(June 22, 2011 at 4:46 am)Anymouse Wrote:
You know, it occurs to me, that if humans had never developed writing, no holy books would exist?
There might be tales and stories handed down from generation to generation, but no neighbour kids trying to cram the Bible down my son's throat when he was growing up.
Of course science would also have a monumental wall to overcome, but imagine a written language where religious ideas had not been invented, sort of like 1984 except not for political reasons.
But the premise of the hijacking is impractical. Presumably, humans indeed handed down ideas through oral communication through thousands, maybe millions of generations until writing was invented; and it was this invention which allowed the preservation of technological progress, leading up to modern civilisation. Religious ideas were probably amongst the stuff being handed down orally. Look how superstitius baseball players are in the year 2011, with their 'lucky shoes' and 'lucky underwear' and whatnot. Imagine primitives in the plains, without a clear understanding of cause and effect, hoping for every advantage in the hunt (and, when some coincidence led to a lucky hunt, trying to replicate every aspect of events leading to that luck, including things which we modernly know can not have had anything to do with the day's success).
