When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.--A. Lincoln I believe Lincoln had it just about right. Longtime readers know that Merle Wayne Sneed rejects the notion of a personal god. We live for a bit and then we return to the cosmic soup. Beyond that, I neither know nor care to know. If a supreme being exists, I am confident it cares nothing about me. Obedience to a power unseen makes us do some awful things. For sure, it makes us do some really good things too, but I suspect that with or without our belief in the supernatural, we would behave in about the same way. It is in our nature. We live cooperatively because it is to our evolutionary advantage. Unbridled mayhem and murder would soon lead to our extinction, as would a simple disregard for the welfare of our fellow human. We rely on one another because he have to, our genes demand it. Our nearest relatives, the great apes, behave socially in much the same way we do, and when I last checked they had not organized into religious sects. So it must be more fundamental than that. Going back to Lincoln's thought, at the core of the world's great religions is the idea that treating others as you would like to be treated is the fundamental principle. That seems to me, the only rule religion needs. If you wouldn't like to be judged, don't judge. If you enjoy being married don't deny that right to others. If you wouldn't like your family torn apart by a bomb, don't bomb others. Pretty simple stuff. You'd think anyway. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky