Religion is Incompatible With the Survival of Humanity
What else can one say?
“I get on my knees every day and I’m saying an extra prayer now. If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it,” [U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom] Vilsack told reporters revealing that 78 per cent of US corn and soybean crops had been hit.
Honestly, the stupidity is breathtaking. Vilsack’s policy is to pray urgently, by any creative means imaginable, to a deity who (if he believes what he’s saying) Vilsack also thinks caused the drought in the first place, in order to get us out of the drought through a miraculous act of divine mercy.
And if by some chance the rains do start tomorrow, no doubt Vilsack and his cretinous gang will be the first to thank God for his mercy, too.
This sort of Stone Age ignorance is going to kill us one of these days.
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Saskboy
In the meantime, I bet that guy ignores the role air pollution and industrial farming plays in drought.
MoS
This “rain dance” nonsense began a few years back with a “day of prayer for rain” pronounced by Georgia governor Sonny Perdue. It was followed by Texas governor Rick Perry staging a week of prayer for rain that was no more successful than Perdue’s. Besides, the prayerful kind don’t really give a shit. They see it all as part and parcel of the End of Times when their assess will get Raptured up.
Holly Stick
Your aim is wrong. That’s not religion talking, that’s stupidity talking. There are plenty of intelligent people who are religious who do not make such stupid statements.
Sixth Estate
I certainly won’t deny there is a considerable amount of stupidity evident in the minister’s statement, or that there are a lot of intelligent people who are religious.
At the same time, however, it is, in this case, stupidity enabled by religion. The notion that there is a benevolent divine figure with his/her/its/their hand on the tiller is to my knowledge compatible with all major faiths, and yet the safety blanket it provides is, to the best of our scientific knowledge, entirely false. Religion is one of the enablers which allows leading policy-makers in this country, in the United States, and elsewhere to do nothing about climate change, to give just one example relevant to Vilsack’s stupidity.
jrkrideau
The secretary is obviously following in Congressman John Shimkus’ distinguished footsteps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5yNZ1U37sE Not perhaps the best video but others seem have been taken down after claims of copyright infringement (by it would appear religious organizations.)
My worry is that our distinguished PM is in agreement with these views.
Mogs
Meanwhile back in Canada…
“PM needs lessons in science”
“Re: PM’s science blindness will only harm Canada, July 14
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre states: “In all cases, science and facts should rule our decisions.” When did Stephen Harper make this stunning 180-degree complete reversal?”
A revolution in the con party coming….
Mogs
Sorry forgot to add link for above MSM news article…
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters/article/1228449–pm-needs-lessons-in-science
thwap
Religious delusion is what gives stupid people the idea that respecting the environment is worshipping a ‘false god” or that controlling population growth is a violation of “His” will for us.
If this religious bullshit helps destroy civilization in my lifetime, I do hope that the defenders of believing in the imaginary will permit me to tell them that I told them so.
Sixth Estate
I trust you see the flaw in that hope, thwap: If civilization does “get destroyed,” you won’t have the opportunity to tell anyone much of anything.
I wasn’t going to bring up contraception, but that is another textbook example of a “serious” “intelligent” “established” church holding onto a position which is plainly not only anti-science but purely anti-math. Fortunately few Catholics actually follow the church’s teachings on being “open to children.”
Holly Stick
Sigh. Science is about material things. Religion is about spiritual beliefs. Science can’t prove or disprove religion because religion is not something material that can be measured or tested.
It is primitive for people to believe God will fix things for them if they pray hard enough, but it is also primitive to set up fundamentalism as a straw man that represents all religion. It doesn’t, it’s an American bastardization of Christianity.
You’s do better to read Chris Mooney on why rightwingers think the way they do.
http://www.desmogblog.com/bio/chris-mooney
Sixth Estate
I don’t think I’ve actually claimed that science can prove or disprove religion, Holly. I’ve simply stated that religion enables the particular form of stupidity which we are now seeing very evidently in the United States — and in our own Conservative government, really.
To me, the very notion that there is a “spiritual plane” which science cannot access is itself an untestable, unproven, and unsupportable statement. It seems to me that once you rigorously remove anything that might be material, testable, or observable from religion, you won’t be left with very much. But whatever there is left over, if that’s something you find value in, you’re welcome to it.
thwap
Sixth Estate,
I was imagining that I would be crawling around amongst the ruin of civilization.
Sigh yourself Holly Stick. This is actually an important point about a genuine threat. Religious stupidity and delusion really might help bring about the downfall of civilization.
What other delusion convinces stupid people that putting a rubber on your dick or taking a birth control pill is “evil” and therefore to be avoided?
What other nonsensical gibberish would cause stupid people to belief that humanity doesn’t cause climate change, but a fickle God who can be prayed to to end the droughts He causes? How would stupid people even get these crazy notions if there were no religion?
Sixth Estate
I was imagining that I would be crawling around amongst the ruin of civilization.
Well, best of luck to you, then.
P. D. Carswell
“I was imagining that I would be crawling around amongst the ruin of civilization.”
If The End comes by way of The Rapture, you’ll love it. Down here partying with the rational ones left behind, who can focus unhindered on fixing the world.
Whee!
Mogs
PD Thwap and sixth
There is a belief among American first nations…
That we are equally quartered…
1/4 is physical…
1/4 is mental or mind…
Next 1/4 is emotional…
The last 1/4 is spiritual…
And not necessarily in that order…
The goal was once you obtained that knowledge of the four ways, you balance the above four…
In your own life…
Religion is a hoax…
But we all have spirit;)
Sixth Estate
That’s an interesting theory but I think unfortunately it, too, is misleading. I think the mental, the spiritual, and the emotional are simply manifestations of the physical, going on in our heads. To me the physical universe is more than large enough as it is without having to contrive supernatural or spiritual add-ons or explanations. And I don’t believe that we as a species will achieve “balance” until we recognize how fragile, irrelevant, and precarious we really are.
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