Someone Asked Whether Religion Was Bad For Animals

The answer is obviously yes: we're animals and religion is bad for us. It's also unfortunate that some religions teach that humans are fundamentally different from other life forms. I'm not an expert on Native American cultures, but I gather that some of them regard humans as just one part of life, no more important than other parts, an insight which Graeco-Roman Judaeo-Christian culture has resisted with much tenacity. And for all I know there many be many other human cultures in other parts of the world which lack these strange ideas about humans being unique, and about "nature" as something separate from humans. It amazes me to see how many biologists, although they've managed to shake the primitive belief in a deity or deities, still hang on to primitive ideas of human exceptionalism, insisting that humans are unique and separate from the rest of life, in the face of ever-mounting evidence that we are not. It's as if they haven't fully grasped the fact that all life forms are continuing to evolve, and that a paltry few million years ago our ancestors were creatures which human exceptionalists would not recognize as human, and that there's no reason to think that in a paltry few million years the descendants of dogs or cats won't be able to read or build computers or do other things which supposedly are "uniquely human." (What, you think dogs and cats aren't paying attention to us?) Not to mention assuming things such as that other species here and now have no human-like emotions, or that we actually comprehend their sophistication in other fundamental ways and are therefore qualified to compare them (disparagingly) with ourselves. Heraclitus and Nietzsche only got this one half right when they pointed out the similarity between apes and humans and said that people don't want to see the obvious similarities because apes are ugly and the similarity is insulting to us: some of the similarities between us and apes are insulting to the apes.

History of the World, Condensed Version, Part I, Clearly Hampered By My Having Studied Mostly Just Western Civ.

About 15 billion years ago, something very small and heavy, containing everything in the universe of which we know, exploded and became very big and hot and gassy. Gravity occurred somehow, or had already been there, or is an aspect or manifestion of the universe being curved, I don't know. Anyhow, hot gas eventually settled into balls, and one of these hot gas balls is our sun, and the Earth was a gas ball orbiting the Sun, and it cooled to the point where it became partly solid, and the Moon started orbiting the earth by mistake, it seems, because generally moons are much smaller proportion to their planets. See Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, and Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, or better yet, ask an actual scientist for tips for further reading.

Water appeared, then single-celled organisms. These eventually became more complex and differentiated into plants and animals. Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life tells us when certain species appeared, all of which are ancestors of us humans, hence the book's title. Did you know we're descended from lungfish? They were around 417 million years ago!

Yeah, I'm pretty clueless about such things. I refer you to Dawkins and Darwin, The Origin Of Species.

Darwin referred to the "struggle for existence. The geologist McCandles in William Gaddis' novel Carpenter's Gothic, presumably speaking for the author, complained about people having to struggle against the stupidity of other people, and speculated that it had been thus for quite a while: he imagined the brightest of out hominid ancestors two million years ago in Africa, banging away with rudimentary stone tools and trying to get something done despite the interference of idiots.

Art seems to have pre-dated urban life. Human life so far seems to have included at least 30,000 Years of Art; whether there actually were, by 10,000 B.C., huge stone temples and substantial towns such as those depicted in Roland Emmerich's film, I don't know. I'm picturing nothing much more than huts and cabins at that point, but what do I know?

I know that by 7,000 or 6,000 BC there were cities in Mesopotamia like Ur. (I don't know whether the name of the Mesopotamian city is only coincidentally the same as the German prefix or whether there's more to it than that.) Within a couple of thousand years after that, there were fairly complex civilizations with big towns in Mesopotamia and also in Egypt.

After 3,100 BC the record becomes much more detailed, because by then people had started writing. Probably in Mesopotamia first, in Sumeria, followed closely by Egypt. In both areas writing began as hieroglyphics, picture-writing, but in Mesopotamia it quickly became more abstract. Egypt became a very monolithic single state, Mesopotamia was filled with competing political entities, rising and falling over and over: among these were the Babylonians in the early second millenium BC, the Assyrians in the late second and early first millenia, and in the mid-first millenium, the neo-Babylonians and, pushing into Mesopotamia from the east where they held much more territory still, the Persians.

End of Part I of the Condensed Version

Well Hello There!

This is my first blog post ever, I just created my first blogger account. I'm not sure why I'm doing this except that some people who seem to know what they're talking about said I should.

I suppose I'll be writing mostly about historical, philosophical, religious and anthropological topics. The history will include a lot of art history. The philosophy will be of the sort where I mention lots of other philosophers and attempt to define my own position through my agreements with and differences from them.

My approach to religion is purely anthropological. I don't believe in God or the "supernatural." Not that that means that I regard all religions and all religious activity as equally wrong. As Nietzsche said, "Es gibt sehr nuetzliche Irrtuemer." (I'm going to be posting a lot of stuff in languages other than English, and I'm not going to translate all of it. If you find my blogs interesting, and you come across a passage in a language which is foreign to you, I hope you might take the trouble to learn a bit of that language. I hope that doesn't seem mean.) I find that the Old Testament is better written than the New, and that Homer is much, much better than either of them: more realistic, more true to the vitality and complexity of human life, just as polytheism, while no more true than monotheism, reflects much more closer the realities of human life with its inabsolutenesses and ongoing struggles between multiple powers.

I've written three books, a collection of essays and two novels, published zero. Is this blog gonna help me with that? I sure hope so. I think it's very likely I'll write at least a fourth and fifth.

Why am I The Wrong Monkey? I suppose I like the idea of monkeys and apes, who are being cruelly abused in labs and elsewhere, rising up, rebelling, evolving and eventually proving that they were the wrong monkeys to be messing with. I suppose I feel I've been kicked around and abused a bit, too. I imagine most people and many monkeys feel that way. I'm all about evolving, opposing oppression and exploitation, finding ways for us to be a little more decent to each other.

Excelsior!