Who & What are you?

Evolutionary limits:

As has been pointed out in this website, elsewhere, "differences" have been tolerated within worldwide society much better only since the 1960s. So, mankind has at least 15,000 years of genetic and social evolutionary adaptation accrued in favor of "sameness" and prejudicial thinking. Growing up as a child in the 1940s-50s, I was aware of strong pressures to "fit in" and "be alike". Though we may be truly unaware of it, we are all different in dozens...if not 100s...of ways. What makes this so? Ever heard of the books pointing out just gender difference, John Gray's 1992 "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus:" & Bill & Pam Farrel's 2007 "Men Are Like Waffles--Women Are Like Spaghetti:"?

Types of things:

Lets just glance very superficially at an outline of a few of the aspects/attributes of us. When I was a youngster and TV had just come into being, there was a game show which asked the contestants questions and centered an aspect of the answer on whether the object was animal, vegetable, or mineral...the only choices possible.

Love:

Because so many aspects & factors comprise who a person is and therefore how different we all must be (one from another), it is amazing that humans have been able to organize...in spite of differences...and accomplish (for good or bad) all that has happened in human history.  Love [defined] helps to bridge the differences & is a key teaching of Jesus [short love essay]! The ability to be thankful & have gratitude may be related to one's capacity to love.

Identity:

Also, all of the factors/components of your personhood come together in your mind and make up your "identity"...who you deeply see yourself as. Did you identify most strongly with your mother or father? If you had only one parent, there is likely a strong undercurrent of gender identification with that parent. This may result in some degree of "gender confusion" if your gender is opposite that parent. As a male, for example, one adds on other possible identification elements (a man, a father, a golfer, a welder, a pathologist, a homemaker, an abused spouse, a liquor-store owner, a preacher, a failure, a person of potential but always held back by "low self esteem", a Christian, etc.). Great internal anxiety/conflict can happen when a person says he/she is one thing and actually down deep "is" another thing. Many have a difficult time keeping straight who they are from what they do...or, maybe they are what they do.

You can see that we have many identities, and where we rank (is the rank actually the same as what we "say" it is?) each identity can have a profound effect on those close to us & on our role-modeling for children & grandchildren. Now a further outline of factors in differences:

Biological (nature) Factors:

Social (nurture) Factors: