Imagine that you are all of humanity. You look at yourself, and you are made of many different kinds of humans. You are many colors, weak and strong, hateful and loving, angry and content, knowledgeble and ignorent. You are like the humans you are composed of, composed of many differnt parts that have thier strengths and weeknesses. Your mind can not move anything material, your muscles cannot conceive of beauty. All your parts function together to allow you to experiance life. You can not be rid of your heart because it brought you pain, nor can you strip your skin off because it itches.

You are humanity, alone for as far as you can see. Nobody will help you if you are injured, or teach you how to survive. If you are to heal, to survive, you must rely upon yourself. You have all along, you know. You learned to make fire to make you safe. You learned language so that you can think. You struggled against the elements for survival and you have become stronger.

You are almost immortal. You have lived since life began, changing, learning, growing stronger. You have grown so powerful that even small parts of you have the ability to destroy the whole of you, like cancer can destroy a man. Now your imortality is threatned, what are you to do? You can not simply remove the rebellious parts of your own body, to do so would only leave you weaker. You must heal your illness, find a way that your body can survive its ability to destroy itself.

How?

One way would be to put forth what effort your sick body can still muster and study the universe around you. The very knowledge that gaves you power to destroy yourself can save you. Once you know the rules of the universe you find yourself in, you can use them to your advantage. Knowledge can be used to build protection against your own power, by halting an attack or by creating another of yourself that can live elsewhere, safe from Earth's nuclear winter on another planet. Sadly, however much you protect one part of you from another, there remains conflict. You would only be treating the symtom of your disease, not its cause.

Your only hope, the only way you can be sure you continue your existance, is by discovering why you fight against yourself. Once you know that, you can begin to remove the reasons for conflict, and the wounds will heal. What reason does any of the billions of humans you are composed of try to harm any other? For food? Cells in a human body share their food so that all might survive. Why cannot humans? Is there not enough to go around? When there is food shortage in a human body, some cells are denied food or even canabalized by other cells so that vital functions can be maintained. The cells that survive are not motivated to mistreat the doomed cells from anger, jelousy, greed, hate, predjudice or any other emotion. They do so because they are programmed by nature to survive at the cost of others because doing so allows the identity of the whole to survive. Without the whole, there would be no parts.

Single cells in a human body have instructions that they follow to survive times of stress. The instructions could have been built up from millinea of trial and error via evolution, or placed there by devine design. It matters not to the human cells where the instructions come from, it matters only that the instructions work. They increase the odds of their survival, the odds of acheiving a type of imortality by creating young copies of themselves. The instructions are carried on, they are the true identity of the cell, its mind if you will. It's mind tells it what to do to survive, to help other cells survive. It also tells the cell when it is time to die, if it survives too long. How would you like to be ordered around like that? To be told when you must give your share of food away, or to withhold food from others? How would you like to be told when to reproduce, or to die?

Like it or not, that is exactly what the rules of society do. They try to make the quality of life for all individuls better by making the whole stronger. The rules of society are like the instructions possesed by a cell. If a single cell becomes defective and begins to harm other cells, the cell may be given the instruction to self-destruct, or it may be repaired. With humans, intstructions are given to them by their governing powers and enforced by other humans who have been instructed. Those powers could be a national or regional government, a religious organization, a private institution, family, friends, or even strangers. A doctor could tell you to put pressure on a persons wound at an accident or crime scene. A government can tell you to give a percentage of your income to them. Your superior officer can tell you to charge into certain death. Even your own mind will instruct you, telling a new mother to love her baby, or telling you to be afraid of deadly situations. You can choose not to follow the instructions, but in many cases you will be forced into complying.

The good thing about having these instructions, however, is that some of them work. They discorage others from killing you, from stealing what is yours, and countless other benifits like facilitating the construction of roads to drive on, school for the passing down of knowledge and instructions, etc... These instructions take individual humans and turns them into humanity.....YOU...

Now you see what is guiding the behavior of the humans that you are made of. Obviously, some of those instructions do not function the way they are intended, or there are no instructions for how to handle certain situations. Cells had billions of years to perfect their instructions. We see the result in the harmony of a living creature. All parts work for the good of the whole, and the instructions are followed. The result is a thing of astounding beauty, which I question the humans power to comprehend. Life. It strives, it has purpose, it changes, grows stronger and more complex. It creates consciousness, the mind of animals, the mind of man, the mind of Humanity....You... Weather that purpose was a result of natural laws, or ordained by god, the fact is that we move constantly toward fullfilling our purpose and we need instructions every step of the way. So, this leads us to the fact that in order for humanity to survive, humans need better instructions. The ones we are using are flawed, deadly. Humans are working on this, they call it "Ethics" or perhaps even "Politics". Unfortunately, humans have a hard time thinking in terms of what is best for the whole. They have instinct to overcome, other instructions that were evolved in nature or put there by god. It is hard to see that what helps humanity directly helps each individual. A particular instruction, like "Don't litter." may not seem so important. After all, there are 6 billion other humans out there, what can 1 human do that would make a difference? A rule may be ignored, even though it is an easy rule to follow and would work if it were followed. Just remember, you are humanity. You are not 1 human, you are 6,000,000,000 of them. What you do is what humanity is doing. Throw a dirty diaper out your car window, then get mad at the water company for haveing bad water. Perhaps a million of you dumped your antifreeze in the lake.

Following the rules is not quite enough. You must have good rules to follow. Say a church tells you that "it is ok that you did evil, God will forgive you if you ask him" you should ask yourself, "Is that a good rule? Could humanity be harmed by following it?" When you ask yourself, do not look toward what others have told you. See if you can expose flaws in the reasoning on your own, you have a mind and can trust yourself to know truth. Just look at things from different angles, like "You know, some people could take that as permission to commit evil, and you don't even need to get permission until afterword!" You can also follow your own rules, if you believe them to be better. For instance, you could change the above rule to "It is ok to comit evil, if you ask god before you do it and feel in your heart that he wants you to do it". Which one do you think would make the world a more godly place? I apologize if I have offended with my resoning, (which is far from infallable), but we DO have problems in this world, and some of them are caused by rules nobody will question, because doing so will endanger their soul, their belief that they are doing good. A good rule will stand up to scrutiny, do not fear to question.