Okay, here's What Joe Believes: I don't believe in deities, heavens,
hells, spirit guides, leprechauns, or any continuance of the individual after
death. Consciousness is an abstract, but it is finite. When the game is
finally called on account of darkness, you don't get to come back tomorrow and
finish the game. The work we must do, must be done today, now, or not at all.

What I believe in is the power of the human being singular to rise above
every challenge, obstacle, tyrant and misfortune. We are where we are because
in the evolutionary crap shoot, we were smarter, and faster, and *thought*
ourselves out of the mud (with a little help from the opposable thumb, natch).
The brass ring of consciousness has made us not only aware of our environment,
and how to control it, but has made us, when we are at our best, self-
reflective, aware of the struggle of those around us, made us conscious of the
fact that we work at our best when we work together, when individuals can
reach for the stars and pull the rest of us along with them...for company, for
pleasure, and to help the next guy leapfrog to the next star. Given nurturing
and direction and purpose, it makes us compassionate.

Stunted, hindered, corrupted by circumstance or hopelessness, it makes us
into monsters.

I believe that we can touch greatness *now*, and that if we remove the
notion of second chances, lifes after this one, no backsies, there is the
added impetus to *achieve* it now. (Witness those who think there's no point
in saving the redwoods because Christ is going to come back soon and the point
will be moot. Remember James Watt's statement on that one?) This, I
believe, is *it*. And so we must do all we can. For those who are raised
well, directed well, that means doing all they can to the good; for those who
fall between the cracks, that may mean something quite different.

But that's the way it is now anyway, really. Religion can be used as
justification to murder, or not to murder, depending on how you approach it.
Religion has been used to rationalize, and attack, slavery.

For my money, religion and science came out of the same impulse, the
desire to understand who we are, and where we came from, and where we're
going, and what we're supposed to do when we get there. Before we had the
tools to grasp the mechanics of sunlight and solstice, we cobbled up pantheons
and spirits and deities who watched over the functioning of the universe like
benign watchmakers. With time and codification, religions began, warred,
absorbed, schism'd and sunk their hooks deep into the world around us. Those
hooks are too deep and tied to too much of our language, our culture, ever to
be removed; they are part and parcel of our human heritage, I accept that and
welcome that element.

But from this side of the modem...it's still just myth. Myth with
billion dollar empires on the one hand, and myth that lives in little steepled
whiteframe churches in the Appalachias, but myth nonetheless.

It can be myth that elevates, myth that ennobles, myth that destroys,
myth that causes war and myth that heals after war...but myth it remains. Just
like the myth of language, of art, of politics and polemics and philosophy.
They are all the constructs we have made, the lenses we have cobbled together
through which we can see the world around us.

That is what I think, that is what I believe. Your mileage may vary. I
have no desire to propagandize my personal beliefs; if you do that, they're
not personal anymore, and my job is to entertain, and to ask questions, not
to persuade anyone to my own perspective. In the pursuit of this story, I
will use myth and math interchangeably, whichever tool best serves the task
most effectively.

If anything, I believe closest to what Delenn said, my one moment of
slippage, of letting my own attitudes creep in, that we are better than we
think, and nobler than we know; that we have the seeds of greatness within us,
and our greatest flaw is that we do not always know this as well as we should.

jms