How we think is determined by the "culture" we were brough up in. In
the modern world, we have a sort of common culture or World View and
way of thinking. It consists of two things:

(1) the religious heritage. In the West, Christianity forms that.
However, it is mainly a "liberalized" version of the faith.

(2) the secular beliefs. With the old faiths liberalized, people can
also adopt the secular beliefs ("Secular HUmanism"). They consist in
our devotion to "freedom" "democracy," "rights," the "free enterprise
economic system", "free will", individualism and science.

Both the religion and the secular beliefs are all considered to be
"Truth" but they have always changed, so "truth" is for them quite
relative!!

All human history is filled with different beliefs that come and go.
Nothing lasts for ever and everything changes with time. All that we
believe will someday be changed.

What is happening now, for example, is that religious reaction is apart
of the current US Administration and it is deliberately promoting
failing policies in Islam in order to discredit the concept of
"democracy." It is deliberately showing the world that it does not work
in either Afganistan (now the world's major scource of heroin) and Iraq
(in civil war). So, people are being led to go to the only alternative,
the old scriptures and religious fanaticism.

This means that the unity wrought by a common world secular belief
system is coming apart and the world is being divided into religious
blocks each with its own atomic bombs.

Anyone interested in the future of the human race should consider this
problem seriously. They need to become informed and able to do
something about it.

charles, http://humanpurpose.simplenet.com