I would recommend, as part of understanding Buddho-Darwinism, almost any book by Richard Dawkins except perhaps, The Ancestors Tale which I believe was more written to the tune of his publisher and thereby may take one in a slightly odd direction compared to his other works.

I have included him here because one of the insights he has into nature encourages one to question as Christopher Hitchens does, asking “What God would do or create such a thing? An example he gives is a wasp which lays eggs in a caterpillar and the offspring slowly eat the caterpillar as they grow inside it.

Rule by fear is always a useful tool to religions and although Jesus actually appears to mean nothing of the Old Testament is changed, many believers think forgiveness of sin is new therefore it could be said to be just the few new rules he gives eg “Love one another”. One of his other rules was to take hold of what I presume would be a Jewish child and say “If any man offends one of these little children it is better he put a millstone round his neck and drowned himself in the sea” (Matthew 18 verse 6). Some Christians interpret this as any Christian causing a young new Christian to sin but that is because they want to dwell on sin. It is an obscure point since it is surely wrong (sinful) to preach lies and the stories of the Old Testament are certainly lies, eg creation and the Flood that apparently only Noah and family survived. Anybody who knows this web-aite knows I would put survival forward as an excuse for lying anyway just as an octopus can mimic its surroundings to avoid predators, (“Look I am not here“ she lied).

My point is that one can look at a related species of our mammalian ancestry and see that the Elephant seal guards the beach harem of females from other male elephant seals, so aggressively that many young get killed, crushed in the fights of the struggle to survive.

My own interpretation is that one could go through myriad “understandings”, all of them false, of how one fits the role of child offender, if one is in doubt and therefore considering Jesus’s words as something directed at you for being an unbeliever who cannot do anything but offend since one is tempting the believing child to not believe by not believing oneself. A bit of a cunning circular prosecution from which one is presumably expected to feel unavoidably trapped. One may slightly sarcastically think “Therefore one really must believe you know”. Otherwise you are as bad as a paedophile.

I appear to have been condemned for disliking the Jewish boy, Berger, at my school, at times in my early life, so much that I punched him for sticking a drawing pin in my backside and as I have recounted elsewhere on this site, from about that time feeling something wanting to get inside my head and indeed giving an impression of pulling my eyes back until, in my perception everything became a tunnel with the teacher at the far end. (Pages Before Bliss and The Omega course supplements)

As always though I caution to distrust the God of the Jews in general, not Jews as they really are part of evolution as the rest of us. Think of him as the God who said “..for I am a jealous God” and you soon get the Beachmaster attitude. (Exodus 20 verse 4-5)