(Cross-posted at God is for Suckers!)
This is a threat. We need to take it seriously.
And no, there's no 'secret conspiracy' in this regard, no cabal secretly planning to annihilate the unbelievers.
In their efforts to 'save us from ourselves', the effort to prove any sort of 'Intelligent Design' will likely get the species slaughtered.
You see, we have a big problem. One that no one seems to have considered: in the ongoing battle of evolution vs. creationism, serious resources are being diverted to combat the intrusion of religion.
If the religious succeed, then we will all be forced to sit on our hands if and when some oversized meteor plants a killing kiss on our planet.
Think about it.
Instead of actively preparing for an upcoming collision of spheres, the religious will (if they take enough power) insist that we leave it all in the hands of some cosmic babysitter. We die? Then it will somehow be all our fault anyways, and the 'chaff' will be separated from the 'wheat'.
I was watching Hyperspace a while back (its original title was Space, but renamed for distribution in the U.S), and apparently there's quite a few threats posed to us from the vacuum of space.
We are long overdue for a major hit from free-range asteroids, for one thing. Luckily for us, Jupiter tends to suck most of them in (all hail, Zeus!), due to its powerful gravity.
So thus far, we've been lucky. However, Jupiter hasn't caught every single one, as evidenced by the Barringer Crater (shown above) or the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.
(I won't go into detail about how many black holes pepper the universe - save that there's at least a hundred million of those pea-sized doomsday devices around.)
The religious, of course, believe that all is in 'gawd's hands', and we live or die at their deity's will.
Time better spent planning our escape (eventual or otherwise) from planet Earth. Likelihood is, it won't be in our lifetimes, but the thought of our beloved species going into the trashbin of history saddens me to no end.
And while today, it's biology, tomorrow it'll be quantum physics, or some other scientific discipline - the invasive nature of the Abrahamic religions (one in particular: can you guess which one?) will get a foot in the door, and next you know, we'll be wallowing in our own garbage (and hey! It's all GOD'S plan!), and claiming the hurtling death is a form of divine retribution.
And the bleat goes on - but there will come a time of silence, one we collectively should avoid.
Once more into the breach, dear friends...
4 comments:
As I said on another blog recently.
Religious faith bleeds into areas of decision making where it would be hoped that rational decisions would be preferable over decisions based in religious faith or decisions based in religious prophecy.
The obvious example is politics.
i read somewhere that sam harris had said that without religious interference, we would have probably have had the internet in the 1700s. i personally think that, by now, we would have drastically prolonged the human lifespan.
asteroid collisions, global warming, nuclear annihilation... humans' chances of surviving are slim as our limited resources are wasted on collective delusions.
Here is an article from the Christian Science Monitor. I did a post on my Stardust blog back in March. It is quite disturbing how many xians and muslims are indeed willing to “leave it in Gawd’s hands”. It is not such an unlikely scenerio. The President of the most powerful nation led us into a pointless war in Iraq because Gawd told him it was the right thing to do.
After reading further into the links KA provided, this is disturbing:
Q: If we find an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, is there an international plan?
A: No, there is no international plan. This is an area of which governments are sadly ignorant. What we really need to do is to carry out a surveillance programme first of all, and this is simply not being done. In essence, the only country doing anything in this area is the United States. There is no southern hemisphere asteroid search programme.
BBIM - it's indeed difficult for the religious to use anything resembling an objective viewpoint.
TMT:
i read somewhere that sam harris had said that without religious interference, we would have probably have had the internet in the 1700s.
Really? Do you have a link somewhere, or was this in 1 of his books?
Stardust - D'oh! I even commented on it,too.
Post a Comment