Religions Have Depended On The Relative Isolation

Every Living Thing Is, From The Cosmic Perspective, Incredibly Lucky Simply To Be Alive. Most, 90 Percent And More, Of All The Organisms That Have Ever Lived Have Died Without Viable Offspring, But Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors, Going Back To The Dawn Of Life On Earth, Suffered That Normal Misfortune. You Spring From An Unbroken Line Of Winners.

The Theoretical Fruits Of Deliberate Oversimplification Through Idealization Are Not To Be Denied... Reality In All Its Messy Particularity Is Too Complicated To Theorize About, Taken Straight. The Issue Is, Rather (since Every Idealization Is A Strategic Choice), Which Idealizations Might Really Shed Some Light... Which Will Just Land Us... Diverting Fairy Tales.

Wherever There Is A Design That Is Highly Successful In A Broad Range Of Similar Environments, It Is Apt To Emerge Again And Again, Independently - The Phenomenon Known In Biology As Convergent Evolution. I Call These Designs 'good Tricks.'

In Short, We Need To Recover The Courage We Celebrate In Our Heroes, And In Particular, The Courage To Tolerate, For The Sake Of A Free Society, A Level Of Risk We Hardly Ever Imagined In The Past.

The Problem Is That No Ethical System Has Ever Achieved Consensus. Ethical Systems Are Completely Unlike Mathematics Or Science. This Is A Source Of Concern.