Fal3, with all due respect, that mentality kept the human race at a technological standstill for 1500 years.

Letters between church patriarchs which have been translated in and out of several languages several times before being selected to be put in print by King James are not exactly on the same "word of GOD" level as the stone tablets handed down to Moses.

Pre-Islamic middle eastern texts refer to several races of beings collectively as the "Jinn" with varying loyalties and principalities, and distinct from the angels and demons. Later Islamic writings expand on it to some degree. While I don't profess to be a Muslim, I don't think Muhammad was all fake either. Apparently he had personal encounters with them to some degree, and they are discussed in the Hebrew writings but apparently named differently. Early, possibly even pre-Hebrew (or pre-Moses) texts of the ancient world also have some interesting and similar parallels.

Although several religions trace their origins to the prophet Abraham, and the writings of Abraham and or his scribes are found as the basis for the major monotheistic religions, The Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Mormon literary tradition does not really begin until Moses. Everything you see in the bible up to that point was Moses and his scribes getting together to record the stories that had previously bee passing by word of mouth or in disconnected scrolls various families had retained.

I am going to stretch this a bit further on the Jesus issue since most of us are Christian here. What we know about Jesus circa year 0 is that the red letter stuff in the surviving bible represents only a small recorded portion of his life. A lot simply is not there. We have also lost tons in translation errors between Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. The dozen or so words translated from Greek to mean "Love" are in fact a manipulation. Heck, the queers even play it their own way now.

That's not even getting into the numerous names from early Hebrew texts which were replaced with either GOD or G-D depending on who is doing the translation. Here is one to freak folks out; what if those different names are or were different manifestations. Or, worse, a poly-divine situation. Yeah, multiple supreme beings, each with a distinct personality, not a single unchanging unified supreme being who seemed to suffer from extreme schizophrenia with relation to the chosen people.

You want to know where the root of humanism is? I'll tell you, it's monotheism. The true human goal to exterminate from memory and deny worship to any and all superior beings who will not fit the mold of the gracious, forgiving, kind and merciful LORD. That ladies and gentlemen, is the vast conspiracy of conspiracy, the true purpose of Islam, Christianity, Mormonism, and every single other outgrowth of the Abrahamic faith.

Without that, we are not only in danger of idolotry, or oppression by idolaters, but manipulation by outside forces which the ancients most likely had encountered from time to time, judged through the lens of abrahamic teaching and at the time determined to be "good" or "evil", but constantly warned that more powerful individuals would be coming along in the future which without demonstrated acts of heroism and self sacrifice, would be representative of hostile forces.

The big warning on this is not so much in our own recorded history, but in that of the Inca and Aztec civilizations which had advanced quickly then became manipulated and perverted into such acts of evil cannibalism and human sacrifice to demonic entities that they were punished in a genocidal fashion.

As a matter of fact, you look at history, and every single civilization that advanced through the use of what they thought of as magic apparently did not do so well because of it. My personal opinion, they made contact with ETs, and the ETs manipulated them as a cruel form of entertainment and indulgence.

At some level, there is a single Creator GOD who apparently has been willing to limit and enforce the influence of the hostiles, but lets look at history, and it is obviously not all been guided by a single force or small number of beings. Sort of like Jesus apparently hinted at in the spiritual world, about numerous principalities.

The ancient Greeks and Chinese had some idea of this, with the Chinese mapping out their observations in the I-Ching, the Greeks with their mythological gods, most of whom had obvious personality disorders.

Faith was not really the issue when the black plague was rolling through Europe, science and a lot of basic hygiene issues though, yeah, that was a big deal. If those issues of being able to sustain a larger population had not been dealt with, then Europe would never have been able to colonize the New World. Europeans would simply not have been able to send the surplus population over. Now the goal is to not go pretending that resources are unlimited and human lifestyles need all function on the basis of unlimited resources, but to enhance survival rates and quality of life with the consumption of fewer earthly resources since the next major stages of human development are going to involve transforming extremely hostile environments into those which can sustain our kind of life.

That's where I look at this whole "population control" thing with skepticism. Humanity needs to learn and develop how to sustain a larger population with more limited resources while maintaining a morally acceptable and personally enjoyable quality of life for 99.9% of the population. Just like advancement and innovation did not happen among the North American Indians who lived at something like one person per 50 acres on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, our current lifestyle will not work when colonizing hostile environments, but we have bits and pieces of those hostile environments all over the planet right now. Living in an Igloo requires a vast amount of cleverness, strength, resilience and discipline, but it is by no means an accomplishment after more than one generation. Large comfortable stabilized environment self sustaining settlements, now that's worth something. We still have yet to touch much on deep sea mining or moon colonization, which I think are pretty much overdue at this point.

That's why personally, I see our destiny is to be interplanetary travel, with the Earth acting as our womb and cradle, not our aquarium. The issue though, once we get out there, is who and what we run into, and personally, I think that who and what has been seeing this too, come here, screwed around with our civilization and religions several times, and could just as happily see us not going anywhere, but again, I look at the Incas and Aztecs, fallen civilizations that obviously had extensive ET contact, and just don't judge the ETs worthy of worship unless someone wants to convince me that they were routinely against that sort of thing. Friendship, maybe, with the worthiness of that judged through the principles laid out in our major religions and to some degree our emerging world consensus on issues of right and wrong.

Now what I see in ancient Greek and Hebrew writings was stories of a supreme GOD who had a hand in creating mankind, seeing great wickedness, expressing great sorrow, and wiping out a huge chunk of mankind in order to start over again, but not totally from scratch.

I think it is right to judge technological advancements through the filter of morality because our morality as spelled out in all relevant ancient works is also a mechanism for advancement.