@Finn dAbuzz,
Finn dAbuzz wrote:
Tribal battles typically didn't lead to the extermination of one side or the other. Raids that either drove one group away from a desirable location and/or brought into the raiding group resources and women of child-bearing age were most prevalent.
When speaking of prehistory, it would be better to say "probably didn't lead . . . " I agree that that was the most likely scenario. This suggests to me that people were not as strongly motivated as the use of the word "terror" suggests.
The allegation of FBM, supported by Manored, that early peripatetic humans would have enjoyed better personal hygiene that later city dwellers is just incredible to me. Walk through the woods some time. Not a manicured urban wood lot, but the actual, honest to Dog, keep an eye for bears woodland. Look at the ends of blades of grass or the twigs of low-lying shrubs. You'll see ticks and fleas sitting there waiting for a potential host to walk by. I've camped in real forests with our dogs on more than one occasion. The last thing you do at night is to pick the parasite freeloaders off the dogs fur. In fact, to stay ahead of the game, you should do that throughout the day, whenever you see them. The early human bands may have done that for one another each day, but i find it hilarious to suggest that they would have been free of such parasites in an environment when every other animal, not excluding birds, are just hag-ridden with them.
City boys . . .
@Setanta,
Quote:In a world lit only by fire, and populated my a majority of illiterates, the story teller is king. It is hilariously idiotic to compare the culture of 2000 years ago with that of today. Impoverished peoples of Africa today pay for things with their phones. Capisce?
So you explain the fact that 2000 years later there are people willing to die for the ideas of some story teller? Those people are as varied as the 12 Christian Syrians who were lined up and shot in the head for refusing to convert to Islam a couple of months ago to an acquaintance of mine who was killed in Africa for talking about the ideas of this story teller from 2000 years ago.
You are truly naive if you believe that.
@Leadfoot,
No, you are truly naïve for not understanding the impact of 2000 years of adherence to any religious confession. You also seem not to understand that Jeebus was not the story teller. It was clowns like the so-called evangelists and Saul of Tarsus.
@Setanta,
Holy **** man, The name of the story teller is irrelevant. And if you think people now are following it just because it's a 2000 year old story, well I don't know WTF to think of that delusional thinking.
I mean some fool told me people nowadays use Cellphones! Whatever the **** that has to do with it... Capich?
@Leadfoot,
You'd be lost without straw man fallacies. At no time did i state that people adhere to christianity because it's 2000 years old. The reference was to the effect of 2000 years of cultural reinforcement. Capisce? (Learn to spell the word.) The Syriac christians were among the first adherents to the cult. Your logic is flawed in more than one way, too. If a dozen were slaughtered, how many drank the kool aid, or at least pretended to do so, in order to avoid being shot?
What cell phones have to do with it is that culture today is far different than culture in a world lit only by fire--fool.
@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:
The allegation of FBM, supported by Manored, that early peripatetic humans would have enjoyed better personal hygiene that later city dwellers is just incredible to me. Walk through the woods some time. Not a manicured urban wood lot, but the actual, honest to Dog, keep an eye for bears woodland. Look at the ends of blades of grass or the twigs of low-lying shrubs. You'll see ticks and fleas sitting there waiting for a potential host to walk by. I've camped in real forests with our dogs on more than one occasion. The last thing you do at night is to pick the parasite freeloaders off the dogs fur. In fact, to stay ahead of the game, you should do that throughout the day, whenever you see them. The early human bands may have done that for one another each day, but i find it hilarious to suggest that they would have been free of such parasites in an environment when every other animal, not excluding birds, are just hag-ridden with them.
City boys . . .
You're forgetting that early cities were built in those same parasite-ridden environments. I don't think their houses were of sufficient quality to do much to keep the parasites away, and in any case they had to go out and work in that parasite-ridden environment quite regularly. Not to mention that they kept animals.
@Leadfoot,
Leadfoot wrote:
True, but I find that rather intriguing.
I mean, all this fuss so many years later about this guy who had no budget for self promotion. What explains it? Will Donald Trump be remembered that well?
Are you talking about the Buddha? Because those words apply equally as well to him. Even more so. It was
centuries after his death before anything about him was written down. By your implicit reasoning, there must be something even more amazing about the Buddha than the Christ.
@manored,
manored wrote:
FBM wrote:
My guess is that the infantile tendencies towards favoritism mentioned above would disappear at some stage of development if it weren't fed and nurtured by adults. That's just a blind guess, of course. But we're not competing for survival resources in the same ways as our distant ancestors. Maybe that infantile tendency is vestigial?
I don't think enough time has passed since that time for that instinct to have started to evolve out of us.
I think what determines the extinction of our xenophobic instincts is interaction. If you have the opportunity to interact with someone from another race and see that the're not that different, then you begin to lose your fear, just as we can overcome our natural fear of other things such as heights.
Vestigial like male nipples, I mean. I don't think the characteristics of male nipples is an indication that we're evolving out of them. And, yes,
positive exposure to and interaction with those unlike us would probably desensitize us to the differences. That's sort of what I meant when I said I suspected that the infantile tendencies would probably disappear at some stage of development.
@Setanta,
Quote:What cell phones have to do with it is that culture today is far different than culture in a world lit only by fire--fool.
It's not the culture or the technology, it's the story - stupid.
@manored,
I'm not forgetting anything--where do you come up with that? I wasn't saying that city dwellers had no parasites, just that nomadic hunter gatherers did. Find someone else for useless arguments. Hey . . . there's Leadfoot, he's always ready to trash a thread for no discernible reason.
@Leadfoot,
Leadfoot wrote:
So you explain the fact that 2000 years later there are people willing to die for the ideas of some story teller? Those people are as varied as the 12 Christian Syrians who were lined up and shot in the head for refusing to convert to Islam a couple of months ago to an acquaintance of mine who was killed in Africa for talking about the ideas of this story teller from 2000 years ago.
You are truly naive if you believe that.
Argumentum ad populum. Try again. Better yet, don't.
@FBM,
Still pushing the ad populum BS I see.
The argument had nothing to do with popularity. It was debunking the absurd idea that the appeal of 'Jebus' was attributable to great story tellers.
See any enduring believer groups built around Shakespeare? Kapeach?
@Leadfoot,
Still pushing the invisible guy-in-the-sky BS, I see.
Quote:2000 years later there are people willing to die for
You want to use this to attest to the veracity of the original claim and that it's not just the skill of a storyteller. Appeal to the people, the masses.
Argumentum ad populum.
Oh wait . . . i get it now . . . Jeebus has some mystical power . . . wait, wait . . . maybe he was divine . . . yeah, that's it. None of the other gods for whom people willingly died over the last several thousand years count . . . just Jeebus.
Just a reminder, this thread is not about the troll and his god superstition. The thread is about the origins of culture in terms of its utility.
@Leadfoot,
By the way, jackass, you didn't debunk anything. In fact, you're the one who claims it's the story. Don't complain about the name-calling, either. You were the one who started that.
Leadfoot wrote:It's not the culture or the technology, it's the story - stupid.
@Setanta,
Less origins, more utility, I'd think.
You'd better knock that off, i'm agonna hafta start callin' you bad names!
@Setanta,
Quote:None of the other gods for whom people willingly died over the last several thousand years count . . . just Jeebus.
Closer than KBM, but still no cigar.
Not that Jesus was God (he was very insistent that he wasn't) but of course lot's of people other than his followers died for the sake of their belief in God. KBM never could bring himself to acknowledge the universal "pull of God" but that's a lot easier to believe than 'people are suckers for a good story teller' or 'people are using God for terror management'. That's just a desperate ploy to justify rejection of that 'pull'.
