A dear friend of mine, Paul Swen, loaned me a book on tape that I have just

finished. It took six hours to listen to but what a worthy investment that was. The

book is by Bill Bryson who has written, among other things, "I'm a Stranger Here

Myself" in which he talks about what it is like to return to American after having

been away for twenty years. The book I have just finished is "A Short History of

Nearly Everything." In this book he talks about the scientific understandings of

how the universe and our understandings of it came to be. We humans have the

egotistical notion that we are the center of the universe and that all of creation

exists just for us. We are prideful enough to think that we are the apex of

creation. Even if one accepts the notion of evolution, the human prideful

tendency is to think that the end-point of evolution is us.

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