A quibble is tribal warfare is an action of man so by definition is not natural. Very early forms can be considered natural but it became man made 200,000 years ago or much longer. Modern humans are the product of a super natural process. To say this is all natural removes all meaning and point to having a word natural.
I agree about morality. All animals that hunt in packs develop a morality, which is really a set of group rules to protect the survival of the group.
Modern anthropology is an embarrassing field full of crackpots that subscribe to the noble savage theory. Leading anthropologists tell us the Neanderthals likely died off from climate change, and never directly mention modern man killing them off on purpose. They tell us human intelligence came from better nutrition and that we walk upright to see better over grass, not because it frees our hands to wield weapons against competitors. Yes hands help us hunt and gather food, but animals show us that can be done fine without hands. Anthropologists often project their modern leftist values onto ancient people that makes them out to be happy hippies living in a commune until evil white man ruined everything. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
In general leftists come from the left side of the bell curve of their tribe. Their excessive vanity leads to envy which eventually sparks war. Leftists lose and die disproportionally during war. Sometimes the left side of the bell curve gets wiped out completely, however the bell curve spontaneously reforms from those remaining and the process repeats forever, man getting a little bit more intelligent and deadly each iteration. So we owe our high intelligence to the leftists among us, but they have little to be proud of.
At least 75% of academia is government funded, directly or indirectly. Because taxes butter their bread they tend to be pro higher taxes and bigger government and shun anyone not on board. High population density also produces people that have higher levels of vanity and therefore envy, and need bigger government to highly regulate away the freedoms of their neighbors. In the city you can’t have neighbors blaring their music at 3 am or barbecuing steaks on their apartment balcony, while living in the big land of Texas these activities are fine. Universities have high population density, are little cities, so they are prone to high levels of leftism.
The extremely wealthy become limousine leftists for the purpose of envy deflection. It works extremely well which is why they do it. While Warren Buffett talks publicly about how he should pay higher taxes, in private he hires an army of tax professionals to pay the absolute minimum. He can now enjoy his wealth openly and not worry about the left side of the bell curve burning his wealth to the ground. The rich do not fear the right so there's nothing lost in befriending the leftist beast so that they might be eaten last.
Religious people have many competitive advantages in school, sports, war, business, and life in general. They tend to be healthier, live longer, have more successful marriages, have more children, live in bigger houses, own bigger automobiles, which invokes great envy in leftists. You might ascribe their competitive advantages to a placebo effect, but who knows. There’s no easy way to gain these advantages without religion, so to attack religion is to wish the destruction of the competitive advantages of others. I'm not religious myself but I wish I was! It seems to require successful indoctrination during childhood, something the left is well aware of and one of the reasons they've worked to hijack education.
I think the main advantage to religious people today practically speaking is that they tend to produce and honor family...traditional families.
The structure that has proven to be the best vehicle for cultural success time and again.
And you are right...the disenchanted are trying to destroy that...our Achilles heel
I love your post.
Say, how do you make that fancy italicized text?
Your quibble isn’t unfounded, but actually that’s one of the major problems with arguments about what is “natural”. Ultimately, since humanity has arising from nature, everything we do can be described as natural; the label “unnatural” is arguably just an example of the anthropocentric conceit - it’s apparently natural when a beaver builds a dam but unnatural when we do it; natural when a wasp builds a nest but unnatural when we make paper. By the same token, when we talk about this very topic in genetics, we speak of natural vs. artificial selection, where natural selection occurs in nature without our influence while artificial selection is the exact same thing, only humans are deciding what to select for instead of natural survivability and reproduction deciding it. There’s no difference in the process, only in human will being behind the latter - and amusingly, selection that occurs due to byproducts of humanity, such as bacteria developing nylonase, is generally termed natural selection.
Further, “supernatural” is even further away from having a workable definition; we generally define it to be events that are somehow removed from the natural order - the actions of faeries or gods or witches or such. The trouble with that is that so long as such things have an effect on the natural world, that effect could be assayed, examined, observed, and tested in some regard; that would allow us to extrapolate about the source, and place it within the realm of “natural”, as the naturalist would use it. On the other hand, if we were unable to assay, examine, observe, or test the effects of the supernatural at all, there would be no way to tell if it had any effect at all in the first place, and so it’s rather moot.
Essentially yes - I agree entirely; the term “natural”, as opposed to either unnatural or supernatural, is poorly defined and of little use when making these sorts of arguments.
I think you have an unfairly dim view on modern anthropology; it’s not a field I spend much time around, I will admit, but when I was taught the basics (we’re required to do a bit, you know), the prof held back nothing; he went over various cultures without the need to sugarcoat, discussing both nice and nasty qualities thereof - he simply withheld moral judgement, as it would have taken longer or gotten in the way of simply describing what they did. Maybe it was different when you were instructed, but the whole “noble savage” thing is actually discussed by the modern anthropological community in an attempt to avoid the sort of bias it contains.
Further, not to be rude, but given the existence of other primates, your argument on hands is a wee bit moot; hands do not evolve merely for weaponry, but can be considered an arboreal (tree-dwelling) adaptation which lends itself well to tool use in general.
Further still, it would be more accurate to say the upright stance is less about seeing over grass (though that may have helped) and more about the key physical advantage humanity actually has - distance running. We are not tremendous sprinters, nor do we have great physical weapons or defenses, but we can run for a long, long time - it’s said that while we can’t out-sprint a horse, an experienced human could chase after it until it collapsed from exhaustion. From the arboreal primate stance, the upright stance makes sense in terms of moving to the planes and taking advantage of running.
As to leftists, while I’m more than happy to chuckle about what I see as the less viable aspects of what they think the role of government is, and indeed would argue against quite a bit of the philosophy that underlies some - not all of course - of their principles, I’m afraid I would have to disagree that leftists come from the left of the bell curve as well. There is actually a statistical correlation between education, intelligence, and more left-leaning philosophies. It’s a bit of a strange divide; while we would expect that the impoverished (who are also typically less educated) would be those more likely to vote democrat in an effort to get support, there is a strong trend of those same people voting republican on the grounds that they think they don’t need the support - the Tea Party, especially after being astroturfed by Fox, are not exactly shining examples of education and intelligence - and I say that not as an insult, but merely a statistical observation. I could look up a source on it if you think it’s untrue; I’d be quite delighted to be proven wrong in this case.
See, if you were to say “leftists are often better educated, and therefore less experienced in the ‘real world’ and hold ideals that are nice-sounding but don’t work out because of it, often becoming more conservative with age” or something like that, I might be able to get behind it. But left side of the bell curve? That’s just tooting our own horn without an real support.
By the same token, while scientific research is fairly heavily government funded, I’m afraid you are not accurate in saying that academics are more likely to vote for higher taxes. They *may* be willing to vote for more progressive taxes - that is, taxing the rich more than the poor, but no one really wants higher taxes. On the other hand, they would argue for more money being spent on scientific endeavors - and given the rather huge difference in military spending vs. scientific research spending (I believe the statistic on a federal level is something like 19% of the budget on military spending and 2% on scientific research, as well as another 2% on education), they would be more likely to argue that we shift the budget so that we have more money for research (and likely education) - in many cases, they suggest reducing military spending, and potentially social programs, in an effort to bolster the sciences, rather than to increase taxes in general.
To be honest, I don’t think I agree with your point about vanity and higher population centers. I’m not entirely clear on how you define vanity in such a case, but when we’re talking about blasting music and grilling on balconies, it’s not a matter of the government taking away rights, but about respecting the rights of others. The core tenant of a conservative view on rights, as I see it, is “your rights end where another’s begin” - blasting loud musing and preventing others from sleeping is essentially infringing upon their rights. The grills on balconies thing is more a matter of public safety; especially in the big city that sort of thing has indeed been shown to be a hazard. The fire code isn’t meant to hold back your rights, but to stop you from burning the place down with another several-score people inside. By definition, when people are living more closely together, in denser population centers, there will have to be more care taken not to infringe on others’ rights, but this is more a matter of *all* those people having equal rights, rather than taking away the rights of the neighbors.
As to the claims about the religious, I’d say it’s not fully accurate. Religion is not strongly correlated with better educational performance, and owing to the fact that it often *is* correlated with less wealth, the reverse is actually true. I don’t think we can say that it has advantages in sports - rather, I would guess that if (and I frankly don’t know) there are more religious folks in professional sports, it is more likely due to the sorts of backgrounds people who go into pro sports have (as opposed to going into the sciences, say) rather than any sort of religious advantage. War I might agree with - religion is frequently used to create a strong “us or them” advantage, and encourage people to go to war - however, that is an advantage on the production side of things; it’s dwarfed by most combat modifiers on the actual battlefield - the best you can hope for is a slight advantage in moral and a willingness to be fed into a meat-grinder; the same can be said of extreme patriotism or other forms of fervor. Business I really can’t speak to; I wouldn’t know where to start that discussion, other than to point out examples of famous religious and non-religious businessmen and women, but we would have to be able to demonstrate that religion actually provided an advantage there.
As to the rest of life in general, I don’t know I can get behind your statements. Atheists actually have statistically longer-lasting marriage when compared to religious folks, for one. More children I’ll grant to the religious of course - owing both to religious beliefs that prohibit contraception, religious efforts to prevent *knowledge* about contraception, and because religion is especially common among people to the left side of the economic bell curve. To be frank though, I’m not sure I’d call that an advantage.
As to bigger houses, cards, and longer life, I don’t see that as being supported at all. Indeed, if one examines religiosity vs. wealth on a world-wide scale, it’s a strong trend that more religious countries are also less wealthy - and more wealth and longer life correlate. Some studies have shown the same for individual people. This is probably not a negative effect of religion itself, but rather a trend that when a country is more wealthy, it is better able to provide for education; with increased education comes an increase in freedom of thought, and thus less religious belief. Indeed, the US is actually an outlier in these statistics; we’re the only country that both has strong religiosity and a strong GDP - which seems to make quite clearly that it is not an advantage conveyed by religion, but something else.
Now I could be wrong here; I don’t suppose you have statistics that show that religion correlates with wealth or being “better off”? Again, I’m just not sure I see the sorts of advantage you’re speaking off; I’ve not seen support for these ideas, so if you could provide me that support I would be much obliged.