Yes I do

I'm not saying that I particularly admire the Unitarian-Universalists, I was just telling you what I found while looking up the Unitarians. They had come up in a previous discussion and neither of us knew a whole lot about them, so I looked them up and reported my findings. I thought the Unitarian-Universalists were worthy of mention because there aren't many religions as tolerant as they are. The only one I can think of is the Hindus, and maybe the Buddhists, although it's hard to tell with the Buddhists, I never could make a lot of sense out of their beliefs. Zen Buddhism was all the rage with the hippy set back in the 60s. I read few books on the subject and, the more I read, the less I understood what they were talking about.

I know that people like to say that the human race has been going downhill since the Industrial Revolution, but I think it just seems that way because people are more aware of things like social injustice today, which is a sign that people are getting better. Take Hitler for example. His problem was that he was born too late. A few centuries earlier and he would have been hailed as a mighty conqueror, but the 20th century rejected him as a madman. Well, most of the Germans liked him at first, but even they eventually decided that he was bad news.

I think that people started getting disillusioned about he future of humanity right about the time you and I were born. That doesn't necessarily mean that it was our fault, it's just that they were finishing up the most destructive war in human history at the time, and people were appalled at the prospect of what the next war would be like. Turns out they needn't have worried, nuclear weapons have not been deployed in any war since then, and they're still decapitating people with rusty swords in the Middle East. Sure we still have wars, we've always had wars, but now we've got people who are against war. How many anti-war protests do you think were held in the Middle Ages? Then there's things like abuse of women and children. Of course it's depressing to see that stuff in the news every day, but it wasn't so long ago that it was so commonplace that it wasn't even considered newsworthy. Nowadays we argue about capital punishment, but a few hundred years ago they hung a man for stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread, and then put his body on public display in a cage until it rotted away.

It's like that Black preacher said right after slavery was abolished: "We ain't what we want to be, we ain't what we should be, we ain't what we're gonna be, but thank the Lord we ain't what we was!"