Thats a straw man; whether or not they functionally caused extinctions is not germane to their psychology because they had no evidential feedback with which to assess their actions.
How is it a strawman? I'm not misinterpreting your argument, deliberately chnaging your words into something you don't espouse, then knocking it down. I pointed out that early humans were at least the proximate causes of major extinctions beginning ~30-40,000 years ago. We continue the problem to this date. I can provide species-by-species correlations to my contention within +-1000 years (at the earlier end) all the way to specific dates (at the more recent end). Your quibble about "functional feedback" is totally irrelevant. If we continue that argument, then we excuse every human-caused extinction up until the rise of the environmentalist movement in the 1960's.
As to the psychology of early humans, you can not possibly have ANY real evidence to back up your claim. The fact that early humans made cave paintings of animals, for example, is no more relevant than the fact that a deer hunter has a painting of a 16-point buck over his mantlepiece. You seem to have bought whole cloth into the myth of Rousseau's "Noble Savage". It's utter crap, in spite of what the politicallly correct cultural revisionists would have you believe. I can point to quite a few recent/current "primitive cultures" who are as devastating to their local ecologies as DOW Chemical is to the global ecology. And NONE of them are Christian. I'd say this refutes your claims to primitive psychology even without the obvious absence of evidence.
What IS common in their psychology tho is a sense of being directly related to other animals, even BEING other animals in human form, or with other animals members of a broader community of creatures over which the gods preside.
More noble savage nonesense. Granted early human cultures were much more closely effected by nature, and their "spiritual" activities revolved around nature spirits in the main (and fertility spirits, among other things). This IS evidenced by their art, among other things. However, that didn't stop them from exterminating vast numbers of species in bulk.
I admit you know a great deal about Marx. I submit, however, that you have very little more than a general, cursory understanding of the causes and consequences of extinction.
Hmm, well, I can't say that I can cite a precise correlation between christinaity and a specific extinction, but I do think it is clear that where christinaity is dominant environmentalism takes a back seat.
That's the problem, as I see it. We can't justifiably claim a correlation, much as I would like to add this to the list of the "sins" of organized religion and specifically Christianity. The explanation for why in mainly Christian, modern industrialized states environmentalism takes a back seat as you note derives, IMO, more from human greed and less from religion. Especially considering the large number of non-Christian cultures that are even now going gleefully about the world slaughtering as many critters as they can. Not to mention mind-bogglingly vast habitat degradation. And not to mention bioinvasion-caused extinction due to globalization (which now leads both habitat destruction and pollution as an extinction cause).
I don't disagree with the rest of your paragraph, however. That was definitely the European mindset of the Middle Ages - and remains in many areas the American and Western mindset of today. It is also, unfortunately, the modern Asian and industrialized African mindset as well. The rest of the world is destroying the biosphere simply to survive.
IMO it was only through the works of thinkers like Rousseau and the later developement of environmentalism that has restored a now fairly widespread perception of ourselves as organisms on the planet like any other, rather than as the lords of creation bestriding our rightful demesne, and doing with it what we will without let or hindrance.
No disagreement.
This message has been edited by Quetzal, 01-05-2005 11:48 AM