Cannot help it. Must say something off topic here.
Diamond's article is good info. Disagree strongly with the following
statement, though: "From biology we learned that we weren’t
specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other
species." Talk about smug. The fashion for the last couple of hundred
years -- a mere blip of a blip on the radar of time -- has been discount
the wisdom of generations as little more than superstition. We're so
much smarter now than then; everyone who went before us was stupid.
Truth is, scientific "knowledge" turns over every fifteen minutes and
what was unthinkable yesterday is rock solid truth today -- only to be
unthinkable again tomorrow. But one thing that has been almost
universal since the beginning of our time here on earth is belief in
the divine. A belief supported by the reality of a creator God who,
yes, does think of people as more important in the grand scheme than
slugs or cucumbers.
Smugness aside, it is a good article and goes a long way to dispel the
Hobbesian notion of the misery of man in the state of nature.