Whether people wish to ascribe to TUB version of human creation/development, or the evolutionary model that we evolved from a common ancestor to apes, or alien hybridization genetic manipulatuion about our history/ancestry, etc there appears to be a continuum, a comonality that transcends even the fact that we are about 98% genetically similar to chimpanzees, and that is, our behaviour.

Jane Goodall has studied chimpanzee behaviour nearly all her adult life and she has found some amazing facts about chimpanzee society and behaviours that, offensive to our egos or not, plant us firmly within the parentheses of inclusion of the designation of the term "rapacious ape", from pope to philospher, to back-alley drug addict.

In one occasion a pile of bananas was placed in the setting of the chimps who had never seen bananas before. What occured next was revelatory in a sense to which we can relate. There was initial anxiety/fear and curiosity about this new "thing" in their midst and after much screeching and posturing, the alpha male chimp approaches the pile of bananas with caution, then slowly smells it, then tastes it then begins eating liike a kid in a candy sotre.

The rest of the chimps want some too. But where there was an egalitarian peaceful albeit hierarchical society of chimps before the bananas arrival, there now was a selfish and militant alpha chimp keeping all bananas to himself, even going so far as to injure any chimp approaching the food. The chimp ate past satiety, fully and unnecessarily force-feeding himself to where he could no longer eat.

Then only from persistent begging, submissive prostrated females with babies in arms, approached this stuffed alpha male and were given one banana but the rest had to watch, protest, and go without.

Now we can all say, "Well they're chimps, what do they understand of sharing and other higher elements of civil living" etc. It would appear that the alpha male chimp doesn't grasp that he has way more than he needs nor could need in the useable foreseeable future and yet he hoards it with violence and only "shares" a small fraction of his wealth with his favourties who have placated him sufficiently.

It is no challenge to the intellect to determine that the chimp simply isn't evolved enough to understand that food shared gives rise to peace and civility amongst the chimp tribe, as it was before the over-abundant bananas enterred the picture.

And, it could be argued, the chimps are not developed enough to understand the moral framework of it not being right to let others of your tribe go without, I mean, what would they know of God's moral code, of Jesus' teachings of feeding the multitudes.

Now do we see such a parallel in modern have/have-not socieites? Where do we see the greatest amount of uncivil behaviours, amongst the comfortable classes or the needy classes of humans?

The insult to injury in this parallel comes from the very premise that while we can conceptualize God and morality and right versus wrong behaviours, we are quite content defending our pile of luxuries, to the detriment of the majority of the human tribe and will even go so far as to develop Prime Directive propaganda about manifest Destiny, merit, hierarchical ethnic/racial and most important... religious discrimination and exploitation. Let me be fair here, given the opportunity for those in need to have what we have, they would also defend it likewise against the unmeritorious needy.

I offer that we are not very far removed from the continuum of such behavioural lineage.
Now I will move onto another similarity in my next post.

Another interesting thing about Goodall's chimps was that they will, with seemingly no detectable conferencing communication, assemble and approach a neighbouring area where there are other chimps, another tribe living.

The chimps will observe them, appear to assess some logistical consideration of the "enemy" size and number, and then launch into a full scale "war" upon the other tribe.

The attacks are vicious and deadly and in some cases results in the total annihilation of the "other" tribe of chimps.

Well we might say that territorialism is common in many animal species so what's the big deal?

Of note is that rather than simply scaring off the other tribe, or make some kind of "reciprocal" social contract with them, the "all-or-nothing" rule seems to apply, the total destruction of another tribe of like kind.
It is not that they destroy an entire colony of other monkeys, or small mammals of a totally different species, but rather that it is enough that while these chimps are for all intents and purposes their "brothers and sisters" they are still from the "other" tribe. Where have we seen this kind of behaviours before?

Then what also happens is that several chimps will capture a la gang scenario, a lone chimp, and three or four chimps will hold down the captured chimp on his back, on the ground, out-stretching his arms and legs and a very intentional kind of torture occurs resulting in things best not described here in the case of any readers' sensitivites. There is murder of females and young alike but no rape.

So think about that for a moment,... there is a planned determined act of war upon brother tribes involving violence, but not just fist and fang battles as soldeirs on a field of battle but a very organized purposeful torturing of the captive chimp. This is more than revelatory of our own tendencies in such circumstances.

We, with the power of conscience, higher realm thinking, moral frameworks and philosophies, wilfully and without good reason, make war upon our human brothers of different tribes mercilessly and as we have seen and continue to see, torture is not just allowed but even promoted. This amongst a primate that thinks him/herself above and beyond the primitive animal immoral unthinking savagery of our ape "cousins" and I use that term genetically.

If I were to indict ape and human alike for crimes against its brother tribes, I think I would find in favour of ape where any lattitude is to be offered to an accused.

In mitigation, the ape we could claim is a victim of his limitations, his inability to comprehend higher moral concepts, his inability to see the "bigger picture" of harmonious civil society. Also, despite all the short-comings vis-a-vis intelligent humans, chimpanzee society is overall, more civil and peaceful than human society.

In aggravation, the human has no such excuse since we have benefit of increased intelligence and the developmental cranial capacities that permit more complex thinking on matters such as morality, religion, compassion etc etc, the very things we throw to the forefront to defend against the evolution argument.

A child may misbehave and we could say,'She just doesn't know any better" but once an adult we can assert that the offender "should have known better" and to use the chimp as our child-mind and modern humans as the adult mind, we must know better and are therefore obligated to behave better, and yet, given the slighest "economic" disturbance in our society, we see a devolution of our higher mindset to that of the rapacious ape, but with the added shame of doing so knowingly.

Now where this appears as an indictment of humanity and negative and certainly not a fun topic at parties, it is meant to be objective and only ego will polarize any debate on these observations.

Jane Goodall has witnessed first and and documented, the many similarities chimpanzee societies have with us, and not just their violence, but also positive behaviours we could only deem civil and maybe, even resembling compassion in certain circumstances.

So we see in chimps, greed, and war-like savagery, theft, and the capacity to commit acts of torture!! What have we seen in Iraq? Women and children bombed into hamburger to put it graphically. Where is the shame?
The soldiers at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay who were photo'd torturing prisoners with dogs biting them, electrocution of genitalia, and forcing the prisoners into homosexual acts upon each other, were smiling in their photos!!! What was missing from any outcry was the revulsion to the perversion of sex included into the torture, something even chimps don't do.

So again, in comparison with a distant relative, if only genetically, we find incredible violence but also lack or remorse, something which we could explain away by asserting our superiority in understanding that chimps may not be (ironically) evolved enough to realize the wrongness of their behaviour according to

....OUR moral compass, and yet, we have shown a capacity to behave far worse than chimps, while possessing superior abilities to prevent such atrocities and further still, we have demonstrated an ability to collectively not show remorse, shame and accountability for such criminality and will go so far as to colour right of action via ideologies, whether economic, political or religious.

Now forgive this old apes' inability to wrap my brain aroun that but it haunts me because it is the very bestial human being who will kill anyone or anything in pursuit of things even chimps wouldn't pursue.

We have and continue to make war, steal, torture in pursuit of acquiring more bananas that we could ever eat nor need as we claim to be, in a majority sense,a spiritual species with indoctrinated moral values based upon our self-applauded higher-evolved ability to believe in God! I'll leave it at that..

My point is not to debate our human origins but rather that we humans do see ourselves as superior in ego-favouring ways, above the rest of "creation" and even go so far as to attribute our superiority as being deity-sanctioned and condoned and I have to ask what right do we have to make such a claim?

Where are our credentials making our premises on civility superior to any other especially when in one hand we hold some "divine moral guidebook" and the other hand on the button that launches nuclear strikes and bombs children.

SO I think the human species to be incredibly ego-centric and arrogant and at some point in our history, we became incongruent with God's nature, ignoring that fact that perhaps we are too limited a primate to assert that "we, the priveleged, know what the Truth is".

I think that based upon our record, in honest big picture objectivity, the very best We can offer is: firstly, we must have an acceptance that we are an arrogant self-aggrandising species, fraught with erroneous thinking; and; secondly, that the best we can come up with as far as truth is concerned, is conjecture and that conjecture, I believe, is not enough upon which to bank any kind of claim or monopoly on truth.

So when i see such parallels between chimps and modern humans, you can understand why I see further egocentric errors made by anyone who would make claim that even older primtive societies didn't have as much "culture" as we do.

The distinctions amongst our differences, while our egos will make full use of them to assuage our illusory self-image, are still captured within the common limitations of primates. It has been said that a human can draw a pciture of himself whilst an ape cannot, but only the human thinks this is any real accomplishment of worth.

Now when I first came to know TUB there was some discussions about the language used in TUB, where by I thought it odd that there was martial language used, and hierachical constructs used. And these terms fall well within the human/primate invention so I guess I expected that an advanced concept would frame itself in an advanced framework, where the kinds of superiority/inferiority hierarchies were not necessary to communicate effectively.

So while without words/schools/PHd's, written language, a chimp society can engage in behaviours akin to modern humans and vice versa, regardless of any substantial differences between the species, the frameworks are similar to our modern societies and as expressed in TUB, framed within constructs parallelling chimp society. Maybe that should be enough to humble us as to our place in the grand scheme of things.

And if ever higher elements of spirituality are to be garnered, I don't think we will get there as long as we frame our reality within parameters of destructive primate behaviours. Until we understand humility, we will remain rapacious apes.

Ok, I'm done. Thank you for your perspectives Christel.