The human being is an animal like no other
in the entire animal kingdom. Though there
is an astonishing similarity in the genetic
make-up of man and other animals, man is
endowed with intellectual capacity which if
properly channelled can ensure his
liberation from the forces of nature with the
goal of mastering nature. However, this
intellectual endowment is rendered almost
nonexistent by superstition or any system of
belief that discourages free use of this rare
but crucial gift. In other words, non-use
leads to slow but consistent loss of function.
The harshness of nature can only be
imagined by the most 21st century human
beings. The real victims of the tyranny of
nature are the animals in the wild and the
early men and women. This discussion will
be limited to the harshness of nature as it
affects human beings and the strategies they
have evolved in ameliorating challenges
posed by nature.
The early men were at the mercy of nature
as food,clothing and shelter, which many
today will take for granted, were matters of
life or death. They ate whatever the could
find, how nourishing those items were was
almost irrelevant. Their unclothedness had to be
covered not for fashion but as a necessity as
many could have died helplessly from cold.
They lived in caves and aesthetics was the
last thing in their minds. To complicate
matters, their lives were under the constant
threat of predators and diseases.
Human reproduction is fraught with wastage.
The chances of conception in a month of
regular unprotected intercourse between
fertile human adults of opposite sexes is put
at one in five. Even after the conception
about one in five pregnancies end up as
miscarriages most of which due to random
chromosomal disorders. Some end with
congenital anomalies which are at best
disfiguring and at worst fatal. Childhood
deaths in the state of nature were rife and
even those that survive to adulthood had
very low life-expectancy even when
compared to today’s standards in the war-
torn and low-resource countries.
One may sympathize with those early
human beings who faced these daunting
challenges. They were simply helpless and
hapless. They had the ability to think hence
they conceptualized their circumstances and
the path of least resistance for them was to
ascribe these problems to forces beyond
their control. The forces in this case are to
them supernatural under the control of
gods. They had to appease these gods for
clemency. When the harvest was poor, the
gods had to be appeased. An infertile couple
had to offer sacrifice to the god/goddess
whose duty, they believed, was to bless
couples with children. Epidemic outbreaks
are often seen as divine punishment for
sundry wrongdoings. That is if some
unfortunate folks especially women are not
blamed for the calamity that befalls the
individuals and community as a whole. This
to me is the foundation of superstition
which mankind has not been able to shake
off. Superstition is a double-edged sword of
mental slavery, it provides the wrong
explanation on one hand and prevents the
quest for the right answers on the other
hand.
However, some of them chose to be
different in their thinking. These ones saw
things in a different light and thought that
man could actually help himself. The lucky
ones were simply ignored while the less
fortunate ones were persecuted or even
made to pay the ultimate price for daring to
be different. They sowed a seed of doubt to
question established norms and beliefs
which in most cases are unfounded. The
seed germinated and was watered by
subsequent generations of critical thinkers
and grew to a tree of empirical body of
knowledge based on the best available
evidence.

Hmm