Dear Google,
I was astonished by your deep misunderstanding of my post in reply to yours about your upset and concern with current international news.
How could you accuse me of having the President of the United States as my hero?
First of all, I have NO heroes. That is not my style. And for you to read mypost and from it call the President of the United States my hero makes no senseat all. I never even mentioned him, or anything about any kind of American politics. What I said is that I think we should not hate all the people of any nation simply because they live there. You certainly must have misunderstood what I
wrote.
NOTE: I never write or talk politics anywhere, at any time. I don't intend ever to do so. I have never written about politics on this forum. I didn't write
about politics last night. I never will. Please read my post again more carefully.
You, of course, have every right to be an atheist. It is not my intention to try to change you. An atheist will easily understand that hatred for all the people of an entire nation is totally unreasonable. Blanket hatred for an entire mass of millions or billions of people is nothing but prejudice. Prejudice is derived from PRE+JUDGE. To hate totally unknown human beings whom you cannot possibly know enough about to judge fairly, is prejudice. Such an emotion has oftenbeen used to manipulate toward war. That's a good enough reason in itself for
us to work to eliminate it from our personal patterns of thought and behaviour.
Climate change is the greater danger for the human race: it's worse than
either terrorism or war. It is swiftly accelerating on many fronts, in surprising and deadly ways, for which we have absolutely no protection. If not self-killed as a species, we stand in danger of being thrown back to a much more primitive stage of human life unless we address what we have caused. There are other terrible dangers but I believe this one trumps them all.
The end of war must happen, to allow the human race the focussed attention. cooperation and wisdom and wealth, to find ways around the causes of climate changeand to stop its progression. All the riches and energy spent now on war will be needed for us to be able to save ourselves from world environmental disaster.
What are your thoughts about how humanity is going to survive climatic world scale destruction involving, among other things, new and deadly diseases; inundated
coastal cities; floods and famines on a vast scale in areas where they have never been before; loss of species; increases in heat and cold where there is no experience of either; the death of trees that provide oxygen, and of sustaining species such as plankton in the oceans which help to replace oxygen and food for other ocean species. Remember, we are up against a tight time line to get things
turned around before we get into a feed-back cycle that will not be able to be
stopped. There's a little bit of time left but there apparently now is no time
to reverse things. There is probably still time left to stop everything from getting into a horrendous feed-back cycle and then into chaos.
At this point I think it is almost humourous that you view me as an optimist! If I didn't have any hope, which I wouldn't if I weren't a Baha'i, I don't know what I'd do, because I can see how dire the situation has become. And how stupid
humans are to continue making wars over religions and oil and running child armies, and working unendingly to pile up vast personal wealth in the face of this pouncing horror.
Do you realize that there can be sudden jumps? Climate change and heat increasedoesn't necessarily happen at a nice, polite, steady pace. It could make an abrupt jump at any time. It can even make a jump today that we might not see the consequences of for five years. The human race has never been faced with anything like this.
More and more people are beginning to understand the dangers, and soon there will be demands for full focus on saving the human race, and not on war. Wars and stuff won't be be tolerated for any reason at all.
I shared with you the only solution I can see for changing motives and behaviours fast enough to get away from wars and move on towards saving ourselves. Humanity has to pull together. As more catastrophes happen an already stressed humanity is going to feel like men in the trenches. Do you know what they said about
the men in the trenches? There are no atheists in the trenches. That means that when people become completely helpless in the face of quite possible imminent
death they have found it impossible to face it alone in atheism. They begin to
cry out to some higher power for help.
How do you see the human race pulling together in unity enough to stop the increasing climate change that is already beginning to spin out some terrible menaces
?
It has hardly begun. How do you see cooperation happening so people
can quickly pull together to work to save the human race from this incredible peril? A workable path is needed. Not simply giving in to hopelessness, hating some kind of a "kicking boy", and continuing to remain divided. It isn't any useweeping over continuing wars about which individuals can do nothing. Remember
, in this mix there are also other new and complicating things such as instant world intercommunication by email, etc. Jets that pollute a lot. An infrastructure for cars that will have to change. Where's the fuel energy to keep things going? Wind? Biomass? Increasingly dangerous weapons, and all the rest of it.
If you find my solution unworkable or too idealistic, what is your solution?
I look forward to a good reply. Warmly, Mary
