Re: On the Hubris Feeling

On Apr 4, 10:57 pm, Sir Frederick <mmcne...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On the hubris feeling :

One of the common insanities bequeathed to us by our evolved
past, seems to be a common hubris ( a feeling that we are somehow
important in the scheme of things).

A symptom of that is the ET visitation fantasy :
I doubt that we will be visited by any ET, anytime, neither sooner nor later.
That would be like you going to the next block to visit
a nondescript cockroach colony under some fridge. Not at all likely.
In the meanwhile : "Happy Hubris!"

Another symptom are the soul and "life after death" stories.
They help produce the thousands of religions we support.
Hubris then may be one of the many religious experiences
our homo sapiens brain promotes.

This insanity is so pervasive it must have been very useful to evolution.
Today we would probably be better off basing our continuation on
more objective grounds. Perhaps even choosing hubris as the vehicle,
but when it is driven as an insanity (similar to sex and breeding), it will
cause destructive problems.

The more primitive cultures are not immune to these problems,
in fact they may find it more problematic in this world today.

I shall explore this more,
despite the assholes that will snipe at it.

Excellent post Sir Frederick:

-----------------------------------
"Silencing a Skeptic

An excerpt from 'Hubris,' the new Isikoff and Corn book about how the
Bush administration sold the Iraq war to its supporters

Newsweek
Updated: 8:08 p.m. MT Sept 8, 2006

Sept. 08, 2006 - As the White House pressed its case for war against
Iraq in the fall of 2002, one senior GOP lawmaker agonized about what
to do. In this exclusive excerpt from 'Hubris: The Inside Story of
Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,' a new book by Michael
Isikoff and David Corn, is the previously untold story of how ***
Armey, who was then House majority leader and a silent skeptic about
Iraq, succumbed to Vice President *** Cheney's pressure-much to
Armey's later regret. . ."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14740070/site/newsweek/
-----------------------------------


"Was Religion a Kinship Surrogate?
Ferren MacIntyre
Environmental Change Institute, National University of Ireland,
Galway, Ireland

The origin of reciprocal altruism remains puzzling. Kin selection
fails because genes dilute quickly, and history does not support the
differential success of more altruistic religions. Some features of
religion can be related to kinship and were available to ancestral
primates in whom any behavior that enlarged the apparent family by
"pseudokinship" would spread. The evolutionary "function" of religion
may be that (like racism) it is a form of pseudokinship that tricks
the brain into thinking, "He looks like me, so we must be related,"
and "She believes what I do, so she must be family," with benefits to
genes that permit this trickery. This may explain the universality of
religious belief (and racism) and its survival independent of content
and why belief must not be testable (an accessible belief is valueless
for group definition). In a multiracial, multicredal world, racism and
religion no longer usefully enlarge the community."
http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/72/3/653






.