Sometimes I wonder if I would have developed into a free-thinking person had I not seen a diagram like this in my youth, and a similar diagram of the evolutiona

Sometimes I wonder if I would have developed into a free-thinking person had I not seen a diagram like this in my youth, and a similar diagram of the evolutionary tree of life. Putting those two things together allowed me to realize, at a young age, that The Tower of Babel's description for how languages became differentiated was similar to the account in Genesis for how life became differentiated. I also remember seeing a third, similar diagram that showed how the various branches of Christianity branched off from each other, with the early Catholic church being depicted as the root, and the leaves being things like "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912" (Sorry, I pulled that from an Emo Philips joke.): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ab6LWXeNDA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ab6LWXeNDA It's interesting to me now that both the tree of languages and the tree of religions are both artifacts of a very long process of self-replicating patters of information, and that self-replication is the essence of life, and that all three manifest in the shape of a tree.