Pacific garbage patch and religious fanaticism

I've posted a new Examiner article exploring the connection between environmental degradation and religious fanaticism.

Pacific garbage patch and religious fanaticism

"By now, many may be wondering if I will be tracing every human ill to religious fanaticism, mania, pathology and psychosis. On a global scale, there is much to be said for the notion that religious delusion has created a tremendous amount of suffering, including and significantly as concerns environmental degradation...."

Please read, comment there and pass it around!

Global Environmental Destruction Will Lead to the Deaths of Millions

For several decades, ever since I was a small child, I have been what may be considered an "environmentalist." As a child, I had an innate and immediate love for nature, which was further inculcated by the responsible practices - not "tree hugging" - of my truly "caring conservative" parents. In the 1960s, my family was recycling as much as we could at the time, including newspapers, bottles and cans, and I honestly believed that was the way most people lived on planet Earth. When I moved to the Big Apple following college, I was stunned to discover that the largest city on Earth had no recycling programs, not even for newspaper!

That unconcerned development was appalling enough, but I subsequently discovered upon moving to Los Angeles that one of the sunniest places on Earth had almost no involvement in solar energy! Frankly, in consideration of the fact that even in some of the poorest parts of Greece decades ago one could find solar panels on homes for heating water, I view this omission in one of the richest areas of the world to be disgraceful. Moreover, all attempts at becoming "greener" have largely been met with open hostility, including "killing the electric car" and other atrocities committed by Big Business along the way.

Shockingly, the destruction continues, not only unabated but actually exacerbated, no matter how much effort many generous, world-loving individuals have put into rectifying the situation, with countless man- and woman-hours spent worldwide on rallying for a better global attitude and policy towards the only home we all possess and share.

Heaven Above Earth?

My own natural activism has always been first and foremost that of preserving our planetary home. Along the way in this process, I kept butting heads with the utterly obstructive and unbalanced mentality towards our Earth expressed by organized religion. Because of my own interest and aptitude to religion, I decided to combine my efforts towards improving attitudes about life on planet Earth. An entire study could be made, of course, of the effects of religious psychosis on the environment, a derangement that made itself abundantly clear in the statements of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan, James G. Watt. Based on his remarks, Watt was a fervent Christian whose apparent mission in life was to destroy the environment as much as he could because such global destruction would supposedly bring about the "Second Coming" of Jesus Christ. When I encountered this depraved mentality that would sacrifice hundreds of millions of people in order to "prove" the reality of a religious delusion, I was naturally struck by the notion that the First Coming had not even been proved to have happened, so it would be completely foolish to bet the house on the Second Coming.

Despite various improvements made - because of the great personal cost and sacrifice by many individuals, including Christians who bucked the trend and were widely ridiculed, castigated and abused for it - the attitude of many devoutly religious people today remains: "World be damned, my personal faith must reign." This selfish attitude is particularly obvious within the religions of Christianity and Islam. While Christians have made tremendous inroads from the dark days of Watts, because of their conditioning many Muslims continue to believe that they can and must outpopulate everyone else on the planet and that their "superior" religion must rule by hook or crook, regardless of the terrible cost to the environment and to human and non-human life.

The facts are that we all must continue to address environmental degradation on every front, including and especially religious delusion that has no concern for our planetary home. Such delusion - such dementia - needs to be thoroughly addressed and aggressively removed from the mass human psyche, or else we will see the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, not only because of a pending World War III or "Armageddon" based on religious psychosis, but also because the rampant overpopulation by the religiously inclined who have absolutely no concern for the environment or any particular life form on Earth but who are obsessively focussed on the "afterlife" and protecting the "good name" of God will undoubtedly lead to an environmental holocaust of global proportions, with the result of not only tremendous human suffering but the massive loss of life within the natural, non-human world as well. Frankly, it is quite apparent that at this point many if not most Muslim nations have very little interest in the environment. Again, religious psychosis evidently demands the destruction of the environment.

In the end, no god possessing any decency at all would be interested in the massive destruction of "his" creation, including loss of life in numbers that stagger the mind - and that is precisely where we are headed. This fact of pending decimation means, of course, that when hundreds of millions are dead, all of this mindless religious bickering will have been for naught, proving itself not only useless but also highly dangerous, as many people believe it to be.

If we are going to save this earth for future generations, we simply must contain the rabid religious delusion ruining life, with absolutely no concern for "offending" religious sensibilities of any sort that stand in the way of preserving our global home. Such "religious sensibilities," in fact, are utterly offensive to those of us who actually care for being alive on planet Earth, who love this world, and who want to see our children and grandchildren live in health and happiness. Religious fundamentalism is one of the greatest threats to realizing this dream, and it needs to be checked now, or we will see the deaths of hundreds of millions within the coming decades.

See also:

This Stinkin' Earth
Rain forests fall at 'alarming' rate
"Tipping point" on horizon for Greenland ice
Al Qaeda use two Down's syndrome women to blow up 99 people in Baghdad markets
Sustainable World