No IE, I think you have raised a very relevant point. First I think the demonization of child molesters is very counter productive. When we create an environment of hate we also create an environment of fear. Where there is fear, there are shadows and where there are shadows bad things happen. We are in a sense cutting our nose to spite our face. We would do better I think to treat all people with compassion, and deal with this problem in a more intelligent way. Yes we can put people in prison, but eventually they get out and we haven't done anything to treat the problem, because we took the path of least resistance and wrote them off as sexual predators. Then having branded them as such, we leave them no way to reenter society as a productive citizen. Surely there must be a better way.

Second is the sexualization of children. When it is done by an individual the law gets involved, people go to prison and have to register as sex offenders for the rest of their life. AND YET when it is done by advertisers through commercial media if is accepted. The sexual exploitation of a single child is a horrendous thing, but so is the sexual exploitation of children as a whole. I don't mean to confuse the issue by saying these two situations are the same. Clearly they are not, rather I want to say that as a society we need to take a serious look inward and ask ourselves what the hell we doing.

I began pondering how I might decently, constructively, and usefully respond to this thread. I wrote a bunch of words, using a separate word editor, edited the words, revised the words, went off to swim at the local YMCA to see if some better words might swim through my mind and, upon returning home, might swim onto the computer screen, and I wonder if that might be what is happening as I tap the keyboard keys for the computer being used for writing this.

Being somewhere within the transgender spectrum, and finding that I will make choices whether I deliberately make them or not, and having done the Female hormone thing for several years, I wonder if I may have something of an inner sense of the concerns so vividly expressed by jemagirl. Specifically, the idea of taking a serious inward look while asking ourselves, as a world society, what the hell we are doing, is a question at the core of what I have done for decades in working to unriddle what it is about the human condition that has long seemed to me to be as though in utter opposition to life itself.

As a child, outside my home, I was met at times with shattering abuse, including breief, intense episodes of sexual abuse. My being autistic and transgendered quite plausibly may have made it uncommonly difficult for some of my school teachers and classmates to understand me with any semblance of respect. To the extent that such was ever so, and I was aware of it being so, it always came into my mind that the people who "abused me" simply did not know how to treat me better, were not familiar with how to treat me better, and did not understand how to treat me better. Therefore, while I never wanted or welcomed being abused, I also had a sort of hunch that the people who treated me abusively, though supposedly telling me about their sense of "what was wrong with me," were actually telling me about unresolved distress (or trauma or abuse) in their own lives.

I have been pondering the wisdom and folly of starting a thread in which I would put forth some of my carefully evaluated scientific observations regarding personhood and society. I am licensed by the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing as a Registered Professional Engineer, and, as a professional engineer, am required to adhere to the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), of which I am a member.

A terse synopsis of the NSPE Code of Ethics, as I understand it, can be stated, "A professional engineer shall hold paramount the public safety, shall work only in areas of professional competence, and shall do so without deception." By mentioning my being a licensed professional, as I have also done earlier, I find I am adequately in compliance with the NSPE Code of Ethics, and can post here using my Eunuch Archive user name of janekane without being deceptive.

What I have found is, perhaps at first meeting, perchance even as peculiar as to be deemed veritably incomprehensible and unintelligible. I have a proclivity to agree with the view in a paper, easily found on the Internet, by David Bohm, Donald Factor, and Peter Garrett, "Dialogue - A proposal." The first paragraph of said paper describes how people may easily talk about what is relatively unimportant, yet talking tends toward disagreement and dispute when a topic of deeply significant importance is the subject at hand. Of this, the first paragraph ends with, "In our view this condition points to a deep and pervasive defect in the process of human thought."

In my work, I think it likely that the "deep and pervasive defect in human thought" is what I have called, "The Fundamental Error of Social Reality," and is very much akin to "time-corrupted learning" in the writing of neurologist Robert Scaer.

In over 70 years so far of pondering seemingly intentional human destructiveness, I have yet to find any person who can do what, according to socially defined reality, ought to be very simple. I have yet to find a single person who can truthfully describe even so much as a single choice/decision/mistake actually made and also truthfully describe any actually achievable process through which the choice/decision/mistake actually made could actually have been avoided.

The belief that something actually done could actually have been done differently than the way in which it actually was done is typically taught to little children who have learned enough words to be told something before having enough life experience to understand the practicable meaning of the words. This tends to result in a child doing other than as the child was told, and being deemed to have been disobedient and deserving of punishment directed toward teaching the child to do as told in the future. This social development phase has been named, "the infant-child transition," or "the infant-child discontinuity," or "the terrible twos," and those three names are not a complete list.

For most of my life, I found making sense of the human condition an intractable puzzlement. During the past few years, I have increasingly found no way to elude the notion that said intractable puzzlement has not gradually become usefully, intelligibly, and constructively tractable.

To get where I am, after all the years I have put into human subject research, I found I had to accomplish one simple task. I found I needed to solve that "Theory of Everything" problem. To solve it, I had to figure out why some of the greatest minds have been unable to solve it. Why has it not been solved by others first? Because of the mistaken belief that there can be a "Theory of Everything" within the science known as physics.

It turns out that the "Theory of Everything" is not a physics problem and is not a biology problem. The "Theory of Everything" is a biophysics problem.

For all I can yet tell, I may have somehow learned enough physics, enough biology, and enough biophysics to actually stumble upon a practicable form of Theory of Everything. And, it is simple. (Occam's Razor, anyone?)

How might a Theory of Everything be put into words? How about, "Whatever happens, as it happens, is necessary and sufficient."

Apply that to the sexual abuse of children, and one might recognize that sexual abuse of children is an important aspect of child abuse, yet is far more the result of even more severely destructive and damaging forms of child abuse than sexual issues alone can generate.

What, as best I have yet been able to discern, is the most severe form of child abuse of all? Coercing a child to be deceptive. Such coercion is the substance, essence, process, and outcome of the traditional infant-child transition of typically 18 months of age.

So I have learned, thus I seek to constructively share so that my purported Theory of Everything can really be tested against direct observation.

The claim to have found "The Theory of Everything" is a claim of plausibly exceptional nature. Alas, I do have enough of a background in studying physics and biology and mathematics and other fields, such as to have had about as good a chance of finding said Theory as anyone else may have had. Is the long-sought Theory of Everything actually at hand? That is for the future to tell.

In the Theory of Everything that I may have stumbled upon, there are some curious features. Guilt is a delusion, and, furthermore, is a stunningly addictive delusion. Shame is an affective brain state produced by the presence of the delusion of guilt.

I think I recall a story of Galileo Galilei,who, when asked how he came upon scientific findings others before him had not found, answered to the effect that others had been looking in the wrong place.

In any event, I find, in my licensed capacity as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer, and find without deception, that guilt, as a neurological process, cannot be other than a delusion, and that this is so regardless of how many billions of people for how many thousands of years have believed otherwise.

What the hell are we doing? I propose that we are, and have been for thousands of years, teaching children to be deceived.

I think we're pretty much done here.

Oh, and reading stories?

Man, is someone in for a huge surprise next month...