Bokelskere.no

"Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family. This banal fact used to be one of history's most closely guarded secrets."

Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70 000 years ago. The Agricultutal Revolution sped it up about 12 000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.

Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. Thats why Sapiens rule the world, wheras ants eats our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

Modern businesspeople and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The prinsipal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.

The human collective knows far more today than did the acient bands. But at the individual level acient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail's pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth.

Most people do not wish to accept that the order gowerning their life is imaginary, but in fact every person is born into a pre-existing imagined order, and his or her desires are shaped from birth by its dominant myths. Our personal desires thereby become the imagined order's most important defences.

Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good God allows so mush suffering in the world.