Christ is risen, page-77

With sentience comes the greatest responsibility to respect and care for nature. The problems with humans is that we became sentient and carried with us every instinctive trait of nature. Now in nature that may be natural order via instinct, male lions killing cubs that are not theirs. Animals taking the kills of other animals. Foxes killing every chook in the hen house when they only needed one, because they had no ability to suppress the killing instinct, etc, etc.

Humans have all that compacted into their dual nature, animal and human. Religion calls the animal nature, sin. We have developed laws to suppress this animal nature. You are not allowed to rape anymore and you need a really good excuse to kill somebody, unless you are fighting for a government and then it's perfectly okay to burn women and children with napalm.

We are like those succulents that grow for over a hundred years and then produce a single flowering stem as big as a tree, then die. Nature developed for 3 billion years to produce an aspect of itself that was sentient. Now we have to try to step over the bridge from animal to human without killing everything else and ourselves.

There is no guarantee that we will succeed. Everything will need to align to get us there, religion, philosophy, science, politics, nations and cultures. So far we have religion that still can't tell the difference between symbolic and literal, real and myth. Half of science is employed in military projects. Philosophy in this age begins and ends with words. Politics is a board game. Nations and cultures are at the pointy end of still trying to dominate each other.

So far we have a 13% rating as a worthwhile species on Rotten Tomatoes and a 9% rating as likely to survive the next 100 years.