humans

[DanaC]

the brain, thought ...thats what i was refering to.

No, you were referring to this:

and what is it that is causing us to be the bad guys?
is it not that which seperates us from all other species?
our mind....

Our mind is what separates from other species and what allows us to cause such havoc. But it's our brains and specifically the older parts of it which lead us to act destructively, and competitively, and selfishly (as individuals or groups) and those parts of our brain are what link us to other species. The instincts which lead to our destructive behaviour are ancient and animal.


[eta] just as an additional point: religion doesn't create destruction and murderous intent; it can however be a vehicle for it. As can any mass concept. Religion stunting our development as a species can only really be argued against specific cases of development, applying it as a factor at a species level is too fraught with additional (often immeasurable) factors to be meaningful. What has potentially stunted our development as a species (and this only works if you believe there is an endgoal to our development, and a timeframe in which we ought really to have reached it, in other words an optimum speed of 'development') is us, specifically, our capacity for/instinctive desire to sublimate ourselves into a larger identity. Given that such an instinctive desire is most likely derived from a part of our brain much older than the mass identities we have fostered and given names to, one could make an argument for this being precisely where we 'should' be in our species' development.