I'm listening to the God Delusion (which might also be called the Atheist Hallucination)... getting toward the end, and it looks as though he's about to propose making it illegal for parents to teach their kids about Hell, as it's child abuse. How about monitoring parents who send their kids to Little League? Put their daughters in Beauty Contests? Make them learn piano just so that they can perform in recitals?
How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
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