Survival
Definition: Continuation of the species.
A very complex question with different strategies evident at every level of organization: individual, community, country, species.
Population
Definition: Numbers of members of the group.
A crucial question having an impact on every aspect of survival since the resources will have to be divided amongst the members of the group.
Procreation
Definition: Reproduction, with whom and how many.
Basic to survival at all levels. Impacting such divers questions as quality of individuals, leadership, and the general direction of adaptation to the environment.
Wealth
Definition: Physical resources necessary to survival.
This is a method of buffering resources and thereby giving additional time to react to threats to survival.
Power
Definition: The ability to affect the actions of people.
A means of achieving wealth.
Philosophy
Definition: Research into motives.
A means of understanding the past and present and predicting the future. In the beginning it will result in the choice of a guiding set of principles identifying the values associated with feminism or masculinism.
Political Ideology
Definition: The implementation of the preferred philosophy, Masculinism or Feminism.
A method of achieving communal survival through organization.
Religion
Definition: The implementation of the political ideology.
The identification of and caring for the authority governing the favored political ideology. These will be identified as Gods to provide for their superiority over humans and to guard against rebellion. This is not to suggest that they aren't real. They are representations of the deepest understanding of the guiding philosophy and represent something incommunicable through ordinary means.
1. Since religion is the child of ideology, (see my short essay on Abraham in "Speculations on Population") this will mean that when ideology shifts, as it is currently doing (from Masculinism to Feminism), religion will have to change to properly reflect it. In our case we should expect a particularly discouraging disaster resulting from human creativity, producing the need to have religion teach why humans should avoid usurping the prerogatives of God (passivity, a feminine value).
2. It should be noted that survival preoccupies all living species all the time. Population preoccupies all living species some of the time. (For a new species, the answer is as many as possible. For a mature species the answer is rather more complicated. It is instructive to fantasy about the creation of the shark. One can imagine an Alice in Wonderland scenario where all the fish leaders get together and discuss the implications of overpopulation and settle on the shark species as a suitable answer. More realistically one can imagine an overpopulation of fish producing an insufficiency of food and the realization of one species at some point that his neighbors appear to be edible. After that crucial moment, evolution suffices to produce the current creatures.)
3. Procreation preoccupies all species some of the time. Accumulation of wealth is only practiced by some species, squirrels and men, for example. The same is true for power, only some species concern themselves, deer and men, for example. After that we come to the purely human responses to survival: philosophy, ideology, and religion.