The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.

Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it's not a universal religion I don't know what a universal religion is. There's also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It's not so simple.

"Nothing is ever lost" means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are.

The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.

Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren't monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism - either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture - and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing.

Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.

It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.