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Early proto-humans, over uncounted generations, learned how to get along with each other as they were evolving into thinking beings that saw how ideas could displace the wisdom of instinct. Their horizontal, cooperative social structure, that resembled the natural democratic form seen in most animal species some of the time and in some species all of the time, was the most successful structure for survival in hard times. Hard-won experience vindicated the wisdom of ever-dimmer instinct, and the lessons learned had to be handed down lest each future generation suffer the loss of wisdom resulting from the ascendancy of thought (the biblical forbidden fruit.) The ultimate distillation of these lessons was, millennia later, echoed in every major religion’s scripture as a paraphrasing of the Golden Rule.
Early humans felt a respect for and awe of the fertile world, the Mother Earth that nourished them. Their ideations produced a pantheon of female gods and, in time, male companions for them.
Some early groups learned how to collect seeds of the plants they liked to eat, and to grow fields and orchards and vineyards, and to store these foods. Rather than the portable life of the herds-followers, farmers built permanent homes, villages, cities. Stored food gave them the time and ease to develop science, technology, culture.
But around 5,000 years ago, an idea took root and spread among the wandering hunter/gatherer groups: Those crop-fed cities, seemingly paved with gold, were just sitting there, ripe for the plundering. When they took over these cities, they imposed their male-dominated hierarchical ruling structure.
Religion had to be changed to provide more force to this kind of rule. Nurturing female gods had to be replaced by male warrior gods. Polytheism had to be replaced by monotheism. The great invention of this time, we are told, was this idea of one god. It was the invention of plundering kings, to bolster the idea of the single king. That monotheism has for centuries been called a great invention demonstrates, not theological reasoning, but the slant of pervasively hierarchical Old World cultures.
Religious scriptures are collections of assorted writings, some very old and some from the much newer era of plunderers. We see the horrific brutality of this era on one page, and the ancient wisdom of the Golden Rule on the next. The structure of empire is incompatible with empathy and mutual respect, yet the pathology and the ethos reside confusingly in the same book. Monotheism, empire, and fanaticism are features of the same face; polytheism, humanism, and natural democracy are features of another.
In our current time of crisis and rediscovery, it’s actually becoming feasible that humans may discard the confusing intrusion of the hierarchical plunderer paradigm, and prosper again in the ethos of Earth Community.
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