no, humans are humans no matter what they do or think or say. We have come too far, and seen too much to require humaneness - it wouldn't be a functional request historically speaking. However, biology as it stands today, is not sufficient to offer a MORAL viewpoint. For that we require PHILOSOPHY.
I suppose if you define philosophy as the repository of morals, that's a fair statement. My view is that morality in the common vernacular is a mostly modern concept, almost cast in concrete in the Victorian era by Christians. It certainly had its tests, such as when Puritans tried to export it to colonial America. It's just that, if you put
Puritans and
Anglicans as answers to the multiple choice question
Philosophy is needed by--, I don't think many respondents would choose either one. Yet if the question asked
Which are known for shaping morality, and
Puritans and Anglicans were listed below
Leary and Jung, which do you think would be the more common answer?
Also, about the diversity thing - again, i am just playing around with this idea, i am not sure how it would connect with anything at all, just providing information that QQ will have something to jump on. haha
I am remembering a study about green eyed flies and red eyed flies where, if there were 1,000 red eyed ones and 100 green eyed ones in a jar, the female would prefer the green eyed ones, but i can't find it online. Here is some guys thing online that mentions rarity preference though -
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Frost_06.html
Early in the development of sexual reproduction, the ability to cast hardened spores that would survive to another season seems to have become a template for the casting of sperm and egg across a wide area. In Cnidaria the hydra become motile during this stage--leaving their sedentary position as polyps, as if to ensure that the range of cross fertilization will increase. The benefits for increasing the range is that a species can maintain a broader spectrum of genes, and any that are advantageous under a particular stress would remain on tap, to see the species through its drift, variation, adaptation--and perhaps speciation--with overall greater likelihood of success.
(re: primitive Brazilian tribe who had no concept of a God) - even assuming that anybody even knows what they mean by what they say to us, that is just one group.
The person reporting this was a linguist who seems to have mastered their language. He goes into more detail, mentioning that they questioned his basis for believing that things had to be caused, as opposed to simply existing that way forever. His point in this statement was to say that they had no creation myth and no sense of a God.
You could ask modern buddhists and they wouldn't have a god either, per se, while many of their contemporaries do.
My thinking about "Godless" primitives is that they show that Jung and Leary (maybe even Nietzsche) maybe should have been looking at modern primitives when they addressed religious ideology (or ideation).
Also, just as another possibility, the high level shaman may not not be telling us his real thoughts anyway.
This was an account by an American who went to live among them, who I think at first was hoping to convert them to Christianity, and ended up not only mastering their language, but the experience effectively turned him into an anthropologist.
I do understand you are making the point only about that people group and not the whole prehistoric world, but i am not sure that it relates to my ideas, because i am not one of those fundies that requires religion for morality to exist anyway.
I thought this was why you were linking evolution (as if primitive people might represent humans at the cusp of diverging from the proto-human ancestor) to religion, morality and philosophy. My reason for mentioning modern primitives is that we have some credible accounts from people who ventured out to study them, whereas the beliefs and norms of prehistoric people (and even many post-historical ones) are at best interpreted from trace evidence.
We could have a perfectly functional secular humanist morality for all i am concerned. Not because science gives us a functional morality though, philosophy is required for that.
I'm not sure I see the distinction or the significance. There could be no science without the demand for honesty you say is only possible with philosophy. And yet there could be no philosophy without the science it was married to (as in the Golden Age of Greece.) If not for religion, it's entirely possible that physics and metaphysics would have never found their mutually exclusive niches. If I were to ask you where Aristotle (or even Alexander) got his sense of morality, would you not say
by studying the laws of nature?
The same people group? so this basically disproves the idea they didn't have religion. Gods, God, spirits whatever, metaphysical powers are the realm of religion, we don't call them their scientific beliefs, even if it was all some other people group had for cosmogony, for example.
I think Boas explains that the tribes he studied were animists. (He speaks of totemism). The closest thing to religion they had was some irrational fear about natural objects and creatures. The question relating to your point is: how does an rationalized fear of nature constitute "a God" or even a philosophy. I think animism is an avoidance of a philosophy, relegating the machinery of nature to something unpredictable and powerful which might snap at you if in the least way provoked, rather than using the analysis of, say, Aristotle, to try to winnow out the grains of truth from the chaff.
We don't even call those beliefs their philosophy, although i only need to go that far and not even take it to the dreaded "religion" point, to show that these people had some philosophy and continue onward toward my point.
That then is my confusion over your point. It seems like you're saying you need only call it philosophy for it to become so. Everett reported that the Pirihã would care for their elders, making sure they had enough to eat, and that they could chew, if they had no teeth, etc., yet the tribe lacked any laws or leaders and no one ever told anyone else what to do. When he asked them whether they put food away for hard times, they would say that if they had any to put away, they would put it in the bellies of their friends and face the problem of finding more food tomorrow. But their responses all seemed to be based on logic, not any sense of right or wrong. If I'm not mistaken, this undermined Everett's own abiding belief, perhaps similar to yours, that morality was a universal, and it had such a profound effect on him that he eventually became an atheist.
