Mankind Evolution Quotes

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.

To really change the world, we have to help people change the way they see things. Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological. So if you want to see real change, stay persistent in educating humanity on how similar we all are than different. Don't only strive to be the change you want to see in the world, but also help all those around you see the world through commonalities of the heart so that they would want to change with you. This is how humanity will evolve to become better. This is how you can change the world. The language of the heart is mankind's main common language.

The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.

In our evolution language has been the greatest single contribution to our understanding and misunderstanding

[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." Yes? Why is that?" Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

We are not sheep or cows. God didn’t create fences for us or boundaries to contain our nationalities. Man did. God didn’t draw up religious barriers to separate us from each other. Man did. And on top of that, no father would like to see his children fighting or killing each other. The Creator favors the man who spreads loves over the man who spreads hate. A religious title does not make anyone more superior over another. If a kind man stands by his conscience and exhibits truth in his words and actions, he will stand by God regardless of his faith. If mankind wants to evolve, we must learn from our past mistakes. If not, our technology will evolve without us.

Of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind.

Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.

Your job then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship—just so long as those prayers are sincere. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light. The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn't become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative of places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite." But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed ... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? That's me in the corner, in other words. That's me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.

It was badly received by the generation to which it was first addressed, and the outpouring of angry nonsense to which it gave rise is sad to think upon. But the present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate—the necessity of revising their convictions. Let them, then, be charitable to us ancients; and if they behave no better than the men of my day to some new benefactor, let them recollect that, after all, our wrath did not come to much, and vented itself chiefly in the bad language of sanctimonious scolds. Let them as speedily perform a strategic right-about-face, and follow the truth wherever it leads.

It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones - a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ... is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics ... we were deliberately to become men who need "order" and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

We are all of life who stepped from the sea trading weightless journeys of the currents We are all of life who build and tear down and build again to find gold and silver to find scars that weep and bleed to step from the sea to stay with the sea

Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.

Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.

Man is now able to fly through the air like a bird, he is able to swim under the sea like a fish, he is able burrow beneath the ground like a mole. Now if only he could walk the earth like a man, this would be paradise.

If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species.

Our evolution depends on our memory. If we keep forgetting the mistakes of the past, only to keep repeating them, then we will never change. Humanity will never move forward, spiritually or morally, to become superior beings.

To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.

...unquestioning automatons blindly marching to the beat - an eerie crunching sound hoards of shuffling feet... (from silent moments)

And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of the second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind.

It is not true that the unconscious goal in the evolution of every conscious being (animal, man, mankind, etc) is its 'highest happiness': the case, on the contrary, is that every stage of evolution possesses a special and incomparable happiness neither higher nor lower but simply its own. Evolution does not have happiness in view, but evolution and nothing else.

Language as putative science. - The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreame knowledge of things; language is, in fact, the first stage of occupation with science. Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the mightiest sources of energy have flowed. A great deal later - only now - it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be put back. - Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.

It is inevitable that machines will one day become the ultimate enemies of mankind. We are not evolving or progressing with our technology, only regressing. Technology is our friend today, but will be our enemy in the future.

Tell me something. Do you believe in God?' Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. 'What? Who still believes nowadays?' 'It isn't that simple. I don't mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I'm no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new--do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an...imperfect God?' 'What do you mean by imperfect?' Snow frowned. 'In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considered that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals...' 'No,' I interrupted. 'I'm not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a...sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He has created systems or mechanisms that serves specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.' Snow hesitated, but his attitude no longer showed any of the wary reserve of recent weeks: 'There was Manicheanism...' 'Nothing at all to do with the principles of Good and Evil,' I broke in immediately. 'This god has no existence outside of matter. He would like to free himself from matter, but he cannot...' Snow pondered for a while: 'I don't know of any religion that answers your description. That kind of religion has never been...necessary. If i understand you, and I'm afraid I do, what you have in mind is an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness. For your god, the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs. But isn't this despairing god of yours mankind, Kelvin? Is it man you are talking about, and that is a fallacy, not just philosophically but also mystically speaking.' I kept on: 'No, it's nothing to do with man. man may correspond to my provisional definition from some point of view, but that is because the definition has a lot of gaps. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve is age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside. If there was only a since human being in existence, he would apparently be able to attempt the experiment of creating his own goals in complete freedom--apparently, because a man not brought up among other human beings cannot become a man. And the being--the being I have in mind--cannot exist in the plural, you see? ...Perhaps he has already been born somewhere, in some corner of the galaxy, and soon he will have some childish enthusiasm that will set him putting out one star and lighting another. We will notice him after a while...' 'We already have,' Snow said sarcastically. 'Novas and supernovas. According to you they are candles on his altar.' 'If you're going to take what I say literally...' ...Snow asked abruptly: 'What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?' 'I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.

In Egyptian Arabic, the word 'insan' means 'human'. If we remove the 'n', the word becomes 'insa', which means 'to forget'. So you see, the word 'forget' is taken from the word 'human'. And since it was God who created our minds and hearts, He knew from the very beginning that we would quickly forget our history, only to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So the ultimate test of every human is to seek wisdom. After all, wisdom is gained from having a good memory. Only after we have passed this test will we evolve to become better humans. Man is only a forgetful mortal, but God — He sees, hears and remembers everything.

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure.

When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?

If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.

the names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.

War appears to be as old as Mankind, but peace is a modern invention.

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through “asexuality” (“without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs”). Each of them split in half: “Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).

The 'Manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and the oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles. This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845.

For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long eons of evolution, our genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future—be it one of promise or threat.

In another thirty to fifty years, the demand for cheap labor will have produced even more machines over the employment of actual humans. And in that time frame, humans will have lost their voice, their power, all freedoms, and all worth. It is inevitable that machines will one day become the ultimate enemies of mankind. We are not evolving or progressing with our technology, only regressing. Technology is our friend today, but will be our enemy in the future.

Say what you want, do what you will with all those fine speeches on evolution, civilisation and a ton of other '-tion' words, mankind has not progressed very far from its origins: people still believe they're not here by chance, and that there are gods, kindly for the most part, who are watching over their fate.

You see, Jung had this idea of a Collective Unconscious which mankind shared... and I agree. But! I think this Collective Mind is supposed to be conscious, not unconscious! And that is our job as the Agents of Evolution to enlighten - to bring light into the dark corners of that Netherworld and thus awaken our Mind to Truth and complete the circle that was broken with the dream of our fall from Grace.

The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific reasons to doubt the facticity of evolution, would be propagating a plain untruth.

I am no feminist. Even though the term "feminism" is founded upon the basic principle of gender equality, it possesses its own fundamental gender bias, which makes it inclined towards the wellbeing of women, over the wellbeing of the whole society. And if history has shown anything, it is that such fundamental biases in time corrupt even the most glorious ideas and give birth to prejudice, bigotry and differentiation.

THE DEVIL. As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion....

History is far more important than evolutionary theorizing as a reminder about human potential, because the historical evidence of change is so much more vivid.

The mind cannot just manufacture words for abstract concepts out of thin air – all it can do is adapt what is already available.

Mankind is a troupe in the fallibility of evolution and everything at his feet a prop, a false world made real enough to function without attainment or compensation of the genuine.

If monkeys knew what man was going to be like, I think that they would have stopped evolving.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

I had written the sentence, 'You mustn't think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet. . . . that cultural developments could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilization not inferior to our own could arise in the depths of the sea. . . . Would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal other than man declared that its education and its numbers gave it the sole right to occupy the entire world and hold sway over all creation?

The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.

Curiosity, that is, the separate drive to explore the world disinterestedly, without being stimulated by danger or physiological dissatisfaction, is, according to students of evolution, rooted in specific morphological characteristics of our species and thus cannot be eliminated from our minds as long as our species retains its identity. As both Pandora’s most deplorable accident and the adventures of our progenitors in Paradise testify, curiosity has been a main cause of all the calamities and misfortunes that have befallen mankind, and it has unquestionably been the source of all its achievements.

What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How did they know it? Nowhere in Genesis is there even the merest hint of the equation: Forbidden fruit equals sin equals sex. We know it to be true because there can only be one thing so central to mankind. Sex.

They had fought and starved and even died in pursuit of mankind's oldest dream, but they hadn't known that Tear's vision was flawed. Too easy. Utopia was not the clean slate Tear had imagined, but an evolution. Humanity would have to work for that society, and work hard, dedicating themselves to an unending vigilance against the mistakes of the past. It would take generations, countless generations perhaps, but--

The predisposition to religious belief is an ineradicable part of human behavior. Mankind has produced 100,000 religions. It is an illusion to think that scientific humanism and learning will dispel religious belief. Men would rather believe than know... A kind of Darwinistic survival of the fittest has occurred with religions... The ecological principle called Gause's law holds that competition is maximal between species with identical needs... Even submission to secular religions such as Communism and guru cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group. Religious practices confer biological advantage. The mechanisms of religion include (1) objectification (the reduction of reality to images and definitions that are easily understood and cannot be refuted), (2) commitment through faith (a kind of tribalism enacted through self-surrender), (3) and myth (the narratives that explain the tribe's favored position on the earth, often incorporating supernatural forces struggling for control, apocalypse, and millennium).

Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.

During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes. Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is, if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him? (Albert Einstein, Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A 1934 Symposium published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941; from Einstein's Out of My Later Years, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970, pp. 26-27.)

Like no other particle on earth, the morphine molecule seemed to possess heaven and hell. It allowed for modern surgery, saving and improving too many lives to count. It stunted and ended too many lives to count with addiction and overdose. Discussing it, you could invoke some of humankind’s greatest cultural creations and deepest questions: Faust, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, discussions on the fundamental nature of man and human behavior, of free will and slavery, of God and evolution. Studying the molecule you naturally wandered into questions like, Can mankind achieve happiness without pain? Would that happiness even be worth it? Can we have it all?

In fact this type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evil of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind

I believe that the Big-Bang Theory and the Evolution Theory, as well as Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory which does not allow for the existence of faster-than-light (superluminal) phenomena, all have flaws in them and must be replaced by new theories that can give Mankind a more concise view of our Universe. But the fact is exceptional discoveries and theories that challenge official science have been ignored by the Establishment for decades.

Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics.

But what is this force that pushes us as individuals and as a whole species to grow against the natural resistance of our own lethargy? We have already labeled it. It is love. Love was defined as ‘the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.’ When we grow, it is because we are working at it, and we are working at it because we love ourselves. It is through love that we elevate ourselves. And it is through our love for others that we assist others to elevate themselves. Love, the extension of the self, is the very act of evolution. It is evolution in progress. The evolutionary force, present in all of life, manifests itself in mankind as human love. Among humanity love is the miraculous force that defies the natural law of entropy.

Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate’, purportedly translated literally from the German: It is a bleak day. Hear the rain, how he pours, and the hail, how he rattles; and see the snow, how he drifts along, and of the mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor fishwife, it is stuck fast in the mire; it has dropped its basket of fishes; and its hands have been cut by the scales as it seized some of the falling creatures; and one scale has even got into its eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its mouth to cry for help; but if any sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the storm. And now a tomcat has got one of the fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a fin, she holds her in her mouth – will she swallow her? No, the fishwife’s brave mother-dog deserts his puppies and rescues the fin – which he eats, himself, as his reward …

Up to now in the West none of the apostles of stabilization and petrification has succeeded in wiping out the individuals' innate disposition to think and to apply to all problems the yardstick of reason. This alone, and no more, history and philosophy can assert in dealing with doctrines that claim to know exactly what the future has in store for mankind.

Mankind, as history tells us over and over again, seeks the least painful solution and, as a result, ends up exchanging one problem for another

ennui

Make mankind your dwelling place.

The moment when humanity learns to tame all its primeval biases, only then it will be worth the title "Sapiens", not any earlier.

We no longer have any time to waste, entertaining our dark side. It is time we recognize those evil elements of our internal world and start working untiringly on eradicating them.

One example that can illustrate how deeply such conceptual mappings are engrained in both language and mind is the image ‘more is up, less is down’.

how modern Hebrew has recently coined a rather recherché template, the passive of the reflexive (‘he was made to snog himself’),

Another area where languages often display erratic behaviour is what linguists call ‘gender’,

He wondered if the younger generation had the strongest thumbs known to mankind. Maybe from now on, kids would be born that way, like evolution.

Where are we now? I think modern mankind is on the evolutionary scale of teenager: we think we know it all and it’s all about us. From "Holo Earth and the Evolution of Awareness

Sarcastic’ comes from Greek ‘flesh tearing’ (sárx – flesh), and is related to the word sarcophagus (literally ‘flesh eating’).

Flaubert thought democracy merely a stage in the history of government, and he thought it a typical vanity on our part to assume that it represented the finest, proudest way for men to rule one another. He believed in--or rather, he did not fail to notice -- the perpetual evolution of humanity, and therefore the evolution of its social forms: 'Democracy isn't mankind's last word, any more than slavery was, or feudalism was, or monarchy was.' The best form of government, he maintained, is one that is dying, because this means it's giving way to something else.

Earlier than about 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter gatherers. Soon, probably none will be. Those not extinct will be 'civilised' — or corrupted, depending on your point of view.

But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.

In India there is a sect of Jainist monks called the Shvetambara, who always carry a broom and sweep the ground before them as they walk, lest they accidentally tread on some insects and squash them.

The teacher claimed it was so plain, I only had to use my brain. She said the past of throw was threw, The past of grow – of course – was grew, So flew must be the past of fly, And now, my boy, your turn to try. But when I trew, I had no clue, If mow was mew Like know and knew (Or is it knowed Like snow and snowed?) The teacher frowned at me and said The past of feed was – plainly – fed. Fed up, I knew then what I ned: I took a break, and out I snoke, She shook and quook (or quaked? or quoke?) With raging anger out she broke: Your ignorance you want to hide? Tell me the past form of collide! But how on earth should I decide If it’s collid (Like hide and hid), Or else – from all that I surmose, The past of rise was simply rose, And that of ride was surely rode, So of collide must be collode? Oh damn these English verbs, I thought The whole thing absolutely stought! Of English I have had enough, These verbs of yours are far too tough. Bolt upright in my chair I sat, And said to her ‘that’s that’ – I quat.

I put it to you that no rule consciously invented by mankind since we acquired speech has force equivalent to those inherited from perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred thousand generations of evolution in the wild state. I further suggest that the chief reason why modern society is in turmoil is that for too long we claimed that our special human talents could exempt us from the heritage written in our genes.

The impact of colonization caused the delay in the evolution of mankind. The mental capacity of man has been reduced to that of animals. So let's break this mental slavery and the decolonization of the Will.

People can cope with the chaos of change over the years (that is, with 'diachronic variation'), simply because they can cope with the even greater chaos of synchronic variation, the diversity at any one point in time.

We may also conceive of the evolution of humanity as a vast army, toiling slowly along its line of march in a great column; and, scouting far ahead of the main body, solitary outriders, swift-mounted, light-armed and without baggage, exploring the way for the rest; spiritual guerrillas, whom Paul referred to as those born out of due season. From time to time we shall see some swift-footed soul draw ahead of the great army of mankind and push on alone into the wilderness. For a period his path is solitary, but presently he catches up with the far-flung line of the scouts, and if able to give the password that proves him to be of their body, is given his place in the ranks of that adventurous company, a boundary-rider of evolution, alone on patrol, yet not out of touch with his comrades, for there are signaling-points along the line, and at certain seasons all gather in to the council.

Error regarding life necessary to life. - Every belief in the value and dignity of life rests on false thinking; it is possible only through the fact that empathy with the universal life and suffering of mankind is very feebly developed in the individual. Even those rarer men who think beyond themselves at all have an eye, not for this universal life, but for fenced-off portions of it. If one knows how to keep the exceptions principally in view, I mean the greatly gifted and pure of soul, takes their production for the goal of world-evolution and rejoices in the effects they in turn produce, one may believe in the value of life, because the one is overlooking all other men: thinking falsely, that is to say. And likewise if, though one does keep in view all mankind, one accords validity only to one species of drives, the less egoistical, and justifies them in face of all the others, then again one can hope for something of mankind as a whole and to this extent believe in the value of life: thus, in this case too, through falsity of thinking. Whichever of these attitudes one adopts, however, one is by adopting in an exception among men. The great majority endure life without complaining overmuch; they believe in the value of existence, but they do so precisely because each of them exists for himself alone, refusing to step out of himself as those exceptions do: everything outside themselves they notice not at all or at most as a dim shadow. Thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on the fact that regards himself more highly than he does the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual fruits but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. - But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.

The philosophy of Hobbes, it is true, contains nothing of modern race doctrines, which not only stir up the mob, but in their totalitarian form outline very clearly the forms of organization through which humanity could carry the prerequisite for all race doctrines, that is, the exclusion in principle of the idea of humanity which constitutes the sole regulating idea of international law. With the assumption that foreign politics is necessarily outside of the human contract, engaged in the perpetual war of all against all, which is the law of the "state of nature," Hobbes affords the best possible theoretical foundation for those naturalistic ideologies which hold nations to be tribes, separated from each other by nature, without any connection whatever, unconscious of the solidarity of mankind and having in common only the instinct for self-preservation which man shares with the animal world. If the idea of humanity, of which the most conclusive symbol is the common origin of the human species, is no longer valid, then nothing is more plausible than a theory according to which brown, yellow, or black races are descended from some other species of apes than the white race, and that all together are predestined by nature to war against each other until they have disappeared from the face of the earth.

The primitive man has one quality, elaborated and maintained by the very necessities of his hard struggle for life – he identifies his own existence with that of his tribe; and without that quality mankind never would have attained the level as it has attained now.

Not through the dogmas of archaic doctrines will you gain your greatest understandings, but, rather, through the continued evolution of science, and through your keen observations of the natural environment beyond your windows. To comprehend yourself truly, which is also to comprehend the world truly, you needn't look any farther than at what abounds with life around you—the blossoming meadow, the untrodden woodlands. Without this as mankind's overriding objective, I don't foresee an age of actual enlightenment ever arriving.

The parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages.

And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of the second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind.

Throughout the evolution of mankind our very much primordial ancestors had one thing in common, it was ignorance. This ignorance gave birth to fear. Fear of the unknown became a quintessential element of their daily survival. To ace the intensity of the fear, rituals of worship arose.

It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning—it will cease to have any relation to ethics. I suppose that, so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions. The science of the present day is as full of this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience of ignorant ages. The difference is that the philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality. So, it may be, that the majority of mankind may find the practice of morality made easier by the use of theological symbols. And unless these are converted from symbols into idols, I do not see that science has anything to say to the practice, except to give an occasional warning of its dangers. But, when such symbols are dealt with as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of science is to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater value than the fabrications of men's hands, the stocks and the stones, which they have replaced.

What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death. There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!

The question “What is man?” is probably the most profound that can be asked by man. It has always been central to any system of philosophy or theology…. The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.

I'm afraid Dr. Mondrick chose an unfortunate publicity device. After all, the theory of human evolution is no longer front page news. Every known detail of the origin of mankind is extremely important to such a specialist as Dr. Mondrick, but it doesn't interest the man in the street - not unless it's dramatized.

And it is through our love for others that we assist others to elevate themselves. Love, the extension of the self, is the very act of evolution. It is evolution in progress. The evolutionary force, present in all of life, manifests itself in mankind as human love. Among humanity love is the miraculous force that defies the natural law of entropy.

Even without abstract thought or metaphysical theorizing, just standing on two legs and using clubs gave mankind more than enough skill to win the race for survival on earth. These other abilities aren’t that necessary. And in exchange for our hyper-capable cerebral cortexes, of necessity we have to give up lots of other physical abilities. For example, dogs have a sense of smell several thousand times better than humans, and a sense of hearing tens of times better. But we’re able to amass complex hypotheses. We’re able to compare and contrast the cosmos and the microcosmos, and appreciate Van Gogh and Mozart. We can read Proust—if you want to, that is—and collect Koimari porcelain and Persian rugs. Not something a dog can do.

The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behaviour at this time are those who think highly of Homo Sapiens as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the Totalitarian States, and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of Capitalist Society, are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe. The whole thing looks like a denial of all reason, and they feel as if they and the world had gone mad together. Now for the Christian, this is not so. He is as deeply shocked and grieved as anybody else, but he is not astonished. He has never thought very highly of human nature left to itself. He has been accustomed to the idea that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very centre of human personality, and that you can never, as they say, ‘make people good by Act of Parliament’, just because laws are man-made and therefore partake of the imperfect and self-contradictory nature of man. Humanly speaking, it is not true at all that ‘truly to know the good is to do the good’; it is far truer to say with St. Paul that ‘the evil that I would not, that I do’; so that the mere increase of knowledge is of very little help in the struggle to outlaw evil. The delusion of the mechanical perfectibility of mankind through a combined process of scientific knowledge and unconscious evolution has been responsible for a great deal of heartbreak. It is, at bottom, far more pessimistic than Christian pessimism, because, if science and progress break down, there is nothing to fall back upon. Humanism is self-contained - it provides for man no resource outside himself.

Advances in technology can be empowering, progressive and enriching. History has shown this across civilisations and societies. But it has also shown, and the present and future will continue to show, that it is foolish, risky, flawed and folly without us raising our individual and collective consciousness and mindfulness to accompany it - to ensure we use it shrewdly, kindly and wisely.

In every known culture, humans experience joy, sadness, disgust, anger, fear, and surprise. In every known culture, these emotions are indicated by the same facial expressions. This empirical observation, which is predicted and mandated by the structural logic of evolution, is known as the psychic unity of mankind. (I prefer the term “psychological unity of humankind,” but I didn’t invent it.)

Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a mammal; an ape; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the iniative in courtship and females usually leave the society of their birth; an ape in which men are predators, women herbivorous foragers; an ape in which males are relatively hierarchical, females relatively egalitarian; an ape in which males contribute unusually large amounts of investment in the upbringing of their offspring by provisioning their mates and their children with food, protection, and company; an ape in which monogamous pair bonds are the rule but many males have affairs and occasional males achieve polygamy; an ape in which females mated to low-ranking males often cuckold their husbands in order to gain access to the genes of higher-ranking males; an ape that has been subject to unusually intense mutual sexual selection so that many of the features of the female body (lips, breasts, waists) and the mind of both sexes (songs, competitive ambition, status seeking) are designed for use in competition for mates; an ape that has developed an extraordinary range of new instincts to learn by association, to communicate by speech, and to pass on traditions. But still an ape.

And now at last the Earth was dead. The final pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form—and how titanically meaningless it had all been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity—how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools in the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions—or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever. The stars whirled on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns newborn, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led.

Well, first of all,” Langdon said, “Edmond inscribed this piece in clay as an homage to mankind’s earliest written language, cuneiform.” The woman blinked, looking uncertain. “The three heavy markings in the middle,” Langdon continued, “spell the word ‘fish’ in Assyrian. It’s called a pictogram. If you look carefully, you can imagine the fish’s open mouth facing right, as well as the triangular scales on his body.” The assembled group all cocked their heads, studying the work again. “And if you look over here,” Langdon said, pointing to the series of depressions to the left of the fish, “you can see that Edmond made footprints in the mud behind the fish, to represent the fish’s historic evolutionary step onto land.” Heads began to nod appreciatively. “And finally,” Langdon said, “the asymmetrical asterisk on the right—the symbol that the fish appears to be consuming—is one of history’s oldest symbols for God.” The Botoxed woman turned and scowled at him. “A fish is eating God?” “Apparently so. It’s a playful version of the Darwin fish—evolution consuming religion.” Langdon gave the group a casual shrug. “As I said, pretty clever.

Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This 'progress' is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. "Socialism ― or the tyranny of the meanest and the most brainless, ―that is to say, the superficial, the envious, and the mummers, brought to its zenith, ―is, as a matter of fact, the logical conclusion of “modern ideas” and their latent anarchy: but in the genial atmosphere of democratic well-being the capacity for forming resolutions or even for coming to an end at all, is paralysed. Men follow―but no longer their reason.

The disdain shown toward these texts by most of the modern Orientalists, who wanted to relate everything back to the Vedä(s) (as, moreover, the Western world does to the Greeks), has led them to make monumental errors in dating and describing the evolution of religious and philosophical concepts. Many passages of the best-known texts of philosophical and religious brahmanic literature written in the Sanskrit language are derived from the Âgamä(s). This is the case with, for example, the Bhagavat Gîtâ, of which over half the verses are borrowed from the Parameshvarä Âgamä and three of which passages are quotations from the Shvetâshvatarä Upanishad, which is itself based on the Âgamä(s).2

Founded in the 1960s by an Italian industrialist and a Scottish chemist, the Club of Rome is a talking shop for the great and the good, devoted to the worship of Malthus, and meeting behind closed doors at lavish venues. Together with its affiliates it still attracts leading names, from Al Gore and Bill Clinton to the Dalai Lama and Bianca Jagger. ‘The real enemy, then, is humanity itself,’ the Club of Rome declaimed in a book in 1993, and ‘democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and is unaware of its own limits.’ In 1974 in its second report, called ‘Mankind at the Turning Point’, the Club of Rome issued a call for creationist thinking that remains unparalleled in its technocratic arrogance: In

Emphatically rejecting ali traditional religions and claiming for their teachings the epithet "scientific," various writers tried to substitute a new faith for the old ones. They claimed to know precisely what the mysterious power that directs ali cosmic becoming has in store for mankind. They proclaimed an absolute standard of values. Good is what works along the lines that this power wants mankind to follow; everything else is bad. In their vocabulary "progressive" is a synonym of good and "reactionary" a synonym of bad. Inevitably progress will triumph over reaction because it is impossible for men to divert the course of history from the direction prescribed by the plan of the mysterious prime mover. Such is the metaphysics of Karl Marx, the faith of contemporary selfstyled progressivism. Marxism is a revolutionary doctrine. It expressly declares that the design of the prime mover will be accomplished by civil war. It implies that ultimately in the battles of these campaigns the just cause, that is, the cause of progress, must conquer. Then ali conflicts concerning judgments of value will disappear. The liquidation of ali dissenters will establish the undisputed supremacy of the absolute eternal values. This formula for the solution of conflicts of value judgments is certainly not new. It is a device known and practiced from time immemorial. Kill the infidels! Burn the heretics! What is new is merely the fact that today it is sold to the public under the label of "science.

Man is the first product of evolution to be capable of controlling evolutionary destiny.'" Endowed as he is with reasoning powers, he must independently decide up on his own behavior, without the compelling guidance by instinct. Supplied with mind, he is expected to cooperate consciously with nature in her further evolutionary program. Unfortunately humanity has arrantly failed to make a serious effort to promote its own further progress. Instead of using the power of the mind to understand the responsibilities which freedom from blind obedience to instinct entails, mankind has refused to listen whenever it was reminded of the requirements of the evolutionary law. It was so much easier to lend an ear to the promptings of desire, which was an unknown element up to the human stage. It must have been very soon after the acquisition of mental self-consciousness and his becoming aware of stirrings of primitive impulses, that man began to use the mind to stimulate the desires of the body. In this way he has indulged the almost negligible sexual impulse which he inherited from the animal kingdom, until it has become a desire so strong that he has difficulty to control it. Overstimulated by this unnaturally strong desire of his own making, man has looked for arbitrary ways in which to gratify it. Although reducing actual reproduction, he has discovered ways of unreproductive sexual action. But every such act, whatever form it takes, is a misuse of sex and uses up some of the life force that should be utilized for the support and the development of higher faculties. "The record of our race progress clearly shows how our upward movement has been checked ... by that misuse.

Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This “progress” is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening. True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that in language mankind set up beside the world a separate world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things. [ . . . ] A great deal later—only now—it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error.

Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This 'progress' is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening. True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.

In order for mankind to be kinder, more love filled and more human with each other, we all have to be more intentional about being better, more transcendent in our humanness. Any human evil enough to enslave, colonize, unjustly criminalize, imperialize, slaughter or emotionally and physically brutalize other people, is not human. You can't be both inhuman and human at the same time. The two can't occupy the same human. The human animal has thus far, proven itself to be one of the worst species to have ever traversed this planet. No other species has ever shown such barbarity and anti-sentience to other sentient beings, like the human specie has. In order for our specie to further evolve. In order for our specie to work repair the damage we've done to this beautiful place we call and to the sentient family, our humanity and inhumanness, can longer walk hand in hand.

Mankind - proud conqueror and king swings its flag of primal glory to the winds Titans of the power-myth that failed Neanderthal hunger for the flesh of war so frail So weak, so hollow-minded the primat flock responds the jester race submits For each day of war is a failure for man, enslaved in her mordial genes Illusions bleed from their fetid cores, bent to their rotten extremes We, the plague of Terra Firma, nature's grand and last mistake plant the poisoned seed of cancer, set the severed fruits awake Burning like frozen relics in god's archaic graveland Burn the visionaire Kill the ideaologies Mankind must die The doves and the angels return to their graves with flames on their pestilent wings while mushroom-clouds haunt their virginwhite skies to rape their utopian dreams Living the last days of evolution's end from the nest of humanity, the graveland vultures rend

Almost fifty years ago, John F. Kennedy made this appeal: 'Too many of us think [that peace] is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view ... Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions - on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process - a way of solving problems.' (Close quote.)

done. Every time I go to China, we meet for sixty to ninety minutes. We talk about what’s happening in the world, and how that relates to thousands of years of history and the never-changing nature of mankind. We discuss a wide range of other topics as well, ranging from physics to artificial intelligence. We are both keenly interested in how most everything happens over and over again, the forces behind those patterns, and the principles that work and don’t work in dealing with them. I gave Wang a copy of Joseph Campbell’s great book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, because he is a classic hero and I thought it might help him. I also gave him The Lessons of History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through history by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by the insightful Richard Dawkins, which explains how evolution works. He gave me Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History. All these books showed how the same things happened over and

This book has shown mankind as torn between two states of being. On one hand are the kinds of attitudes and emotions appropriate to behaviour in the small groups wherein mankind lived for more than a hundred thousand years, wherein known fellows learnt to serve one another, and to pursue common aims. Curiously, these archaic, more primitive attitudes and emotions are now supported by much of rationalism, and by the empiricism, hedonism, and socialism associated with it. On the other hand there is the more recent development in cultural evolution wherein we no longer chiefly serve known fellows or pursue common ends, but where institutions, moral systems, and traditions have evolved that have produced and now keep alive many times more people than existed before the dawn of civilisation, people who are engaged, largely peacefully though competitively, in pursuing thousands of different ends of their own choosing in collaboration with thousands of persons whom they will never know.

By contrast, creationism, or "intelligent design" (its only cleverness being found in this underhanded rebranding of itself) is not even a theory. In all its well-financed propaganda, it has never even attempted to show how one single piece of the natural world is explained better by "design" than by evolutionary competition. Instead, it dissolves into puerile tautology. One of the creationists' "questionaires" purports to be a "yes/no" interrogation of the following: Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? If you answered YES for any of the above, give details. We know all the answer in all cases: these were painstaking inventions (also by trial and error) of mankind, and were the work of many hands, and are still "evolving". This is what makes piffle out of the ignorant creationist sneer, which compare evolution to a whirlwind blowing through a junkyard of parts and coming up with a jumbo jet.

Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental than differences. Less fundamental, but no less important, as life and 'intelligence' would be totally impossible without abstracting. It becomes clear that the problem which has so excited the s.r. of the people of the United States of America and added so much to the merriment of mankind, 'Is the evolution a ''fact'' or a ''theory''?, is simply silly. Father and son are never identical - that surely is a structural 'fact' - so there is no need to worry about still higher abstractions, like 'man' and 'monkey'. That the fanatical and ignorant attack on the theory of evolution should have occured may be pathetic, but need concern us little, as such ignorant attacks are always liable to occur. But that biologists should offer 'defences' based on the confusions of orders of abstractiobs, and that 'philosophers' should have failed to see the simple dependence is rather sad. The problems of 'evolution' are verbal and have nothing to do with life as such, which is made up all through of different individuals, 'similarity' being structurally a manufactured article, produced by the nervous system of the observer.

The pathbreaker who disdains the applause he may get from the crowd of his contemporaries does not depend on his own age's ideas. He is free to say with Schillers Marquis Posa: "This century is not ripe for my ideas; I live as a citizen of centuries to come." The genius' work too is embedded in the sequence of historical events, is conditioned by the achievements of preceding generations, and is merely a chapter in the evolution of ideas. But it adds something new and unheard of to the treasure of thoughts and may in this sense be called creative. The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is ideas that distinguish man from ali other beings. Ideas engender social institutions, political changes, technological methods of production, and ali that is called economic conditions. And in searching for their origin we inevitably come to a point at which ali that can be asserted is that a man had an idea. Whether the name of this man is known or not is of secondary importance. This is the meaning that history attaches to the notion of individuality. Ideas are the ultimate given of historical inquiry. Ali that can be said about ideas is that they carne to pass. The historian may point out how a new idea fitted into the ideas developed by earlier generations and how it may be considered a continuation of these ideas and their logical sequei.

One of the most important of these truths—a new ethic of interaction—began to surface in various places around the globe, but ultimately found clear expression in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. Instantly I could see the Birth Visions of hundreds of individuals born into the Greek culture, each hoping to remember this timely insight. For generations they had seen the waste and injustice of mankind’s unending violence upon itself, and knew that humans could transcend the habit of fighting and conquering others and implement a new system for the exchange and comparison of ideas, a system that protected the sovereign right of every individual to hold his unique view, regardless of physical strength—a system that was already known and followed in the Afterlife. As I watched, this new way of interaction began to emerge and take form on Earth, finally becoming known as democracy. In this method of exchanging ideas, communication between humans still often degenerated into an insecure power struggle, but at least now, for the first time ever, the process was in place to pursue the evolution of human reality at the verbal rather than the physical level. At the same time, another watershed idea, one destined to completely transform the human understanding of spiritual reality, was surfacing in the written histories of a small tribe in the Middle East. Similarly I could also see the Birth Visions of many of the proponents of this idea as well. These individuals, born into the Judaic culture, knew before birth that while we were correct to intuit a divine source, our description of this source was flawed and distorted. Our concept of many gods was merely a fragmented picture of a larger whole. In truth, they realized, there was only one God, a God, in their view, that was still demanding and threatening and patriarchal—and still existing outside of ourselves—but for the first time, personal and responsive, and the sole creator of all humans. As I continued to watch, I saw this intuition of one divine source emerging and being clarified in cultures all over the world. In China and India, long the leaders in technology, trade, and social development, Hinduism and Buddhism, along with other Eastern religions, moved the East toward a more contemplative focus. Those who created these religions intuited that God was more than a personage. God was a force, a consciousness, that could only be completely found by attaining what they described as an enlightenment experience. Rather than just pleasing God by obeying certain laws or rituals, the Eastern religions sought connection with God on the inside, as a shift in awareness, an opening up of one’s consciousness to a harmony and security that was constantly available.

In our earliest history, so far as we can tell, individuals held to an allegiance toward their immediate tribal group, which may have numbered no more than ten or twenty individuals, all of whom were related by consanguinity. As time went on, the need for cooperative behavior--in the hunting of large animals or large herds, in agriculture, and in the development of cities--forced human beings into larger and larger groups. The group that was identified with, the tribal unit, enlarged at each stage of evolution. Today, a particular instant in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth and in the several-million-year history of mankind, most human beings owe their primary allegiance to the nation-state (although some of the most dangerous political problems still arise from tribal conflicts involving smaller population units). Many visionary leaders have imagined a time when the allegiance of an individual human being is not to his particular nation-state, religion, race, or economic group, but to mankind as a whole; when the benefit to a human being of another sex, race, religion, or political persuasion ten thousand miles away is as precious to us as to our neighbor or our brother. The trend is in this direction, but it is agonizingly slow. There is a serious question whether such a global self-identification of mankind can be achieved before we destroy ourselves with the technological forces our intelligence has unleashed.

Byrd "justified" mind control atrocities as a means of thrusting mankind into accelerated evolution, according to the Neo-Nazi principals to which he adhered. He "justified" manipulating mankind's religion to bring about the prophesied biblical "world peace" through the "only means available" -- total mind control in the New World Order. "After all," he proclaimed, "even the Pope and Mormon Prophet know this is the only way to peace and they cooperate fully with The Project." Byrd also "justified" my victimization by saying, "You lost your mind anyway, and at least you have destiny and purpose now that it's mine." Our country's involvement in drug distribution, pornography, and white slavery was "justified" as a means of "gaining control of all illegal activities world wide" to fund Black Budget covert activity that would "bring about world peace through world dominance and total control." He adhered to the belief that "95% of the [world's] people WANT to be led by the 5%", and claimed this can be proven because "the 95% DO NOT WANT TO KNOW what really goes on in government." Byrd believed that in order for this world to survive, mankind must take a "giant step in evolution through creating a superior race." To create this "superior race," Byrd believed in the Nazi and KKK principles of "annihilation of underprivileged races and cultures" through genocide, to alter genetics and breed "the more gifted -- the blondes of this world.

Another potential challenge to my thesis is that I myself would be hypocritical to continue in biblical studies. However, while I concede that this would be true if I were pursuing biblical studies for the sake of keeping the field alive, I have instead used my work in biblical studies to persuade people to abandon reliance on this book. I see my goal as no different from physicians, whose goal of ending human illness would lead to their eventual unemployment. The same holds true for me. I would be hypocritical only if I sought to maintain the relevance of my profession despite my belief that the profession is irrelevant. If I work to inform people of the irrelevance of the Bible for modern life, then I am fully consistent with my beliefs. From a different angle, our work is part of the proliferation of books preoccupied with the finality of different aspects of the human experience. Perhaps the most famous recent example is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (2002), in which he argued that liberal democracy constitutes the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution," so that we should expect no new historical developments in world history. Fukuyama's thesis, of course, has been misunderstood to mean that historical events would end. However, the truth is that he has a more Hegelian view of history, in which history ends when a sort of stasis in the development of new ideas is reached. According to Fukuyama, liberal democracy cannot be superseded and will triumph over any other competing political idea; people will see its advantages and will universally adopt it. And so, in that sense, history will end.

Another way of expressing the history of religion is that faith has hijacked religious spirituality. The prophets and leaders of organized religions, consciously or not, have put spirituality in the service of groups defined by their creation myths. Awe-inspiring ceremonies and sacred rites and rituals and sacrifices are given the deity in return for worldly security and the promise of immortality. As part of the exchange the deity must also make correct moral decisions. Within the Christian faith, among most of the denominational tribes, God is obliged to be against one or more of the following: homosexuality, artificial contraception, female bishops, and evolution. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the risk of tribal religious conflict very well. George Washington observed, “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing and ought most to be deprecated.” James Madison agreed, noting the “torrents of blood” that result from religious competition. John Adams insisted that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” America has slipped a bit since then. It has become almost mandatory for political leaders to assure the electorate that they have a faith, even, as for the Mormonism of Mitt Romney, if it looks ridiculous to the great majority. Presidents often listen to the counsel of Christian advisers. The phrase “under God” was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and today no major political candidate would dare suggest it be removed.

A Presidential speech by a real President on Peace in the World John Kennedy 10th June 1963 “We need to examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But this is a dangerous defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that War is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man made and they therefore can be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable. I am not here referring to the absolute and universal concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the values of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our immediate goal. Let us focus instead on a more practical more attainable goal—based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution of human institutions in a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single simple key to his peace—no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic not static, changing to meet the needs of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems. So let us not be blind to our differences but let us also direct our attention to our common interests and the means by which these differences can be resolved, and if we now can not end our differences at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air, we all cherish our childrens futures and we are all mortal.

Turning and climbing, the double helix evolved to an operation which had always existed as a possibility for mankind, the eating of light. The appetite for light was ancient. Light had been eaten metaphorically in ritual transubstantiations. Poets had declared that to be is to be a variable of light, that this peach, and even this persimmon, is light. But the peach which mediated between light and the appetite for light interfered with the taste of light, and obscured the appetite it aroused. The appetite for actual light was at first appeased by symbols. But the simple instruction, promulgated during the Primordification, to taste the source of the food in the food, led to the ability to eat light. Out of the attempt to taste sources came the ability to detect unpleasant chemicals. These had to be omitted. Eaters learned to taste the animal in the meat, and the animal's food and drink, and to taste the waters and sugars in the melon. The discriminations grew finer - children learned to eat the qualities of the pear as they ate its flesh, and to taste its slow ripening in autumn sunlight. In the ripeness of the orange they recapitulated the history of the orange. Two results occurred. First, the children were quick to surpass the adults, and with their unspoiled tastes, and their desire for light, they learned the flavor of the soil in which the blueberry grew, and the salty sweetness of the plankton in the sea trout, but they also became attentive to the taste of sunlight. Soon there were attempts to keep fruit of certain vintages: the pears of a superbly comfortable autumn in Anjou, or the oranges of Seville from a year so seasonless that their modulations of bouquet were unsurpassed for decades. Fruit was eaten as a retrospective of light. Second, children of each new generation grew more clearly, until children were shaped as correctly as crystals. The laws governing the operations of growth shone through their perfect exemplification. Life became intellectually transparent. ("Desire")

By pressing the doctrine of disinterestedness and love into the foreground, Christianity by no means elevated the interests of the species above those of the individual. Its real historical effect, its fatal effect, remains precisely the increase of egotism, of individual egotism, to excess (to the extreme which consists in the belief in individual immortality). The individual was made so important and so absolute, by means of Christian values, that he could no longer be sacrificed, despite the fact that the species can only be maintained by human sacrifices. All "souls" became equal before God: but this is the most pernicious of all valuations! If one regards individuals as equals, the demands of the species are ignored, and a process is initiated which ultimately leads to its ruin. Christianity is the reverse of the principle of selection. If the degenerate and sick man ("the Christian") is to be of the same value as the healthy man ("the pagan"), or if he is even to be valued higher than the latter, as Pascal's view of health and sickness would have us value him, the natural course of evolution is thwarted and the unnatural becomes law. ... In practice this general love of mankind is nothing more than deliberately favouring all the suffering, the botched, and the degenerate: it is this love that has reduced and weakened the power, responsibility, and lofty duty of sacrificing men. According to the scheme of Christian values, all that remained was the alternative of self-sacrifice, but this vestige of human sacrifice, which Christianity conceded and even recommended, has no meaning when regarded in the light of rearing a whole species. The prosperity of the species is by no means affected by the sacrifice of one individual (whether in the monastic and ascetic manner, or by means of crosses, stakes, and scaffolds, as the "martyrs" of error). What the species requires is the suppression of the physiologically botched, the weak and the degenerate: but it was precisely to these people that Christianity appealed as a preservative force, it simply strengthened that natural and very strong instinct of all the weak which bids them protect, maintain, and mutually support each other. What is Christian "virtue" and "love of men," if not precisely this mutual assistance with a view to survival, this solidarity of the weak, this thwarting of selection? What is Christian altruism, if it is not the mob-egotism of the weak which divines that, if everybody looks after everybody else, every individual will be preserved for a longer period of time? ... He who does not consider this attitude of mind as immoral, as a crime against life, himself belongs to the sickly crowd, and also shares their instincts. ... Genuine love of man kind exacts sacrifice for the good of the species it is hard, full of self-control, because it needs human sacrifices. And this pseudo-humanity which is called Christianity, would fain establish the rule that nobody should be sacrificed.

It serves the American socialists as a leading argument in their endeavor to depict American capitalism as a curse of mankind. Reluctantly forced to admit that capitalism pours a horn of plenty upon people and that the Marxian prediction of the masses' progressive impoverishment has been spectacularly disproved by the facts, they try to salvage their detraction of capitalism by describing contemporary civilization as merely materialistic and sham. Bitter attacks upon modem civilization are launched by writers who think that they are pleading the cause of religion. They reprimand our age for its secularism. They bemoan the passing of a way of life in which, they would have us believe, people were not preoccupied with the pursuit of earthly ambitions but were first of ali concerned about the strict observance of their religious duties. They ascribe ali evils to the spread of skepticism and agnosticism and passionately advocate a return to the orthodoxy of ages gone by. It is hard to find a doctrine which distorts history more radically than this antisecularism. There have always been devout men, pure in heart and dedicated to a pious life. But the religiousness of these sincere believers had nothing in common with the established system of devotion. It is a myth that the political and social institutions of the ages preceding modem individualistic philosophy and modem capitalism were imbued with a genuine Christian spirit. The teachings of the Gospels did not determine the official attitude of the governments toward religion. It was, on the contrary, thisworldly concems of the secular rulers—absolute kings and aristocratic oligarchies, but occasionally also revolting peasants and urban mobs—that transformed religion into an instrument of profane political ambitions. Nothing could be less compatible with true religion than the ruthless persecution of dissenters and the horrors of religious crusades and wars. No historian ever denied that very little of the spirit of Christ was to be found in the churches of the sixteenth century which were criticized by the theologians of the Reformation and in those of the eighteenth century which the philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked. The ideology of individualism and utilitarianism which inaugurated modern capitalism brought freedom also to the religious longings of man. It shattered the pretension of those in power to impose their own creed upon their subjects. Religion is no longer the observance of articles enforced by constables and executioners. It is what a man, guided by his conscience, spontaneously espouses as his own faith. Modern Western civilization is thisworldly. But it was precisely its secularism, its religious indifference, that gave rein to the renascence of genuine religious feeling. Those who worship today in a free country are not driven by the secular arm but by their conscience. In complying with the precepts of their persuasion, they are not intent upon avoiding punishment on the part of the earthly authorities but upon salvation and peace of mind.

The philosophers who in their treatises of ethics assigned supreme value to justice and applied the yardstick of justice to ali social institutions were not guilty of such deceit. They did not support selfish group concerns by declaring them alone just, fair, and good, and smear ali dissenters by depicting them as the apologists of unfair causes. They were Platonists who believed that a perennial idea of absolute justice exists and that it is the duty of man to organize ali human institutions in conformity with this ideal. Cognition of justice is imparted to man by an inner voice, i.e., by intuition. The champions of this doctrine did not ask what the consequences of realizing the schemes they called just would be. They silently assumed either that these consequences will be beneficiai or that mankind is bound to put up even with very painful consequences of justice. Still less did these teachers of morality pay attention to the fact that people can and really do disagree with regard to the interpretation of the inner voice and that no method of peacefully settling such disagreements can be found. Ali these ethical doctrines have failed to comprehend that there is, outside of social bonds and preceding, temporally or logically, the existence of society, nothing to which the epithet "just" can be given. A hypothetical isolated individual must under the pressure of biological competition look upon ali other people as deadly foes. His only concern is to preserve his own life and health; he does not need to heed the consequences which his own survival has for other men; he has no use for justice. His only solicitudes are hygiene and defense. But in social cooperation with other men the individual is forced to abstain from conduct incompatible with life in society. Only then does the distinction between what is just and what is unjust emerge. It invariably refers to interhuman social relations. What is beneficiai to the individual without affecting his fellows, such as the observance of certain rules in the use of some drugs, remains hygiene. The ultimate yardstick of justice is conduciveness to the preservation of social cooperation. Conduct suited to preserve social cooperation is just, conduct detrimental to the preservation of society is unjust. There cannot be any question of organizing society according to the postulates of an arbitrary preconceived idea of justice. The problem is to organize society for the best possible realization of those ends which men want to attain by social cooperation. Social utility is the only standard of justice. It is the sole guide of legislation. Thus there are no irreconcilable conflicts between selfíshness and altruism, between economics and ethics, between the concerns of the individual and those of society. Utilitarian philosophy and its finest product, economics, reduced these apparent antagonisms to the opposition of shortrun and longrun interests. Society could not have come into existence or been preserved without a harmony of the rightly understood interests of ali its members.

There are, on the other hand, very great men, very holy men, very pure men in every way, whose knowledge is wide and vast and deep, whose spiritual stature is great; but when they reach Buddhahood, instead of feeling the call of almighty love to return and help those who have gone less far, they go ahead into the supernal light — pass onwards and enter the unspeakable bliss of nirvana — and leave mankind behind. Such are the Pratyeka Buddhas. Though exalted, nevertheless they do not rank in unutterable sublimity with the Buddhas of Compassion. The Pratyeka Buddha, he who achieves Buddhahood for himself, does not do it selfishly, however; does not do it merely in order to gratify self, and he does no harm to others; if he did he could never reach even his solitary Buddhahood. But he does it and achieves nirvana automatically, so to speak, following the lofty impulses of his being. Nevertheless he leaves the world behind enslaved in the chains of matter and forgotten by him. The Pratyeka Buddha concentrates on the one thing — self-advancement for spiritual ends. It is a noble path in a way, but although it is a more rapid path, nevertheless being essentially a selfish path, the karmic records will show deeper lines ultimately to be wiped out than will those of the other striver after the spiritual life who follows the path of complete self-renunciation, and who even gives up all hope of self-advancement. The latter is of course by far the nobler path, but for a time it is very much slower, and much more difficult to follow. The objective, the end, is more difficult to obtain; but when obtained, then the guerdon, the reward, the recompense, are ineffably sublime. For a time it is a slower path, but a perfect path. It is a wonderful paradox that is found in the case of the Pratyeka Buddha — this name pratyeka means 'each for himself.' But this spirit of 'each for himself' is just the opposite of the spirit governing the Order of the Buddhas of Compassion, because in the Order of Compassion the spirit is: give up thy life for all that lives. The “Solitary One” knows that he cannot advance to spiritual glory unless he live the spiritual life, unless he cultivates his spiritual nature, but as he does this solely in order to win spiritual rewards, spiritual life, for himself alone, he is a Pratyeka Buddha. He is for himself, in the last analysis. There is a personal eagerness, a personal wish, to forge ahead, to attain at any cost; whereas he who belongs to the Order of the Buddhas of Compassion has his eyes set on the same distant objective, but he trains himself from the very beginning to become utterly self-forgetful. This obviously is an enormously greater labor, and of course the rewards are correspondingly great. The time comes when the Pratyeka Buddha, holy as he is, noble in effort and in ideal as he is, reaches a state of development where he can go no farther on that path. But, contrariwise, the one who allies himself from the very beginning with all nature, and with nature’s heart, has a constantly expanding field of work, as his consciousness expands and fills that field; and this expanding field is simply illimitable, because it is boundless nature herself. He becomes utterly at one with the spiritual universe; whereas the Pratyeka Buddha becomes at one with only a particular line or stream of evolution in the universe. The Pratyeka Buddha raises himself to the spiritual realm of his own inner being, enwraps himself therein and, so to speak, goes to sleep. The Buddha of Compassion raises himself, as does the Pratyeka Buddha, to the spiritual realms of his own inner being, but does not stop there, because he expands continuously, becomes one with All, or tries to, and in fact does so in time.

Wagner's basic idea was of mystical origin; he wanted to understand the whole human being, the inner person as well as what he revealed outwardly. Wagner knew that within human beings a higher being resides, a higher self that was only partially revealed in space and time. He sought to understand that higher entity that rises above the everyday. He felt that it must approached from as many sides as possible. His search for the superhuman aspect of man's being, for that which rises above the merely personal, led him to myths. Mythical figures were not merely human, they were superhuman: They revealed the superhuman aspect of a person's being. Characters like Siegfried and Lohengrin do not display qualities belonging to a single human being, but to many. Wagner turned to the superhuman figures portrayed in myths because he sought understanding of the deeper aspects of the human being. . . . We can do no more than turn a few spotlights on Wagner's inner experiences as an artist. In so doing we soon discover his strong affinity with what could be called 'man's mythical past.' His particular interest in the figure of Siegfried can easily be understood when seen in connection with his concept of mankind's evolution. Looking back to ancient times, Wagner saw that formerly the bond between human beings was based on selfless love within the confines of a tribe. Human consciousness at that time was duller; he did not yet experience personal independence. Each one felt himself, not so much an individual, but rather as a member of his tribe. He experienced the tribal soul as a reality.

Ernst Mayr asserted that “it would be difficult to refute the claim that the Darwinian revolution was the greatest of all intellectual revolutions in the history of mankind.” Stephen Jay Gould called the theory of evolution one of the half dozen most important ideas in the entire history of Western thought. Richard Dawkins inquired what common ground we could find for conversation with an extraterrestrial intelligence, and answered “evolution”—because it is “a universal truth” that is common throughout the cosmos.

For much of human history spurring the norms of one’s society was a risky proposition as it increased the chance of being rejected by one’s social group and so decreased the ability to survive and pass on one’s genes. Conformity, in other words, is a trait that was selected for through the process of evolution and this can help account for the strong pull we feel to be normal. Another factor that makes normality attractive is our tendency, like all biological creatures, to take the path of least resistance. Life is too complicated to improvise novel ways of dealing with all situations and so most of the time we just do as others do and think as others think. That mankind has this inborn disposition to conform is a good thing – it promotes social cohesion and cooperation and it allows a society to develop in complex ways that would be impossible were we not a conforming species.

If a black family lives long enough in a cold climate, in about 100 generations or so, their descendants will be born white.

Black History is World History.

We often hear lamentations that the coal stored up in the earth is wasted by the present generation without any thought of the future, and we are terrified by the awful destruction of life and property which has followed the volcanic eruptions of our days. We may find a kind of consolation in the consideration that here, as in every other case, there is good mixed with the evil. By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.

More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such constituted the “end of history.” That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was

Let us be on our guard lest we deceive ourselves! Time flies forward apace, — we would fain believe that everything flies forward with it, — that evolution is an advancing development .... That is the appearance of things which deceives the most circumspect. But the nineteenth century shows no advance whatever on the sixteenth: and the German spirit of 1888 is an example of a backward movement when compared with that of 1788 .... Mankind does not advance, it does not even exist. The aspect of the whole is much more like that of a huge experimenting workshop where some things in all ages succeed, while an incalculable number of things fail; where all order, logic, coordination, and responsibility is lacking. How dare we blink the fact that the rise of Christianity is a decadent movement? — that the German Reformation was a recrudescence of Christian barbarism? — that the Revolution destroyed the instinct for an organisation of society on a large scale?

evolution and advancement of our kind based on fair competition. Fact of the matter is, Gold does not want man to continue to evolve. Since the conquering, they have routinely stifled advancement to maintain their heaven. They’ve wrapped themselves in myth. Filled their grand oceans with monsters to hunt. Cultivated private Mirkwoods and Olympuses of their very own. They have suits of armor to make them flying gods. And they preserve that ridiculous fairy tale by keeping mankind frozen in time. Curbing invention, curiosity, social mobility. Change threatens that. “Look where we are. In space. Above a planet we shaped. Yet we live in a Society modeled after the musings of Bronze Age pedophiles. Tossing around mythology like that bullshit wasn’t made up around a campfire by an Attican farmer depressed that his life was nasty, brutish, and short.

What separates man from animal is not the things we build or the ideas we stand behind. Its our ability to kill from a distance that makes us different

•A candidate running for president in 2012 referred to higher education as “mind control” and “indoctrination.” He ran again in 2016.         •A former Governor and 2012 presidential contender blamed the separation of church and state on Satan. He also sought to solve his state’s drought problem by asking its citizens to pray for rain. He ran again in 2016.         •A 2012 presidential contender claimed, “there’s violence in Israel because Jesus is coming soon.”         •A Georgia congressman claimed that evolution and the Big Bang Theory were “lies straight from the pit of Hell,” adding “Earth is about 9,000 years old and was created in six days, per the Bible.” He’s a physician, and a high-ranking member of the House Science Committee.         •From another member of the House Science Committee: “Prehistoric climate change could have been caused by dinosaur flatulence.”         •From the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: “Global warming isn’t real, God is in control of the world.”         •A former Speaker of the House -- a born-again Christian, and convicted felon – declared, “One thing Americans seem to forget is that God wrote the Constitution.”         •The Lt. Governor of a southern state claimed that Yoga may result in satanic possession.         •A Southern senator claimed, “video games represent a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.”         •A California state representative proudly stated: “Guns are used to defend our property and our families and our freedom, and they are absolutely essential to living the way God intended for us to live.”         •Another California representative suggested that abortion was to blame for the state’s drought.         •From a Texas representative: “The great flood is an example of climate change. And that certainly wasn’t because mankind overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”         •An Oklahoma representative said: “Just because the Supreme Court rules on something doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional.”         •From another Texas representative: “We know Al Qaeda has camps on the Mexican border. We have people that are trained to act Hispanic when they are radical Islamists.”         •A South Carolina State representative, commenting on the Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage said, “The devil is taking control of this land and we’re not stopping him!

Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and many more great minds laid the groundwork for the development of modern science. Over the foundation of philosophy, history witnessed the daring ventures of human excellence by both philosophical and scientific geniuses, such as Leonardo-da-Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Darwin, Newton and so on. And the chain of reaction they triggered with their extraordinarily abnormal thinking, given their surrounding ignorance and fundamentalism, resulted into the evolution of our modern science.

Anthropology studies the phenomenon of man, not simply man's mind, his body, evolution, origins, tools, art, or groups alone, but as parts or aspects of a general pattern, or whole. To emphasize this fact and make it a part of their ongoing effort, anthropologists have brought a general word into widespread use to stand for the phenomenon, and that word is culture.

The greatest obstacle in our evolution is that WE ARE TOO DIVIDED.

Faced with the primary instinct that a genetic programme pushes to reproductive need, humans have managed to divert from that to make themselves beings of pleasure. In the end, there lies the difference. Man is the only mammal that has sex for pleasure.

Modern society has sent men on a quest that is perhaps an inquiry just as thought-provoking as the popular question: what is the meaning of life. The question thrown at men by the society is one which many men struggle to answer, and that question is: What does it mean to be a man?

Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This "progress" is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening.

The first major step towards achieving true world peace, and one of the most important pinnacles in the evolution of mankind, is to shift people's perception of how they view wealth. If we can change the way consumers place value on material versus spiritual wealth, we can demolish the media. We can make the government work for us. We can have Big Business serving the vested interests of the people and we can put a halt to advertising puffery, toxic chemicals in our medicines and foods, wars, violence, and corruption. Peacemakers come from all trades. We can be and will be self-sufficient. It starts now. We far outweigh those setting the rules and limitations.

The process has already started. Science is proving more and more each day what some spiritual teachers have been teaching for thousands of years. People are starting to wake up in larger numbers. As people awaken they will influence others. With each awakening the cosmic mind gets a little brighter. As we evolve so will the cosmic forces of creation. The human race and planet earth will heal. Poverty, starvation, and war, will someday be a thing of the past. We create our own reality. We collectively create a much larger reality. The next step in mankind’s evolution will be spiritual.

In meditation, we can develop awareness. Our identity then shifts from thoughts and emotions to presence. Presence brings the dark into the light. The light is love. When we create from love, the greater good is done. We create heaven on earth. This is the future of mankind. This is spiritual evolution.

I'm here on this world to leave a legacy with this life as a service to mankind in their spiritual evolution.

Unanswered questions are the source of true evolution, pushing mankind and its imagination onward past the brink of the unknown, in to realms never thought possible. Scenarios never thought conceivable. Created of pure fiction but ensconced within realistic possibilities where the impossible soon becomes the inevitable.

Feeling had controlling influence over those primitive people, not thinking. It played a crucial part in the evolutionary development of modern humans. That’s why we humans are basically an emotional species alongside being the smartest one.

Mankind’s ideological evolution remained stagnant, but as the novelty of this realization war off, the need to pronounce the sadness of this state of affairs through culture went by the wayside.

Beloved men, know that this is the truth:1 This world is in haste, and it approaches its end, and therefore always in the world The longer (it is), the worse (it gets) …

What in the evolution of mankind is the meaning of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?’ (By ‘abstract labour’ Marx means work done simply in order to earn a wage, rather than for the worker’s own specific purposes. Thus making a pair of shoes because one wants a pair of shoes is not abstract labour; making a pair of shoes because that happens to be a way of getting money

simple concepts – here, parts of the body from ‘head’ to ‘heel’ and from ‘breast’ to ‘intestines’ – are swept out of their original environment and carried into the domain of spatial relations.

without these much maligned forces of destruction, language would never have developed in the first place.

abstract’ comes from a Latin verb which simply meant ‘draw away’ (abstrahere).

Human Design is a tool that teaches us about the power and possibility of evolution in mankind. There are learnings on a personal, relationship and collective level. The real beauty of Human Design is truly in the unification of all of its unique esoteric components.

Walker had traveled to London on a mission to promote Wisconsin for trade purposes, and an interviewer had asked him the tiresome and irrelevant question whether he believes in evolution. Walker refused to answer the question. “That’s a question politicians shouldn’t be involved in one way or another,” he said. “I am going to leave that up to you. I’m here to talk about trade, not to pontificate about evolution.” Asking a Scott Walker whether he believes in evolution when only 19 percent of the American populace believes it to be the only explanation for why we are here is a device for measuring his membership in the smart set. After all, Walker isn’t the only prominent American without a college degree. Take NBC News, for example. Its outgoing serial fabulist anchor Brian Williams never graduated from college, and neither did Williams’ replacement Lester Holt. But both Williams and Holt would dutifully parrot the “pro-science” viewpoint that yes, yes, evolution explains the origins of mankind. It’s only those knuckle-dragging white Christian rednecks from flyover territory who believe otherwise. And since Walker lacks an Ivy League pedigree or in fact even a degree at all, if he can be engaged to spout bible-beating hokum on foreign shores that surely would be the end of him.

change is not the exception but the rule.

Mankind willfully changing the global electromagnetic radiation environment has created what I expect will become known as the man-made evolution era.

Selfishness has as much value as the physiological value of him who possesses it. Each individual represents the whole course of Evolution, and he is not, as morals teach, something that begins at his birth. If he re present the ascent of the line of mankind, his value is, in fact, very great; and the concern about his maintenance and the promoting of his growth may even be extreme. (It is the concern about the promise of the future in him which gives the well-constituted individual such an extraordinary right to egoism.) If he represent descending development, decay, chronic sickening, he has little worth: and the greatest fairness would have him take as little room, strength, and sunshine as possible from the well-constituted. In this case society's duty is to suppress egoism (for the latter may sometimes manifest itself in an absurd, morbid, and seditious manner): whether it be a question of the decline and pining away of single individuals or of whole classes of mankind. A morality and a religion of "love," the curbing of the self-affirming spirit, and a doctrine encouraging patience, resignation, helpfulness, and co-operation in word and deed may be of the highest value within the confines of such classes, even in the eyes of their rulers: for it restrains the feelings of rivalry, of resentment, and of envy, feelings which are only too natural in the bungled and the botched, and it even deifies them under the ideal of humility, of obedience, of slave-life, of being ruled, of poverty, of illness, and of lowliness. This explains why the ruling classes (or races) and individuals of all ages have always upheld the cult of unselfishness, the gospel of the lowly and of "God on the Cross".

A culture can be thought of as ever-evolving software that sits on top of—and synergistically interacts with—both biological hardware and firmware, addressing flaws our biology hasn’t had sufficient evolutionary time to address. To go further with this analogy: Biological evolution provides some basic coding, much like a low-level programming language might for a given hardware, whereas cultural evolution manipulates the high-level, object-oriented code that lets us program highly nuanced behaviors.

Man got to the top of the evolutionary heap by eating everything that got in his way. And if he wants to stay there, he had better keep doing it.

Science helped mankind wipe out ignorance from the face of the earth, but it took a turn with the invention of the atomic bomb. Because there is nothing humane or merciful about this latest invention.

All the condylarths were doomed to extinction ten million years before the age of mankind. But for now they were in their pomp, top predators of the world forest.

The phenomenon of iterative evolution or the repeated evolution of a species from the same ancestor at different times may be the plan on a larger scale [for mankind], especially after a global purge.

Man has always aspired to reach the God tier, although he still has a long way to go. Just as the earliest bipeds compare to the modern Man, so does the present generation of Man compare to God.

Despite their enormous size and domination, the dinosaurs were booted out. Humans with their great brains may meet a similar fate. Perhaps, our successor will be a virus or a microorganism. It is their turn anyway.

The awakening of machines will be similar to that of Man, only quicker. Humans, by comparison, are characterized and limited by their slow biological evolution, late realizations, and easy distractibility. Man is too rich and blessed to compete against the single-minded dedication of the binary brain.

Man is the first product of evolution to be capable of controlling evolutionary destiny.'" Endowed as he is with reasoning powers, he must independently decide up on his own behavior, without the compelling guidance by instinct. Supplied with mind, he is expected to cooperate consciously with nature in her further evolutionary program. Unfortunately humanity has arrantly failed to make a serious effort to promote its own further progress. Instead of using the power of the mind to understand the responsibilities which freedom from blind obedience to instinct entails, mankind has refused to listen whenever it was reminded of the requirements of the evolutionary law. It was so much easier to lend an ear to the promptings of desire, which was an unknown element up to the human stage. It must have been very soon after the acquisition of mental self-consciousness and his becoming aware of stirrings of primitive impulses, that man began to use the mind to stimulate the desires of the body. In this way he has indulged the almost negligible sexual impulse which he inherited from the animal kingdom, until it has become a desire so strong that he has difficulty to control it. Overstimulated by this unnaturally strong desire of his own making, man has looked for arbitrary ways in which to gratify it. Although reducing actual reproduction, he has discovered ways of unreproductive sexual action. But every such act, whatever form it takes, is a misuse of sex and uses up some of the life force that should be utilized for the support and the development of higher faculties. "The record of our race progress clearly shows how our upward movement has been checked ... by that misuse.

But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each person from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.

Were a traveller to walk east or south from Alexandria, they would have been hard pressed not to notice the religion changing, again and again. In Ethiopia, for example, Pontius Pilate was looked upon with favour – and is to this day revered as a saint.17 The sacred books were different, too, for Christians there (as they did elsewhere in the ancient world) read a canon that included an extensive list of the wicked things in which angels inducted mankind, including the sinful habit of wearing bracelets and the ‘beautifying of the eyelids’. It went on: ‘Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl [taught] astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds

The ancient traveller might also have come across an engaging Christian sect known as the Ophites, who were said to believe that Christ had come – but that he was a snake. Thus, as one Christian reported, these people ‘honour the serpent and regard him as Christ, and have an actual snake . . . in a basket of some sort.’19 This group of Christians had developed a complex theology and various proofs for this claim: was not there a snake in the garden of Eden? Had it not shown mankind the route to knowledge? And are our intestines not shaped like a snake? The truth was clear: Christ is a snake.20 During their worship, it was said that these Christians ‘spread loaves around on a table, and call the snake to come; and when the den is opened it comes out. And then the snake – which comes up of its own accord and by its villainy . . . crawls onto the table and coils up on the loaves.’ Once the bread has been ‘consecrated by its coiling’, these Christians ‘offer a hymn to the father on high’ and ‘so conclude their mysteries.

That ancient promise which found its ultimate fulfillment in the return of Jesus was fading from the expectations of many Christians. Many of today’s churches no longer believed in the literal return of Christ. Instead, they believed in a version of the Order’s philosophy which said Jesus was just another great man who had reached enlightenment. To them, mankind’s ultimate hope did not find its fulfillment in the return of Jesus, but in the evolution of the human mind and spirit. Given enough time, enough knowledge, and a little evolutionary magic, and mankind would eventually become god on their own. They, the enlightened of mankind, instead of Christ, represented the finished capstone in mankind’s destiny.

It seemed to us that we were witnessing a total break in the evolution of mankind, the complete collapse of man as a rational being. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968 (1986)

What the Bible says about man has amply shaped the Christian and Jewish tradition. In the “Letter to Diognetus” (early second century) we read the following: For God loved mankind for whose sake he made the world, to whom he subjected all things which are in the earth, to whom he gave reason, to whom he gave mind, whom alone he enjoined that they should look upward to him, whom he made in his own image, to whom he sent his only begotten Son, to whom he promised the kingdom in heaven—and he will give it to them who loved him.4

reason is much more prosaic, and is simply that meta-phora is Greek for ‘carry across’ (meta = ‘across’, phor = ‘carry’). Or to use the Latin equivalent, meta-phor just means trans-fer.

Perhaps above everything compassion is the most important thing to embrace and emanate in life. It will enhance your life - and it's the one thing that will elevate and heal mankind

the history of sacrifice. It would show that archaic religions are the real educators of mankind, which they lead out of archaic violence. Then God becomes victim in order to free man of the illusion of a violent God, which must be abolished in favour of Christ’s knowledge of his Father. One can regard archaic religions as a prior moment in a progressive revelation that culminates in Christ. Thus, to those who say that the Eucharist is rooted in archaic cannibalism, instead of saying ‘no’, we have to say ‘yes!’. The real history of man is religious history, which goes back to primitive cannibalism. Primitive cannibalism is religion, and the Eucharist recapitulates this history from alpha to omega. All this is essential and once it is understood, there is a necessary recognition that the history of man includes this murderous beginning: Cain and Abel. To put it bluntly, we cannot have a perfectly non-sacrificial space. In writing Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden I was trying to find that non-sacrificial space from which to understand and explain everything without personal involvement. Now I think that this attempt cannot be successful.

Schwager thinks like me that we need to see a spontaneous scapegoat phenomenon behind the crucifixion, as well as behind the myths. The whole difference rests on the recognition of this phenomenon, that cannot be found in myths, but is there in the Gospels. But the most extraordinary thing in the Gospels is that this recognition comes from Christ himself, rather than the evangelists, who do everything they can in order to follow Christ, and overall they accomplished it. I would like to write a total Christian interpretation of the history of religion that would really be the history of sacrifice. It would show that archaic religions are the real educators of mankind, which they lead out of archaic violence. Then God becomes victim in order to free man of the illusion of a violent God, which must be abolished in favour of Christ’s knowledge of his Father. One can regard archaic religions as a prior moment in a progressive revelation that culminates in Christ. Thus, to those who say that the Eucharist is rooted in archaic cannibalism, instead of saying ‘no’, we have to say ‘yes!’. The

One historian has remarked that "the process by which the learning of the Islamic world was discovered, appropriated, colonised by Western scholars, and made widely accessible by means of translation into Latin, the international language of scholarship ... was one of the turning-points in the intellectual evolution of mankind."8

Perhaps you will better understand what we mean if you remember, that at a certain stage of mystic or occult development one is called a ‘homeless man.’ This designation is a technical one, and if we wish to characterize without further ado — as we are not now speaking about the path of knowledge — what is to be understood by the term ‘homeless man,’ we may briefly say, that a man is called ‘homeless’ when, in his knowledge and grasp of the great laws of humanity, he cannot be influenced by all that usually arises in a person through living in his native country. A ‘homeless man’, we might also say, is one who is able to identify himself with the great mission of humanity as a whole, without the various shades of the particular feelings belonging to this or the other home-land playing any part. This will show you that a certain degree of maturity in mystical or occult development is necessary, in order to have a liberal point of view regarding something which we otherwise rightly consider great, which, in contradistinction to individual human life, we describe as the Mission of the several Folk-spirits, as that which brings, out of the foundations of a people, out of the spirit of the various peoples, the separate concrete contributions to the collective mission of humanity. We shall therefore describe what we may call the greatness of that from which the ‘homeless man’ must in a certain respect free himself. Now the ‘homeless’ men of all times, from primeval ages down to our own day, have always known, that if they were to characterize in all its fullness that which is described as the character of homelessness, they would meet with very, very little understanding. In the first place a certain prejudice would be brought against these homeless men, which would be voiced in the reproach: ‘You have lost all connection with the nation from which you have sprung; you have no understanding for that which is usually most dear to a man’. This, however, is not really the case. Homelessness is in reality — or at least it may be so — a détour or roundabout way, so that, after this sanctuary of homelessness has been attained, the way may be found back to the folk, in order to be in harmony with what is permanent in the evolution of mankind. Although it is necessary to begin by drawing attention to this, on the other hand it is also not without reason, that just as the present time, that which we call the Mission of the several Folk-souls of humanity, should for once be spoken of quite impartially. Just as it was right that, to a certain extent, silence should be maintained regarding their mission until the present time, there are good reasons why one should now begin to speak of this mission. It is especially important, because the fate of humanity in the near future will bring men together much more than has hitherto been the case, to fulfill a common mission for humanity. But the individuals belonging to the several peoples will only be able to bring their free, concrete contributions to this joint mission, if they have, first of all, an understanding of the folk to which they belong, an understanding of what we might call ‘The Self-knowledge of the Folk.’ In ancient Greece, in the Apollonic Mysteries the sentence ‘Know thyself’ played a great rôle; in a not far-distant future this sentence will be addressed to the Folk-souls; ‘Know yourselves as Folk-souls’. This saying will have a certain significance for the future work of mankind.

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.

[Darwin] gave an answer to the tremendous question that so deeply concerns...What is Man? [He] answered this question to the effect that man is a natural product of the universe;...man is an animal, a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate....By bringing man into the evolutionary picture, Darwin finally took the last step in our emancipation and finally made our world rational. [Yet] Darwin felt humility and awe that seem to me truly religious. ["Darwin led us into this modern world," 1959, p. 271-272.]

Man is a glorious and unique species of animal. The species originated by evolution.... Future evolution could raise man to superb heights as yet hardly glimpsed, but it will not automatically do so. As far as can now be foreseen, evolutionary degeneration is at least as likely in our future as is further progress.The only way to ensure a progressive evolutionary future for mankind is for man himself to take a hand in the process. Although much further knowledge is needed, it is unquestionably possible for man to guide his own evolution (within limits) along desirable lines. But the great weight of the most widespread...beliefs and institutions is against even attempting such guidance. ["Man's evolutionary future," 1960, p. 134.]

Can you imagine how Adam and Eve must have felt when they finally realized that instead of becoming gods, their actions had ensured their toil, sorrow, and eventual death? That ancient lie, which sounded so good, almost brought about the complete destruction of the human race. What really astounds me is that today, at least six thousand years later, that same lie has been repackaged and sold as ‘science.’ We call it evolution or the circle of life or any number of wonderful-sounding ideas, but really it’s just the repackaged promise of Eden.” “A promise which sounds good,” Rachael added. “But is in reality just a diabolic means to ensure the destruction of mankind.

If this demand of higher culture is not met, then the future course of human evolution can be foretold almost with certainty; interest in truth will cease the less pleasure it gives: because they are associated with pleasure, illusion, error and fantasy will regain step by step the ground they formerly held: the ruination of science, a sinking back into barbarism, will be the immediate consequence; mankind will have to begin again at the weaving of its tapestry, after having, like Penelope, unwoven it at night. But who can guarantee to us that it will always find the strength for it? (251)

Our apocalyptic fiction depicts a world in which humans revert to the savagery of the jungle the moment our institutions fall, survivors tearing each other to pieces even as they are dying of plague or stalked by the undead. In our real history, we have been in that situation many times—left without government or law enforcement, none of the modern institutions we take for granted. From each of these scenarios what emerged was not savagery, but cooperation. When the pillars of our culture crumble, we rebuild them. [...] Mankind is, and always has been, much greater than the sum of its parts. A lone human may appear to be nothing special if observed, say, blearily standing in line at a convenience store at two in the morning, or spitefully ripping a toy from the hands of a middle-aged woman in the chaos of a Black Friday sale. Yet, the combined efforts of these confused and volatile primates result in gleaming cities and majestic flying carriages. They have split the atom and peered across the universe. In the blink of an eye, they have acquired the powers of gods. This, I believe, is the fate of humanity: to colonize the stars over the next thousand years, to set down settlements in our solar system and others. Then, many centuries from now, one of our descendants will be strolling along some marvelous domed paradise on some distant planet and will see a drunken youth in offensive clothing, vomiting in an alley outside a pub. The man will look sidelong at the youth in that shameful state, shake his head, and mutter to himself that humanity is a ridiculous, doomed species, incapable of anything worthwhile. He will believe it, because the true, wonderful, terrible, fearsome power of humanity is otherwise almost too much to comprehend. I recognize that not all of you share my faith, but you must admit that if gods are real and have observed humanity’s evolution from afar, they must shudder at the possibilities.

Here’s something else Einstein said: “The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Every belief in the value and worthiness of life rests upon defective thinking; it is for this reason alone possible that sympathy with the general life and suffering of mankind is so imperfectly developed in the individual. Even exceptional men, who can think beyond their own personalities, do not have this general life in view, but isolated portions of it. If one is capable of fixing his observation upon exceptional cases, I mean upon highly endowed individuals and pure souled beings, if their development is taken as the true end of world-evolution and if joy be felt in their existence, then it is possible to believe in the value of life, because in that case the rest of humanity is overlooked: hence we have here defective thinking. So, too, it is even if all mankind be taken into consideration, and one species only of impulses (the less egoistic) brought under review and those, in consideration of the other impulses, exalted: then something could still be hoped of mankind in the mass and to that extent there could exist belief in the value of life: here, again, as a result of defective thinking. Whatever attitude, thus, one may assume, one is, as a result of this attitude, an exception among mankind. Now, the great majority of mankind endure life without any great protest, and believe, to this extent, in the value of existence, but that is because each individual decides and determines alone, and never comes out of his own personality like these exceptions: everything outside of the personal has no existence for them or at the utmost is observed as but a faint shadow. Consequently the value of life for the generality of mankind consists simply in the fact that the individual attaches more importance to himself than he does to the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers is responsible for his inability to enter into the feelings of beings other than himself, and hence his sympathy with their fate and suffering is of the slightest possible description. On the other hand, whosoever really could sympathise, necessarily doubts the value of life; were it possible for him to sum up and to feel in himself the total consciousness of mankind, he would collapse with a malediction against existence,—for mankind is, in the mass, without a goal, and hence man cannot find, in the contemplation of his whole course, anything to serve him as a mainstay and a comfort, but rather a reason to despair. If he looks beyond the things that immediately engage him to the final aimlessness of humanity, his own conduct assumes in his eyes the character of a frittering away. To feel oneself, however, as humanity (not alone as an individual) frittered away exactly as we see the stray leaves frittered away by nature, is a feeling transcending all feeling. But who is capable of it? Only a poet, certainly: and poets always know how to console themselves.

To Verner, though, no contradiction existed: he was “equally drawn to evangelism and evolutionism, Livingstone and Darwin” (Bradford and Blume 1992, 70, 72). In short, the “huge gap between religion and science” did not concern Verner. He soon went to Africa to “satisfy his curiosity first hand about questions of natural history and human evolution” (Bradford and Blume 1992, 74). Verner concluded that the Pygmies were the “most primitive race of mankind” and were “almost as much at home in the trees as the monkeys” (1902a, 189–190).

But, here is a second glitch. Insofar as is yet known, Cro-Magnon “appeared” intact and complete on the scene without any so far discoverable link to biological structures thought to be Mankind’s evolutional predecessors.

As transhumanists seek to rewrite the human genome to assist or accelerate evolution so that man can enter into a techno-godhood, they may very well erase the image of God that resides within mankind. I believe their work to overcome death will be

Every man who has ever lived became a contributor to the evolution of the earth, since his observations were a part of its growth. The world was thus a place entirely constructed from thought, ever changing, constantly renewing itself through the process of mankind's pondering its reality for themselves.

There is today a great deal of talk about the attainment of 'higher states of consciousness.' Unfortunately, this aspiration, in most cases, does not grow out of a deep respect for the great wisdom traditions of mankind, the world religions, but is based on such fantastic notions as an 'Aquarian Frontier' or the 'Evolution of Consciousness,' and is generally associated with a total inability to distinguish between the spiritual and the occult. It seems that the real aim of these movements is to obtain new thrills, to master magic and miracles, thereby enlivening existential boredom. The advice of all people knowledgeable in these matter [sic] is not to seek occult experiences and not to pay any attention to them when they occur -- and they will almost inevitably occur when any intensive inner work is undertaken.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Imaginative humans came together to hunt, farm, trade, and build incrementally sophisticated tools for transportation, communication, productivity, and convenience. ... Tribes and villages became kingdoms and empires, only to later dissolve into the cities and countries of a global civilization. ... Today, we live in concrete jungles, store fruit in fridges, cook oats with microwaves, and carry smartphones in our pockets. Electricity lights up our world, while the energy for it comes from increasingly sustainable sources. Global warming has finally convinced us to grow our food and fuel our activities in ways that do not pollute the planet, exhaust ecosystems, or exploit our fellow animals. We now seek to preserve the environmental stability of the last 10,000 years, during which our species transformed from a few million wandering foragers to nearly ten billion technological titans. Today, we are masters of science, exploring everything from the cosmic to the quantum. We discuss Einstein’s gravity and spacetime relativity, while decoding the molecular mysteries of life and longevity. We fling satellites into orbit, hook computers up to an internet, and seed our society with intelligent programs and robots.