Digit wrote:OK, Cooker. That I have to say is a female response. Don't take the details literally. The point was following what WA had said, that Shamanism has produced nothing, science is what has given you the time to think, to question, to practice.
When I was a child women, even in this 'advanced' country, had a bloody hard life! For that increased freedom that science has given us, yes, we should be grateful.
I don't know how old you are Ish and as a gentleman I'm not going to ask, but in my childhood, producing the evening meal for the 'bread winner' was an all day job that started in the morning with the shopping and was ongoing throughout the day, along with cleaning, looking after any children and doing the washing.
The 'good old days' my foot!
Dig, it always amazes me how two people can view the exact same thing but see it entirely differently.
Anyway, I'm going to re-run something from one of my posts earlier today:
It's difficult for us to imagine the difference of effort expended to survive in a hunter gatherer society versus an agricultural one - both look like hard work to us!
But the writer Marshall Sahlins coined the phrase 'the original affluent society' about hunter gatherers. And Lorna Marshall, an anthropologist writing about the San Bushmen in the 1950s, described them as enjoying 'a kind of material plenty'....
We have to work very hard, Dig, to maintain our lifestyle today...which is why we need all these labour saving gadgets and yes, modern day life would be tough without them. Most people now, no matter what their profession, spend all day sitting in front of one of these marvellous computers that I have to be so grateful for, including me. Occasionally, I look out of the window at the sky, and I do get out a lunchtime to buy an overpriced sandwich that was made the night before. But otherwise, that's my life, five days a week and I'm not much different to most people.
Despite the fact we've never had it so good, our hospitals and doctors' waiting rooms are full to overflowing with obese people who are dying of malnutrition and diabetes, or their addictions to alcohol, cigarettes and drugs.
We're all just slaves to the system really...it's just that, thanks to science, some of us can afford velvet lined shackles and useless little toys, like the latest mobile phone that's also a video camera that's also a game boy that's also an ipod that's also a computer, to distract ourselves from this fact. The day that we became slaves was the day we gave up the hunter gatherer lifestyle, and traded roaming with our herds in the wild and the beautiful for some sort of security that has come at a huge price to us - and not least, to the planet.
