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My wild side features: wild things blog
9-10-08: PERMALINK
Where we came from, and what we are
Didn't Jesus, Buddha, and lots of other history-making leaders-- near-universally considered to have been the wisest and/or best among us to have ever lived-- advise folks to be modest and humble?
It seems to me that humility on the part of modern man would include accepting the truth of who we are and where we came from. Namely, the lower animals. More recently and specifically, the monkeys and the apes.
It always amazes me how so many so-called Christians today can either utterly ignore the teachings of the one they claim to worship, or else act in perfectly opposite ways to those teachings. And then still claim to be Christians. Heck: the worst among them have pretty much thrown out all of the New Testament-- except for those bits and pieces they perceive as giving them reason to hate strangers, for one reason or another. Yuck! But maybe that's only true of particular strains of American Christians.
Anyway, one huge source of humility for us should be our own true origins among the animals. The plain fact that we are apes, which originally evolved from smaller monkeys (all of us merely different expressions of primate).
It may even be that our future survival itself depends on such humility as this: of admitting our true beginnings. For until we do that, we may not ever be able to truly and permanently cast out the worst of our animal natures. Those parts of our soul which have led to us creating our own ultimate doom in nuclear weapons and environmental poisonings. Not to mention the daily injustices we routinely inflict upon our own kind for purposes of often unjustified fear, and unbridled greed.
I recently ran across a video presentation which looks like a good follow up to the article Nature, CNN, CBS, the Economist, and the New York Times reveal that incest,
bestiality (and possibly homosexuality) were all crucial to the survival and
emergence of modern humanity:
What we are! (video)
 The true essential nature of the very richest among us today. |
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My wild side features: wild things blog
9-10-08: PERMALINK
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