Random observations for January 2019

Ideology is almost as destructive to art as capitalism is.

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Unfortunately, natural selection may have imbued humans with a propensity for obedience.  Back in the stone age, when the elders told the children "Don't go near the river, there are crocodiles there", those who obeyed were more likely to live to pass on their genes than those who went to see for themselves.

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A while ago I drove past a church whose sign bore the message, "Have you ever wondered how many lies you believe?"  Oh, the irony.

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A century from now people will look back on our time, which passively accepts aging and natural death as inevitable, with the same pity and horror with which we now look back on the age that accepted its helplessness in the face of the Black Death as something normal.

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Gods are usually made in the image of the humans who create them.  That's why they hate the same people their human creators hate.

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"War is not the answer," goes the cliché.  If you think about it, war is more often the question.

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I honestly don't see any good in religion at all.  All the good that it supposedly does is actually done by people, and those people would probably be just as good even if they weren't religious.

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If you favor "punching Nazis" (simply for being Nazis, as opposed to in retaliation for violence of their own), then you need to come up with a clear, straightforward, and generally-accepted definition of "Nazi".  The term is thrown around far too promiscuously these days.  If you believe a certain category of people can legitimately be subjected to violence purely because of their opinions, then at the very least you owe everyone an exact definition of who falls into that category.

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It's objectively wrong to claim that religion and science can be reconciled with each other.  Every religion makes some empirically testable claims about reality.  In the case of Christianity, the Bible makes claims about the origin and age of the universe, the origin of life including humanity, a global flood, and so forth.  All these claims can be, and have been, tested by scientific methods and all of them have been shown to be completely wrong.  Similarly, Biblical claims about the Exodus and most of the Israelite "history" before about 600 BC have been shown by archaeology to be mythical.  The Gospel stories of Jesus are full of details which are irreconcilable with the known history of the period.  It is all just mythology.  Trying to reconcile it with science is as silly as trying to reconcile the Harry Potter books or Spider-Man comics with science.

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We need a basic change in our thinking about the environment.  The option of just doing our own thing while the planet’s climate and ecosystems keep humming along on their own, as they have for billions of years, is no longer available.  The impact of human activity is simply too large now.  From now on we’re going to need to manage and control the Earth, the way we need to manage and control things like gardens and parks (which, unlike wild ecosystems, don’t remain stable in the absence of human intervention).  There’s no alternative.  So we’d better learn to do it properly, and get a clearer and more honest sense of what our priorities are.

[For previous random observations, see here.]