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Permalink Reply by Loop Johnny on December 6, 2010 at 4:54pm

You are tying religion with pollution. They are hardly related. They may be related by 'destructiveness'.

I may argue that pollution indirectly helps the growth of civilizations just because it is closely tied with heavy industry. With industry you get powerful civilizations and an unhealthy environment if the production methods are not green and sustainable. On the long term it has some grave consequences. Think perspectively.

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Permalink Reply by Aliqsandre Suguitan on December 6, 2010 at 10:12pm

Religion is the greatest scourge of mankind because groups think their God gave them the right to kill, maim, destroy, and pillage for their God. The crusaders killed, destroyed and looted non-Christians. Mohammad and Muslims used the sword to spread Islam to Mecca, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Persia, Pakistan, India, Malaya, Indonesia and parts of China and the Philippines, killing those who would not convert. Columbus killed Indians who refused Christ. For the sake of Christ, Joan of Arc was burned, the Spanish Inquisitors tortured, and the Salem dunked witches until they drowned.

Pollution is in no way related to religion, except that pollution is a modern scourge, that, like religion, may also spell the end of civilizaion as we know it. Plastics end up in the sea smothering fish. Carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases cause global warming. The polar ice caps and glaciers are less than half they were 50 years ago causing sea levels to rise. Many south sea islands, just a few feet above the sea may soon be gone, together with many cities that are close to sea level. THe climate and weather has also changed in many areas causing drought in some areas, and flooding and excessive huricanes in others. Lake Mead behind Hoover dam has less than its capacity. The same is true with many reservoirs throughout the land. Agriculture is failing in many parts of California due to lack of water.

Atheist must not only concentrate on the first scourge - religion - although that is what unites us. What I propose is to use that unity to fight the two scourges that threaten our civilization, both religion and pollution. We should not limit ourselves to fighting religion. We should also fight pollution, the modern threat.

Ignorance is slowly being pushed back - and atheism has to be credited for this. Disease is also a fight atheists can take up. Many people are dying because of the strangle-hold of the pharmaceutical industry on the FDA and politicians. But even after pandemics and epidemics many people survive.

However, if Muslims do not give up their belief that world peace can only be attained when the whole world is under Islamic rule, we may be headed for more and bigger wars. If pollution and global warming is not solved we may soon have an earth incapable of sustaining our civilization..

So we should not just keep hitting religion among ourselves. We should convince the rest of the world of the dangers of jingoist religion, and spearhead the war against pollution and the change to renewable energy.

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Permalink Reply by Xoandre Moats on December 7, 2012 at 11:25am

Horrible things done in the name of religion:
-- Looting of Babylon by religious fanatics, who destroyed "evil mechanisms and monstrous creations" of the Babylonians (as in Electricity, centralized plumbing and refrigeration, amongst other technologies fully in use in ancient times.)
-- The Crusades to the "Holy Land" wherein priests, knights, and peasants invaded, looted, raped, sodomized, murdered, and brought death to millions of innocent children, women, and men just because they did not believe in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
-- The Holocaust, wherein the devout and fanatical Adolf Hitler kissed the ring of the Pope and took the Pope's words of "Death to all Jews" to heart and brought death and destruction to Europe.
-- The American Indian Holocaust, which gave Hitler the inspiration for his Death Camps, based entirely on President Jackson's Reservation System. The Trail of Tears, which is a stain of blood on the face of the United States much ignored but never forgotten and impossible to wipe away.
-- Repeated invasions of the countries of the Middle East for religion and money and oil, regardless of how oxymoronic those are...
-- The attack on The World Trade Center and London Underground, amongst other Terrorist attacks by Islamic Radicals, who have skewed the peaceful writings of the Koran into death and destruction around the planet.
-- The blind dedication that the majority of the "Civil War" Southern States have toward the Republican Party, which has absolutely nothing to do with Religion, but still uses the symbols and names of Religion as a standard bearer while raping and looting every possible source of greed and economic improvement that this country so desperately needs...

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Permalink Reply by Dale Headley on December 7, 2012 at 2:36pm

For those of you who fail to see any direct connection between religion and pollution, may I suggest that perhaps Aliqsandre is indirectly pointing out that fundamentalist Christians in America tend to discount, if not outright deny the importance of pollution, because they see it as disrespecting the power of their omnipotent God to protect the earth? Therefore, they support oil-state politicians like James Inhofe who oppose any and all efforts to fight, control, or mitigate pollution by denying that climate change even exists.

I applaud many of you who have provided such a thorough and horrifying litany of the inhumane depredations perpetrated by religionists over the centuries.  However, I don’t hear many of you ALSO pointing out that the overwhelming preponderance of these crimes was committed by pious Christians.  Sure, Islamists and others have done their share of killing and torture; but nothing could ever surpass the quantity and brutality of the Christian rampages.  

And Christianity is the only religion in which these horrors are encoded and enshrined in its basic premise and its founding documents: praise HIM or suffer now and for eternity.  The main difference between the Old and New Testaments is that, in the former, people are murdered and brutalized while still alive on earth.  In the latter, that suffering will be interminable and agonizing after death.  In either case, Christianity is a religion that proudly celebrates misogyny, racism, torture, and murder at its very core. 

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Permalink Reply by RobertPiano on December 7, 2012 at 5:02pm

I agree with Dale. There is a direct link. It could not be clearer:

“Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28).

Plus- who cares about a "used up" earth that is pending a great apocalypse when you have heaven waiting for you?

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Permalink Reply by Ed on December 7, 2012 at 9:17pm

"Plus- who cares about a "used up" earth that is pending a great apocalypse when you have heaven waiting for you?"

What a shitty pathetic excuse to rape our planet. They need to reread the definition of stewardship.

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Permalink Reply by Lewal on December 8, 2012 at 12:14pm

Equivocating the two is justifiable on some level. Religion is pollution. These belief systems pollute the purest, oldest beliefs about how we might be better as people with nonsense and it corrupts society. Don't we pollute the planet in the same way? Don't take our basic needs and overpopulate them with resources until we've ruined ourselves? So many of the blind faithful are blind wasteful. So many of the people that ruin people are people that ruin the world. Is it wrong to lump them together? Sure. But shooting a pedophile and having the round go through and hit a rapist isn't so bad.

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Permalink Reply by Amy L. Cook on December 8, 2012 at 4:46pm

pol·lu·tion   /pəˈlo͞oSHən/ ; Noun:

The presence in or introduction into the environment of a substance or thing that has harmful or poisonous effects.

A lot of you have stated that pollution is completely unrelated to religion, and it is (unrelated) for the most part. I Googled it and could not find one church or religious organization that was pro-pollution or who was cited for causing a great amount of pollution. In fact, a lot of religious institutions seem to have anti-pollution programs for their local communities - and kudos to them for doing something right. But I can make a couple of good points, here, that involve both of these problems in relation to one another.

1) Okay, of all the things that SHOULD be in the bible, the proper care of our home is utterly missing. If there was really an omnipotent being out there somewhere who took the time to create all of this just for us, don't you think one of the first things that would/should be in his/her instruction manual/bible would be about how to keep our planet in proper working condition? Things like, oh - I don't know - "THOU SHALL NOT BURN UP ALL THE OIL IN THE EARTH" or maybe "THOU SHALL NOT ALLOW CORPORATE FARMING". But I have found no trace of any kind of warning about mistreating the earth, save for some vague statement about the 'destroyers of the earth' being punished (Revelation 11:18, King James Version: "And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth." - Whoa, heavy! LOL)

We are granted dominion and stewardship over the earth and we are told to go forth and replenish it, which implies that a certain amount of caretaking is demanded of us, but no actual knowledge as of how to do this is provided. We are simply handed the reins and told to run with them. To me, this is like setting an unsupervised 4 year old free in a toy store. Pollution will ensue, almost inevitably. For an all-knowing, all-caring "god" this would be highly irresponsible and shows not even a gleam of omnipotence; and this is just one of the holes in religion, as far as I am concerned. Over the years, "God" has proven to be more and more ignorant to the way our world actually works. So if there actually is a god, he/she/it knows almost nothing about his/her/its own creations and he/she/it is extremely irresponsible. Which brings me to my second point.

2) Religion is merely pollution of the mind and of the healthy consciousness of our race as a whole. It creates an unhealthy environment in which to be a human being. It pits us against each other for no reason other than to pit us against each other. It is a poison and a scourge on our planet. Sure, it is not a tangible form of pollution; one cannot get a shovel or a net and gather it all up for disposal - oh that we could! But it is a form of pollution that needs to be cleaned up somehow, someway. We have to keep fighting the good fight until the majority of our population wake up and realize that they have been scammed for millennia or two (or four) and come over to the good side.

Yet, here we are in 2012, and we still pollute our minds with wrong ideas. We use other people we deem more important than us (preachers, priests, rabbis, gurus, etc... etc... etc...) to confirm those wrong ideas, and then proceed to spread the disease to the rest of the world by making other people feel guilty and/or threatened by the prospect of not believing. I mean, if you have to use the threat of an imaginary lake of fire to get someone to believe something, a giant red flag should be automatically raised in the mind of your prospective believer. Anything worth your time should not include eternal punishment as a result of non-commitment. Anything worth your time WOULD NOT NEED such a threat. That more people cannot see this makes me extremely sad.

So, while religion and environmental pollution are really two separate issues, there are a few overlapping points. If you view religion AS a form of pollution, as I do, it's really easy to see their similarities. They are both things that we need to either completely eradicate or greatly reduce in order to have a peaceful, healthy planet. I would add a few more things to that list, like money and government, but that is an entirely different conversation.

Peace.

 

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Permalink Reply by Gregg R Thomas on December 9, 2012 at 6:08am

I'm against word pollution. :D

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