Do You Believe In God?

[cladking]

your earlier post about idiots, minimal evidence and nuclear bombs comes to mind -

when will you get it in your head that dissenters have always been killed to maintain the status quo?
they were the ones that were 'sacrificed' - not your vestal virgins

I'm not convinced this has always been true.

People have probably always been afraid of change and resisted it but I can't help but suspect that before the invention of writing that more were willing to embrace it. Writing was a watershed event for the species since it allowed many more people to become educated and to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge. The human advantage isn't intelligence, it's language. Not only did writing allow more widespread contributions but it propelled innovation and population to higher levels.

The unintended by products of change might have been the cause of the fear of change after populations got sio high that starvation might be the unintended consequence but I think it more likely that the real cause was war. With greater wealth and population came greater need for security beyond mere police. Militaries were formed for defense and conquest and this is where innovators and crackpots started getting put in the front lines. Relatively few survived so the problem was solved. Napolean put the tallest soldiers in front and now the French are among the shortest people.

There are several possible components that make up a person's resistence to change. Some is just an inflexibility of thought and some people just don't want to risk their comfort no matter how little of it they have. Some is religious and this component might be a little worse among monotheists but one certainly doesn't need to be monotheist to kill oddballs.

I still believe the world has been in a dark ages for a very very long time. We took a bad turn 4,000 years ago and never looked back.