Koko sent me the pic of his fiance, a bald (hairless) very muscular bonobo. The more I look at the picture, the more uncomfortable I am. He is short, wide shouldered with bulging biceps and a powerful hand. His teeth are large and white, and his expression is defiant and sarcastic. We are very different, very different.
The problem is that we are not. With some cosmetic surgery here and there, he would be easily hired as a nightwatch, a security guard, sargeant, rugby player, rock singer, army general, or CEO of a large corporation in need of a strong leader. He is human. Or it is me who is bonobo? No! I am a human being, no evolutionary twin of Koko-san. He is an animal while I was created by God.
Really, I felt in my guts the rejection of the mere idea that I am like this hairless anthropoid. I dont WANT to be an anthropoid animal. I am but I feel uncomfortable in my skin. I want God to create me and not to evolve in the African savannah.
If I could, I would be a Creationist.
10 comments:
God created both the animals and the humans according to the biblical account (on different days), but he appointed humans as masters over the animals. This, I think is easier to accept on a common sense level than the "scientific" idea that humans are just slightly smarter apes. As a practical matter, we are the masters the animals, just as the Bible says. We put apes in zoos but not vice versa.
Sometimes a difference in quantity (of intelligence in this case) is so great as to put something (humans) in a completely different category. You could say that a polar bear is just a very large mouse, but most people would say that they are two different things. Man has passed some magic threshold of intelligence and consciousness that puts us in a different category than all the other animals. It is the "scientists" who deny this obvious fact and insist that we are just another animal who are wrong. Orwell said that some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.
K
I do not think we have all passed this threshold.
Anon.
I hear he runs a hedge fund.
BTW, he is trying here to imitate the Lloyd Blankfein look.
Anon.
No, outside of the profoundly retarded, all humans, even the stupidest, are on another plane.
I will give you an example:
http://m.memri.org/14500/show/a6db60c806d17f2a08d60705e2c3eabd&t=20320d97cb30b6845cb6422bedb5dfbe
Now, by human standards, Walid is a copplete idiot, but still his thoughts are many times more complex than any bonobo (other than Koko, of course).
K
It is disurbing how similar we are to the bonobos. It is disturbing to think that we are a bunch of chemicals.
Regarding Walid, in the terrorist mental universe it is an accepted fact that we Jews have magic super-powers and cast spells that make them drink their piss and eat their feces. Even the journalist knew it. Good.
Again, the "bunch of chemicals" view is incomplete. All living things have a magical spark of life - Michelangelo depicts it better than the scientists. A bunch of proteins in a test tube is not the same thing as a human or even an amoeba.
Yes, the most amazing thing about the Al Jazeera piece was the complete lack of questioning or skepticism by the reporter. There is a double standard here - if the head of the CIA told this same reporter that the sky was blue, he would confront him on it.
K
K
Jews are 0.15% of humanity, that is, one in ten thousand. The billions living in Muslim countries, in India, in China, in Africa - have never seen a living Jew. Even most Christians have zero experience with living Jews and their image of us is from the Bible. They believe the most bizarre things.
Not that those having close personal experience with us will like us more. But at least they know we have no superpowers. We should have.
When my mother was deported by Stalin to Kazakhstan, the daughter of the villager who took my mother's family in travelled many miles to see my mother, because she had never seen a Jew before. She asked to rub my mother's head to feel if there were horns. She exclaimed with surprise that Jews looked just like humans - in her conception, we were another species, like the bonobos.
The woman who took my mother's family in was a widow - one day when her husband was leading one of the kolkhoz's horses, the horse supposedly broke free and headed for the endless steppes, never to be seen again. The husband was accused of being a saboteur and executed. Who knows, maybe he sold the horse for some food, or even ate it.
K
Unpleasant memories.
It's hard to believe that such hells existed (and still exist in some places) while we live such lives of comfort and luxury. People once worried about starving to death - we worry about eating ourselves to death (or starve ourselves intentionally). Once a single coat was a precious possession, now our closets overflow with smattes (and yet we crave more). And yet, being so blessed, we still kvetch endlessly.
K
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