Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 01:35:20 PSTInteresting to note, that Verne merely pulling a quote from Ayn Rand, about morality being a set of "values to guide man's choices and action" can precipitate Longshot's foray into religion and history.
Actually, there was more barbarity and immorality committed in the singular events of the Christian religious crusade or the Christian inquisition than in the last 100 years. Feudalism, servitude and slavery have decreased. Man is progressing. One gets a sense of it by reading history and recognizing how awfully bloody and cruel it used to be. Man's inhumanity to man has been less with the passage of time. Progress is not in a straight line, it has setbacks and looks more like a stock market chart. But by any definition, the process of socialization has improved.
More important Longshot gives his biblical version HOW "morality " developed and he said it was because "Adam and Eve disobeyed God" and constraining my imagination, we are consequently punished for the so called sins of our ancestors. The sin being eating an apple. So eating the apple against God's will caused all succeeding generations to be punished. Interesting concept. I would hate to know what would have happened if Eve would have really done something more sinister. Aren't you glad that your offspring are not punished by some of your indiscretions?
The Arabs that wrote the Book of Abraham (l'st Testament) had a definite sense of vengeful wrath about their god. Their god definitely believed in visiting the sins of the fathers onto the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and never stopping. This concept of heirs inheriting wrath still exist in the mind set of the Semitic people in the middle east. A common obscene curse in Arabic is not only directed at you but your children also. It's funny but in our culture we usually refer to the individual's parentage. We insult back in time and they in the future and forever--"a pox on your house" is one of the Arabic curses. The religious books of the bible and Koran contain hundreds of them.
The Arab people of the middle east who bequeathed to us our 3 great religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam(All springing from the same root) also gave us algebra, astronomy, our alphabet, concept of Zero, the fork, Arabic numerals and an Abacus to play with the numerals. They did and still use a lot of "A" in their writings.
A good analogy is the invention and use of our laptop computers today.
When homoerectus begin to evolve into homo sapiens a million or so years ago there was a pressing need to band together for safety and furtherance of genome survivability. Just as you can see lions banding together in a pride acting out their "code of conduct" for perpetuation of the species. They band together to run down gazelle and defend against other prides etc. There has to be rules in a band or otherwise anarchy would prevail. In homo sapiens we call this banding together for the common good "the social contract."
Since the survival instinct is the basic drive of all biological life, then man grouping together could enhance his survival in numerous ways.ie. It was far safer to be a member of a tribe in numbers as there is strength and It was very difficult for one or two to kill a mastodon for meat. Within each tribal group, a set of rules, ritual and mores, etc were developed over hundreds of thousands of years.
Some obvious examples of these rules are "treat others as you would want to be treated." This rule within the social compact has been expressed in every religion known to man and has been traced back about 3500 years in written form to the Greeks altho it has existed in unwritten codes of behavior for tens of thousands of years before. It is a fairly obvious outcome of banding together. I don't like to be hit therefore I will not hit you.etc. I won't steal your woman, don't steal mine. I won't steal your club, don't steal mine. ect.
Current Western "morality" is no more or less than the workable contemporary mores that have been distilled from a few million years of homosapien's experiences on how best to survive and perpetuate the species to the same degree as a pride of lions or a pack of wolves have developed their code of conduct. Morality has been always been a relative concept depending upon the epoch you talk about. ie. at one time human sacrifices were the order of the day to satisfy a God or Gods in order to grow a bountiful harvest. Not so today.
It was perfectly alright to kill hundreds of thousands of people in the Christian religious crusades in the name of a God. Not so today except in real fundamentalist religious zealots. Holy wars were quite the order of the day in our past history.Thousands of poor women during the middle age were executed in Europe and in the US in places like Salem, Mass. Their crime was being suspected of being witches. They were burned at the stake under the Biblical injunctive authority of "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live."
I kind of think we are over the hump with that sort of malarkey until I look at the TV station Trinity Broadcast Network and see that guy Benny Hein(Spelling?) waving his hand and all the people falling down in front of him while he cures them immediately of cancer, heart problems etc. He has one upped Oral Roberts on this. All the while Jan and Paul are softly smiling in the back ground counting their money.You will never see those charlatans regrow a limb lost in fighting a war. You can just never underestimate the IQ of a certain segment of society.
Longshot mentions that "the Bible is the origination of British Common Law. I beg to differ. The British common law takes its name from the "commoners". Basically it was the customs of the common people as handed down and not codified. The Magna Carta codified parts of the customs. But even then the customs or as we call it "common law" had as its greatest influence Roman codified law after the Roman conquest of the British Isles. Roman Law, in turn was distilled from the Greek codified law long before the Arabic people wrote the Book of Abraham which is in most parts the bible's old testament which is essentially the same as the Koran used by the Moslem faith today.
In the Koran, Jesus is relegated to that of a prophet and not the son of God as Mohammed in his "revelations" came to the belief that no man shall claim to be the son of God.The reason that common law was not codified was that the tribes in northern Europe did not have a written language and the law was largely applied by being handed down word of mouth and the Judge using "stare decisis" pronouncing in effect that the matter in question has been previously decided.
In effect the common law became an amalgam of "handed down oral mores" with a healthy dose of Roman law hence the many Latin phrases found in the common law.
I've tried to be brief and simple in an otherwise difficult overview of a few million years of developing homo sapiens. But it has to be understood that the very core of our behavior or that of any behavior of life forms has at its primal drive the perpetuation of the species-The "social compact" and resultant body of social rules be it called "morality", "civilized" or "code of behavior" is but one manifestation of this phenomenon.
All behavior patterns of life forms are survival driven. Even a cancer cell or Aids virus is survivor driven and changes and adapts to the need to survive. That is why the damn things are so hard to stop. This survival at all costs behavior is embedded in all of biological life's creatures. The tree will bend to the sun and the human will use his more advanced brain to come up with ways to survive and endure with the limbic primal drive of gene contribution.
I have the notion that this old world will continue to rock on at an ever increasing pace of acceleration with us or without us. We collectively, as the highest evolved species, have the power to make it better or destroy our species as well as other species in the process of acting out the survival instinct.
As to the fundamental question of why all this activity has taken place or is taking place, I haven't a clue. As Hal the computer says"insufficient data". At this stage of the game I don't have a clue. But I can console myself with the thought that no body else has one either as stated many time by no less than Einstein. Where did I come from? Why am I hear? Where am I going? In answering these questions, some don't think about it and accept the mythology handed down by their tribe, some think about it slightly and waffle and some deeply think about it and concluded what Hal concluded-insufficient data at this point in time, on our little ball which is one of trillions of little balls floating out there.
I believe the following quotes are revealing:
It's not what we don't know that hurts, it's what we know that ain't so---Will Rogers
There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is almost nothing about which one can be certain--Somerset Maugham
Most of our future lies ahead-Denny Crum, Basketball coach
The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization---Sigmund Freud
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice---Will Durant
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers--Socrates 441 BC
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped---Arthur Schopenhauer
Idealism is what precedes experience: cynicism is what follows--David Wolf
What is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of mans--Friedrich Nietzsche
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon---Susan Ertz
A pious man is one who would be an athiest if the king were---Jean de La Bruyere.
Bob White in Brownsville, Tx.
No comments:
Post a Comment