[ExI] Eden, deep memes, exodus from the Ape God

[Will Steinberg]

Recently I was pondering the widespreadness of belief in a higher power.
When one considers the facts, this is actually a fairly arbitrary thing to
believe.  Perhaps then, I thought, specific past events could be directly
and parsimoniously, powerfully related to belief in a god.

Well, what do we know?  The most popular world religions believe in a
utopian past where humans and god were in direct contact.  Our world
society shares this idea of a perfect world before the 'fall of man'.  Is
there a possible true physical basis for this?

I propose a sort of world-historical view of the matter.  Imagine early
prehumans in mass monkeyculture.  As communication began, ideas were able
to remain memetically in the culture.  At the same time, separate ape clans
were probably fostering strong kinship ties, as well as fighting other
clans.

So imagine one clan is the strongest.  It absorbs the others.  The leader
of the group is the best leader--he has organized a system where each ape
has its own task, an edenic apeland.  Maybe this continues for generations,
with different strongest leaders.

But at some point the amount of ideas in this society reaches crescendo.
Maybe it was magic mushrooms. (Fruit of knowledge?)  Or the leader did
something that made him seem weak.  In any case, some event occurred that
led to the dissolution of this society.

And, in a hilarious, pathetic and very human twist of fate, all that the
prehumans could pass down was "once a great man ruled us; our father; he
was made like you and I and he provided us with food and order.  But
something happened and we left.  Without his rule we split into many tribes
with many different languages, into a world of the chaos, away from the
land of God..."
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