Please forgive my blunt way of putting things, I did not intend to be mean. My only point is that we don't have to be natives of somebody else's tribe to have the right to criticize it (it's different then being violent or hostile! it certainly requires some knowledge and empathy and it doesn't mean that we'll always be right, the point is that it must be based on empathy and reason). Even if traditions mean deep things to people from those cultures and change is always difficult, that doesn't mean that change isn't necessary and breaking apart from CERTAIN traditions wouldn't make the culture more humane. I will say again that we should connect with each other through our humanity instead of worshiping our tribes or loyalty to our tribal subgroups. AlphaF - I was responding to vineyard's comment, sorry for getting off topic.

Thanks SunFlowerSeed, what I wrote earlier is obviously not a full exploration of this topic. You wrote very nicely about the need to respect each other as individuals. What I sort of implied in my previous comment was that humanity should go BEFORE traditions/cultures/religions/tribal loyalty - if they are in conflict with each other. This is a different issue then what you are describing, although many people confuse these two. So for example, if according to a tradition it's ok to rape a woman when she doesn't want to have sex with her husband, then somebody should criticize this cultural/religious belief and stand up for human rights of these women. If according to a religious belief, an infidel should be killed or outcasted, then obviously this religious dogma has to be criticized. If you look at the kind of porn many men watch these days, it's so hideous how they look at and treat women.
These examples look very obvious, but the amount of human rights violations all over the globe says that it's not so obvious to everybody.

I agree with you once again that humanity must go before other things.
But you are talking about IDEALs my dear. Humanity was dead with 'Habil and Kabil'(Sorry, don't know the English names, but should be similar in the Bible).
People has 'VALUE's and, sadly those values are in front of everything. Because of those values we(humans) hurt, killed, raped etc and we thought that we were doing the right thing.

The humanity described in books, laws are all based on values of humans. I mean your humanity is based on your values, your knowledge. My humanity is based on my values and knowledge. So there is nothing ideal-for-all in this REAL world. But, of course there are common points that everybody should agree. I am against every bad things that you have described some of them in your post and more that you haven't mentioned.

In Eastern philosophy there is Ying-Yang, bad in good, good in bad. It is another humanity idea. Expect something good from a bad event, and expect something bad from a good event. But keep your respect to everything. Here you can change good-bad with other antonyms.

I don't think that the human beings will reach the perfection in the next hundreds of thousands years.

Keep fighting till the sun dies, may we succeed.

No big deal about humanity.

Humanity is the second form of life, possibly in the whole universe, which works towards destruction of the very source of its own existence : The mother earth.

Observe the likeness between humanity and cancer infected cells of a living body. They both aim to the destruction of their own existence: one by destroying the earth, the other the body they dwell in.

Humanity is the cancer of the universe. Nature will eventually deal with humanity.