the Leavers to straighten out their lives and give them new sets of laws or principles to live by. Why this dependence on prophets? Why do you need prophets to tell you how to live? s-We need the prophets to tell us how to live because otherwise we wouldn't know. Questions about how life is supposed to be lived ultimately become religious questions amongst Takers. And they find the answers to these questions worth dying for. Take the question of legalization of drugs and abortion, for example. Why do you need the prophets, why don't you know the answers yourself? Because Mother Culture tells us that we can find out certain answers to things like atoms, but not answers about how we should live. No matter what we decide to do about legalizing drugs we will never be sure if it was the right thing to do. The knowledge of how to live is just not out there. Are you sure? Have you looked? Finding the answers to matters of how man ought to live is one of the biggest problems facing him. Does it not seem strange to you, no one is looking? You'd think there would be a whole branch of science devoted to it. But we know the answer is not there. In advance of looking you mean? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------I-So we know two more things about the how the Taker culture sees things. For one thing, man is fundamentally flawed, and for another, he doesn't know how to live. If man knew how to live, then he would know how to handle human nature. Could it be that the only flaw in man is that he doesn't know how he ought to live? The story so far states that the world was given to man to turn into a paradise, but he is bound to screw it up because he is fundamentally flawed. He might be able to do something about this if he knew how he ought to live but he doesn't, so, however he might labor to try and fix things he will fail. It's a sorry story you have there, a story of hopelessness and futility, a story in...
