Religion was primitive humans' first attempt at pseudoscience, their first attempt to make sense of the mysteries encountered by the primeval brains of a nascent species with minds able to soar from the physical to the abstract on wings powered by imagination. As with any first attempt, it was clumsy and riddled with holes invisible to fledgling brains, rightly focused on satisfying physiological needs necessary for basic survival, such as building or finding shelters to protect them from weather and marauders. They formed small cooperative groups to share the hunting and gathering necessary to support the group, including the offspring scurrying about the cave and those soon to cross the threshold from mother's protective womb to Earth's suckling breast.

To level set: Superstition is a belief that attributes supernatural significance to specific objects, actions, or events despite lacking scientific evidence or logical connection. Faith is a profound trust and belief in someone or something, often transcending mere intellectual acknowledgement, to involve deep reliance and commitment. Both involve faith (a form of not knowing) in unseen, supernatural forces. These forces influence life. They rely on rituals, generally stemming from fear or a desire for control and meaning. The key difference is the object of their focus. One's magical thinking is targeted toward a sky daddy, while the other is not limited to a god. Both make space for the inclusion of amulets to bring about good fortune and to ward off evil.

Silence is typically defined as the absence of sound. Incomprehensible is the inability to understand. The question rejiggered would be "What does it mean to be an absence of sound that can't be understood?" Silence can also refer to a book omitting pertinent data, effectively silencing knowledge, ensuring the topic can't be properly comprehended or is purposefully manipulated toward nefarious ends. And there is the vacuum created when a group is silenced by institutional exclusion, epistemic injustice, and marginalization, bringing about loss of agency and the inability to influence the world around them. The oppression of people is a silence incomprehensible to me, who believes all humans should be equal participants in the game bookended by life.

There was a time when a child was meant to be seen, not heard. Told to stop crying or they would be given something to cry about. More often than not, they were instructed not to speak unless spoken to and, in even less enlightened times, were used to do menial and dangerous labor for a pittance, if any compensation, because they were viewed as more expendable than the more robust workers in the labor force who required higher wages to support their families. It wasn't until 1796 that an English radical published "Rights of Infants,"

There was a time in my arrogant younger days when I would have responded with an unequivocal yes. I thoroughly bought into the anthropocentric doctrine proclaiming that the only valid moral choice would be to choose human survival over the survival of any and all non-human beings. The arrogance arises from the pompous belief that humanity was somehow more special than our evolved brethren of the nonhuman varieties. It was a haughty attitude toward nonhuman life, bolstered by the many religions where man is the face of the worshipped deity, with the rest of the earth to be used and abused to satiate man’s desires.

My thirty-plus years as a soccer referee make me uniquely qualified to address this question. It was a role requiring me to be not only the judge and jury, but also the executioner when severe breaches of the Laws of the Game (LOTG) occurred. The brilliance contained in the LOTG is the unwritten law, known as Law 18, that says referees must use common sense when applying the LOTG. This allows the referee to set aside any breaches of the law for the “Good of the Game.” It helps the referee manage unique situations with practicality rather than the strict application born of rigid literalism

Inner peace, aka peace of mind, is generally defined as a state of psychological or spiritual calm that is maintained despite the presence of external stressors. External stressors are events or situations that originate from your environment rather than from your own internal thoughts or beliefs. Let's face it. Bad shit beyond our control happens to us. We cannot control external stressors, but we can choose how we respond, a choice that is healthier than surrendering control. That a question about cultivating inner peace would come from the current incarnation of the Dalai Lama, the world leader of a religion dedicated to inner peace and a man whose countenance is so beatific...

The earliest identified purposeful burial site dates back 300,000 years ago in South Africa by our hominid ancestors, Homo Naledi, an extinct relative of Homo Sapiens, our species. The Naledi were cave dwellers with a timeline overlapping early Homo Sapiens. The Neanderthals, contemporaries of the Naledi, were buried with grave goods, including flowers. They included behaviors of covering bodies or placing them in protected niches as if their corpses needed to be protected for future use. The earliest Homo Sapiens single individual, intentional burial sites are estimated to have occurred 100,000 years ago. Those Sapiens grave sites contained bodies decorated with red ochre and tools suggesting their ritual care held symbolic intent. 40,000 years ago, burial sites grew more elaborate with graves containing ochre, jewelry, weapons, and artwork, culminating around 4,700 years ago in the Egyptian pyramid system. Modern burials...

There are no known organisms that live on nothing. All must engage in some sort of food consumption to sustain their lives. Predators either hunt and kill or scavenge off the deceased. Grazers mow green plants until they are nubs, then move on to greener pastures. Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants, consume light, water, and carbon dioxide to synthesize the sugars necessary for their survival. Biologically, consuming means taking in matter and energy to live, grow, and reproduce, a process necessary to all living beings if they are to perpetuate and procreate. Without the pressures of death to sustain life, evolution would have taken a vastly different path. I doubt that life would have evolved beyond single-cell organisms, including the blue-green algae that inhabited the primordial soup.

I grew up in the racially charged South Side of Chicago, an area with definitive lines separating white from black. Many of the families in my suburb fled the city neighborhoods in which they grew up because they feared living in an integrated neighborhood, believing they would be under siege from those "colored" people. The exodus was called white flight. It was exacerbated by unscrupulous real estate agents who would cold call and announce that "they" were moving into the area and ask if the homeowner would like to sell before property values plummeted. It was not until I attended University, where, immersed in diversity, that I was able to purge myself of the infected thinking rooted when surrounded by homogenous thought and petty prejudices that I assimilated by osmosis.