Where did spirituality/religion come from, and where is it going?

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Raptor

Okay, so is this "free time" a good thing or bad thing? And why is this "continual progress" a bad thing? So we should hamper our innovation and creativity just to generate more free time? I'm pretty sure our competitive and curious nature goes against this. Not to mention that the average annual work time has gradually decreased recently according to HNM's chart.

No of course free time is a good thing because that is precisely the time that we can be creative and innovative. Which we have a really hard time when we are entering in a work relationship between an employer and an employee in which we usually do not earn the fruits of our creativity or innovation but only a monthly paycheck and maybe a bonus payment. Even I as a scientist with rather increased freedom compard to many other employees do have to restrict my creativity to the topics I can get grants for and I would often rather like to go out and swim in a lake in the sun than sit in the lab - sometimes scientific curiousity is keeping me in the lab, but most often it is duty and a work contract that pays my rent and food. So to be against work is IMO not to be against being occupied with something, being innovative or creative, it is to be against the relationship between a worker and someone who gives the worker money for the work - in capitalism, the employer even controls the tools and space that the work is done in addition to the time and workload of the person who became a worker.
Freedom from that would be if a worker has controls over his own means of working - his own tools, his own workspace, his own schedule and in the extreme case the liberty to not do any work that he does not want to do.

Continual progress is not in itself bad, but I think it is a bad concept. Progress towards what? What we see is a change in techniques and technologies, new concepts developing, new relationships - but IMO it does not reall yhave a direction, just like evolution does not have a direction. What makes the kind of progress we see now a bad thing is that it claims to have a direction but that this direction is mostly focussed on growth. More production, bigger houses, bigger cars, faster trains, more airmiles travelled, more food, more sales, more people... basically everything faster, higher, stronger, bigger, more complex. And this direction is coupled with an increase in energy and resource consumption, the expansion is driving species and cultures extinct and frankly is not even good for the sanity of those living within the culture that promotes this type of progress.
I would maybe also call it a progress if people learned more to listen to the natural world, understand the language of the animals, explore their emotions and beneficial cooperative social structures. IMO the NA'Vi are a very strongly developed and "progressed" (yet of course fictional) culture - just their focus is not on growth but rather on balance, it is not on machines but on relationships, not about competition but cooperation and not about doing things faster or bigger, but rather doing it at a scale and speed that is appropriate.

I also pointed out a flaw in HNMs chart - namely the increase of percentage of workers due to the womens movement. The chart I would like to see would not have "average workhours per worker" on the Y-axis, but "average workhours per citizen". In that case I am sure that the numbers would increase in the timeframe between 1960 and now as more and more women became "workers".