That is one very good reason to reject ghod as any sort of moral standard – the simple fact that he’s immoral. But that’s almost beside the point, next to the realization that we are able to judge him at all! That means that he never was and could not have ever been the one moral foundation, even if he had spoken and acted perfectly. In that case we would have judged him perfect and in so doing asserted our moral authority over him.

Religion-based morality, *any* religion-based morality is as ultimately self-defeating as faith apologetics. (Got to love a religious movement that pumps out agnostics and atheists. Why is it those who’ve actually read the bible don’t believe it?)

As Austin Dacey was rumored to have said: “…conscience cannot be based in a duty to God, for it is conscience that must tell us where our duty lies. … Interrogating Euthyphro’s definition of the righteous or holy as “that which is loved by the gods,” Socrates asks: Is it holy because it is loved by the gods, or do the gods love it because it is holy? No matter which horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma one takes, the ox of religion-based morality gets gored: If holiness is just whatever the gods love, then the gods’ evaluation appears arbitrary or subjective. If, on the other hand, holiness is loved because it is holy, then the gods’ evaluation appears superfluous–any reasons for recognizing what’s righteous must be god-independent.”

Why bother critiquing one religion when you can wipe out whole classes, *families* of them?

I don’t think the problem is the size of our population, this earth is beautifully abundant and life giving. The problem is that we all can’t live like we do presently in the West. “What would happen if everyone on Earth did/bought what I’m about to” is the question every consumer/politician should ask themselves before they commit to anything.

While I agree with the question, I disagree profoundly with the preamble. The Earth is not “beautifully abundant and life-giving”— that would imply that it was some kind of nipple that existed mainly to dole out the juice for us special biped folks. The Earth is not here for us, any more than a car exists to serve its spark plugs; the Earth is the vast tangled energetic metasystem that we were lucky enough to have emerged from, and the best thing we can do is keep from knocking that system onto its side with the metastasizing of our own population. There are simply too many of us for the system to sustainably support, and there is no other system to turn to.

We have to reduce our impact. We can do that either by cutting our numbers, or by reducing our per-capita impact. Unfortunately we evolved in a system in which other life forms were trying to kill us off at every turn, either by competing with us for resources or by turning us into resources, and the way we survived those conditions was by increasing our numbers and grabbing as much as we could. We are programmed, right down in the bone, to do the very opposite of what is now necessary to survive as a species.

In that light, I don’t see voluntary efforts being especially successful. Some measure of coercion seems called for.

My sci-fi apocalyptic theory is that something will shut down the global market for, hmmm maybe months? That should kill off most city dwellers (either by starvation, hypothermia, or mass homicide — because hungry people are sooo compassionate in a crisis) and utterly wipe out any commerce whose survival depends on quarterly dividends and share holders.

Culls are good too.

If you are a producer with a direct connection to your consumer, you’ll be fine.

Or enslaved by nonproducers wielding big sticks with nails driven through them.

The moral of the story, or I would say this thread, is that the methods of the past have proven ineffective in the long run. Permanent and peaceful change comes from the realisation on the individual level that harm to one is harm to all, something we have ample scientific data to support. Ignorance or ideological habits are no longer excuses and control and coercion, barbaric and irrational.

I agree, but the question was never whether these things were excuses. The question is whether we are capable of throwing off three and a half billion years of natural selection for greeding and breeding. The evidence to date suggests we aren’t.

The only downside to this realisation is that it is meaningless unless it is voluntary, something the God of Abraham has been trying to tell us for millennia.

There must be two Gods of Abraham out there. The one I know about is a psychopathic dickhead who routinely endorsed rape, genocide, and slavery. I roll my eyes when evangelical protestants insist that one cannot be a moral person with having scriptures to fall back on, given the bloodthirsty intolerance of so much of their source material. (And don’t bother trying to erase the whole Old testament by Jesus. Jesus in turn got erased by Paul; and that guy was one dickhead in a million.) (And don’t get me started on the whole “progressive revelation” shtick….)

The moral of the story, or I would say this thread, is that the methods of the past have proven ineffective in the long run. Permanent and peaceful change comes from the realisation on the individual level that harm to one is harm to all, something we have ample scientific data to support. Ignorance or ideological habits are no longer excuses and control and coercion, barbaric and irrational. There has never been a person with power who didn’t make a mistake (even if it was based on limited information) so the arrogance of a manifest destiny should be apparent to anyone armed with common sense and a history book.

The only downside to this realisation is that it is meaningless unless it is voluntary, something the God of Abraham has been trying to tell us for millennia. You can’t force equality – you can’t even effectively legislate it – the best you can do is stigmatize inequality, and lead by example (confer: basketball rules in the Grapes of Wrath.) Call the prodigal son a cunt while he’s in town, but open your arms when he comes home. We’ll just have to wait and see how much of our inheritance he squanders.

But historically, and still over much of the world, that’s exactly what we’ve done. Kids are cheap and powerless, easily motivated and, ultimately, dispensible-with, especially when they’re from the abundant and ever-replenished ranks of the poor. There’s always more where these ones came from. Abundant inexpensive children obviate the necessity for any sort of social organization that might guarantee a less insecure future. A high reproductive rate is not the cheapest option, but the most expedient, in most human societies.
This is arguable, but I think that what a population policy like China’s does is make kids expensive. More likely to be individually valued. Not something that you produce in bulk to secure your future.

- Lars

I don’t think the problem is the size of our population, this earth is beautifully abundant and life giving. The problem is that we all can’t live like we do presently in the West. “What would happen if everyone on Earth did/bought what I’m about to” is the question every consumer/politician should ask themselves before they commit to anything.

I can’t deny, a population cull is the easy way out and we do seem to be getting more sterile (I would assume in the poetically just way of the world as a side effect of our own actions) but attempting to control population a la China’s example has its own downsides. Turning children into rare commodities, especially in a culture where they are expected to support their aging parents, puts insane pressure on youth and leads to skyrocketing suicide rates among teenagers who think they aren’t good enough to fill the role and want to give mum and dad a chance to try again, I’ve seen it first hand. Alternatively, parents off their own daughters because they wanted sons and the result is cities of millions of men and NO women. If I needed an army in an hurry, and one that was easy to motivate at that…! *shudder*

Making children the variable we manipulate is lazy, WE are the ones who need to change.

My sci-fi apocalyptic theory is that something will shut down the global market for, hmmm maybe months? That should kill off most city dwellers (either by starvation, hypothermia, or mass homicide – because hungry people are sooo compassionate in a crisis) and utterly wipe out any commerce whose survival depends on quarterly dividends and share holders. If you are a producer with a direct connection to your consumer, you’ll be fine. If you have 47 layers of bureaucracy and your goods need to travel halfway around the globe to get to your market, you might just be fucked. That should sort us out… with just enough collateral damage to teach us to know better in the future, but also with the perfect opportunity to start again. I’m not saying we can’t/shouldn’t have a global market/village, I’m just of the opinion that we ignored what was coming down the pipe for so long now people with power have cemented the means to retain it. Now that we’ve all had a chance to read Adam Smith, maybe it’s time for a do-over.

They see right through me.

Do you accept marriage proposals via comments?

I can always count on your wit and and no-bullshit arguments to wake me when I find myself haphazardly sliding into a consumerism coma.

I had been wondering about our slide into dystopian fascination the last few months, and with your fine examples of the true human condition, I can see why we’re so attracted to our own self destruction.

Keep up the real.

Kate Baker

At this point, we are more likely to limit population because of reductions in fertility whose cause we don’t know. Growth rates are down all over; the only industrialized nation with a large positive growth rate just now is the US, which has a large population that reproduces for religious reasons. Several European countries (and Japan) have negative growth rates. And we don’t know why; we do know that in many countries there’s been a significant decrease in the average motility of sperm. This has lead some of the more fuitbatty of the environmentalists to declare that Mother Earth has decided to kill us off so we won’t damage her anymore. I”d be more inclined to call it suicide than pesticide, though the result may be the same.

And as for what you, personally, can do to help; do you know what the total effective energy and material load of a CFB is versus an incandescent? They cost a lot more energy to make than standard bulbs; anyone seen any studies that show they end being better, all told? Biofuel is very likely to be worse than dino-based gasoline in terms of total carbon load. So running off after the latest eco-enthusiasm may make things worse.

Someone said upthread that most of the problem is industrial, not personal, and I think that’s correct. Huge amounts of energy, much of it from fossil fuel, is used to create the things we use day-to-day, and no one seems to be willing to talk about that in public. That’s the other way the rich and powerful control the situation; they control what the bulk of the population gets to hear about the problem and the potential solutions. If you don’t know what’s wrong, and you don’t know what can fix it, you’re stuck with going along with the program. You did know Dubya used to be an oil company executive (most emphatically not a non-sequiter?

i was really only going to mention another horrible token gesture in the same vain as earth hour that is happening in the UK at the moment and i would also presume in the US:
plastic bag fascination.

im pretty sure that at the moment in the UK a plastic bag is rarer than a ghost fart and worth more than gold on the open market. Supermarkets currently have obscene hardons for proclaiming their green cred by getting rid of as many bags as possible

I wish. I keep 2 reusable cloth bags in the car, but if I forget them and run for something quick, I invariably (and I do mean invariably; it’s sad) have to refuse a plastic bag for as little as one single item. If I’m not putting it in my pocket while they’re ringing it up, someone wants to use a plastic bag.

I try to refuse them gently, generally using my patented “let’s save a plastic tree today” comment, which at least gets a groan as often as not…but I’m befuddled by the thoughtlessness. No one even ASKS if I’ll just carry stuff. *sigh* I guess it’s some bizarre form of “customer service”.

It’s not about bragging, it’s about leading by example. Have you ever made a list of the things you now do to reduce energy usage, help clean up polluted areas, assist in animal conservation, reuse/recycle items that can be re-purposed or recycled? Give it a whirl; the results might surprise you.

OK. I recycle. I’ve never owned a car. I got myself sterilized in my early thirties (tried back in my early twenties, but nobody would perform the operation). I spent two decades doing ecological research on threatened and endangered species on both coasts, studies ranging from population collapse to the environmental impact of northern hydro development. (In those cases when such studies turned out to be industry-funded shams, I quit in a huff and took up writing science fiction instead.) I wrote the screenplay for a cheesy documentary (on the maritime seal/fisheries controversy) that both won a major award from the federal government and was blacklisted as antigovernment propaganda by the federal government. I do stuff around the edges, as the opportunity arises: occasionally help trap feral cats for neuter-release, pitch in to relocate the occasional amphibian population out of the path of impending development. Spent a few days as an oil-spill cleanup volunteer on the west coast once. I live in a one-bedroom apartment lit with CFBs (although granted, that may be more a function of poverty than conscience; check back with me after I’ve written a massive bestseller and see where I’m hanging my hat then.)

On the minus side, I now work in an industry that wastes paper at a fucking obscene rate, thanks to idiotic rip-and-return policies dating from the depression. The publishing business is anything but environmentally friendly.

And after all this time, what really cheeses me off is that a) the world has not got any better, so this whole “lead-by-example” thing is just not doing it, and and b) the whores and assholes who make prissy pronouncements about environmental protection while taking industry money to fund whitewash studies are doing just fine, thank you very much, revelling in high-income tenure and regular jaunts to the tropics while we who stood on principle live hand-to-mouth and consider it a good year when we get to fuck their wives behind their backs.

Actually, didn’t we have this conversation a few years ago?

Anonymous said…

Peter, I just have one question. What do you think you’re odds are of visiting the US anytime soon?

We’re about to find out. I’m headed for Nebraska at the end of the month.

rick phillips said…

Isn’t the problem too many people? Shouldn’t the governments of the world be seeking ways to convince folks to NOT reproduce?

Well, that was one of the suggestions Janet put forth for her proposed “50 Ways to Ease Your Conscience…” book. Suggested actions would have been ordered ordered on the basis of whether you wanted to actually do something or just pat yourself on the back, and the example she used as proof-of-principle was:

1. Don’t have kids.
2. Okay, if you must have kids, at least keep the numbers down (we’re looking at you, Catholics).
3. Okay, if you’re not going to keep the numbers down, at least use cloth diapers…”

And so on.

Like I said, OPIRG hated it. And if you can’t even win over a bunch of explicitly left-wing Birkenstock-wearing granola-eating environmentalists on the whole reproductive front, what hope do we have with the mainstream? There’s a reason they call these things “motherhood issues“.

Or, is that just too much common sense?

The resident soccer mom with a cause rushed around on friday evening at the office, turning off computers that are typically left on by their users. She looked so proud of herself on monday morning at the water cooler. You could almost see her thumping her chest in pride. Of course, she didn’t bother monday evening, because she was in a hurry to leave. And the people who typically leave their PCs on did, and nothing’s really changed at all.

But man, does she look like she feels good about herself.

we have been for decades, and will continue, to split hairs and argue the semanitcs in favour of any really palpable change or action.

(these opening paragraphs make me sound like a rabid, militant green, which i am not. For the record i reckon we’re pretty fucked. Whats the current stat? 100 years of environmental change that is now set in stone? 2 – 6 degree temperature change? anything above 4.5 degrees being pretty much unsurvivable for the majority of the species?)

We will be red in the face and pointing fingers when the lights start to go out for real and only the smartest of us will have already headed for the hills, caves and hideaways.

Ironically from the context of this thread this is when violence really will start to let you get your way. The “give me all your stockpiled food or i will shoot your daughter in the face” approach to social interaction/survival will be very effective.

but i didnt really want to gibber about such things.

i was really only going to mention another horrible token gesture in the same vain as earth hour that is happening in the UK at the moment and i would also presume in the US:
plastic bag fascination
im pretty sure that at the moment in the UK a plastic bag is rarer than a ghost fart and worth more than gold on the open market. Supermarkets currently have obscene hardons for proclaiming their green cred by getting rid of as many bags as possible. neat idea. but it won’t save us. Only slightly less ridiculous than earth hour.

The root cause of our problems is unavoidable. Over population. I remember biology lessons as a teenager. snowshoe hares. boom and bust, take the lynxs out of the equation and theres hummanity right there dead in a snow drift.

whilst it has been alluded to previously surely population reduction is the only way to combat this problem (although i must admit i do have a slight population deciamtion fetish but i dont get off on torture porn.)

As little folk, our actions are certainly a drop in the bucket, I agree. But that doesn’t absolve us of a responsibility to do what little we can to conserve. And I say that as someone who’s as guilty as the next guy or gal, me with my consumer electronics fetish.

————

Although I actually find myself in something of a unique situation here: I have a chemical engineering degree, and while most of my job involves helping the company I work for make money, part of it does involve reducing our emissions, and I’ve already been able to contribute to some fairly significant reductions. I’d like to do more, though, so I’m trying to find a job where I can contribute directly to solutions rather than working to mitigate the problem.

We may be fucked, but I guess I feel like I owe it to the human race to contribute to something that might help us solve our problems.

“Mammy Morgan Played the Organ; Her Daddy Beat the Drum” is by Michael Flynn. First published in Analog, collected in The Nanotech Chronicles.

“You want to stop war? Instead of fighting it with armies, strip the world leaders naked, drop them into a muddy pit and let them fight to the death. Whoever wins, wins the war.”

Let’s see how Hawkish Bush & Cheney would be if that were the case.

The point is that it is absurd to think this way, but it’s extremity casts the primary problem with war and many “righteous causes” in sharp definition. The people who support and benefit from these courses of action, are also rarely the people who suffer the greatest consequences of those actions. Even the downfall of tyrants hardly compensates those who suffered from their rule (both those who followed them and those who opposed them).

I didn’t think anyone would take the idea of murdering the rich seriously, but I did enjoy the debate on the ability of violence to accomplish great change.