Month: March 2013

“The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms … . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.” -Frans de Waal-

In a book coming out next week called The Bonobo and the Atheist, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that morality is built into our species. Rather than coming to us top-down from God, or any other external source, morality for de Waal springs bottom-up from our emotions and our day-to-day social interactions, which themselves evolved from foundations in animal societies.

For 30 years, de Waal has authored books about apes and monkey that open our eyes to the bottom-up origins of our human behaviors, ranging from politics to empathy. In this, his 10th volume, he extends that perspective by writing, “It wasn’t God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to.”

The Bonobo and the Atheist
The Bonobo and the Atheist

In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

by Frans De Waal

Hardcover, 289 pages purchase

More on this book:

“The way we felt we ought to” has a long evolutionary history, so that de Waal’s thesis depends crucially on numerous and convincing examples from our closest living relatives.

(via fuckyeahnerdpr0n)

victoriousvocabulary:

SUCCUBUS

[noun]

1. (plural succubi) a female demon or supernatural entity that appears in dreams, who takes the form of a human woman in order to seduce men, usually through sexual intercourse. The male counterpart is the incubus. Religious traditions hold that repeated intercourse with a succubus may result in the deterioration of health or even death.

2. any female demon or evil spirit.

3. Slang: a strumpet or prostitute.

4. Slang: a manipulative and sexually alluring woman.

Etymology: Late Latin succuba “strumpet” (from succubare – ”to lie under”, from sub- “under” and cubare “to lie”.

[Wagner Bruno]

bedgoer:

i’ve felt for a while now that nations are a direct result of capital’s attempts to create the ‘Other’ and maintain a mythology of oppositionism amongst the proletariat, even though capital itself maintains no loyalty to any set of boundaries. i’ll support nationalism pragmatically as a bulwark against imperialism in places such as palestine, but i find it a troublesome concept overall.