/lit/ - Literature

Ishtar is fucking hot. Gilgamesh was a fool.

I'm partial to Crom, myself.

>>843585

Care to expand just a little more?
This is a subject close to my heart.

>>843593
Religion and mythology were the terms that the ancients explained the world through. Their worldview isn't invalid, it's simply couched in ancient metaphors and language.

>>843599
You're telling me that lightning ISN'T generated by a giant dude with a white beard tossing the bolts around?
How obscene.

>>843599
I agree in spirit, but would love to hear more of your thoughts on specific examples of this ancient worldview success.

>>843604
Huh, randomly I made the connection right now between the fact that people usually think lightning comes from clouds and the fact that all the Lightning deities have big beards... shaped like clouds.

We shouldn't forget that myth and religion weren't distinct categories for the ancients.

Comparative Religion can be very dangerous in the wrong hands.

La-di-da, OP is reading Joseph Campbell.

>>843606
Alright, the idea of dualism is a profound and interesting commentary on the reality we find ourselves in. Judeo-Christian idea of a God is a direct reflection of the father. However, in ancient mythology there is a much more prevalent idea of a female creative deity, Mother Earth. In modern times (around the time of the reformation), we've forsaken the idea of the female creative force, though she shows herself in the Virgin Mary. In fact, idea of the virgin Mary can be traced back to the Venus totems.

A good basis for these ideas is Indian mythology. Read up on these for a good baseline.

>>843613
And the Golden Bough, and Freud, and Jung.

And the classics, like the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy and paradise lost.

>>843612
How so?

>>843616
Didn't the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost add a lot of misconceptions in popular view of Christianity? They added a lot of things that people seem to think were spoken of originally. Wouldn't someone studying Comparative Religion understand the "original source" and not later interpretations, or are the developments of religions also important?

>>843617
Interestingly, no. These interpretations were so popular because they were the ideals of the time reimagined and couched in the mythology of the time, while at the same time drawing on the myths of

For example, most of the demons in paradise lost have counterparts as Greek and roman gods.

>>843615

>However, in ancient mythology there is a much more prevalent idea of a female creative deity, Mother Earth.
Gaia--as the appellation 'Mother Earth' suggests--was not a creative force. In fact, she was quite the opposite. Mother Earth was a passive receptical for the active power of the sky father who impregnates the fertile mother with his sky-seed(rain) giving birth to all life.

>we've forsaken the idea of the female creative force, though she shows herself in the Virgin Mary.
The Holy Mother of God is a perfect representation of the divine feminine. She isn't in any way creative though. The idea of a creative female goes against the way the ancients viewed the world.

I don't mean to sound harsh. For all I know you are using these words loosely.

>>843617
Not op but I agree. The more I study works written on the original texts the less I think we should be calling this dogmatic monopoly most of the western world adheres to "Christianity".

>>843617
And remember, the Abrahamic religions are unique in having a single book of faith that is the "law" of religion. Most religions only have stories which change, evolve, and develop over time. Anyone who's read Pagel's "Origin of Satan" can see the development of the sa'hatan into what we see in Paradise Lost

>>843584

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>>843623
A law that was imposed by the establishment on a set of ideas that were very much open source at that time.
Hell, everybody and his mother claimed that he had seen Christ at that time and knew the answer.
So, psychological warfare was met with fascism.

>>843621
>>Gaia--as the appellation 'Mother Earth' suggests--was not a creative force. In fact, she was quite the opposite. Mother Earth was a passive receptical for the active power of the sky father who impregnates the fertile mother with his sky-seed(rain) giving birth to all life.

This is one interpretation of it, and it's certainly the ones that the Greeks used. However, "Gaia" shows up in many other places and in different forms. In india, for example, there was a faith which believed that the ONLY way for crops to grow was for a young woman to be sacrificed, for her blood to be spilled on the ground. This idea was derivative of noticing the way that plants grew on the graves of the dead.

There are dozens of pictures of plants growing out of the womb of a woman.

>>843616

>How so?
A lot of people get drunk on religious parallels and go overboard with unwarranted comparisons. The exoteric forms of the world religion are distinct. Comparativists often compromise the integrity of these religions by carelessly introducing foreign elements in their interpretations.

"All religions are the same" only works on a metaphysical level. We must be careful when comparing the outer forms of the world's religions.

>>843629

http://www.paleothea.com/Myths/Eurynome.html

This was the myth that was originally around in Greece. In some myth cycles this is still interpreted as what happened before the titans.

>>843630
This is a valid point, and I thank you for raising it.

>>843629

That's very interesting.
I still think that women pretty much always embody the passive pole of reality in traditional belief systems though.

>>843623

>the Abrahamic religions are unique in having a single book of faith that is the "law" of religion
Please do note that Catholics and Orthodox Christians do not view The Bible as divine revelation.

>>843581

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>>843615

>Judeo-Christian idea of a God is a direct reflection of the father.

According to some of the church fathers, God The Father is genderless, The Son is masculine, and The Holy Spirit is feminine.

I'm fond of this way of looking at things.

>>843637
That's because you were brought up with the western interpretations of the myths. Go back to the originals, read some of the indian myths. This is a good place to start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramayana

>>843647
The Indian myths are pretty interesting. I saw this movie the other day on LinkTV called Sita Sing the Blues. I believe it was based on the Mahabharata or a story in it.

>>843645
I personally have come to see it as the Son being humanity, as in the personal self, while the Father is the masculine society with it's rules and regulations and the Holy ghost is the world from which we've sprung.

Just how I see it though.

I like how there's always a Dragon.
Somewhen, SOME BODY saw a real dragon. Why else would every damn culture on earth have one in its myths at some point?

>>843658
Because China Went to the americas.

>>843658
People say Dinosaur bones led to the creation of the Dragon myths, since they're all over the place.

>>843661

So did the Celts and Vikings. :3

>>843658
Because people get scared and see crazy shit. Happens today. What I've found curious is nobody examines UFO's, the abduction stories, government conspiracies of many kinds, the ghost/paranormal beliefs, and looks at them from a viewpoint of sociological/anthropological investigation of mythology. If there are books about just this sort of idea, especially involving conclusions or concepts about what this has to say about developed countries where these mythologies are prevalent, I'd be extremely interested in reading it.

>>843662
I know they figure the giant Cyclops was started from an elephant skull.

>>843666
The one-eyed giants, called Cyclopes, of Greek myths are usually said to live on the island of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea. Significantly, the island was once home to ancient elephants whose enormous, fossilized skulls and bones can still be found today eroding out of cliffs and hillsides. As far back as the 1370s, scholars have suggested that when the first inhabitants of the island encountered elephant skulls, they might have mistaken the large central hole where the trunk was attached for the enormous single eye socket of a Cyclops.

And Griffins are Protoceratops

>>843585
Or maybe you should stop doing hard drugs.

Comparative religion, at best, can give us some mildly interesting insight on human psychology. Considering how incalculably detrimental religions have been in the world though, it would be preferable if they didn't exist.

So in a perfect world, comparative religion wouldn't exist either.

>>843683
In a "perfect world," maybe. But what would that world look like? A world where we don't question our perceptions, wonder why some stars move and others don't?


And who fucking cares what a "perfect world" would be like? We have to live in this one, and the fact of the matter is that our societies have been influenced forever by these ancient cultures. If you think otherwise, you should probably just go back to starbucks and ignore the lady on the wall.

>>843683
Religion held humanity together. It is the very basis of society. Through brutality and oppression, yes, but we'd all be in a Mad Max world without cars if not for religion.

>>843683
>>hur durr atheism is cool u guyz

>>843704
old rhetorical trick in the christfag book

>>843683
It wasn't religion. It was man's instinct to hold on to power. Since the religious leaders were the ones in power, they didn't abide anything that undermined what they preached. This goal was often at odds with the very teachings they adhered to.

>>843693
In a perfect world we wouldn't *need* to question our perceptions and we definitely wouldn't wonder about anything. But point taken, our world isn't perfect.

I'm saying (repeating, actually) that comparative religion can give us some insight on human psychology. That's not quite insignificant but it's not particularly impressive either. To go as far as to claim it's "the secret behind our culture and our reality" is beyond absurd. You'd learn a lot more about the world by studying, for example, evolution.

>>843710

>Since the religious leaders were the ones in power, they didn't abide anything that undermined what they preached.
Would you say this is applicable to all religions? Is that what you are trying to say?

>>843712

>You'd learn a lot more about the world
There's you problem. Ultimate reality is not 'worldly'.

>>843700
Stop saying such ridiculous things. You're like one of those priests who say people would revert to savages if religion wasn't there to tell them how to behave.

Guess what. Some of us have brains and realize that stealing is wrong without having to read a rule carved on some fucking stone tablet.

Religion has done far more harm than good.

>>843710
Pretty much. Religion has just been a convenient tool for political power. It's amazing enough that we've managed to shake off the clergy's monopoly on education... even if it took centuries.

>>843714
He most likely didn't, although most successful religions are successful specifically because it was like that, so it's usually a valid observation.

>>843717
That doesn't mean anything. "the world" *is* ultimate reality.

>>843583
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>>843725

Math is not of this world my friend.
You would deny the reality of mathematics?

>>843712
If you're saying that evolution can inform us about our culture, you're sadly misinformed. Evolutionary psychology is mostly BS.

>>843722
It doesn't matter that "some of us have brains". At the core we are selfish, mean, and violent. Take away the religious ideas of punishment for wrong doing, and it would be ass rape and murder at the hands of the stronger.
My god, look what happens every time there is a natural disaster that compromises society's ability to reign us in. Looting and riots and terror.

>>843746

Grow up

>>843722
>Religion has just been a convenient tool for political power.

I think you've failed to make the distinction between organized religion and normal religion. Additionally, many people are spiritual without being religious, like Buddhists. Yet you'd probably lump them under religious.

You're also subtly implying that anything that can be used as a political tool is something the world would be better off without. You're excluding a lot of things from your "perfect world" because of that.

>>843731
I come back and see this...

Fuck this thread. When the level of absurdity itself is absurd you know it's time to hit the eject button.

>>843746
No wait. One more.

>society's ability to reign us in
>society's

There you go. You disproved your own theory. You don't need religion; society is enough.

OK, now I can close this failure of a thread.

>>843746
you cannot compare what happens to a population as the direct result of a castastrophic mass-trauma to what might happen as a result of cooperation.

>>843753
Evolutionary psychology has the tendency to think that America is the only place out there.

"Men like breasts because they make for good nursing."

No, that's just stupid. Pre-civilized women barely had any breasts at all.

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>>843753
Aaaand this is why OP should just keep himself to himself.
I agree with you OP, but it's a waste of time tryna get others who just wont stretch their thinking beyond the established paradigm of thinking

>>843790
Someday I'm going to write a book of religion from the Atheistic perspective and blow the close minded fools brains out of the water. It will be awesome.

>>843795

We don't need it! We have lots of them already! Your's would suck anyway!

I AM BEINGTROLLED HAAAAAALP!

>>843758
It's not "mass-trauma". It's "we can get away with shit so we're gonna do what we want.
Looting isn't about getting things to survive, it about getting shit you wanted.

>>843844
I've never seen one, or at least, one that impressed me. Recommendations?

Check out the edition heavily annotated by Wittgenstein.

Dis thread

>>843944
...of what?

>>843731
>Evolutionary psychology is mostly BS

care to elaborate? otherwise I call bullshit

>>843995
Yeah. Basically, some ideas in evolutionary psychology are simply racism, sexism, or other faulty ideas dressed up in scientific talk.

http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2008/03/the_other_threat_to_evolutiona.php

This is a fairly common viewpoint from what i've gathered from evolutionary biologists

>>843984
The Golden Bough, obviously

>>844001
>in reality, biologists aren't actually signed onto the idea that men are born to fuck around while women are born to stay at home not being fucked by the men fucking around with apparently each other, since all the women are tied to the hearth by nature.

Evolution is mostly natural selection. Who do you think had the better chance to pass on his genes, the dude who only had one mate or the dude who fucked every age-bearing female he was able to? Yes, men *do* have a biological imperative to mate with every available female.

Females, however, can only cause a single pregnancy at a time: their own. A woman having sex with all available males will, on average, produce weaker children than if she only had sex with the strongest male available to her. She'll have as many children either way, so again by process of natural selection the women who tend to favor only one partner will pass their genes more often.

It does explain why men are far more prone to cheating than women. It's not just pervs trying to find an excuse for their behavior, it's a sound scientific explanation for it.

You can explain a ton of stuff with evolution, from behavior to more random stuff, like the reason things taste good or bad or some sounds are pleasant while nails on a chalkboard is fucking awful, etc etc. It's really far more amazing that it gets credit for.

Some schools in the US still teach that evolution is not real (one more negative effect of religion).

>>843984
>>843944

http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/logwit35.html

Golden Bough annotations by Wittgenstein

>>844060
you need to read the selfish gene my friend.

>>844060
It's amazing because you don't need proof or experiment. ANY IDEA YOU THINK OF MAY BE TRUE!

This poor, poor thread.

>>844448
That doesn't make any sense...

Sure, I can make up stuff if I want to. Here.

"Elephants have tusks because one time the elephant-hating aliens invaded and they were invulnerable to everything except tusks and one elephant dude happened to have tusks and he killed the aliens but the other elephants died so the only elephant who passed on his genes was the one with tusks and that's why elephants have tusks!"

Except that was completely out of my ass.

It's not difficult to explain something using simple logic. Like, we can easily figure out that, since eating rotten meat often leads to diseases, humans who didn't find that smell repulsive had a much higher death rate than those who did. After tens of thousands of years of this selection, it's no surprise that the smell of rotten meat is the one that humans dislike the most.

Use your fucking head.

Wow, I finally looked up "The Golden Bough." I'll definitely have to read it. I'm also looking for "The Book of J." Anyone here read that?

>>844060
Just for the record, that's not a sustainable system. Monogomy is better for the survival of the species, because while in the short term monopolizing mating partners may improve your genetic expression, doing so kills hybrid vigor. Populations with a restricted gene pool tend to die off, while those with a varied one do not. Among the very few animals in nature where harem structures are conventional (I'm thinking Gorillas), there are periodic opportunities for groups to break up and scatter.

>>844691
In monogamy you're also restricting yourself to a certain number of "combinations". In a situation with 10 males and 10 females forming couples, maybe a few of the females had awesome genes which they won't get to pass down because they happened to mate with a male with a huge flaw. With a single good male you still get fairly decent variety (because all the females are different) and you'd only be screwed if the male had a hidden flaw somehow.

Monogamy works (because of the variety you've mentioned, plus males taking better care of their offspring), but polygamy works too (much better male selection).

In the case of humans, seeing how men very very very clearly desire multiple partners, it would stand to reason that polygamy was a superior system. If sticking to a single partner was better, polygamists would have had less success and would most certainly have been selected out after tens of thousands of years. Men would tend to stick to a single female. They definitely don't.

Hey, sorry I stopped watching the thread for a while. I'd point out that genetics are more complicated than simple selection. The only way for behavior to be modified by evolution is for there to be a biological mechanism controlling it. Ignoring the broader and more disturbing implications of that for a second, it means that there is some gene or combination of genes which have survived in the gene pool, not as you've put forward, that the behavior itself was somehow selected. Genes are tricky. They don't have a one-to-one relationship with phenotypes. Sickle-Cell Anemia, for example, is not a survival trait, but it rides on the same genes as malaria resistance, so it is expressed strongly in populations where malaria is common.
This puts me in a bad position as far as arguing that polygamy is inferior to monogamy as a genetic survival trait, but I'm not sure that's what I want to argue. What I will point out, however, is that monogamy is overwhelmingly popular in humanity's most dense and long-living societies, and while that brings up the more complex issue of the relationship between evolution and non-genetic adaptation, it seems to me that that's significant of something.

>>844855
>monogamy is overwhelmingly popular in humanity's most dense and long-living societies, and while that brings up the more complex issue of the relationship between evolution and non-genetic adaptation, it seems to me that that's significant of something.

The abrahamic religion, which infected most of the world, includes the concept of marriage and forbids sex outside of it. People would follow these rules, even if they are contrary to their own nature (if you look at the "seven sins" of the Christian branch of the abrahamic faith, they usually go against natural inclinations of human beings).

Oddly enough, while Christianity itself is quite evil, it's a very efficient way to control the population. Eat only what you need, don't take breaks too often, only have sex when you need to make kids, stay humble... it turns people into worker ants, which explains why those countries developed faster (if not in science, at least in productivity and population).

This is the kind of thing that can skew data.

>>844899
Ah, this must be what was happening in the top half of the thread that I didn't read. Well, I've read Snow Crash, too, and I'm not sure even Stephenson would get behind everything you're saying. To begin with, monogamy is in no way an artifact of the "Abrahamic Faiths". Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and many Eastern Religions, which do not share a conceptual root with Christianity or Judaism all have doctrines of monogamy. Likewise, Islam to this day supports a limited polytheism, and it IS an Abrahamic religion.

I'll be away from the internets for a few hours.

>>844899

First contribution to this thread and I have no special areas of expertise but it seems to me that Christianity must have come from somewhere. It's far more likely that certain economic/evolutionary/environmental conditions affected the development of Abrahamic religions - and caused them to take their original shape - than that their cultural force shaped history to that extent. Obviously cultural movements have an effect on history's course, but cultural movements are at bottom rooted in, or anyway strongly affected by, the environment in which people live. By the time what we now call 'civilisation' got going, that environment included economics.

Take the taboo status of sex. Why is it so? For animals, sex is something performed in the open, even if it’s also an act of fierce possession (these rights to mate are MINE; this womb is MINE– and you’d all better fucking know it). But even the Abrahamic religions seem to demand sex be kept under wraps. If you go back to, say, the medieval period, or the renaissance, you find the privacy of sex is firmly related to the economic status of women.

In a patrilineal system where property is inherited through the male line, a man has to jealously guard sexual access to his wife in order to ensure that it’s his sons and not anyone else’s who inherit. Of course, if your wife’s pregnant, and even if a son is born, it can be hard to know whether the kid is your own. That difficulty resulted in fanatical protective measures, as well as a whole pseudo-scientific virgin-testing industry (which women, for the most part, knew how to fool). Here, all the energy of a very basic instinct – the urge to pass on one’s genes and ensure their success – is channelled through an economic system and erupts in complex cultural phenomena like the Renaissance belief that a good woman is a silent one (if she opens one orifice, she’s willing to open others!) or that women who’ve had sex will talk a lot and be incontinent (because she’s been punctured and is now a leaky vessel). We might even regard marriage itself as an instrument of economic power, a way of legally binding women to men.

So perhaps the demand that sex be a private thing originates in the necessity that a woman be a private thing. She must not even be looked at by other people, because it might inflame their lust. But eating is also a behaviour which is concerned with power. In a pack, eating the best parts of a killed animal cements one’s position at the top of the pecking order. And eating has never been a taboo – quite the opposite, for in a pack it must be done in the open so everyone can see who’s in charged. But maybe property is what intruded between animals and ourselves. Eating makes you strong and healthy but it doesn’t pass on to your offspring in a direct way, not if you’re a male. But when your pack dynamics become complicated enough to evolve the concept of ownership – and when they are strong enough that ‘leadership’ becomes an object which can be owned – then, THEN, something is at stake. If you want your offspring to prosper, they must inherit these things; if you want them to inherit, you need a woman, and women, as a vector of lineage, can be distinctly unreliable. Hence the control, hence the oppression.

The Abrahamic religions never covered the world, but if the poster you respond to is to be believed then other social organisations impose monogamy as well. It would be interesting to look to see what correlation there is between systems where property is important, systems where power is patrilineal, systems where sex is taboo, and systems where monogamy is imposed. If my words above about sex seem a little irrelevant, let them serve as a demonstration of the kind of movement I suspect to characterise human development. You’re correct in identifying the Old Testament as a prototype constitution, an attempt to create a coherent political body in an age before nation-states. Deuteronomy doesn’t only say that such and such a thing is bad, and often it doesn’t bother to say that at all; what it does is tell you that if a person does a thing, they should be punished in this particular way. It is a rulebook for holding a society together, a replacement for government, so that all you need is interpreters, judges, readers.

But its rules probably come from long-established cultural wisdom built on the bedrock of trial-and-error investigations into the nature of natural selection. More simply, packs learn pretty quick what does or doesn’t work. Its promotion of monogamy must begin in a similar place, since it doesn’t make sense that Christianity would ARBITRARILY impose monogamy (men are in power, and even under cultural force, you’d think a lot of men would go for a harem structure). After all, monogamy exists elsewhere, throughout the world and outside of Abrahamic influence. Someone claimed above that monogamy is useful for ensuring the vitality of a gene pool, and that polygamous systems need opportunities to mix groups. If that’s true, maybe monogamy becomes more important when complex civilisations, with their structures of agriculture, land ownership, class, and economic position, restrict an individual’s ability to move from place to place. That would chime with its connection to patrilineal property. But then again, maybe that’s nonsense - the Islamic tradition has maintained polygamy through hundreds of years of complex civilisation.

Whatever. Let’s suppose monogamy has become the norm because it’s useful in selection. That is a bit like saying that the word “slut” exists as a specifically misogynist slur because of the urge to pass on seed. On the one hand, it refuses to consider the intricate history of the systems through which that urge is mediated and expressed. On the other hand, the past systems are present only in the makeup of the current ones, while the urge is still present. Then again the urge and our relationship to it may have changed, and been shaped, by that history; the snake eats its own tail. Let’s SUPPOSE monogamy was useful. That is no reason to believe it is necessary or good in the present day. As a species or as giant industrial packs our ability to change the environment has far outstripped our biological capacity to respond to it. That leaves us staggering through a world which is very different from the one for which the forces which propel us were formed.

We may therefore find it difficult to practice polygamy without those forces – channelled always by culture – making us jealous. However, we find ample opportunities to fuck up simple monogamous relationships. I see no reason why anyone should be forbidden the opportunity to attempt polygamy, especially because, from what I’ve heard, some people do manage it (eg actress Tilda Swinton). As far as I can tell, natural selection as we know it is not operating in a knowable form – we can’t easily predict what our environment will be like in 20, 50, 100, 300 years, let alone what it will be like in any time long enough for biological evolution to matter (and forget being able to analyse how selection will function during that interval). We don’t need and can’t afford to act with selection in mind because whatever happens it is taking effect; God only knows how that’s going to work, but fuck second-guessing. We may be able to fuck with it ourselves soon enough (though I doubt the appearance of a social structure that can exploit that capability in an ordered or sensible fashion).

This being /lit/, I’d be interested in any book recommendations that touch on this.

>>845205
It is?

Religion was very strong at the time. I'm not saying it's impossible that a woman's "economic status" might be responsible for sex's status (although I don't really see how it could have caused something so dramatic as a woman showing her ankles being considered a slut), but it seems so much more likely that it had been made taboo because "lust" was considered so terrible a thing that you deserved eternal torture if you felt it too regularly...

>>845252

That a woman is a bubble or vessel who leaks when penetrated* - that "a ship and a woman are ever repairing" (Elizabethan proverb) - that one orifice is as good as another - that a fucked woman talks and pisses - that you can give a woman a chemical virginity test and she'll piss if she's been fucked - that if a virgin holds a seive and you pour water through it, no water will go through the wholes (because she's not leaky, see?) - these ideas aren't well-entrenched in the Christian tradition, and yet they are very strong in Early Modern discourse about women. They didn't come from Christianity (don't think the New Testament says much about chastity). They came from the difficult economic position of women as something essential to the transfer of property and power, but dangerously inscrutable. Not being able to know whether your son is your own or your wife unchaste seems a likely cause of the immense medical and religious interest into chastity, virginity, virginity testing, and so on.

There are many plays and poems where virginity is the centre of the plot, but the jealous men are never scared of hell, and never act out of a concern for their wives' eternal fates. Artists saw that men were covetous. And throughout all history, no matter how strong the fear of hell, lust has been a constant. People fucked in the middle ages. People fucked in the Renaissance. People fucked in the 18th century. The times during which people have fucked less than they used to are those in which belief in God has declined. As far as I know, the groups who historically fuck the most are upper-class males and lower-class everybody. When you analyse how much each one stands to lose economically, what does it tell you? They don't seem to have been scared of hell. I'd argue that genuine all-consuming terror of hell as a motive for chastity is mostly a creation of the modern (post French revolution) age. And even now, evangelical christians still end up losing their virginity. Does the fiction of hell really matter as much to anyone as cultural norms, peer pressure, money, or power?

*Poor obstretical instruments, frequent childbirth and the likelihood of bladder infection made this a self-fulfilling prophecy.
**Easy to cheat: just line the seive with oil or vaseline. Try it yourself with the latter - I've seen it done. At least, I THINK it was vaseline...no responsibility accepted if it's not.

a couple notes I forgot -
- The stuff about leaky women is a demonstration that economics really are super important.
- I'm not saying that at any given moment economics are actually consciously more important than social norms. I'm arguing that A) the economic foundation has a major effect on social norms, and B) that social norms and the immediate fear of censure or transgression are FAR more powerful than the simple idea that "you'll go to hell". Going to hell because you fucked around is a bit like dying of cancer because you smoked cigarettes - very few people consider it when they make decisions, because generally we just aren't very good at thinking long-term. Presumably it was not something our environment selected for (the disjunct between what our old environment selected for and what our new environment demands comes up again, and think of the problems it causes with things like global warming, or deforestation. We need long-term thinking as we've never needed it before).

man, you guys, tell me I'm wrong and recommend me books jeez

I prefer McKenna's take on the subject