No doubt as a direct result of the materialistic philosophy promoted day and night by scientists, writers, zoologists, biologists, atomic scientists, governments, doctors, military leaders, genetic researchers and lab technologists, and their constant dismissal of religious ideals and a possible solid foundation for religious beliefs, there is widespread reluctance on the part of modern man to look open-mindedly at the question of Divinity. The very subject seems disreputable to many people.

So, what has an atmosphere of undiluted rationality produced? The underlying religious trend in the late18th and early 19th century produced a crop of individuals such as Whitman, Tennyson, Bucke, Emerson, Thoreau, Balzac, and Carpenter, to name only those known in the west, who developed or bordered on higher consciousness, and whose writings still inspire, more than a century later.

But the environment of the 20th century which declared God a myth, religion a fantasy, and higher ideals to be wishful thinking on the part of charlatans and priests, has nurtured a different breed. It has been the most destructive century ever known in terms of sheer hatred, warfare and destruction; in the 21st century, millions are killed in conflicts still raging almost everywhere on the globe.

The rising crime rate, mental illness and suicides, especially among the young, the proliferation of serial killers and despotic leaders such as Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Amin, Milosovic, Hussein, Ceaucescu, and Pinochet; the resulting mass killings in WWI and WWII, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Bosnia, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, South America, Chechnya, Algeria, South Africa, Angola, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, Rumania, and Northern Ireland, to name a few; cults involved in nerve gas attacks, mass suicides, the Jonestown massacre, the Waco seige, and the rise of fundamentalists like the Taliban all point toward a growing, world-wide distemper within the brain itself. What other explanation could there be?

If this continues, the race may extinguish itself in a few decades. Is this sufficient motivation to promote research into the biological implications of the current mode of life? Could the cherished belief that science has found the answer to all humanity's problems be somewhat wide of the mark?