The next leap forward vs fear of spiritual authority

I think we live in fear of going against authority because authority had evolutionary advantages. In other words, we have an innate, natural abhorrence of going against authority because for most of our species history (approximately 3.5 million years ago until recent times i.e. founding of democratic secular societies, we lived in patriarchal or matriarchal hunter-gatherers societies in which there were an Alpha male or female, as well as their individual parents, who led our prehistorical ancestors. For example, if we look at our ancestors prior, to the introduction of agricultural which occurred approximately 9 to 10 thousand years ago, they were all hunter-gathers, and they may had supplemented their meat diet with wild fruits, berries, and proto-agricultural vegetables. Then someone had the idea instead of us going hunting why don’t we domesticate the food we have been hunting (the idea of domestication may have come from our experience of domesticating wolves into hunting companions, then they eventually became the common dog, and the livestock need food so the idea of planting grass and wheat to feed the livestock came into existence which then led to domesticating the wild fruit, berries and vegetables. This new adaptation led to a stationary lifestyle from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. During our hunter-gathering days, we lived in close family units like the African San-bushmen, African Pygmies, and South American native tribes do today, they live in small family units, and so authority was important to survival. We are one of a few species in which our young are helpless until they reach at least adolescences, and some adolescences and even adult are still helpless (how many 30 to 40 years old are still living with their parents when they don't have to). In other words, Homo Sapiens-Sapiens don’t get up and immediately walk like the gazelle or zebra on the African Savannah, that is we are dependent on our parents for a long time and so we take authority figures seriously in our lives, and we assume they are telling us the truth until proven otherwise. As Daniel Dennett or maybe Richard Dawkins may have brought out that when the village elders, shaman, priest told us to kill a goat or if our parents told us not to go to the edge of the water or a crocodile may get us, and if some Johnny-come-lately disobeyed their parent and became crocodile food we had an immediate reinforcement to what was said and so when ever the parents who gave up their authority to the village shaman who was most likely an elderly family member we got use to our elders and shamans telling us things based on authority. Therefore, I think we have a difficult time going against the authority of our families and if your family are Christians or whatever religious faith your family has adopted, there is this evolutionary fear of going against the authority of our parents and religious authorities. We seek out authority, even in science, we name drop (just like I did in mentioning Dawkins and Dennett), for instance we say Einstein said such and such, or this famous scientist said such and such, it is a natural innate drive or desire to seek out authorities, this is why science is often peer-reviewed, we seek out authority, that our hypothesis is right or wrong. Therefore authority acceptance and seeking is a natural thing. Yet when we decide to think outside our narrowed tribal, religious views, our families think we are moving into dangerous territory, like the child who goes to the waterside after they been told not to, they fear for our "eternal souls", we have broken the taboo. However, I begin to think about courage to go against authority, may sometimes be necessary for the survival of our species. Someone in proto-homo Sapient society had the courage to step down from the tree and walk on two feet, someone had the courage to stand up to the leopard, lion, and sabre tooth tiger, and other predators, someone had the courage to migrate out of the African Savannah to populate the world. I know there were deaths in some of these steps of courage. To give you an analogy, during the civil rights movement, Rosa Park refuse to give up her seat, she lived a long time, however Dr King was assassinated, Medgar Evers was murdered, some freedom riders in Mississippi were murdered and many others died fighting for civil rights, as a result today over 40 million people of color have more rights than they had because someone took a courageous stand. Freedom and progress takes courage, and if our species is going to survive it is going to take courage to move pass religion, race, and other differences. It will require us to take another great leap forward and we are going to have to fight our evolutionary fears of going against the things that divide us and may have had a survivability or evolutionary purpose, but they no longer do and these things need to start in this generation if we are going to do something about climate change, exploration of space, and move on to the next evolutionary step in our species.

Black Socrates