jwfacts:
I dont think things would be dramatically different. You can not tell an athiest apart from a deist walking down the street.
NOW you can barely tell them apart, but 1,000 years ago, 2,000, 10,000??
Just ponder on the advancements made because of the spread of Arabic knowledge (e.g. numbers), Grecian philosophy, Roman thoughts, ambitions and engineering, and so on...
We have arrived at this point in civilisation, just as other civilisations reached various points, as a distillation of all that went before us. You can walk down the street as an athiest without fear of the sky falling on your head precisely because you live in the age that you do.
As for the impetus for creating rockets being nested in warfare, that may be where the funding came from but the wonder of what was out there spawned the imagination to explore. The attempt to get closer to "God" (a la "Tower of Babel") has been strong in our species for millenia. I assume it has been possible ever since we secured enough of a food supply to have time to think and discuss and wonder, around a camp fire.
Prior to this point of security how did Hominids view the world? Well, its not quite the bleak image that I portrayed with the shaking poodle, but we do have near ancestors to observe. They haven't exactly rocked the world with their achievements. They still wander around in territorial wee clusters and pick one anothers nits. Is this the kind of "oneness" that James portrays? Or did we need to ascend from that state to even permit such a kind of "oneness"?
To ignore history is to repeat our mistakes. To think that somehow the previous generations thought exactly like we do, but with a smaller pool of data to work from, is entirely wrong. We think the way we do because of their prior influences. Even our parents and grandparents (especially if they were Europeans during World War 2) thought differently from us, as they had different survival needs.
"Release the memes of war!!"
