My reply to an introduction post by a peer in an online "Child Development" course
My name is Eric, but my friends call me Smelly.
I'm 25 years old and work at a bike shop in Colorado Springs. I absolutely LOVE bicycles. I've got 4 of 'em: A road bike, a DH moutain bike, a Dirt jumper, and an Ordinary (aka-Bone shaker, Penny-Farthing, Big wheel bike). Im is school for my psych, because I think its fasinating how humans have progressed though time. I would love to become an evolutionary psychologist... I won't make much but I'll love my job!
Cheers!
Hiya Eric...Right on and welcome brother!
Evolutionary Psychology...a very cool and underappreciated discipline.
Do you believe, as I do, that our species' unflappable and nearly universal faith in a supreme puppet master has proved an indispensible trait in fostering the success of our species?
I believe that the introspectively myopic or lazy...let's say, the existentially challenged; the blissfully ignorant, blue-pill dropping majority (Matrix reference there) has been humankind's saving grace. I mean, we're smart...smart enough to grasp our own mortality, so what better philosophical black box—sledgehammer to the skull housing reason—exists for preventing an endemic spiral into the morbid abyss of knowing, based on all available empirical evidence, that this is it and there is no hereafter, than faith? How successful would our species have been (and continues to be) at propagation if everyone was a brooding fatalist? A dark truth indeed, but what are the further implications?
Many of our greatest minds have been locked into such dismal musings, hanging around long enough to shout in a vacuum and recede quietly into the annals of human history as intellectual exhibitionists...remembered only for their eccentricities and the practical, technological advancements they gifted a quick-buck, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, unsentimental public without recompense.
So, will these tortured souls—with their short lives, scant, scattered, and congenitally doomed offspring—eventually fade into genetic oblivion as their evolutionary fitness disposes them to burn fast and bright and leave a legacy of erudition obscura, wounded windmills tilted at but not slain, and social solitude? Will the tormented genius who would not wish to bring a child into a coldly indifferent universe to live among the masses—who, by virtue of their insular groupthink, found it necessary to coin a term like "pariah"—vanish like codpieces, corsets, and a classical education? To those who are irretrievably cursed to live by their wits alone and are constitutionally divorced from (though not necessarily hostile to) the concept of God, peace of mind is a unicorn, and posterity is cold comfort as the context of one's achievements will eventually be lost amid the din of time and the selective, fickle memories of their fellow man (or woman).
In short (ha ha), is there a "God gene" and how much has it contributed to the psychological development of humans individually and collectively? Enthusiastically impaling one's frontal lobe on the nearest crucifix may be a quick, painless, and I'm certain, biologically natural impulse which allows for the sidestepping of deeper ruminations about the meaning or meaningless of life, but there's something to be said for pain and a hole in the soul.
That was a ramble, but a fairly lucid one by my norms. Little to do with this course...familiarizing yourself with teleological arguments are, at its core, a critical component of your chosen field. I look forward to reading your posts.
Glad to hear that you're into psychology! Some people are naturally intuitive and suited to the study of the mind, and many, particularly those you'll find in a clinical or academic environment, have minds that function like an abacus in the hands of a thumbless corpse. Not everyone should be given license to ‘play' with others minds; if you're worth your mettle, you will feel a compulsion, from time to time, to strangle (or browbeat anyway) some of your professors who often (based on my observations as former psych major) harbor a slavish devotion to one school of thought or another and are pathological theoreticians (failed practitioners)...try not to give into temptation...it will bite you in the butt when grades are issued.
Good luck and better days,
Paul
