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anthrosub -> RE: The Bible and Common Sense (8/19/2006 5:05:52 PM)
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Unlike the natural sciences, we can only speculate at how people related to the world and each other before recorded history, so it's difficult to say with any certainty how our behavior came to be what it is. You use the term "conditioning" which I find interesting because, from a sociological and psychological perspective, that's exactly what we are if you look carefully. We are "creatures of habit." Everything we do, even our identity is a pattern at some level being repeated every day.
The other salient feature about humans that I only alluded to earlier is our ability to circumvent environmental circumstances using technology. We live in cold climates by manipulating fire, have artificial daylight, can cover great distances with machines, and have harnessed power by the use of the wheel and the inclined plane to name only a few examples. Agriculture is seen as the principle turning point for civilization to begin. No longer needing to hunt and forage for food, people were then able to stay in one place but still needed to work together to maintain the annual crops. Irrigation was another invention that significantly changed how we live (and where). All these things took coordinated effort and it's for this reason government came about.
But government needs authority, so it was only natural that the first primitive governments got their authority from religion. For thousands of years this was the bond between the priests and the politicians. This is how the problem of the church and state came to be born.
People created religion, then forgot that's where it came from, and finally forgot that they have forgotten. I think it's our complex brain and the ability to conceptualize everything that's at fault regarding our more negative behavior. We conceive of the future and then worry about it. People won't admit it but we all live in fear at some level. Fear of dying is probably the ultimate, followed by insecurity of understanding the meaning of being alive. Meaning is something we each bring into our world through interpretation. This is another facet of religion that gives it its power as it provides an attractive interpretation for the masses.
People need and want security and they will do whatever is necessary to quell that hunger. This is what I mean by being greedy and selfish. You might say it's an amplified sense of self preservation, made possible by our advanced brain and understanding of technology. I often wonder how many people in the developed parts of the world could if they had to, go out and live off the land successfully. It's quite possible they may one day have to.
anthrosub
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