For example, I would say most single, urban Americans, enslave themselves to their pets (myself becoming one of them). On a Sunday morning like today, I walk up to the garbage bin with a bag of cat poop, while all my neighbors go around walking their dogs exclaiming what good boys/girls they are. At least Koreans, who are pretty much slaves to their children's upbringing, have a biological reason to be enslaved to their offspring. Pet binding is purely voluntary, not to mention excessive and expensive. Those who do not have pets or family enslave themselves with religion, vision, work, romance, hobbies, drugs, food... the list goes on. Despite how all of us modern human beings celebrate the free will and living our own destination, it seems that the old, feudal society of medieval times actually fulfilled our basic instincts better than the modern ideal. At least during feudal times we were actually enslaved by a master in the real, physical sense. I am guessing we were also much more mentally stable back in those days. Nowadays, we actually have to search for a master to serve; some people just cannot find a master, and the lack of a master drives us lost and crazy.
So, we need to depend on something to govern our lives, to be adored unconditionally either for our being or for our purpose and adore something in return. This really echos a Christian sentiment that we were created to adore God and be adored by God in return. Therefore, here is where I am supposed to say that the Bible was right, that "He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Which would explain why we have a yearning for being one with "eternity," to be with and to be loved by the holy God, but since we do not know that it is God that we are actually yearning for, we try to fill that yearning with various different things, like pets. Yet, I can also think of a purely evolutionary reason as well though, that we evolved to be pack hunters for survival, so much like wolves or lions, we need a pack leader, or at least pack members, to support our being in order for us to be truly content with our lives. (Although, interestingly enough, neurologically speaking, human brains are wired more closely to a cat's than a dog's; we are supposedly individual hunters and not a pack hunter, and the pack hunting instinct should be more or less learned, not primal.) As animals with no physical strength, lacking in size, claws, fangs, heightened senses, etc., we really need to depend on something else to ensure that our species' genetic makeup will continue on to the next generation. Which, by the way, is also written in the Bible ("God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth"" (Genesis 1:28). But that's another completely new blog entry.
I guess all I want to say out of this is, the truth is truly in the eye of the beholder; because honestly, any explanation of a cause can make perfect, logical sense. That is, in essence, what sciences is about, trying to attach a logical reason for "how things work." In the end, it really is faith, in both the religious and literally sense, that guides the individual to how she sees the world. So there really is no use on fighting over who is right or wrong; also this is why the movement to ban certain "sciences" from school education is utter bs, a complete insult to the spirit of science itself.
And that I am pretty much a slave to my cat. And that I should go clean the litter box of my master right now.
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