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Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

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Avi Tuschman

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“Long ago, our ancestors realized that the natural world was not the only wellspring of resources essential to our survival. The mind was just as rich. Humans possess a wealth of psychological resources necessary for survival: empathy, loyalty, commitment, and goodwill. Just as material resources must be processed and managed, so too with psychological resources.”

ReligionEvolutionSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“The fragmentation of our awareness may trigger dizzying vertigo in the chaos of our living. As such, an overwhelming flurry of connectivity and images generate thereby an oversaturation in our brain and the overabundance makes us anxious, fractured and insecure. This might, in turn, actuate us to cut the wire with the world and stumble into an estranging and contentious cocoon of self-absorption, while off-loading the lush supply of social interaction. Life becomes, then, an intricate maneuvering ground for walking a fine line between sound connectedness and crumbling consciousness, between unflinching cohesion and atomizing fragmentation. ("Give me more images")”

ConsciousnessAwarenessCohesionSelf AbsorptionFragmentationConnectivityCocoonManeuvring GroundOversaturationWalk A Fine Line
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“So confident are we in ritual's power that we dare brandish it against the might of Nature herself. Nature will have its way with us, but we have always used ritual to rob it of the last word. It is nature that determines when a baby is born. But it has always been ritual that decides when a child's body has taken adult form. But it has always been ritual that decides when the boy is recognized as a man or the girl has become a woman. Nature directs our lusts and desires, but it has always been ritual that decides who our legitimate partner is. And in the end, nature snuffs the life from the body. But it has always been ritual that determines when our beloved is dismissed from our care. Humans are the only species that take offense at Nature's indifference to our plight. Ritual is a defiant gesture expressing that offence. If we abandon ritual do we give up something of our humanity? No. It is much simpler than that. If we abandon ritual, we give up being human.”

LifeDeathReligionEvolutionSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“The ubiquitous singing, chanting, and dancing of traditional societies laid the requisite groundwork from which civilization and modernity sprouted. Take that away and Homo Sapiens are thoroughly ordinary primates - upright chimpanzees, nothing more.”

ReligionEvolutionSingingDancingSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“Despite the many material comforts of modern life, anyone who has lived long enough knows that life's joys are at minimum balanced by its sorrows. Loved ones die, jobs are lost, houses flood, fields burn, hearts and bones get broken, able bodies grow old and ill. None of this is new. Humans have been struggling - and rejoicing- since time immemorial. To keep their footing while shouldering their burdens, our ancestors always turned to ritual. Ritual mobilized the psychologiacl resources necessary to withstand whatever life threw at us.”

LifeReligionStruggleEvolutionSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“Despite the many material comforts of modern life, anyone who has lived long enough knows that life's joys are at minimum balanced by its sorrows. Loved ones die, jobs are lost, houses flood, fields burn, hearts and bones get broken, able bodies grow old and ill. None of this is new. Humans have been struggling - and rejoicing- since time immemorial. To keep their footing while shouldering their burdens, our ancestors always turned to ritual. Ritual mobilized the psychological resources necessary to withstand whatever life threw at us.”

ReligionEvolutionSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“If a religious community lacks cohesion, it will lose members. But other problems—from isolation to aggression—arise when a religious community is too cohesive, when it is so tightly bound there is no space for adhesive forces to form ties with the wider culture and members of other communities. When inward-looking groups face outward with fear or fury, they can become, to coin a term, dehisive, a bond-breaking social force. The history of religion provides myriad examples of volatile religious movements that overemphasized in-group solidarity and escalated tensions with outsiders.”

CohesionReligious Community
Book:Religion: A Very Short Introduction
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