Beliefs as an Expression of Genetics and the Environment

The philosopher Schopenhauer considered animals and humans to be of a single kind, which makes sense to me and is my gut feeling on the subject. In fact, the sand-people religions' idea that animals are mere chattels and only exist for people is anathema and alien to me. Perhaps that concept makes sense for a nation of traders and accountants.

I observe on my own property that the native animals, that is the animals which are stitched into the fabric of the local environment, act in a way that at least partly benefits the whole place rather than just themselves. It probably couldn't be any other way. (See Earth is Self Regulating)

It makes sense that human beings would be the same, that is, an expression of their history with their environment as it is encoded in their genes and their beliefs and attitudes would be an expression of that as well. For any given area, it seems likely that all the plants and animals, including humans, co-evolved.

While the natural environment where I live seems timeless, in fact, it's "only" tens of thousands of years old, not millions. The last glaciation of the area had it buried in ice for thousands of years. The beech-maple forest has been around forever practically, but where I live, it was wiped out by glaciers then reborn in the Holocene with a different mix of animals.

Human civilization, which is essentially the same age, bundles together people from diverse environments and corresponding diverse core beliefs, even in the cultural nation states of middle ages Europe, the collection of people living in a particular "nation" were in fact a collection of different tribal stock from all over Eurasia. The dogma of the catholic religion painted all of them with the same brush for a few centuries, but perhaps they all have a different brain and different sense of what they should be doing.

The Amish are a great example of a group of people who decided that they didn't belong in the mass societies of the western world. They tried to create a way of life that harmonized with their feeling of the way things ought to be.

When civilization and the day to day things we do seems to make very little sense, or feels evil, it's probably because it's contrary to what your bones and guts want to do because you and your ancestors lost your ancient home and way of life.