[b]Frans de Waal
The enemy of science is not religion. The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.[/b]
Just not your own, right, Mr. Objectivist?
If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee’s eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?
Uh, animals too?
Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: ‘Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.’
The first ironist. Or, perhaps, the first famous one?
Perhaps it’s just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.
Not quite sure how to react to that though.
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
Let’s just live with it.
We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like.
We? We being who exactly?