Young viewers can learn valuable lessons from Finding Dory: lessons about perseverance and learning to celebrate their individuality. Let’s just hope these future drivers don’t pick up any ideas about traffic safety.

A climactic scene has Dory, the blue tang fish, and Hank, her octopus pal, driving a truck the wrong way down a freeway while other vehicles swerve frantically to avoid them. Funny? Maybe for the kids in the audience, but adults’ enjoyment might be tempered by memories of the countless tragedies wrong-way drivers have caused in real life.

Beyond teaching the dubious message that reckless driving is harmless fun, the scene may strike some as odd for another reason. Namely, it places two marine animals in an environment where they’re completely out of their element. And it’s far from the only scene where this is the case.

Beginning around the halfway point or sooner, the plot takes the plucky but forgetful Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) to the human-run Monterey Marine Life Institute. As a result, she spends most of her time hopping from one water receptacle to the next rather than swimming around in the deep blue sea.

An atheist's sermon on Luke 7: 36-50 delivered at Saint Joan of Arc in Minneapolis, Minn., on June 12, 2016.

Forgiveness is a universal need, among those of us who are not religious and among believers in every religion on earth. We must forgive each other our differences, and we must forgive much more difficult occurrences.

Some things we can forgive easily -- by which, of course, I mean eliminating resentment from our hearts, not granting an eternal reward. If someone kissed my feet and poured oil on them and begged me to forgive her, frankly, I would have a harder time forgiving the kisses and oil than forgiving her a life of prostitution -- which is, after all, not an act of cruelty toward me but the violation of a taboo into which she was likely compelled by hardship.

But to forgive men who were torturing and killing me on a cross? That I would be very unlikely to succeed at, especially as my nearing end -- in the absence of a crowd to influence -- might convince me of the pointlessness of making my last thought a magnanimous one. As long as I live, however, I intend to work on forgiveness.

There is a long history of social critics and progressive thinkers offering critiques of human society.

Among those who are better known, Karl Marx offered a critique of capitalism, anarchists have critiqued the state, Mohandas K. Gandhi offered a critique of industrial society, Sigmund Freud and Herbert Marcuse offered critiques of civilization, and feminists have critiqued patriarchy. In addition, critiques of colonial/industrial society by indigenous people, critiques of white society by people of color, critiques of modern industrial society by environmentalists and cultural historians as well as critiques of technocratic society by a succession of scholars have been presented.

While these and other critiques have much to offer, if we want to trace the origin of the dysfunctional and violent human behaviours that now threaten human extinction, I believe it is necessary to examine what has been happening since the Neolithic (agricultural) revolution some 12,000 years ago.

The most likely way to die in a U.S. war, by far, is to live in the country that the United States is attacking. But the most likely way in which a U.S. participant in a war will die is by suicide.

There are a couple of widely observed top causes of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops returning from recent wars deeply disturbed in their minds. One is having been near an explosion. Another, which has been around longer than explosions have, is having killed, having nearly died, having seen blood and gore and suffering, having imposed death and suffering on innocents, having seen comrades die in agony, exacerbated in many cases by having lost faith in the sales pitch that launched the war -- in other words, the horror of war making.