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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (17865)	7/10/2001 4:46:24 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

As soon as you impose anything on anyone, outside of yourself, even within a society that has a majority consensus, you are then enforcing one view over another as being right, or true. I am obviously not getting through here. I don't know how many time I have to explain this. The rules we impose on each other have not the faintest Fcking thing to do with what is "true", "right", or "moral". They are simply rules that we have invented to govern ourselves. They are rules that the majority of us have accepted as the best collection of policies available to us at this time. We thhink that they are the best policies available because we think them most likely to create the sort of society we want to live in. We change these policies regularly, according to our perceptions of their effectiveness. We change them to reflect emerging ideas. Sometimes the emerging ideas don't work, and we change our polices back again. The means by which we choose our policies evolve by the same process. We often disgree. Over many generations we have developed ways to resolve these disagreements peacefully, and to compromise. Of course it's hard to compromise when one guy thinks his idea was revealed by God. I'm not saying that there's no such thing as right and wrong. I'm saying that we don't DISCOVER** what is right and what is wrong. We DECIDE what is right and what is wrong. There's a big difference.

To: Greg or e who wrote (17865)	7/10/2001 5:33:57 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

It's only fair to warn you that you wander closer to the perilous question of why people created God. I have my own theory about this. It is often assumed that people created God in an effort to explain the inexplicable. I don't think this is true. That is simply not a sufficiently compelling reason for such a ubiquitous phenomenon. I think that the creation of God was an evolutionary adaptation. Early human social groupings were simply extended families, and it seems likely that the earliest human social groupings were not very different than those of other primates: a single dominant male controlling a group of females and younger males, with adult males driven out by the dominant male and remaining on the outside until they were strong enough to win a territory of their own. This has one large evolutionary advantage: only the strongest, smartest males got to reproduce. It also had a huge evolutionary disadvantage, in that the young males would be perpetually killing each other off, a problem that would have become critical as we began to develop weapons. This would have been a serious disadvantage, one far more immediate than the genetic desirability of allowing the strongest male to do all the procreating. In hunting or in defending (or attacking) territory, a group with several prime males would have an enormous advantage over a group with one. I think this advantage would have been quite clear to many within the early social groupings, particularly to the older females, many of whom would not be at all pleased to see old Ug grabbing his club and driving the boys off into the jungle just about the time they started to get useful. The older females would, of course, have not had the physical strength to force old Ug to change his ways. They would, however, have a great deal of influence over the tribal superstitions. So gradually they invented mysterious outside forces that wanted men to stop beating on each other, stop grabbing each other's stuff, stop fighting over women, stop doing all the things that men that caused them to fight among each other. Over generations, these forces became endowed with the power to inflict all kinds of hideous punishments, and took on a life of their own. They became God. There is no doubt that God was a fantastically successful evolutionary adaptation. Societies equipped with a God were able to cow young males into maintaining peace with their fellows and diverting their aggressive energies into conquering new territories and developing better tools, shelter, etc., all of which would quickly have become part of the new system of sexual competition. Of course there were other advantages too: when Ug stopped chasing the young bucks away, the girls had a whole lot more fun. That's a quick version and not as developed as it might be, but it is, in a nutshell, my theory.