The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

Sigmund Freud

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Hahaha, the good ol'Sigmund, he throws the stone and we must do the interpretation...Personally, I rather prefer the stone hurling...

Freud thinks it is more civilised to throw an insult.  Freud probably feels that a civilised mind is more hurt by an insult than a stone and the stone thower also realises that an insult hurts more than a stone.

I think Freud's quote goes a little deeper than it appears to. Civilisation started to grow when man, used to a risky and violent life, started thinking of something more than physical violence. He started thinking, evidently positively and negatively, of human emotions. So, probably man had become an emotional animal, relatively more emotional than other life forms around him. This could be called a begining a civilisation.

Man had started thinking how to live in a group.

Orion

Man always lived in a group but at some point of time, he understood human emotions better, beyond violence and Freud says that that was the beginning of civilisation. The point is that at some point in time, man's intelluctual development started and thus began his civilisation. We may differ about the exact point of time but we can define some intellectual event that can be said to be the starting of civilisation and then proceed from there to show how civilisation developed further.

Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization."

Did thinking produce that urge to worship? I doubt it.

Thinking produces temples, and it produces ways to take wealth from those with an urge to worship.

How do thinking people explain an urge to worship?

 

I have literally hijacked Tom Sarbec's above part from his reply on another thread because I think a reply to Tom's above question is good for a discussion on this thread. Please forgive me Tom for this hijack.

How the human need for civilisation arose? What could be the reasons to feel such a need? Need for a social order? Need for belief in god? Need for a religion, either as a code of good social conduct or for a code of devotional practices? Or someting different than this?

The only thing that threatens a civilization based on an insult, in my opinion, is understanding.

Lilium Mitchell

 

The Freud quote is just a device for giving a starting point. Neither Freud nor anyone including myself would want a civilisation based on insults. Let us now move forward and educate each other by sharing information and thoughts on how civilisation started and evolved. I believe that evolution of civilisation was a vey important and probably a final phase of Darwinian evolution.

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