General Discussion

I tend to think that Sagan's 1977 classic "The Dragons of Eden" was correct about humankind's "fall from grace" was correct in that the growth of the frontal lobes resulted in our consciousness believing it was seperate from nature. This includes the seeing humans who were different as potentially dangerous "others." Recent finds in southeast Asia document, for example, the mixing of genetic materials between three distinct types of human beings, which tends to suggest that our type was the first that identified others as something different than us.

All modern humans are, to some extent, superstitious. While science has documented that, for example, a solar eclipse is not a supernatural event, we have a lucky pair of socks we wear when we are up to bat, etc. This would seem to have some ancient connection to the lizard brain's ritual instinct. Thus, the wearing of sacred socks when going to mass.

Education and science indeed provide a means of rising above being limited to being a clever ape that, to quote Neil Young, live in a box at the top of the stairs. Yet all education in the sciences has both the potential for good or bad, positive or negative. How these are to be used depends entirely on human evolution ..... and that is only the evolution of human's consciousness. We are at a point where no evolution is possible with the unconscious mind. That will not -- in fact, cannot -- happen unconsciously. Without that, we are clever apes driving our automobiles towards extinction.

I am not anti-religion. Some of my best friends are religious. Heck, most of them, actually. I've enjoyed participating in a wide range of their religious ceremonies over the decades. Some of the most outstanding individuals I've known were religious, with Daniel and Phillip Berrigan coming to mind. Yet, like science, religion can be used for good or bad, positive or negative. And I see a rise in the negative with the white christian nationalist movement, which calls upon the unconscious negatives of the human potential.