""It appears that compassion and equality are secular traits after all. Funny that. .""

Which is absolutely obvious really, if you look at it without the unidirectional filters of all the religions which have claimed and still do claim ownership of morals and ethics.

IMHO, knowledge of right and wrong preceded all religions and possibly preceded Homo Sapiens.

After all, morals and ethics are largely an expession of the need for an individual to moderate his behaviour for the benefit of the community, and even apes have a rudimentary concept of acceptable and unacceptable actions.

Early hominids must have co-operated to hunt for food and it's not to much of a jump to suspect that family and tribal groups had some vague, maybe even subconscious, golden rule which predisposed them toward empathy, if not love, for their immediate kin.

Don T.