Humanity – Necessarily a Good Thing?

I can’t help but get the feeling I’m not breaking any new ground here, but I was just listening to ‘The Animal Song’ by Savage Garden (I never seem to get inspiration from anything that could be called literary or intelligent) and this line struck a chord within me:

‘Animals and children tell the truth they never lie; which one is more human, there’s a thought, now you decide.’

So is telling the truth a particularly human characteristic? What exactly constitutes being human?

I’m going to go down the cynic’s route and say that the primitive forces that make us compete against others, fight for power, and lust after our desires are what constitute humans. We are innately selfish – a trait that many claim to be bad but realistically drives most of our actions. No matter how much we try to act without benefiting ourselves, we can in fact never consciously do so, for as soon as we become aware that we are doing something selflessly, part of the action becomes the pride that we are thinking of others, and turns it into something we are partly doing for ourselves. I DIGRESS!

The point is, being human doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with charity, hope and truth – these are all merely religion-originated terms that encourage community feeling for the general benefit of a civilisation and the specific benefit of those who run different churches/mosques/temples etc. Being human could merely mean that we are advanced enough in intelligence to manipulate others through pseudo-beneficent sects and organisations.

How very ramble-filled this post is…