Dear skeptic,

Most organisms don't become fossils. They disappear without a trace mainly due to fungal action unless special conditions exist.

Dear runner,

Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish sage, was asked how you can show love for God who is an impalpable presence. He answered, "Use your divine mind to ask questions." I have done so and have come up with answers different from yours. That doesn't make you corrupt. You seem given to wrath – a Deadly Sin. It is easier to love God than your fellow humans.

Thanks mac, crabsy, CJ Morgan, spindoc, Severin: Flattery will get you everywhere.

Dear crabsy,

80 Great Poems by Geoff Page contains "Dover Beach" with fascinating commentary.

Dear CJ Morgan,

I don’t think humanity will outgrow religion. The need to accept the absurd seems present in most humans. The apparently growing belief in New Age mumbo-jumbo and alternate medicine appalls me.

Dear Jon J,

The anthropologist Marvin Harris wrote "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture" which, among other things, describes the origin of pig and anti-pig cultures. That's where I got my information. You could be right about shellfish.

Interesting comment, Squeers. Why not eat humans? Good protein wasted on worms. I feel Marx bottled religious nonsense in secular clothes - Private property from primitive communism = original sin, a messianic class, paradise revisited in the ultimate classless society, the class struggle with its slaughter of millions replacing the race, national or religious struggle, justifying slaughter by faith, Which side of the barricades we are on is as much an accident of birth as which army we are in. Secular rubbish replacing religious rubbish.

Dear spindoc,

Each key element of religion can lead to and is dependent on the other. The lonely experience called spirituality depends on belonging to a community of others who have also trodden that path and use the inadequate instrument of language to tell about it.

Dear Daviy,

Religion is plastic. It can do without gods and devils. As most of us do, Frank Herbert defined religion by the religions he was familiar with.

Dear David,

Your gloss of Marxism is “perhaps” mostly a fair assessment, except for the last bit, (we’ll know at the end of time. I don’t believe in Fukuyama’s utopia either, do you?), and indeed a clever analogy, but the insinuation that mass slaughter was part of the theory is shocking. Do you have any evidence for this notion of messianic genocide (what’s a collective noun for the slaughter of an entire class)? With the example of the French Revolution behind him, Marx famously said that revolution proceeds by its dark side, but he was hardly endorsing or “justifying slaughter by faith”. If anything he was a pacifist, the equivalent of a conscientious objector, asking a correspondent here for instance, “is there any sphere in which our theory that the organisation of labour is determined by the means of production is more dazzlingly vindicated than in the industry for human slaughter?” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1866/letters/66_07_07.htm
Marx would have been naive, in the context of his day, to imagine that the bourgeoisie would give up its newfound ascendency without a fight. I’m sure he would have preferred a peaceful settlement, but when in history has any dominant power given it up willingly for equality?
These days notions of grand historical narratives are mocked, especially their prophetic elements, yet is there any doubt that human history is dynamic rather than random? At present, for me, it is driven by negative human attributes; capitalism is predicated on them and is now going global (admittedly any system would be subject to human corruption--making theodicy our most urgent discourse). The mythical proletariat may yet turn out to be mother nature and "her" abused equilibrium.
I do think that Marx's humanism deserves a better hearing; its critique of our culture is as true and damning as ever.
Btw, my rhetorical “why not eat humans” was an allusion to the ethical injunction against it--far more visceral than religious or humanist ethics.

Dear Squeers,

I doubt very much that human history has an inner dynamic driving it in any direction.

I don't regard Marx as a humanist or a pacifist. He was a Jew hating bigot. Read his "On the Jewish Question." He ranked countries in order of their progression in his scheme of the march of history. Thus he could support the Turkish suppression of the Greek revolt on the grounds the Greeks were less advanced.

One can look at some of his 10 points in the Communist Manifesto:

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
The above prescribe tyranny as far as I am concerned.

I live in Australia and get my Social Security payments from the US. If 4 were applicable I would not.

6 pretty well eliminates freedom of expression if means of communication are in the hands of the state.

'the bringing into cultivation of waste lands' I doubt that Marx had much of a notion of ecology so I excuse him for that. However, a more equable distribution of the populace over the country can only be realised by coercion.

Industrial armies mean more coercion.

He prescribed tyranny, and he got tyranny.

Also from the Manifesto:

“You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.”

That sounds like a recommendation for mass murder to me.

I regard Lenin and Hitler as the two evil geniuses of the twentieth century.

Sure. God talk, not God . Lets leave it open cause all our words on the subject of how big this place is could be just an inadequate series of words - hot air. Not that there isn't logic there - perhaps just not enough to convince most of us about "what it all means ?"

Modern psychology, as a tested theory of behavior and logic , supports the idea that all men have gods of some kind. The question might then be, say if we lay on the couch to do this , " why do you in particular believe in gods that are always changing" or if you are observing someone lying on the couch "Tell me, do you think your god taller than you are "
Maybe a more mature discussion then is strangely " why my god is better than your god "

David Fisher,

you(and others) might be interested in this article explaining the psychological/neurological basis for religious belief.

http://tinyurl.com/cobwmv

It was Thomas Aquinas who is said to have used Hellenistic Reasoning to lift Christianity out of the Dark Ages.

However, also as a Christian philosopher with his feet on earthly soil, he wisely saw the need for the beginnings of the learning institutions we have right now.

So it seems as a Saint he gave us the right to choose.

Or if he did not, was it the Greeks then who gave us the right to choose?

Cheers, BB, WA,