I had never been able to believe that God would give us poor frail humans only one chance at making it -- that we would be assigned to some kind of hell because we failed during one experience of mortal life. ... So the concepts of karma and reincarnation made logical sense to me.

Let us develop respect for all living things. Let us try to replace violence and intolerance with understanding and compassion. And love.

It's not Africa that is destroying the African rainforest, it's selling concessions to timber companies that are not African, they are from the developed world - Japan, America, Germany, Britain.

Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?

We can learn to suppress our feelings for other reasons.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

There are many people out there (me being one of them) who can vouch that animals have feelings; they feel compassion and love, as well as pain!