Blend into our lives like life in living tree trunks

Encompassed, restricted, contained

Bound in wood flesh

Enslaved by mammal inadequacy

Yet saturated by spring’s volition

Growing sacred freedom

In progressive rings

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“Until the late nineteenth century the question of woman’s ability to profit from or even survive higher education was controversial. Vassar College opened in 1865 was often described by its first president as an experiment.… as late as 1871 an MD at Harvard Medical School published a book on the dangers of higher education for girls, he doubted the achievement was worth the cost from their psyche and procreative powers.”

From: Carl N Degler, In Search of Human Nature, Oxford University Press 1991

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An active constituency insists that civilization would be better off with no religion. This anti-religion constituency has grown in numbers. They claim religion is mumbo-jumbo. They remind people about centuries of dastardly behavior, violence against weddings and worshipers, pilgrims and patients, students and children committed in the name of some religious brand. They remind us that even today, religious people continue to inflict an encyclopedia of horrors upon their own kind.

They observe that religion’s dance with power and money is like a year-round prom.

Reverse Witnessing

A friend recently offered his selection of anti-religious propaganda online as if he totally agreed with it. He “witnessed” in reverse. He cited as a fact that “most scientists are anti-religious.” Yet his anti-religion narrative is based on mumbo-jumbo fantasies of his own. If the“delete religion” campaign is successful, who does the anti-religion constituency imagine is going to do a better job of managing civilization?

Doesn’t removing one power always means replacing it with another?

The anti-religion constituency often fails to take responsibility for centuries of dastardly behavior committed by nonreligious people, including Stalin’s gulags, Hitler’s camps, and Mao’s blood Red Book, which were violent crusades for “secular divinities”.

I ask my anti-religious friend, “aren’t the put downs emanating from religion one of the qualities you find most objectionable”?

Avoid put-downs when possible. Follow your own better ways.

His “opinionating” reminds me that some religious and anti-religious people are inclined towards righteous judgment, too easily condemning perspectives other than their own.

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So why my tears on Mother’s Day? Tears on Mother’s Day because I miss the way mom was to me in infancy, childhood, adolescence, college, and towards my marriage, children and grandchildren. I’m sure mom misses lots too.

Tears on Mother’s Day because I remember my wonderful grandma Annette Needleman, Auntie Rose Skurka, mother-in-law Mary Ferguson Shugart, and my mom’s sister-in-law Natalie Langner. What a blessing for me to be nurtured by such loyal, loving, smart, practical and faithful citizens of humanity.

We capitalize Mother’s Day, but we don’t capitalize sacred mother? What happened to female divinity? There’s evidence of mother God worship going on for tens of thousands of years. People stomped Earth mother worship out of existence comparatively recently.

Infinite divinity extends infinitely beyond our mammal genders. Now is a practical time to give up on male only club divinity. Women make up half the human family. Gender alliances need re-balancing in families, neighborhoods, nations, and globally. So let’s open every job group to all, for example let everybody share in human mothering. God knows we need as many nurturing mothers we can find.

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What does this prayer mean? The tsunami wave reached the unimaginable height of 133 feet in Miyako in Tohoku’s Iwate Prefecture. Should our brothers and sisters in Japan build a 150-foot-high wall around their entire coast to protect themselves? And what walls can humanity build to protect against devastating interpersonal violence emanating from primordial rupturing embedded in human nature?

You don’t have to be a crime scene investigator to identify the natural disruption that caused the largest number of human deaths from the beginning of the 20th century. It wasn’t the terrifying 1918 flu epidemic, which killed up to 50 million people in one year. It wasn’t the March 11, 2011, Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which killed 20,000 innocents. It certainly wasn’t the raging solar storm featured in this week’s headlines, which sounded scary, but killed no one.

Death by Nature

The deadliest natural disruption of the past century was the Second World War. Estimates of deaths caused by World War II range from 62 million to 78 million men, women and children. Interpersonal violence, especially war, is the most dangerous natural disruption threatening humanity. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties.)

Our situation is critical. Interpersonal violence erupts from human nature like molten magma from a volcano’s deepest core. Civilization is like a patient suffering from malignant cancer, praying for a cure. Cancer is a tumor that destroys itself. War is the most devastating cancer known to man.   Interpersonal violence continues to play a deadly role in human history.

Interpersonal violence is as natural as earthquakes, tsunamis and solar storms. We’ll learn more about how to control and even eliminate interpersonal violence by accepting its natural origins. Denying the nature of interpersonal violence inhibits rational diagnosis, treatment and cure.

People investigating crimes gather and scientifically verify evidence, test hypotheses, draw conclusions, shut down perpetrators, and devise ways to prevent recurrence. Treating interpersonal violence resembles crime scene investigation. Civilization is accumulating data to measure many categories of interpersonal violence, including infanticide, child abuse, bullying, beating, rape, murder, suicide, and war. The self-inflicted violent behavior we think we’re managing ends up harming and destroying millions and even billions of people.

Managing Human Nature

The treasure of life extension (increasing longevity) is a direct result of the better management of human nature. Reliable supplies of peace and healing have been essential ingredients in civilization’s winning formula since the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It’s obvious that relationships are healthier when violence has no part in them. The healthiest civilization enjoys peaceful coexistence.

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Female divinity was driven from shared eminence in the Western world by around 500 A.D. How did this happen? The likeliest explanation is brute force. Consider that male domination of civilization may be a direct result of larger body size and physical strength. According to a U.N. report on the status of women in 2000, one in three females is beaten or sexually abused in her lifetime. Does this fact offer a fundamental clue about the source of earthly power?

Good News for Modern Man

Here’s the good news. Slowly but surely, women are gaining a fairer share of power in civilization. Many tribes and nations are moving closer to accepting the principle that the genders are entitled to equal rights and privileges before the law. Women are gaining ground in the leadership of government commerce and even religion. Consider the following list of currently serving elected national leaders:

Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany
Portia Simpson, prime minister of Jamaica
Julia Gillard, prime minister of Australia
Johanna Sigurdardottir, prime minister of Iceland
Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, president of Argentina
Yingluck Shinawatra, prime minister of Thailand
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia
Laura Chinchilla, president of Costa Rica
Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh
Dalia Grybauskaite, president of Lithuania
Kamala Persad-Bissessar, prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago
Iveta Radicova, prime minister of Slovakia
Atifete Jahjaga, president of Kosovo
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, prime minister of Denmark

Add to this list millions of hired and appointed women who lead globally and locally in every kind of human endeavor, famously including Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s democracy leader; Sonia Gandhi, leading India’s Congress Party; and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who we hope is helping to shepherd us into a global economic recovery.

In the past, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Philippines, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Guyana, Latvia, Panama, Finland, Indonesia, Serbia, Liberia, Chile, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Lithuania and Kirgizstan have all elected female heads of state. Five of the world’s most populated nations, China, Russian, Nigeria, the United States, and Japan, have so far not elected a woman president or prime minister.

Vote. Vote. Vote.

The world population of men and women is currently almost equal. How will humanity be affected as more women gain and exercise their right to vote? American women gained the right to vote less than 100 years ago. More women voted than men in the U.S. 2010 congressional elections (46.2 percent compared with 45 percent of eligible male counterparts).

Celebrating Gender Alliance

Human gender alliance is naturally grounded and barely subject to the shifting tides of cultural history. Two-gender strategy has provided millions of life forms with survival solutions for more than 100 million years. Gender alliance might be described as life’s most successful strategy in nature. Surely human conversation about gender is informed by the fact that more than a million versions of gender alliance exist in the world today. Gender equality is one of civilization’s revolutionary developments.

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Self-definition is one of the engines driving the American dream. Americans have long-held their definitive independence to be an advanced position. Ideas have salience. Self-definition is a salient idea.

The self-definitive entitlement is similar to a salient in the isolation it brings to self-definers. Safe leaps for humans are likely to be no more than a few feet, not a thousand miles. Life in herd, traditional family and tribe generally felt more secure. Our recent human opportunity for self-expression and personal development was barely anticipated.

Self-definition might be defined as leadership from within or personalized civilization. From Pilgrims wading toward Plymouth’s shore to chained slaves staggering off ships, self-definition was the most important opportunity in  America. Self-definition is a declaration of independence for most immigrants.

Healthy self-definition is a powerful ideology, but it’s also a job. Healthy self-definition and selfishness are different life-styles. The personalized pursuit of happiness can be dangerous when self-definition isn’t balanced by community commitments. Self-definition is a practical social adventure to the extent that humans succeed in communal self-management.

The action figure in democracy is the individual. The number of personal decisions made in a lifetime is increasing geometrically. Individualism is in ascendance. Many kinds of traditional restrictions on self-definition are rapidly eroding. Self-definitive rights are flourishing. Globally self-definition is expanding the range of human leadership.

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