Werner Herzog once said that the state of the natural world was one of "chaos, hostility, and murder." In a sense, he is paraphrasing Mr. Thomas Hobbes' sentiment that life is "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Dr. Samuel Johnson says, "he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
The natural state of human beings is not always pleasant. In fact, our genetic programming frequently proves quite to the contrary. Still, I cannot fathom that we are not born from a masochistic concept such as original sin. I like to think that our genetic code is there for a reason, and that reason is keyed to survival, not metaphysical punishment.
I believe that why we are depends largely on what we are. If we can understand what we are and how we got there, then we can make conscious choices about where we are and where we should go. Science has been making very significant strides in this department, thanks largely to the Human Genome Project.
Still, there are those forces out there who oppose this sort of enlightenment, and would end proponents of science. The list of martyrs includes Galileo Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, Mikolaj Kopernik, and even Charles Darwin--all persecuted, suppressed, and feared for simply discovering certain truths that were already there, only because those truths flew in the face of words already written and deemed sacred, immutable, or unquestionable.
No institution, group, clan, or confederacy should need to fear knowledge. The tighter any orthodoxy clings to a fiction, the easier its constituency is squeezed out of its grasp. Information wants to be free.
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