Evolution emphasizes survival and reproduction at all costs yet is responsible for evolving a brain which is focused on a sense of justice.

This led to god and religion but also to ego. Is it possible for an intelligent person to be consistently honest? If survival is all important, what is the role of integrity and principle?

Is the American Indian way better or the African-American way? Am I unnecessarily agonizing over Hamlet's dilemma? Was Karna, the hero of Mahabharata or was it Yudhishthir or Arjuna? Was Antigone right or Kreon? Did Tennyson say it all in Ulysses or The Lotus Eaters? Which group is right, Steven Weinberg and Sartre, Mother Teresa and Gandhi, or J .Paul Getty and Mick Jagger? Is it better to fight and run away and live to fight another day or behave like Ajax defying Jupiter? Does it always make sense to draw a Lakshmanrekha, for oneself and others not to transgress? If even the synapses, which constitute hardware show plasticity, are rigid principles and behavior contrary to survival, laudable or to be shunned. Did Socrates die in vain?

Where is the representation of ethics and morality in the brain? What is the basis of consciousness? What is the nature of qualia? How did life and the universe begin? How does one understand or explain quantum paradoxes? What is the nature of causality?

Religion

Parentage of ignorance and fears,
Deprived of milk of human kindness,
Gorging on blood, sweat and tears,
Promising all, delivering less and less.

A Ponzi scheme at its very best,
Concocted by scheming priests,
To intimidate the masses, lest,
They intrude upon elitist feasts.

Denuded of reason or even sense,
Intoxicated by a fanatical brew,
Luring the deprived and the dense,
Hindu, Moslem, Sikh, Christian, Jew.

What relegates does also choke;
Freedom does leave room to fail;
Faith channels minds with a yoke,
Hate looms large in its terrible tale.

I am sick to death of preachers
And prophets, who always prey,
What merciful god, O teachers,
Created the kind Ichneumonidae.