Talking to the Ghost of Food

Larry Gonick's "Cartoon History of the Universe" is always relevant.

 

  It's good to state at the outset that the reason something was developed might not be the reason it stays successful. In a episode of Radiolab called "The Cataclysm Sentence" contributors were invited to offer the single most useful sentence of human knowledge to pass onto a post-human intelligence, and of course I sarted thinking what I'd choose. I'm not a scientist but I'd want to pass on some fun short-cut to generating curiosity: maybe something about doubling the length of a string, then comparing its pitch when plucked to see, or rather hear, that leap of an octave – or something about the law of gravity: the idea that the very fact of our existence makes us attractive. Cute facts.

 

 One contributor was the excellent youtube mortician Caitlin Doherty, who's appeared on this blog before. She suggested, "You will die. Aand that's the most important thing... so you have to have Religion, you have to have Communities. You have to have Art. Those are created by our fear, and our strange, difficult, weird relationship with Death." Which is one theory for the invention of all the above, but listening along as a fellow atheist, I realised it wasn't mine. 

 What if we created Religion around about the same time we became evolved enough to start wanting to enjoy life, and to realise that wanting to enjoying life had a moral dimension – and that eating meat meant taking a life, for example, but that we still liked the taste? What if we created therefore a way to look upon the world not simply as an environment, but as a provider? What if we developed Religion not to help us deal with death, but to help us deal with killing? As I said however, the reason something was invented isn't necessarily the reason it hangs around.

Here's the episode.

This is somewhere on the riverbank outside Kew.