not much use as a cite.
  
  
• Casual Wikipedia browsing inspired by the above.
  
  As for deism, it can't be ruled out exactly, but neither can anything - you are asking for a probability of p=0 which simply doesn't happen in a universe that has to be understood via evidential refinement of plausibility estimates. What it can be is ruled "pointlessly overcomplicated and thus wildly implausible, beneath notice".
  
  Occam's razor can be formalized as Solomonoff induction. The mathematical fact is that adding one binary bit to the essential complexity of a guess at the laws of the universe halves your likelihood of guessing right. This can be used as a "universal prior" for Bayesian updates - it takes evidence to push your best estimate towards a more complex guess. It would take a mountain of evidence to make a deist theory more plausible than regular physics. And by definition a deist universe is indistinguishable from a godless one, zero evidence. The concept is basically a senseless dodge into la-la land (bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster are hugely more plausible) simply with the goal of saving a useless and unnecessary god.
  
  So it's religion, because religion isn't bound to be sane. But it's not worth actually considering as a theory of reality.
  
  As for dark matter, any appeal to that that is a variation on "we are ignorant, therefore god". Yes, it's inconvenient. No, we don't understand it yet. presumably there is a gap in the theory. That does not constitute enough of a nod-and-wink to invalidate the many tests that have thoroughly confirmed quantum and relativistic theories to extreme precision in the observable universe, both locally and not. (Seek a physicist for better detail on this. I am not sure how much people are still considering the theory that the laws of physics might vary. These things do get disproven, and that disproof doesn't necessarily filter down to the pop sci press.)

I'm a Mormon who believes in evolution. In fact, in a recent discussion on r/lds and from what I've seen in the majority of my conversations with other Mormons most of us do. Links to discussions [1](http://www.reddit.com/r/lds/comments/eiu9e/as_a_member_of_the_church_what_is_your_opinion_on/?sort=controversial
) and 2

We also have doctrines specific to Mormonism that seem to support evolutionary theory to me such as an un-determined period of actual time for the "days of creation" (creation may have taken place outside of time all together), in much of LDS specific scripture God created the world is replaced with God organized the world and that matter (and spirit) has always existed and cannot be created nor destroyed. More on Mormonism and Evolution here

My personal belief (read not church doctrine and pure speculation on my part) is that evolution was the mechanism that God used to create the world we live in. His role was in essence to guide the seemingly random chance of natural selection to make us and everything else what he wanted it to be. Thus religion answers the why question and science answers the how. For an overview on the Why read this. When everything was the way he wanted it to begin the test of man-kind he sent down the first spirit to inhabit a body created through evolution. Making Adam the first complete man with body and spirit.

An interesting read on all this is Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. I disagree with the author on several theological points (he's catholic) but reading it helped me sort out what I thought God's role in evolution was.

Edit- An article about how evolution is taught at BYU Link

If you're interested enough to read a response in book-form on the subject, CS Lewis wrote a piece with almost this exact title... I don't think I can paraphrase the entire thing but I remember it being a good read.

Not exactly about the stuff you mentioned, but of its history, there is a good book on non-german history of eugenics called In the Name of Eugenics by Daniel kevles

No-self

I like the definition of evil as the lack of empathy and willingness to do harm to others. This was a good book on the subject http://www.amazon.com/Science-Evil-Empathy-Origins-Cruelty/dp/0465023533

>To be a feminist means that you are taking the stance that the problems faced by women today are greater than problems faced by men...

I would like to start by saying that nothing in my reply is intended to sound hostile, bitter, or dismissive. That said, your attitude about feminism is representative of an extremely biased approach to understanding the issues feminists seek to address. It is indicative of a general misunderstanding of the basic ideas and (in my mind, more importantly) terminology of feminist theory.

To start with, if you can honestly find me an academically or socially recognized feminist who would truthfully assert that women should be in control and men should not, then I would be absolutely aghast. I'm not talking about some blogger or some crazy in the local paper; I'm talking about someone whose studies, writings, and or activist work has influenced a substantial portion of people identifying as feminists. Feminists do not seek to elevate women to a social or political position anywhere but equal to men. I think this common misconception stems from a grave misunderstanding of concepts/terms such as "privilege" and "patriarchy" as well as a simple judgement based on the roots of the name "Feminism" itself.


>To say men have no problems is to minimize issues that are present in the other sex...


I have never heard any learned feminist argue that in any way. If you think that the argument that women face more adversity in society is the same as saying that men face no problems then you have woefully misinterpreted the statement. If you want to play the oppression Olympics to determine who has it worse, well I suppose that's your prerogative.

What I see in your comment is a quite common issue people exhibit when confronted with feminism: a cursory examination of the name and basic definition (often flawed) is enough to convince you (not you necessarily) that feminists are antagonistic to men both as a group and individually. In reality, while feminism began as a way to give political voice to women completely without power, it has evolved into a complex and diverse school of philosophy which has as its most common element the attempt to understand social problems related to and constructed upon gender. While the most common inequalities feminists address are those that harm women, feminists have also worked to study social issues adversely affecting men. This is because, in typical feminist theory, the root causes of female social issues also adversely affect men.

For example, feminists often talk about "gender roles". What is a gender role? A gender role is a quality or act expected of someone, from birth and throughout their life, assigned to them on the basis of the gender they are assigned at birth. Gender roles that typically adversely affect women: expectations of maternal/parenting instincts, femininity, housewife roles, submissiveness. What separates a gender role from a biological quality is that, whereas a biological trait is something that may be common to a certain group (but often varies heavily within that group), a role is a social construct that denies the validity of a lifestyle not lived within that role. Consequences of breaking from one's role can range from social shaming to (in some places) outright discrimination and violence. Female gender roles harm women because they force our attitudes to condemn women who do not act/appear to act as their roles would have you believe. The flip-side to this in feminism (that feminist detractors ignore) is that men are also have expected roles. Roles such as "the provider", aloofness, strength, and masculinity. These roles provide the basis for social issues that negatively impact men: Men shouldn't hang around children because they shouldn't exhibit any qualities that seem "maternal", Men aren't good candidates for romantic relationships unless they posses material wealth, etc. As should be obvious, the same root causes of female inequality are problems for men as well!


>...only WOMEN face REAL problems, and ONLY men cause them.


As I mentioned earlier, one of the problems I think many people have with feminism comes from a profound misunderstanding of its terminology. Words/Phrases like "Male Privilege" and "Patriarchy" seem to trigger the idea that feminism means "MALES BAD. FEMALES GOOD". This is absolutely not the case. I'll admit, with just a superficial observation, the words themselves don't seem to exactly praise men (whether the words themselves and the feelings they elicit should be renamed is another argument entirely). First, Privilege refers to the idea that certain people, due to existing social prejudices deeply ingrained into every single person in that society, benefit from qualities or conditions that they had no control over. "The Patriarchy" refers to a social system by which the difference between power and no power is guided by the distinction between masculinity and femininity. Notice that it is not the distinction between men and women but the gender roles mentioned earlier: masculinity and femininity. The concept of a patriarchy is that it is circular: The patriarchy encourages that men behave in a masculine way and women in a feminine way, then those who best exhibit masculine traits overwhelmingly occupy the positions of power and influence, where they then serve as social "proof" that masculinity in males is a good thing, beginning the cycle over again. As you can see from this simple overview, feminism does not seek to blame each and every single man for being a man. It seeks to examine the fundamental forces that guide our social interactions, which existed long before any currently living person and (likely) will continue in the future. There is no "evil board of men" that feminists think are turning all the world's men into insufferable misogynists; feminism merely believes that the current system of social dynamics favors the masculine, which overwhelmingly is a trait that is forced into men. This should also be obvious: who represent the vast majority of politicians, CEOs, wealthy and/or influential people? By and large, men. Not because men are inherently evil but because society expects men to do these things, so they do. We hammer it heavily into our children (though more passively than the hammer allegory might suggest).

In summary:
-No, feminists do not think men face no problems in society.
-Feminists do think that men's social issues stem from the same root causes as those of women.
-Feminism (as widely practiced) is about studying and hopefully eliminating the forces oppressing both women and men.
-Feminists do not think all men are evil, they take issue with the idea that society dictates that all men must be X and all women must be Y, and then society determines that X is the best quality of leadership/influence. This is called patriarchy.

I don't take issue simply with your rejection of Feminism, but several statements in your response indicate that your analysis of feminism has been cursory, at best. I highly recommend Feminism is for Everybody, by Bell Hooks for a simple, short overview. I apologize for the length of this comment, I wrote it not just to you but to anyone for whom Feminism seems like dark magic. Additionally, the issues I had with your comment weren't issues that can be addressed usefully with just a quick note. These are complex issues and thus require more than a few sentences.

TL;DR, The 57 on Heinz ketchup bottles refers to the number of different types of pickles the company once sold.