If we can, through law, try to protect the public from itself by regulating smoking, alcohol consumption, and sale of firearms, surely we have the constitutional power and duty as Americans to defend the wall between church and state and to protect freedom of conscience from the force of ancient myths. Fundangelicals are pounding their battering rams at the wall of separation and at the pillars of democracy. They want people to surrender their personal power to them and share their pathological illness. They have seen many changes and have been against every one of them. What a difference it might make if their one life was seen as one to live for growth in relationships and for the discovery of knowledge that permits something beyond groveling before non-existent, capricious gods.
Easter Island is a tidy little microcosm.
Space was limited. Islands are that way. The people destroyed themselves, their civilization and their environment by overbreeding and internecine wars. Religion was their fatal disease. It might be ours.