Thursday, December 31, 2009

Happy New Year! And all that jazz.

It's been a stressing week here at home and I am ready for the new semester more than ever. I have two Anthropology classes lined up: Physical and Human Society. I have Ant of Human society with a visiting professor that I have heard great things about and Physical Anthropology with a professor that's been at the university for a long time and about with which I have previously spoke with and sat in on his lectures, so I'm super anxious to start those classes. Not to mention I get to finally get my hands wet in evolution, well, in a class anyhow. The lecture I sat in on with my soon to be Physical Ant professor had to do with an extraordinary transitional fossil which greatly intrigues me.

Anyhow, I've been pondering a lot lately about what makes something true or false. The beliefs people adopt by means of enculturation are given to be true outright, no matter how absurd. We are taught to believe things which gives the most logical answers to our questions, and most people, actually, a very large majority of the human population never questions such beleifs on any levels. That is, of coarse, what makes cultures and the process of enculturation so intriguing. We as humans usually learn things one way, and that one thing becomes truth, and through time and space results have become rather...imaginitive in many ways. But to a person who beleives such things and knows no other things in a certain respect, these become absolute truths.

The idea that a person will be sent to hell for not believing in one Christian belief or another becomes true to the person(s) that beleives it. In this way, we develop many of our own truths, and that's where it becomes complicated.

You see, it's very possible for a truth to be false, but a surviving method in enculturation only teaches absolutes. If something is right, or true, then on no level can it be wrong, or false.

However, such thinking will lead one to an extreme level of social darwinism, however, I am also only speaking in my experience, which is primarly lower middle to low class american enculturation. Which I can definetly say that the thought processes of social darwinists still exists in lower classes, which may very well be a distributing factor to why they're still is a lower class in a country that supposedly is "the land of opportunity."

But enough theorycrafting.

TLDR; I have a hard time staying on target.

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