If (taking for the sake of argument the account in Exodus as having some remote basis in actual events) the Israelites had become so pissed off at Moses' ceaseless hectoring, and suspicious of his frequent unexplained absences—supposedly to confer with Yahweh, but just possibly he was heading into town to knock off a piece—that they took up golden calf worship, thereafter degenerating into one more animistic Arabian sect and vanishing from the historical record; or

if at twenty-nine Jesus the carpenter had stepped on a rusty nail on his way to that first fateful meeting at the Toastmasters' Club and had thereby died of a massive infection of Clostridium tetani before he could take up his calling as a motivational speaker; or

if Mohammed had choked to death on a fig as a child, then

absent all three, or just two, or even one of the Abrahamic siblings, it would be a significantly different world today, and the sequence of great and small historical events* necessary to produce all of us here at IWT would not have obtained, thereby depriving humanity of our witty banter, knowing allusions, and penetrating insights and analyses of current events. Well, OK, there's boxley in one of his moods, but still.

You've already told us that art is "only of value subjectively." Perhaps you could enlighten us as to the human institutions that have yielded artifacts or institutions of absolute and objective value: please specify in as much detail as you like the institutions and the valuable products. Extra points for detail. Show your work.

cordially,

*For example, but for Pearl Harbor my old man would probably have got some girl in trouble in St. Louis rather than running off to enlist in the Marines and waiting until after the war to meet my mother in Mexico City and get her in trouble. Thanks, Admiral Yamamoto!