My belated condolences. I always enjoyed reading his posts and will miss his insight and wide ranging views. May hew…
Green Myths : There’s only one evil species on Earth and it’s us.
I am not a religious man. For a number of reasons, some intellectual but mostly personal, I don’t even believe in a God but I acknowledge the overall good religion has done in the world, as well as the bad. A religion is after all a man-made thing directed by human beings and will therefore at times reflect the good as well as the bad that we all know humanity has the capacity to do. I respect people who have a true faith and try to live their lives according to its precepts but only as long as they do not expect me to conform to their particular religious beliefs.
If you have thought through your acceptance or rejection of a supreme being, there are a number of commonalities about all the different religious persuasions. The one that I’ve always found objectionable is the basic axiom that there’s something essentially bad about us which only practising a religion can save us from; original sin in the christian context. We’re somehow born cursed and need saving from ourselves.
I do not and never will accept that proposition.
While a religious person has faith that they’re right, I can see, rather than have faith, that humans are basically good. If you have children, you’d have to be pretty strange to look at them and detect any sort of inherent evil in them from the word go. Sure, they’re all going to have some positive and negative character traits but that’s because they’re human beings. People are fundamentally decent. I see it all around me on a day-to-day basis. It’s so pervasive that it’s nearly invisible and on the occasions we really notice it, it can still come as a surprise, even to an optimist like me.
An example that occurred before Christmas springs to mind. I have a few friends who don’t do computers, email or even phones, so I write a Christmas card and post it to them. Cards in hand, I was walking down a long straight road to the nearest post box, when I saw a gaggle of children coming towards me. There were about half a dozen of them, all in the seven to nine-year old range with a couple of them riding bicycles while the rest trotted along with them. A little girl riding a bicycle in front took a tumble and went down in a classic knees and elbows tangle with her bike. It looked awkward but not too bad. There is no such thing as a graceful upset with a bicycle.
It was about four hundred yards away from me and I waited for her to get up. She didn’t move at all, not a muscle. I started walking faster, all the while thinking get up kid, get up. She still didn’t move. I quickly moved through a jog to the full sprint. I got to a hundred yards of them, when she suddenly got to her feet, dusted herself off, got back on the bicycle and they all resumed their progress.
They hadn’t even noticed me tearing in their direction and as I stopped and caught my breath, I felt a bit embarrassed. I looked around to see if anyone had seen me make a fool of myself and noticed that two cars, coming from opposite directions on the road, had also pulled over. The drivers and I all exchanged sheepish grins before they slowly drove off. They’d seen what I’d seen and just as naturally did the decent thing. Like I said, it’s all around us and it’s there for good and practical reasons.
We need to be good to each other not from some inbuilt morality but because if we’re not, then we couldn’t survive as a person, never mind as a species. We all get by because we work with each other, cooperate with each other and do small favours for each other. This is all predicated on a judgement we make several times a day every day, to trust other people are fundamentally decent rather than innately evil. Sure, there are occasionally people you meet that you don’t trust and usually your instincts are correct, but in the main, that’s the basis of how you’ll live your life. No other way is possible. If nobody trusted anyone else, civilisation around the world would crash in a day.
The times you’ll see the goodness in people are usually the most terrible of times. The worse it gets, the harder people have to work together to survive and the more the kindness to each other comes out. This is why the veterans of every war have a closeness to each other that simply can’t be shared with anyone else who wasn’t there.
There is good and evil in the world and although I’ve met a handful of people I’d truly classify as evil, it’s my experience that the majority of evil deeds done are by ordinary people who think they’re somehow acting on behalf of a higher good or bringing a brighter future closer. It’s the old mantra of the end justifying the means and is the characteristic trait of extremist politics and extremist religions.
Environmentalism has over the last two decades perverted itself to the point where it’s become a pseudo religion, a cult worshipping the almighty god Gaia, who must be protected from the innate evil of humanity. When it comes down to a choice between us and Gaia, the cultists are quite prepared to sacrifice us on the altar of their beliefs. Let malaria kill millions of people yearly in the developing world, even though we could eradicate it there, like we did in our world, with DDT. Let people die of starvation because we’ve switched from growing staples to bio fuel crops; it’s to protect Gaia after all. Let other human beings live in the cold and darkness because we don’t think they should have electricity generation plants, though we do. Let them starve and die because we don’t think they should have disease resistant bioengineered crops, though we do.
It’s all about returning the Kingdom of Gaia, that’s to say the Earth, to some ideal balanced state that actually never was but it’s the cult’s version of Heaven. This steady state has never existed anywhere in the universe, never mind on the Earth but that’s what’s in their heads. To achieve it, the whole of humanity is ultimately seen as expendable.
As religions go, it reminds me inescapably of the industrial scale bloodbaths of human sacrifice that the pre-Colombian civilisations of South America indulged in; and it’s just as pointless and ineffective. It didn’t matter a scrap how many thousands they butchered or how much blood ran down the sides of the ziggurats, their non-existent gods were equally indifferent to their pleas for salvation but that never stopped them. Two decades ago I was an environmentalist but not today. Today I hate it and believe that fighting it should be the moral imperative of our generation. What little good it now does is far outweighed by its crimes against humanity. It kills the most vulnerable of us, so we must kill it stone dead.
If the more brutal periods of history teach us anything, it’s that the only people we ever need saving from are those self-appointed people determined to save us from something.
©Pointman
Related articles :
The steady-state environment delusion.
Green myths : We have to get back to a natural life.
Pointman's 
Good post, P!
The bicycle ‘thing’ gave me some memories in terms of ‘knowing-a-friend’ / or opposite /. This by zig hours of tramping in the mountain-area of Sweden. I was the initiator of an still ongoing, quite popular, ‘pay-walled’ tourism to the north/mountain (‘fjäll’) area, at first for our customers in Germany (which still goes on). On marches in the wilderness, I (at that time at extremely good shape… 😉 ) I used to (sorry) ‘classify’ the party members by the first person offering me help to carry the rather heavy load of food/firewood etc. – This was in the 1970:s.
I’ve kept this ‘screening system’ up to todays date and it is truly working 100. Ok, one has to have the mental/intellectual ability to adapt this ‘scheme’ appropriately the situation.
These kind of threads do really appeal! Många Tack! 😀
Brgds from Sweden
ThomasJ
PS: the young icehockey-team guys just won the WorldChampionship (1-0 vs Russia). Yippeee!
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The end justifies the means.
Good results necessitates evil action.
Just how often does any end justify evilness on the route towards it?
I think this quote is bandied about a little bit too much; usually by people who have not sufficiently analyzed the true nature of the end to which they aspire.
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Well said.
A lot of Greenies / Gaia fanatics have the perverse belief that humans are somehow outside of the natural world when of course we are all very much a part of it. They seem to have in common with religious zealots the idea that the humans are not animals; the Greenies because they think we are inferior, the religious because we are superior. But the basic, false, distinction is the same.
Anybody who says that only humans indulge in violence (or sex) simply for the hell of it has never seen chimpanzees (or bonobos) in action.
If you are not averse to some fairly technical biology I recommend The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins. You will see that the skyscraper or the jet plane are as much natural extensions of the animals known as humans as the beavers lodge, the birds nest, or the termites mound are natural extensions of those creatures.
@Tomjak – Well done to the Swedish ice hockey team. In Britain ice hockey is seen as a strange affair where large men armed with sticks skate into one another in a vain attempt to avoid brain damage.
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Thanks Peter! Talking about ice hockey & Britsh team, I remember a game between my home towns team (Skellfteå AIK, look it up on google earth) and a team, I think, from Nottingham way back in the 50-ies… SAIK won… 😉
BTW, the young champs will recieve a huge welcome today in Stockholm, one can watch in via http://www.svt.se / play.
There is more on the go here up in the north; have a look at Tallblokes blog and take part of Dr. Hans Jelbrings urging to fully scrap IPCC. Link:
Hopefully, he’ll be accompanied by lots and lots of scientists around the Globe!
Brgds from Sweden
ThomasJ
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Hi Tom, despite my little joke about ice hockey I always enjoy watching sporting celebrations by people who are rightly delighted at their success. Thanks for the link.
Like you I love to take people into wild mountainous terrain. As Pointman points out most people are OK really and In extremis will pull together.
Regards from Wales to Sweden (or Sverige if you insist)
Pete
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P, your sentiments are mine almost exactly except for two things: even with my 20/20, assisted eyesight I’d struggle to see much detail at 200 yards, let alone nearly a quarter of a mile and, in my opinion, DDT is one of the most foulest chemicals ever released into the ‘wild’.
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Amcoz, I would really like to know why you think DDT is the foulest chemical, and what do you mean by “the wild”,regards.
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Hi amcoz, Of course you are right about DDT being a pretty horrible substance – BUT its controlled use could have saved millions in the third world as Pointman says.
It is worth reflecting that a “green” movement convinced by its own rhetoric ensured a total ban of DDT, but its worst effects were because of its indiscriminate use from aerial crop-sprayers and the like.
It is another case of the law of unintended consequences and is a very good example of what Pointman’s post is about. You see the exactly the same myopia with bio-fuel today.
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Wildly wiping out many species in the expectation of ‘controlling’ one, just for the sake of helping one excess species seems to me rather poor ecological science.
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And there we have the perfect example of the mentality I was talking about in this topic. Humanity is considered to be just an “excess species” according to Amcoz. It would be better for Mother Gaia if we all just died out.
A case of the scorpion and the frog, I’m afraid.
Pointman
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Pointman,
You couldn’t be more right on about DDT. Anyone that would oppose DDT either has no idea what they are talking about, or they don’t value human life. DDT saved 500 million lives according to the National Academy of Sciences. DDT was used heavily in the US and completely eradicated malaria.
http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html
Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring which is about DDT. The word DDT is mentioned 188 times in the book. Largely due to the public outcry caused by her book, DDT’s use was banned in many parts of the world, and heavily discouraged in others.
Her book was cited accordingly in the EPA hearings that banned it:
Click to access DDT-Ruckelshaus.pdf
And, yes I know DDT was not banned for vecor use, but it was strongly opposed and it stopped being used.
Malaria made a huge comeback afterwards. Malaria has caused the deaths of 30 million people directly due to the discontinued use of DDT. In 2006 the WHO re-sanctioned the use of DDT to fight Malaria saying that it poses NO risk to humans in interior household spray applications.
In 2000, the South African Department of Health reintroduced DDT, and in just one year, malaria cases fell by 80% in the KwaZulu-Natal province alone which was worst hit by malaria. In 2006, cases are now 97% below the previous high.
Even now we have the Sierra Club officially stating that it “does not oppose the indoor use of DDT to control malaria..” The Sierra Club is now paying for the purchase of DDT.
Despite all of that, environmental groups are still trying to stop the use of DDT and trying to prevent it from being used in places like Uganda.
Yes, there are many websites that try to debunk what I am saying, but none do. They say things like the National Academy of Sciences opposed DDT at the same time they admitted that it saved 500 million people. Perhaps. But it still saved 500 million people. None of my facts are wrong. Perhaps others played just as important a role as Rachel Carson in stopping the worldwide use of DDT. Perhaps. But that doesn’t contradict anything I have said.
As far as health effects, DDT was sprayed 4,650,000 times in the homes of people in the US. It was sprayed from trucks and airplanes. People even ate DDT to show it was harmless. (Not that I recommend it). Where are the adverse effects? There are some theories, but not one citable case of a DDT death. At least I can’t find one, and I have tried. Instead I find things like “Although DDT is thought to cause health problems there has been no known case in which the pesticide directly caused a fatality.”
Meanwhile, people are dying, and the people of Uganda want DDT. But western “environmentalists” think they know better, and are opposing it.
People need to wake up.
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A great post Pointy.
I am fully behind the idea of allowing the ‘poorer’ nations to industrialise asap, cheap and plentiful energy is the key, ie, coal, oil and gas, nuclear [U] maybe but thorium is better.
The convoluted, rambling, dissembling illogicality of why the nutters [Gaia idolists] won’t allow this are unconscionable, this is a crime against the human race – and all to ……… save, save what exactly?
I’ll come back to the rest of it P, gotta sleep.
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I am a humanist – I think. I have always thought along the lines of the quote I am sure you have all seen widely on the web – usually attributed to Marcus Aurelius, although many dispute that.
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.”
I have often had religious people, for whom I have respect for their faith, tell me that if I have no religion then I have no framework for my moral code. I don’t see the need for some imposed code. I suppose being brought up a Christian country (UK) had some effect, but being as though that country’s main religion now is based on greed, envy and consumerism, I hope that wasn’t a big effect.
I was brought up to believe that I should treat others as I would like to be treated – To treat anyone who worked for a living (no matter how lowly) with 1000% respect – To work hard to make my own way in the world and not expect someone else money, but to see it as a duty to help good people less able to make their way in the world, whenever I could.
I agree with Pointman’s premise that the human race is basically good – or has become so.
I have wondered sometimes though, that if we are truly the outcome of evolution and thus the survival of the fittest, whether our empathy for the weaker amongst possibly lead to our eventual demise. I do hope not.
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Hi Dave.
That oft repeated phrase, the “survival of the fittest” is interesting for a number of reasons. Darwin never actually used it in his book and the meaning of it has shifted subtly from its 19th century meaning. Today, it means the strongest or most physically fit but back then, it quite literally meant the species that fitted its environmental niche better than any other competing species. It was that subtle difference that allowed some pretty nasty political movements to coopt Darwin into their brutal philosophies.
I feel “our empathy for the weaker amongst” us cannot be an evolutionary liability, since that universal altruism cannot be something new in us. We haven’t changed at all in any evolutionary sense in 200,000 years. Despite perhaps a few brutal cultures, we’ve always done it. It’s interesting to note how many of our most inspirational people had sickly or difficult childhoods. Maybe that’s a factor in them later becoming prominent.
Pointman
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Going from your last sentence relates to something I once wrote about ‘freedom’:
“And, when the revolutionary cries that he is fighting for ‘freedom’, be sure to run away from him just as fast as you can, for you can be damned certain he’s fighting for the freedom to tell you what to do.”
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Once again Pointman, your thoughts mirror many of my own. Whilst I count myself lucky that as a young lad I was brought up in a Christian home and was taught Christian principles, I would hope that I’d have been just the same raised with no religious belief. As with most of you, I know my parents were inherently good and kind and gave me the love that I have shared and passed on to my children and others. If some people feel the need to believe in some Higher Power or some doctrinal faith or other in order to be comforted or fulfilled, that’s fine but it’s not for me.
However, one should) never forget that some of the most horrific massacres, atrocities and acts of torture in history were carried out in the name of religion and in many places in the world they are continuing !
On the Green environmental madness currently sweeping the world and the battle of “terminology” that is being waged, I hope this new description will go viral as I think it’s brilliant. Check out the links.
“WHAT IS MEANT BY THIS NEWLY COINED TERM: “SOVEREIGN ECO-CIDE?”
Posted 6 January 2012
If ‘sovereign debt’ is now acceptable as economic jargon popularised by the global financial meltdown, let me have a crack at inventing a new term, ‘sovereign eco-cide” as descriptive of how nations can inflict on themselves economic suicide by means of carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes, cap-and-trade madness , etc, caused by the myth that human and animal emissions of carbon dioxide can cause ‘dangerous global warming’. For what led to this invention, see three links below – Terry Dunleavy, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.”
http://nzclimatescience.net/
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Another really thoughtful piece. Again, echo’s many of my sentiments.
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Pointman,
These are the headlines that Australians are confronted with on an ongoing basis……
It is the coal barons, not activists, who threaten society
“As peaceful community activists, we collectively have no history of or motivation to disrupt energy supply. We pose no threat to society – unlike the coal industry, which wields massive political influence and holds the greatest responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of deaths, extinction of species, and billions of dollars of damage annually that climate change is causing.”
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/it-is-the-coal-barons-not-activists-who-threaten-society-20120109-1pro1.html#ixzz1j0SGrT33
“So not only does the coal industry appear to be manipulating our political and legislative processes, it continues to pollute, expand, and cause death and massive damage with impunity. For years, it has successfully curtailed government action to combat climate change. Now the crisis looms: leading scientific experts tell us that the world is on track for 4 degrees of global warming, potentially by as early as 2060, resulting in mass extinction and a reduction of Earth’s carrying capacity to less than 1 billion people.”
I agree with your view that most people are inherently decent and wish to do the right thing by their families and society, but when the Gangrenes’ perspective is so seriously warped and they remain convinced that theirs is a righteous cause, we end up with the kind of economic genocide that lies in store for us.
With so many vested interests riding on our carbon dioxide tax, that legislation isn’t going to be repealed any time soon even when the Marxist/Fabians are thrown out of office.
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I agree that environmentalism has become a monster, and especially so during the Great War on Carbon, over the last couple of decades. But I also think that it started out with an impulse that I imagine most of us would share, to some extent – a love for the natural world, a curiosity about plants and animals and a desire to protect the beautiful wild places of the world.
One danger (referenced above by Hillbilly33) is the pernicious idea of “ecocide”, that human activities such as farming, mining, building roads and cities, etc., are crimes against some ideal balanced state of nature. This I consider nonsense. I agree with Pointman that there is no “balance of nature”; there is no evidence of some sort of reference frame external to humanity, where species and ecosystems are particularly valuable in themselves. Nature does not care about giant pandas and coral reefs, and will replace them in a geological heartbeat with some other combination of living things, as has happened countless times in prehistory.
We may care about pandas and coral reefs, but I think we need to understand that if these living things are valuable it is because we choose to value them. And not only that but we have to balance them against other things that we value – human well-being, the banishing of hunger and disease, and the lifting of people out of poverty, with the help of affordable energy.
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Pointman,
The lunacy continues ……
Taxpayers stump up for logging policy failures
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/taxpayers-stump-up-for-logging-policy-failures-20120109-1pr8v.html
“As $45 million of your taxes is about to be divvied up for broke loggers, a worrying precedent has come to light that raises serious questions about this bailout of a struggling industry.”
Nowhere in this article does the “useful idiot” mention that it is the insane Gangrenous Policies that have brought Tasmania’s Forestry Industry to its knees.
For thirty years Tasmanian loggers and sawmillers have been driven to the wall by the incessant campaigns of the great unwashed masses of feral dole-bludgers and the political main-chancers who drive on the idiot foot-soldiers.
Sabotaging and disabling machinery, hammering steel spikes into trees that could ultimately kill a mill worker, building platforms in trees that halts work for weeks or months, depriving workers of their livelihoods, sending so many small mill towns broke, and worst of all……… demanding that only “plantation trees” are used for milling and export.
As a consequence, many thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, cleared from virgin forests on the broken backs of men for 200 years, have been planted out to genetically modified eucalypt hardwoods.
This is in regions where some of our most valuable vegetable-growing areas have flourished for decades, sending processors such as Birdseye offshore and livestock pastures shrink to be overtaken by massive stands of silver-grey Tasmanian Blue Gums. If farmers haven’t bowed to the pressures of planting forests on their land, then the other alternative is growing opium poppies for the Pharmaceutical Industry.
Certainly the bureaucratic bungling, lack of accountability and sheer waste of public money is disgraceful, but none of it would have been necessary if the miserable, meddling Gangrenes had allowed this state to go about it’s once-thriving timber industry. They have stopped a major Hydro-electric dam and now native forest logging. What could possibly be more “sustainable” than clean hydro power and logged forest coups that have been replanted after harvest for decades?
As far as I’m concerned, these people are urban terrorists who are singularly responsible for shredding the fabric of our society.
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Pointman, I always enjoy the clear and incisive logic of your posts.
My position is that all religion is a man-made construct so that a small group of people can have power over a large group of people. It has no other purpose. That small group may have genuine “good” intentions, but that does not change the nature of the beast. The political religion of Gaia is no different.
The idea that any being capable of creating the universe is in any way interested in the lives or actions of insignificant bipedal mammals living on an unremarkable planet in a isolated corner of a unimportant galaxy is nothing but arrogance on a monumental scale. That arrogance shows in the way they see the world and arguments they make to control others.
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Hello and welcome Truthseeker.
Any organised religion, like any organisation, will reflect the morality of its leadership. Though as several commenters here have observed, religious fervour has been responsible for some horrific events, in the main, I think the influence has been benign.
Enjoy yourself here and feel free to comment.
Pointman
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Pointman, the “morality of its leadership” may not have as much influence on the rank and file depending on the size of the organisation involved. The larger the organisation, the more effective independence the lower levels have on a day to day basis. This may be either good or bad for those that deal with the organisation from the outside but the underlying purpose is power regardless of the stated motivations.
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DDT is still parroted in science textbooks as a harmful thing. Last I checked, science was meant to prove and disprove a theory, and that the things that are put into books have survived criticism and peer review. Not so. This is the world of science. I wonder if people in the past would be in awe or in disgust at the current state of science.
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