We've Come so far

What can we learn from history? This question has plagued modern humans for at least the last 100,000 years or so. Every few centuries our species learns something amazing that shakes the foundation of our everyday existence. Sometimes these discoveries are good for society, and sometimes not. The invention of the spear meant more energy-rich food for the tribe, therefore a lesser need to spend most of our days foraging for plants or scavenging for dead animals. This left societies with a lot of free time on their hands. Those tribes with better technologies and the ability to not resist change survived longer, had healthier offspring, and were more likely to spread their genes though the populations. Add a few thousand years, a few more discoveries, a newly developing culture and the ability to communicate written/spoken language and you'll find yourself in the middle of a species divided. As our society evolved it began to select for intelligence and the ability to command authority. The societies that claimed to know more and could wield their authority over others; survived better and populated.

          

Enter the “Dark Ages” religious Ideas flourish and became entangled with our humanity. Heresy becomes common place for those who wouldn't conform. The trend becomes; if we can't wield our authority over you, then you'll be judged by god. Namely, if you don't conform to our dogmatic authority, then you will be subjected to the supreme law of us. We'll judge you by our beliefs and our interpretation god's word. This way we'll be the judge of you now!, hear on earth as the arbiters of gods almighty power. This convenient power play on behalf of god’s ultimate authority now allows us to judge you as dammed justifying reckless king in the the name of god.

Now skip forward almost to present day but not quite all the way to today, more towards the last hundred years or so. Societies have pretty much written off the word of god as the ultimate authority to kill. We now judge others out of frustration, not entirely because we’re mad at them for not conforming, but because of the loss in supreme authority over the mass's. Luckily we have societal evolution to advance us in our humanity's. With loss in supreme authority, religion and dogma become fair game for doubt to rear its sneaky, vial, malicious head. The men who once demanded respect and authority for no good reason other than “because [their] god said so!” now hide in a vale of secrecy and misguidance so as not to be recognized as supreme fakes. They hide in fear, as they should for all the damage their dogma has done and the knowledge that the gig is up. Their fear and hatred have rotted their minds and that of the mass's, causing an epidemic of impedance among mankind in its ability to evolve as an equal, just and loving society.

On to current day. We now harness and embrace the ability to think critically, speak freely without fear of persecution, and respect evidence over dogma. This freedom, however, has come at a great price. We are now in the middle of a great divide where reason is championing the dogmas of our ancestors. As we chose to reject the religious dogmas of our past and embrace the battle for reason a new vision comes in to focus. However there was no way we could predict just how strong an effect this would have on our society. Thankfully society and dogma, for the most part, have become more civilized. We now rarely kill one another over decanting opinions, and we value facts and evidence as the deciding factor in a cases of opinion vs fact. Unfortunately When facts are unable to be accepted or reasoned through we perform mental gymnastics known as Cognitive Dissonance. "The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognition's, adding new cognition's to create a consistent belief system, or reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements."

A new battlefield: As the internet has became increasingly popular it has also become the prime location and battlefield for intellectual discourse. It has also become one for philosophical, metaphysical and moral quandary's. Now it appears as a mass graveyard where bad, false, or immoral ideas go to die. The internet is currently the ultimate resource for finding answers to problems we once thought were impossible to conclude. It has proceeded to halt the indoctrination of ignorance and is steadily eroding the towers of dogma that have stood in the face of a Reason for so long. Reason is prevailing and the tides are washing us towards a brighter future free from the grasp of ignorance and dogmatic fervor.