Was the belief in the supernatural the force behind civilization ?

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by arauca, Oct 16, 2011.

  1. arauca Banned Banned

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    I would like to hear something other then war
     
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  3. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    Hunger.

    The wish to eat is the driving force behind civilization.
     
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  5. arauca Banned Banned

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    If we are hungry we move were there is food ,we steel, ete.
     
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  7. Me-Ki-Gal Banned Banned

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    it is an intriguing question really . You think about it . The fairytale and its affect on culture . What is it that goes bump in the night . You throw in wild beasts like lions tigers and bears , plus war mongering for power and the fairy tale becomes real , or more that there is real danger to support the fairytale . We all love a hero and in the hero there is the chance of the impossible being achieved . Human feats of strength not thought possible like Ryan braking the 4 minute mile . Do we set our selves up to create an illusion of achieving the impossible ? As to taunt the hero into achievement ?

    What is supernatural anyway ? Is that even a real word? Is that something made up just to give life to the impossible as to push for the impossible to be achieved ? I am still get a handle on it . There is something there . More than just an outlet for human rage . It is cohesive and a very strong motivating force in human activities . It conveys secret messages from generation to generation . I say secret because of the brush off so may give it yet it seeps deep into the human mind set . We start learning them from an early age and then they continue in the modern era in the way of entertainment < Movies , Books, Plays ,Music , Art in general . How are we affected . You take a painting like " Rainy Day" and just by me saying the name you all know what it is . You can see the picture in your mind right now . How many of you don't know what the painting looks like ? How many know . My guess is most of you do.
     
  8. Me-Ki-Gal Banned Banned

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    See the thing is you can live in the wilds and live . There is always plenty of edibles in the wild . I know cause I am a wild man . I understand survival in the wilds , been there . You may not be able to reproduce being a lone satellite bull , but you can live . Hunger does not pass my litmus test .
    It might attract by want more than need . Now the economist back in my day taught want and need are the same thing from a capitalistic consumer based economy . Well the Stones all taught us those fuck nut don't know shit . Thank god for Rock and Roll . God Gave Rock and Roll to You . That is a funny song for a bunch of rockers to sing . What ever rocks your boat
     
  9. Pineal Banned Banned

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    There are many groups that were both believers in the supernatural and remained hunter gatherer. They tended to get attacked by 'civilization' or used as slaves or sacrificed or heavily taxed or moved, etc.
     
  10. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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  11. Me-Ki-Gal Banned Banned

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  12. arauca Banned Banned

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  13. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No. Hunger drove us to invent agriculture, the twin technologies of farming and animal husbandry. This was the dawn of the Neolithic Era (the "late stone age"). Nomadic hunter-gatherers are always only one lean year away from a famine. Agriculture created the first food surplus this planet had ever seen. It also both permitted and required us to stop being nomads because farmers have to settle down in permanent villages, causing a wrenching change in human culture. Economy of scale and division of labor increase the yield of agriculture, so it became advantageous for once-rival tribes to make peace and live together in larger villages... another wrenching change for a pack-social species, whose members in the past had lived in extended-family groups of a few dozen people who had cared for and depended on each other from birth.

    But this was not civilization, "the building of cities." Although that came soon enough. The first evidence of agriculture is around 9500BCE (hybridized and therefore cultivated figs), and the first cities (larger settlements in which people lived in peace with strangers and required hierarchical government to maintain order) were built less than a thousand years later. Agriculture was invented a little later in the New World (which had not been populated as long and therefore food was bountiful), and their first crop was peppers. The first cities didn't spring up until much later, and civilization had still not spread throughout the entire hemisphere when the Christian armies arrived to destroy it.
    Jung tells us that many fairytales, rituals and images are universal, what he calls archetypes, instincts that are hard-wired into our synapses by our DNA. They may be survival traits from a long-ago era whose dangers we can't imagine, such as the instinct to run away from a large animal with both eyes in front of its face. Or they could be accidental mutations passed down through a genetic bottleneck.

    The ancient pantheon appears to be a set of archetypes, since all of the old traditional religions had the same gods and goddesses with different names. This was probably a great help when we developed agriculture and needed to make peace with the neighboring tribes. Discovering that they had the same gods must have made it easier to trust them. Unfortunately the modern, oversimplified monotheistic religions with their pathetic one-dimensional model of the human spirit have done away with all that, and they inspire war between neighbors more often than peace.
    Here in a place of science it means "beyond what is natural, unexplainable by natural laws." Since the dawn of science a few centuries ago, our statements of the natural laws are now derived from empirical observation of the behavior of the natural universe, so "supernatural" now implies "unsupported by observation and therefore not proveable." So something that is supernatural has no claim to being real. It is at best a hunch that has not been proven, but more often simply a fairytale or other acknowledged fiction, although it is also the basis for the irrational faith that underlies religion.
    One lone human, especially one with good outdoorsman skills and weapons of steel and gunpowder acquired in the nearest city, may be able to survive on the food he can find in the wild. But Homo sapiens is a pack-social creature and we hunt much more successfully in groups. With only stone age gear it would be difficult for a single human of average strength and skill to survive. In any case, as I said above, during a bad year there simply isn't enough food, and this is why our ancestors developed the techniques for cultivating plants and herding animals--not to mention techniques for preserving surplus food and for making containers in which to store it securely.
    Mick and the boys have chefs and chauffeurs. I'm not sure I would put much stock in their expertise about the simple life.

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    Agriculture predates containers. Nomadic hunter-gatherers had no wheels and no draft animals, so they could only "own" things that they could carry with them on their journey--and some of that carrying capacity had to be allocated to babies. They did not invent pottery because it's too fragile, and stone containers are too difficult to mate with a lid that seals securely, and in any case they're too heavy to schlep around.

    Agriculture always came first, then pottery.

    The earliest evidence of brewing is in the Neolithic Era, when agriculture and pottery were well established. Anthropologists do not dismiss the possibility of Paleolithic humans inventing beer, but it would have been quite a project to collect enough wild grain to ferment. It would have been a very small-scale operation, perhaps for a summer festival when multiple tribes got together to swap stories and DNA.
     
  14. arauca Banned Banned

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    I would not be so positive , primitive had biodegradable container primitive people in the jungle . use container made out of some vegetable fruits were the inside is town out and you can carry milk or water , urinary balder is used also as a container , coco nut shell is used as a container .
    Perhaps in your mind they planted the coconut and the totuma three
     
  15. scheherazade Northern Horse Whisperer Valued Senior Member

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    Conservation of human energy, achieved by proximity to natural resources and the easiest routes of travel would be my hypothesis.

    'Civilization' is an elaborate structure that has evolved to address our most basic needs in the most energy efficient fashion.

    That we have done so by exploiting each other and the environment is simple mathematics that confers more advantage to some individuals than to others, evolution since human intervention.

    All wildlife in these parts requires water, food and shelter. Fellowship and co-operation is only required to a point for successful reproduction in most species.

    Civilization is perhaps an elaborate reproduction strategy designed to simplify the mate selection process. :bugeye:
     
  16. Me-Ki-Gal Banned Banned

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    Last edited: Oct 30, 2011
  17. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Its my belief that there are two kinds of people in this world, those who believe that everything in the universe is connected and meaningful and has some cause or reason for being and those who believe that everything just is. Religion is the outward expression of the first kind of people who looked at the skies and felt awe and grandeur, wove myths around the sun, planets, moon and stars, gave them names and personalities, assigned them with qualities that found expression in nature - all religions have their root in such thinking. From there it was but a step to try and comprehend these forces of nature in order to appease them [that is to say, control their expression] for which it was desirable to trace the causes of their expression. This is why education in every society begins with those who controlled religion because at some point they also controlled the gods and used nature as evidence of divine intervention. So Hinduism was propagated by the gurukul, Buddhism by the monastery, Christianity by the friars and Islam by the madrassas. Its only natural then that these gurukuls graduated to schools, the monasteries to universities like Nalanda, the friars and monks to Oxford and the madrassas to universities like Qaraouiyn.

    But was this the basis of civilisation? Not entirely, its a chicken and egg thing. Do people who believe in supernatural forces make settlments or do people who make settlements believe in supernatural forces? We have examples that contradict both assertions. So I think civilisation is probably a side effect of something entirely different: agriculture
     
  18. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Native American beliefs are deeply rooted in their culuture. We believe EVERYTHING is sacred from the largest mountain to the smallest plant and animal. A lesson can be found in all things and experiences and everything has a purpose.To sum up Native Spirituality; it is about HONOR, LOVE, and RESPECT. Not only do we love, honor, and respect our Creator and our Mother Earth, but also every living thing. It is about being in touch with ourselves and everything around us. It is about knowing and understanding that we are part of everything, and everything is a part of us. We are all One. We also believe that our Elders hold the answers. Our Elders keep our culture alive. We have much to learn from our Elders, and they deserve and receive our utmost respect. Listed below is some poems, quotes and rules that show the beliefs native americans hold. No matter the person nor the tribe it is taken from. you can see a common string that runs through them. I have been asked many times what it is to be Native american. What it is we believe, and though I have given the above defintion to this day I still refer to the simple words of a departed loved one and teacher. White Feather; navajo/apache born medicine man. To him I dedicate this page.


    "Native American isnt blood; it is what is in the heart. The love for the land. The respect for it, those who inhabit it; and the respect and acknowledgement of the spirits and the elders. That is what it is to be indian."
    White Feather
    Navajo Medicine Man


    http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...uP3uDg&usg=AFQjCNEeJJYAX5cqpOOHRLB6Sz6jVJztcg
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    There is abundance in the world of nature today only because the vast majority of us don't live out there to share that "abundance.". One person in good health, with tools and weapons he bought at REI on his way out of town, and maybe a Boy Scout Manual, could probably survive in the woods because he only needs to find enough food for himself.

    A whole tribe of 30-40 people wouldn't find it so easy. Especially with children who A) can't help very much with the hunting and gathering, B) need to be protected from other creatures who want to hunt and gather them, and C) when they're very young need to be carried, making some of the adults much less effective as hunters and gatherers. (The birth rate was very low in the Paleolithic Era because a couple with two toddlers could not feed themselves. The dawn of agriculture with its sedentary lifestyle made it possible for women to take care of multiple young children while still helping with the farming and herding, a discriminatory division of labor that we have only recently begun to overthrow.)
    This is because you had the good fortune to be born in the Western Hemisphere, which was only discovered by human explorers 15KYA and is still very sparsely populated by the standards of the rest of the world. You won't find such bountiful wilderness in China, India or Africa, and in Europe they'll probably arrest you for hunting anything besides mushrooms.
    I'm a third-generation atheist and I see the order in nature. I think the natural laws are beautiful. I only recently learned that pi can be expressed as a very elegant infinite series and I'm still in awe of that.

    The difference between the religious/superstitious people and the rest of us is that they can't conceive of such order and beauty occurring naturally and so imagine that there's a conscious force behind it, whereas we see our aesthetic and artistic sense as developing naturally to find order and beauty in nature. Just as our eyes have evolved to sense a light spectrum with green, the sun's most energetic wavelength, at its center, so have our our more whimsical senses evolved to find flowers, rainbows and birdsongs charming. A creature more in harmony with its surroundings will be a more successful creature.
    I think the people who invented stone tools, and then the ones who invented agriculture, and then the myriad technologies that comprise civilization, followed by the Bronze Age, et al., were the ones who felt that they could manipulate the world through their cleverness, without needing to rely on (or even believe in) supernatural forces.
    Contrary to the popular Euro-American belief, there is no monolithic Native American culture or philosophy. The Cherokee, who may be the second largest North American tribe after the Navajo (I can't find the stats), and the only ones to develop their own written language, most definitely believe that Native American is blood. You are not counted as a member of the tribe, with the "head rights" to their petroleum wealth, if you have less than 1/16 Cherokee ancestry.
     
  20. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Navajo or Navaho (native name: Diné bizaad) is an Athabaskan language (of Na-Dené stock) spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages (the majority of Athabaskan languages are spoken in northwest Canada and Alaska).

    Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the U.S.-Mexico border, with 170,717 self-reported speakers in 2007,[1] and this number has increased with time.


    In Navajo orthography, the letter h represents two different sounds: it is pronounced [x] when stem initial and [h] when prefixal or stem/word final. However, when [x] is preceded by s it is always written as x and never as h so that it will not be confused with sh (e.g. násxéés "I'm turning around", but never náshéés). The consonant gh [ɣ] is written as y before front vowels i and e (where it is palatalized [ʝ]), as w before o (where it is labialized [ɣʷ]), and as gh before a. The glottal stop ʼ is not written at the beginning of words.

    For /ɣ/ gh, both the palatalization and labialization is represented in the orthography where it is written as y for the palatalized variant and w for the labialized variant. The orthography does not indicate the variants for the other consonants.

    http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...78CODw&usg=AFQjCNHubvGEZqof02cOvvw1uN-2yXqy8A
     
    Last edited: Oct 31, 2011
  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Within this century the discovery was made that the Na-Dene languages are related to the Yeniseian languages of Siberia, making Dene-Yeniseian the oldest known language family by a factor of about 2.5.

    Using this introduction to get back on topic, when Cavalli-Sforza was doing his (also 21st-century) exhaustive study of DNA and Paleolithic migration routes, his team went to the Navajos with this information, and also with photographs of modern Yeniseian people.

    Now bear in mind that the Navajo have a creation myth that rivals Genesis in its intractable support: the Navajo have lived in the Four Corners region since the beginning of time. Period. No walk across Beringia, no relation to the Tlingit, much less the Chinese.

    When one family was shown these photos, one fellow grabbed one, stared at it with his mouth hanging open, and said, "Dad, this guy looks just like Uncle Ernie!"

    The father looked at the photo for a while, then raised his head, looked straight into the camera, and said solemnly, "I guess it's true then. We really are all brothers."

    Damn. Don't you wish it was that easy to get science accepted everywhere?
     
  22. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    Civilization was an extreme departure from the prehuman instincts which had been in effect for tens of thousands of years. For one thing group size was never as large all through previous prehuman evolution. Because this new range of behavior was not initially natural, it would have caused a repression within the neohumans, until the human instincts had time to take root.

    The potential within the repression would have made the unconscious mind active and animated, with its dreams and projections attributed to their spirits of their mythologies. If this projection came from the collective unconscious, these spirits would symbolically outline paths to lower the repression, like in modern dream therapy, but within the context of the progressive changes implicit of the budding civilization. This would become their religion until human instinct began to evolve separated from their prehumans past.
     
  23. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    It can't have been that extreme, since we did it.

    More specious crap.
     

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