IT'S BEEN AWHILE

Well, what a day! Today I've been reading my friend's poetry in his latest book, Crazy Stairs. And dipping further into Foreign Affairs magazine for July/August while alternately journaling in my paper journal bits of poetry influenced by Geoff Peterson's work and odds and ends of political and cultural thought entering and exiting my 70 year old leaking brain as fast as they can. There's also more to enter from the Gould book I'm reading, The Mismeasure of Man. I finished Brautigan's book, The Revenge of the Lawn (my bathroom reading these past weeks) and am really disappointed by it. Poor dead suicide. My new bathroom reading will be Art For Beginners by Dani Cavallaro. Well... take a breath... I won't get that all in today, and who'd read it if I did?

BARACK OBAMASERVATION

Barack Obama is a man of the 21st Century. John McCain is a man of the past, a left over jingoist, cold warrior from a dead era. More than anything we need an Obama. If we fail to elect a man of the 21st Century in this next election, America may find itself irrevocably behind and out of the touch with the developing and modern world. I mean, we need more than change, we need someone who in his psyche and very synaptical being is modern. This is it for America. Get with it or get lost. Will the religionists hold America back and multiply its inevitable decline?

Today, Sunday, I passed yet another rich suburban church, it's lot crammed full of SUVs and other gas hogs, i.e. terror supporters. I imagined I was seeing the ancient linkage of the rich and powerful and the church, just as one found them linked in Franco's Spain, pre-revolutionary Russia, and Dicken's England, and currently, Arabia's Imam's and political rulers. The fat ladies are singing all over America. One out of four Americans is now obese. Is the game nearly over? And has America lost it? Or, at minimum, lost the way?

CHINA'S OLYMPIC SPRINT IS NEARING ITS END

As you newspaper readers know, China's international image is supposed to be enhanced by its Olympian effort, but internal and external politics, repression and secrecy have made them to show themselves as exactly what they are, a despotic government, but, strange to say, China's history with the West has made its average citizens extremely mistrustful of our motives. (The imperialist past coming home to roost?) So there's a twist on the old story about empires, dictatorships and democracies that we don't often meet. Read below and weep:

[SNIPPER]
If the Games do not go well, there will be infighting and blame shifting within the party's central leadership, and it will likely adopt a bunker mentality. Vice President Xi Jinping, the government's point man on the Olympics and President Hu Jintao's heir apparent, would likely face challenges to his presumed leadership.

A poor outcome for the Games could engender another round of nationalist outbursts and Chinese citizens decrying what they see as racism, anti-Chinese bias, and a misguided sense of Western superiority. This inflamed form of Chinese nationalism could be the most enduring and dangerous outcome of the protests surrounding the Olympics. If the international community does not welcome China's rise, the Chinese people may ask themselves why China should be bound by its rules. As a result, Beijing may find the room it has for foreign policy maneuvering more restricted by public opinion. [All we have to do is imagine how Americans feel when their national honor is challenged. Stupid, yes, but explained by evolutionary biology? Yes also.]

This is from the magazine I hold in my hand (to your right) from July/August 2008 by Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal. Damn, I can't get it to turn itself right side around. Well, you'll just have to read backwards or print it out and hold it up to a mirror. No wait, I flipped it upside down, snapped the picture, then turned the result upside down. At least I think I did.
[PASTER]

WILL THEY APE HUMAN BEHAVIOR?

I mentioned a few entries back that maybe we human animals might want to start thinking about our animal cousins in a different way, and, it seems, the Spaniards are doing just that—at least about some of our animal cousins. The following information is from the venerable New York Times:

[SNIPPER HERE]
…the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month [voted] to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project’s directors, Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a “community of equals” with humans.

If the bill passes — the news agency Reuters predicts it will — it would become illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture, including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden.

The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated.
[PASTER HERE]

CONDOLENCES TO THE CONDOLEEZZA, BUSH’S BLUNDERBUSS

I just this morning read Condoleezza Rice’s report in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs. Interesting how she reported on our current foreign affair objectives without once showing us how Bush has screwed them all up. For example, on Page 7, she believes that the rise of an alliance of certain unnamed democracies in Asia along with Japan and Australia will counterbalance the increasing influence of China in that region. She forgets to mention that a recent poll in Australia shows that Australians trust China more than they trust America. So much for that alliance.

About Iraq, she writes that “the cost of this war in lives and treasure, for Americans and Iraqis, has been greater than we ever imagined.” (Page 21) I wonder if she or Bush or Cheney ever read any popular magazines, like Newsweek, for example, before they illegally invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. I recall very clearly reading in many places and hearing on many TV shows just how costly our invasion and occupation of Iraq would be. Were some of our news media more astute and informed than the government which carried on the invasion? Humnnnn? Also under this heading, she failed to mention why we did not, therefore, invade other dictatorships whose practices were worse than Hussein’s.

She also continued to assert the now defunct reason for our invasion of Iraq, that is the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein. She did this by going to the fallback position of the Bush administration, that Saddam was willing and ready to reconstitute his invisible weapons of mass destruction. Her assertion was an act of mind reading that surpasses the abilities of all previous American Secretaries of State, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and including James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams. (Page 21) I wonder if she’ll take up tea reading after her stint in American government?

Anyhow, I didn’t mean to make this an endlessly long recapitulation of Rice’s essay in Foreign Affairs. But you might enjoy reading it yourselves. Nowhere does she take Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld to task for their blunders and failures. I think this failure of nerve on her part makes the entire presentation suspect and weak.

Note how her paragraph, following, would be more honest if she just mentioned how our American values have been most compromised, not by liberals, but by you know who and his lackey and by Republicans in general since the start of the Reagan era:

“Ultimately, however, what will most determine whether the United States can succeed in the twenty-first century is our imagination. It is this feature of the American character that most accounts for our unique role in the world, and it stems from the way that we think about our power and our values. The old dichotomy between realism and idealism has never really applied to the United States, because we do not really accept that our national interest and our universal ideals are at odds. For our nation, it has always been a matter of perspective. Even when our interests and ideals [i.e. under the Bush administration or when Republicans invaded Chile and overthrew a democratically elected government] come into tension in the short run, we believe that in the long run they are indivisible.”

PORTLAND, JESUS AND WORK SLACKS

We had a fine weekend, my wife and I. We spent a part of Saturday in Portland, walking around, shopping at the Loyd Center at Ann Taylor, where my wife found some size 2 slacks for work, finally, after much disappointment at regular stores in Vancouver, our new hometown. Then we took in a movie, "Bloodline", which expands on and furthers the Holy Grail story found in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Jesus Papers. In the end, director Bruce Burgess presents some striking evidence that will leave you agape. So watch it if you can before the Vatican burns the film at the stake. Later we ate Indian food which Mertie liked and which I hated. Not that I haven't had good Indian food, but this was so bad that I gagged when I followed one taste with the taste of a cucumber gruel. Really... I gagged. On a Sunday of love, we later walked along the river hand in hand and watched a horribly bad movie about sixteen wheelers gone astray on the Fear Network in the evening. We have yet to find a really good movie on that channel.

NOT NECESSARILY A CREATIONIST THOUGHT

"Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it, whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." —Chief Seattle

AND WHY IS SHE IMPORTANT?

In complete disagreement, I imagine, with Ray Kurzweil is Baroness Greenfield. We came across this passage in Top 75 Questions of Science

“Changing a gene will change a protein that is made in the brain, and it will have lots of widespread and varied effects. Anyone gene participates in many functions, and many functions have the participation of many genes. Those genes in turn will be active or not according to what happens in your individual lifestyle. Gene therapy and genetic screening will be helpful, but we have to be very cautious about getting people all excited about these genes.” —Susan Greenfield (a baroness and member of the British House of Lords, researches neurological diseases)

IF YOU THINK HUMANS ARE ROTTEN, WHAT WOULD THEY TELL ROBOTS?

Also in 75 Questions, we came across these fascinating thoughts about robots and humans by Marvin Minsky.

“We don't make most appliances look like people. The new point to me is the idea that we don't want people to learn to order around servants that look like people, because that's catching. If you tell a household robot to do unspeakable, disgusting, or just boring things, you'll get the hang of telling other people to. And most human interactions are rotten already. People lie, cheat, do all sorts of awful things.” —Marvin Minsky (computer and robotics pioneer)

WHAT IF THEY ARE LIKE THREE YEAR OLD CHILDREN?

Steven Wise is an animal-rights lawyer, and this is what he has to say about animal consciousness in that same magazine, 75 Questions.

“At least two basic legal rights should be granted immediately. The first is bodily integrity. We may not eat chimpanzees; we may not use them in invasive biomedical research; we may not do anything to their bodies that we may not do to the bodies of our 3-year old children. The second right to which they are immediately entitled is bodily liberty. We may not kidnap them from Africa. We may not enslave them in steel and concrete cages. In countries in which they reside but are not native, we may place them in sanctuaries for their own benefit. In Western law, autonomy is a sufficient condition for basic legal rights. Autonomy requires that individuals be conscious, able to desire and act intentionally to achieve those desires, and have a sense of self sufficiently developed to allow them to understand that the life they're leading is their life, that what happens to them matters to them. Strong cases for the attribution of these two basic legal rights can be made for all the great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans; for cetaceans, such as dolphins; and for elephants and African gray parrots.”

That magazine, Top 75 Questions of Science, which I bought for my flights to and from Ohio has been an interesting brief on many matters which science is causing us to consider. It worked exactly as I meant it to. I did not have to give complete and deep attention to the reading, yet it filled some of my otherwise boring hours on planes and in airports.

JINGOISTS NEVER GET SMARTER

A few years back, a motel in Airway Heights, Washington changed its name from Baghdad Motel to something so forgettable that I can't remember what it's now called. Guess I'll never be staying there! Seeing that so many American troopers died in Baghdad, it seems sort of tragic that people don't want to honor the name of that city in which they died, doesn't it? You'd think that a patriotic fellow would speak with great reverence of the "Battle of Baghdad" rather than forget the location of such a long and fatal conflict. Anyhow. . . jingoists and the politically correct were no smarter sixty years ago than they are today. Remember Freedom Fries? Well think Sauerkraut. . . now there's another horrible name we should never again speak!

The following passage is from the Betty Smith novel of 1943, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I didn't much like the style of the book. Too old fashioned for me, but the speakers are living in 1918, the year that America entered the First World War, and this is what they said. You get the picture, don't you?


"Send Francie. The last time I asked for sauerkraut he chased me out of the store," complained Neeley.

"You've got to ask for Liberty Cabbage now, you dope," said Francie.

"Don't call each other names," chided Katie [their Mom] absentmindedly.

"Did you know they changed Hamburg Avenue to Wilson Avenue,” asked Francie.

"War makes people do funny things," sighed Katie.


As a kid, I recall the movie made from the book. It moved me nearly to tears. They also made a play out of it. Many people adore the book. An Irish actor named James Dunn (I think) got an Oscar for his supporting role as the lovable alcoholic father of Peggy Ann Garner, the lovable sweet adorable wonderful loving obedient innocent. . . (you get the picture) child daughter. Ah we was so innercent then, were we not?

SCUMBAG BUSHITES HIT NEW LOWS

These are real actions that threaten to undermine freedom and democracy. When justice is aimed to help or hinder one’s political enemies and friends, then justice is as dead as a Nazi or Communist doornail. How does this differ from what’s happening in Zimbabwe except for murder? Or communist Russia or Nazi Germany? And if this perversion of justice can happen in a Republican government, how long before neocons decide that political murders are justified? The scary thing is that neocon Bushmen don’t even see what and how bad they are.

Here's one of the scumbags now>>>>>>>>>>>

[SNIP]
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 24, 2008; 11:50 AM

Justice Department officials improperly used political and ideological factors to screen applicants for the agency's prestigious honors and summer intern programs, sometimes rejecting otherwise qualified candidates because of their ties to Democrats, internal auditors said in a report issued this morning.

The long awaited review faulted Bush administration officials for violating Justice Department policy and civil service rules beginning in 2002, when they tried to fill career posts with rookie lawyers whose political affiliations mirrored their own.

Investigators for the Justice Department's Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility, which oversees legal ethics, reviewed thousands of e-mail messages and conducted interviews with current and former officials, concluding that the hiring efforts "undermined confidence in the integrity of the department's hiring processes."
[PASTE]

SOME SCIENCE FROM CBS SOURCES

The noose keeps getting tighter around the neck of the Bible literalist. The only trouble is that he doesn’t know his neck is in the noose. He thinks it is an imaginary noose that god put there to trick the rest of us. But, “my goodness sakes alive” (as my Grandmother used to say), it seems that his god is tricking him. I can clearly see the noose around his fundamentalist neck. I certainly know my senses tell me it’s not around mine. I trust my senses pretty much and don’t go in much for his non-sense. (But, I also know that I can't always trust my senses either. They do trick us sometimes. But then, pity the poor believer—he's twice tricked!)

[SNIP]
(AP) Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.

The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/26/tech/main4210989.shtml
[PASTE]

[SNIP]
Fossil studies have long suggested modern birds were descended from T. rex, based in similarities in their skeletons.

Now, bits of protein obtained from connective tissues in a T. rex fossil shows a relationship to birds including chickens and ostriches, according to a report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

"These results match predictions made from skeletal anatomy, providing the first molecular evidence for the evolutionary relationships of a non-avian dinosaur," Chris Organ, a postdoctoral researcher in biology at Harvard University said in a statement.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/24/tech/main4044053.shtml?source=related_story
[PASTE]

LANGUAGE BARRIERS

Not too many months back (or years or weeks—sometimes the years fly like months these days and the weeks drag like years) I mentioned coming across the idea (I don’t know where) that the British and American peoples will no longer be able to understand one another’s languages in 200 years. Then, in order to join a book group, I recently read The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night by a British author Mark Haddon. I know... I also mentioned that very recently. Anyhow, recalling what I’d said about language differences, I started to jot down some British idioms and words in that novel which might be beginning to stretch the bounds of an illiterate American’s understanding of the Brits. Most of the list I’m about to enter into this blog I still understand but only because I watch and have watched many British films in my life and also still read British literature, classic as well as modern, and, of course, I had the context of each of the following words and phrases. I added two final examples Sunday night that I don’t understand… from a Masterpiece Theater presentation.

The list with my interpretations… (or not):

shift it = get moving
hop it = get moving
“I’m not having you scarping….” = something about stealing
“…go for another wee…” = go take a piss
invigilator = someone who monitors a student’s test
cooker = an outdoor grill
“end of a skip” = this is something (?) parked at a curb a boy was hiding behind
boot = trunk of a car (this, of course, is an old one)
carriageway = a highway (it’s obvious but quaint to our ears)
“get a place to live of our own” = can see a shift in prepositional usage
“got a job on the till” = work as a cash register, also note use of preposition
a plaster = band aid, I think, from its usage
knock you up = come knock on your door, very old
“Hooray Harrys for a knees up” = first half pretty clear, but second …?
curb crawling = cruising for prostitutes

Of course, I think I mentioned that I can still read Shakespeare (500 years ago) and, even, with the help of a dictionary, Chaucer (700 years), but no farther back than that. I took one quarter or two of Old English around 1980, and Old English is very much like a foreign language to modern usage. So perhaps whoever suggested that we’ll soon not understand the Brits was rushing it a bit, but when one realizes that so many young Americans no longer read… well, who knows? Of course young people the world over are developing a chat room language (you know… LOL and OMG?) that I can’t understand at all. Maybe they’ll develop a worldwide language out of that which will be the first truly global language. You know, we elders of the tribe are always seeing the end of the world in every little cultural tremor when, usually, it really is no more than a tremor which workarounds can fix.

WHAT IS IT?



Okay, here's a photo from a blog I sometimes visit, a blog that originates in Estonia. Now the young lady who takes these photos can be a bit unusual at times, and I was thrown off by the photo myself. At first I thought it was one very dangerous photo, then, I thought I saw what it really is. Maybe you'll maybe have to ask her what it is. I think she was trying to be suggestive and clever which she most always is... clever, that is.
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JESUS WAS A REVOLUTIONARY WHO BETRAYED HIS CAUSE

So here’s the story on Jesus, according to Michael Baigent in The Jesus Papers. He also co-wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Jesus Paper’s is an addition to the latter book and further explains Jesus’s mission (which changed in mid stream according to Baigent) his marriage to Mary Magdalene and their disappearance into France with the help of Roman authorities after a faked crucifixion.

Let me admit, however, that Michael Baigent writes in a very circuitous manner, in such a way that one wonders why his narrative does not travel in a straight line. It leaps back and forth in time. Is this a fault in his method? Is this the only way he can work his thesis in a satisfactory manner, or is it that a more straightforward methodology would make his case appear weaker? Frankly, I think the case for Jesus being a revolutionary rather than the son of God, as the Catholic Church claimed and passed on to the Protestants, is very strong. After that, I don’t know, but if those two letters (read on) are true, wow, what a smack to the senses of anyone raised in our modern world so much dominated by the “People of the Book” (Muslims, Christians and Jews). Another point, after reading this book and several others, I and no objective person can believe in the facts as presented in the Bible, the Koran or anywhere else. Baigent and others have clearly revealed just how much empty supposition goes into every line of the Bible and its interpretations. When you finish reading The Jesus Papers, you should realize that everything is a chimera, created by people who had a political motive to interpret everything just as they did rather than a spiritual one.

According to Baigent, Jesus (because he descended from the house of David) was chosen at an early age by Zealots to fulfill the Old Testament mission of a promised Messiah who would lead them on a political war against the Roman authorities. Thus Jesus consciously fulfilled the many prophecies of the Old Testament, but he had spent part of his undiscovered youth in Egypt where he came across the sort of mysticism which informed early Greek and Egyptian religions. He became an initiate of those mysteries by which people learn to have visionary experiences in caves and dark underground places in Egypt. The Greeks called this inward journey visiting the Netherworld, the Egyptians called the underground journey going to the “Far-world”, and Christians called it, and still do, the “Kingdom of Heaven within”. As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Not out there >>>. We modern people, of course, understand that people from everywhere have always sought these transcendent moments through the use of drugs or sensory deprivation in deep caves or in modern chambers that are much like wombs or in groups full of music and shouting. We recognize them as self-induced psychological experiences rather than spiritual experiences. Baigent points out the many passages in the New Testament and in the scrolls from Nag Hammadi and in the Dead Sea scrolls where it is clear that the mystics of those days, one of which Jesus became, believed they could journey to these places of death and return by initiations that only the initiate knew how perform.

Baigent further claims that there is a written message that Paul took for his own purposes that split the Jewish tradition between the political Zealots and James, Jesus’s brother, and the messianic Jews who eventually became the Christianity of the Roman Church which is based on the unsubstantiated claim that Jesus arose from the dead and is, essentially, God. The Vatican to this day is trying to suppress and hide the fact that there is much evidence that shows that Jesus never claimed to be God and, of course, never was God, that all he spoke of were these mystical moments when an initiate could think he had personally experienced the realms of the gods. Baigent claims that Jesus revealed his changed course when he was asked if the Jews of Jerusalem ought to pay their taxes to the Roman Emperor. The Zealots felt double-crossed when Jesus said that they should pay those taxes. That’s why Judas Iscariot (sicarii = knife bearer and, thus, Zealot) betrayed him to the Roman authorities. Jesus was no longer useful to the Zealots.

Of course you must read this book for yourself because Baigent must work long and hard to tie all the loose ends together. The kicker to the book, coming at the very end, is that Baigent saw with his own eyes two letters (circa 32CE that he could not translate to read) which were in the hands of a wealthy private Jewish collector of antiquities. He believed they were authentic and written by a “bani meshiha—the Messiah of the Children of Israel”. The letter writer is defending himself to the Sanhedrin against charges that he had called himself the “son of God”. He explains that he did not mean that he was physically the son of God but only that he is spiritually adopted as a son of God, and that anyone who is filled with a similar spirit can also, in that sense, call himself a son of God. Thus, Jesus is not God and never was. As you can see, if these letters are authentic, they can change the course of history, but, as of yet, in the murky world of antiquities, they have not yet been surfaced by this collector or by anyone he sold them to, if he did sell them, if they are, indeed, letters written by Jesus in his own defense. Interesting, eh? Much more interesting than that hanger in dry dusty Southwestern America.

SIGNS FROM ANCIENT/MODERN DAYS

Today, passing by a church on Minnehaha Street in Vancouver which likes to load down its curbside reader board with pithy (well, maybe pissy) conundrums for the passing parade, I read the sign, WHEN YOU'RE DOWN TO NOTHING, GOD'S UP TO SOMETHING. Actually, from personal experience and a lifetime of reading and study, and as revealed in that old movie with Joanne Woodward, "Rachel, Rachel", I think the sign, if it were honest, should read, WHEN YOU'RE DOWN TO NOTHING, WE'RE OUT TO GET YOU, for that's when the Christian brotherhood comes for you—when you're weak and vulnerable.

Of course, the upshot of pouncing on the vulnerable and lost is Christian or Moslem or Jewish houses of worship full of the mentally ill or, at best, the neurotic many who are trying to get well but not always achieving that goal. Which further means, it's in those sanctuaries where you'll find weak-minded authoritarian figures who like to dominate others (as part of that, they are manipulators, prevaricators, passive-aggressives, child molesters and rapists too) all mixed in with the weak and vulnerable who are open to that sort of molestation of body and psyche, quite often children and women. Witness that Texas mess! Would anyone but a wimpy sort of male want a women chosen from that brainwashed bunch? Of course, to be honest, sex is an interesting sort of animal, and women (men too) can be a lot more interesting in bed when that evolutionary adaptation sets the synapses to firing than you or I may imagine them to be. Sex has a lot to do with imagination and less to do with pure chemistry.

DID YOU HEAR THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS AND HUMANISM?

In reading The Jesus Papers, by Michael Baigent, I came across an interesting quote by the disciple Thomas as revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thomas said (no, that's not me, but it could be) "When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father."

When I was more of a believer than I am now, I used to understand that Jesus was calling me brother and telling me that we shared the same father and, therefore, I was as much a god as Jesus was. How the Catholic Church corrupted the historical Jesus into a triune clusterfuck, I'll never know.

Self knowledge. Ah, yes! Later in the morning after reading that passage, as I was strolling through the Vancouver Mall for exercise and window shopping, I pictured a teeshirt conundrum that read: HUMANISM—THE ETHICAL LIFE.

Then I imagined the dedicated dogmatist challenging me, saying, "Yeah, but who anchors your ethics? What unimpeachable source underlies your philosophical musings?"

My only answer could be "Me and what can still be called my human nature. And yours too!"

I went on rambling in my head while my body rambled too, meandering between the aisles of the goods and services in Sears, Macy's, Penny's, etcetera. Each of us carries the basis of moral behavior in our own bodies, I thought. We all know what it is to "feel" we've been treated unjustly. It hurts. By extension we can surmise that each of us, sharing the same biological feeling structure or moral mechanism in our own bodies, can recognize and share this feeling mechanism. In fact, humans are so certain of this moral mechanism in the human animal that we recognize those who don't have this universal mechanism are a real danger to us. We call them sociopaths and the criminally insane. From that simple fact of shared biology (some have called it the golden rule)(some have announced it in the saying "all men are created equal"), we can build a humanwide ethical structure when, and if, we mature as a species a little more than we are now matured.

The flaw in religious people is that they want to cheat on this biological mechanism. Instead of referring to their own feelings as a source of ethics, they try to buttress their personal feelings by calling in a higher authority. They want to trick us into giving their feelings a little more concern than we give our own feelings. Specially guilty of this hedging of bets are the preachers and other church leaders like mullahs and rabbis who use their power positions to wheedle money and even more power out of the weaker and less skeptical among us. Specially nasty and irrational of these religious folk, leaders and followers alike, is the belief, which the gullible among them accept unquestioningly, that this higher authority who justifies their human feelings about life can also reward and punish humans with eternal punishments and rewards. Now there's a real stretch of the imagination and also of the unbounded ego of religious people and their leaders in their attempt to get the rest of us to give more importance to their "ethical feeling mechanism" than we give to our own ethical mechanisms.