Chapters 7-9

I found it interesting to read about the fluid nature of religion as civilization continued to develop during the time period outlined in the reading this week. From what I understand based on what I have read and previous classes, the main purpose of religion is to address complicated questions to which we have no answer. I am referring to questions like, "What happens when we die?" and similar things. For the people then, it could also refer to things like ,"Why did a tornado just drop and decimate our entire village?" Religion sought to answer the tough questions. I like this aspect of religion and through that lens I believe it to be very beneficial to society. Unfortunately, religion was appropriated throughout history by powerful people and rulers to justify their actions and policies. When you speak to a follower of one of these religions, they are very passionate about the sacred writings of their religion, but somewhat ignorant about the general history of religion in general.

From the reading, we find that Buddhism began in India. They have a fascinating view of the divine, but because the followers of Hinduism (the ones in power) didn't think they meshed well and thus Buddhism declined in India. The buddhists were pushed out of India and started spreading their message in other parts of Asia. In China people didn't really like Buddhism because it didn't mesh well with their familiar confucian values. So, Buddhists literally just changed their messages to be more favorable to the Chinese (For example, changing gender-equal messages in favor of the patriarchy.) Humans are apparently totally fine changing their divine writings in favor of power. The Buddhists weren't really conquerors, but other religions are a different story.

Islam apparently arose because a charismatic man wanted to unite the Arab people and solve a bunch of cultural and societal problems. He didn't like the Jews because they were exclusionary and apparently the Christians were wrong to consider Christ a god, so he made a new religion in his own image (one that addressed the issues facing his community.) Looking broadly over the centuries, it seems that these religions kind of just pop up when theres something bad going on. The caste system brought lots of order to India for a long time, but eventually Buddhism was birthed from it. Rulers claimed divine status as a way to control the people they extorted from.

As I bring this rant to a close, I'd like to finish with addressing a big concern I have with all this. Whether or not a divine presence channeled knowledge into these ancient prophetic people we will never know, but it was all written down way later by someone else. These sacred writings are used to justify some pretty horrific stuff. They aren't scientific in any way and give no evidence to support anything they claim yet, people kill and subjugate in their name. In the reading it says that the Quran says women are equal to men yet in Islamic countries women are totally---
So yeah, I think religion should stick to philosophy and stay away from the people who have power to control others.

Chapters 3-6

One thing I found interesting that I read was regarding slavery during the Roman Empire. Slavery, wasn't really racially motivated rather it was purely economic and strongly tied to their culture. Even more interesting was the fact that slaves held literally any occupation in society with the exception of the military. Slaves were skilled craftsmen and even doctors. It is so crazy to me to read that it would be perfectly legal to own a person and train them for years in a skilled task to never pay them or let them have any rights as an individual. For a long time I assumed a big reason slaves didn't revolt very often was due to them being uneducated and generally kept segregated from one another. The book said that they worked alongside non-slaves in all sorts of occupation. This leads me to think that many more of them were educated and able to read and write than I had previously thought. Was it simply that the military would step in readily and execute slaves trying to start rebellions? Also, was the fact that they were not allowed to learn military skills enough to keep them from challenging authorities? This would make sense considering that a big factor contributing to the failure of the rebellion led by Spartacus was his lack of military skills compared to the legions he was up against. Still, with at least a third of the population being slaves, that's a huge population that could be mobilized. I think all the women and the slaves should have united for civil rights as they would then hold the majority population wise, but as we know, nothing of the sort happened and patterns continued to repeat until modern times and only get darker. 

Another thing I found interesting was how the absence of domesticated animals shaped society in the Americas. Because America didn't have many animals capable of being enslaved, it greatly affected how civilizations developed. They couldn't produce food on the scale at which was possible in Eurasia and consequently, population didn't explode like it did over seas. Also, giant civilizations were much more difficult to grow so you had many more smaller states with few great rulers. It kind of makes me think about what would have been better. We now have the ability to feed an insane number of people, but what does more food mean? It means more people. Famine is natures way of population control and enforcing a sort of balance among all life on the planet. We figured out a way to 'hack' that natural process, but its unsustainable. A famine a thousand years ago meant little to the planet as a whole and with regards to all forms of life, but if humans are to experience a global famine today it would mean such a depletion of world resources I am worried will leave our planet lifeless (at least in the way Earth has been for millennia, I'm sure some bacteria and algae will start to evolve again into more complex creatures eventually as global climate change permits.)

Week 2 Journal Chapters 1, 2

I found it super interesting to read that during the Paleolithic era, there was very little class inequality. It makes sense that with small groups, people would more or less have to be proficient in all jobs and thus contribute the same things to the group as everyone else. I was surprised to read that there was however, no gender inequality. I had always assumed that a tendency towards patriarchy was sort of ingrained in our species. I figured men trying to control women would have arisen as soon as groups of humans began sticking together. This makes it seem kind of strange how it came about as civilizations began to grow. I get the military and 'heavy lifting' arguments for women being excluded from certain occupations and what not, but everything else? Why restrict women from so much? Not being able to own property or hold positions of authority seems insane and I can't think of any rationalization except that men in general liked being in a private power club. Why didn't women ever revolt? If they all stopped cooking and tending the house, what could the men do?

Another thing I thought was interesting was the fact that there were several human species living together for some time. Why did they all die out but us? They had obviously survived for a very long time independently from homo sapiens. Besides chimpanzees, we are also almost identically related to the bonobo, which is similar to a chimp. The chimpanzee is more violent in general and the bonobo is more peaceful in that many social conflicts are solved by sex. I bring this up as a shower thought, but here we have two very similar monkey species and they both survived just fine despite being so similar. Comparing them to us, wouldn't one of them have died out or something? I think homo sapiens are inherently xenophobic and with our increased brain sizes, that leads to some horrific behaviors. Basically, I surmise that homo sapiens probably wiped out these other species of humans rather than them simply dying off because its preprogrammed in us to not like what is different. Given our natural ability to wipe out other species, i think its more than reasonable to say this is possible.

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Yay! i have successfully set up a blog. So strange. I used this site in 2009 for a political science class and the blog is still here.... trippy