beliefnet
I certainly can deny out warlike
nature. All evidence is that before Abram came along and invented God,
humans were agricultural - herding communities or hunter - gatherers
where the ecology permitted it. Their gods (if any) were generally
earth/fertility oriented and community sustainability was an important
moral imperative.
War
was rare although not non-existent, as there were tribal leaders that
for one reason or another usually outgrowing their resource base could
try to take what they wanted by warfare. Usually settled communities
could defend themselves and the marauders failed usually when the
dysfunctional leader was killed.
Abram's
genius was inventing a leader that couldn't be killed because it didn't
really exist, and who divided all the world simply into us and them.
Them just didn't count. This was a successful concept, as poor young
men could be convinced that it was "their" fault they were poor and
horny and run off to battle for plunder, and women.
As
for the people who created the mythology, whether or not they were
inspired by God is moot, as they believed in God, and codified the
mythology based on that assumption. My belief or lack thereof in God
has nothing to do with what others believe. I also do not think that
50+% of the population that believe in Christianity and Islam and at
least pretend to read and abide by Scripture is "only a fraction."
I was not arguing that predatory tribes
did not exist before or even after Abram invented God. Tribal survival
is always an evolutionary imperative. If drought or other natural
disaster makes your community uninhabitable the tribe or community if
larger does what it takes to survive. Since arable land is usually
occupied and defended predation involves the expenditure of many
warriors. Those mass graves mentioned earlier may or may not have been
all victims of predation. In a battle of relatively equal weaponry one
would expect the attackers to have the most casualties.
At
Crow Creek the lack of young women in the grave is more likely the
result of the defenders giving the most important members of the tribe
time to escape to safer ground than the biblical assumption that God
delivered the virgins to the victors. The site was defensible as noted
by the defensive trenches that the attackers had to overcome. The
assumption that they did is optimistic at best. The burning of the
settlement may well have been a defensive move to remove the incentive
for the attackers. The fact that the site was abandoned for several
weeks suggests to me that the attack failed with the loss and/or retreat
of the attackers and the villagers returned later to honor the dead
with a proper burial.
While
predation and defensive warfare may have been common in prehistory, the
long term survival of most communities on arable land suggests that
predation was a poor tribal survival strategy. That is until the Romans
came along with their emperor Gods emulated by the Christian God that
held all of "them" in contempt to be slaves and breeders, that predation
became a way of life and a relatively successful one at that.
Getting Iraq right
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