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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. The end of the world (part two) Ecology, terrorism or disease? By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 796 words Publication date: May 14, 2006 Last week I pointed out that the End Times described by Christian fundamentalists were impossible and absurd. The basic scenario is flawed, since a knowledgeable, compassionate and powerful God would neither orchestrate nor permit the destruction of its creation. The details are equally inconsistent, because the Rapture would lead to mass conversions among those who remained. For the record, I’ll repeat my commitment that if hundreds of thousands of people suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, I’ll spend the rest of my life devoted to the Big G. Let’s get back to the real world. While the Antichrist is a fiction of the imagination and Christ’s Thousand Year Rule is on a par with Sleeping Beauty, we may yet be facing the end of human civilisation as we know it. Global warming is merely one of our worries, although it may have the greatest impact in the long term as seas rise, storms become more violent and average temperatures rise or fall. On a smaller scale there is the loss of individual biosystems as humanity encroaches deeper into once pristine deserts, forests and seas. 16,000 species are now on the world’s endangered list. The rapid destruction of our physical environment is matched by upheavals in our social lives. Ongoing waves of migration cause tensions across the globe, with the US merely one among dozens of countries uncertain how to deal with recently arrived cultural and linguistic minorities. While poverty pushes some people to seek a better life elsewhere, it pushes others into the illusion of fundamentalist religion. It also fuels self-destructive drug use (legal and illegal) and encourages some to turn to violence. Global culture is destroying languages (half the world’s 6,000 tongues will soon disappear) and traditions across the world. American English and commerce (think Starbucks and MacDonalds) are not the only villains; the juggernaut of Mandarin-speaking Han are destroying indigenous cultures across China from Tibet to Turkestan. Meanwhile the aspirations of billions in the developing world to attain the same standard of living as the average American will at some point outstrip the planet’s resources. All these facts remind us that humans breed too fast, we consume too much and we destroy the organism that nourishes us. We are a cancer on the face of the earth and as we flourish our host begins to die. How quickly the end will come and in what form is uncertain. The sea may rise in a matter of years, decades or centuries, but rise it will. Our great-children may be able to walk through the streets of Amsterdam or the fields of Bangladesh, but their descendants will not be so lucky. Americans may learn the lesson of Hurricane Katrina and build stronger defences against increasingly powerful storms, but parts of Louisiana and Florida may soon be lost forever. Europeans may be better prepared for the summer heatwaves that are occurring with increasing frequency, but such preparation will carry increasingly higher costs and the old and weak will continue to die. If the Atlantic current fails, those living on the north-west of the continent will have to adjust to winters as cold as the plains of North America. Feasible, but at equally high economic and environmental cost. And the desertification of much of Africa continues. If climate change does not catch us, there is always terrorism. A nuclear war in the Middle East? Or merely a dirty bomb in Paris, Sydney, Chicago or New Delhi? Or will the tragedy of Iraq teetering on the edge of civil war be repeated in Egypt and Iran, Russia and China, as it has persisted for the last forty years in much of Africa? Let us not forget disease. China and India are so vast that millions may die from HIV/AIDS with only their relatives to mourn them. What about the next epidemic, bird flu or otherwise, that rushes from continent to continent on increasingly cheap (and environmentally destructive) air travel? From one perspective, none of this is new. People have been predicting the end of the world since the beginning of history. The usual culprit is the God(s) displeased with various human misdeeds. In the late eighteenth century, the economist Thomas Malthus was first to suggest that human growth might outstrip food production. In the 1970s, a flood of books suggested that ecological disaster was around the corner. Current predictions may be equally wrong and given human ingenuity, even a global disaster would probably not eliminate the whole species. The only sure way of averting disaster is to actively prepare for it. We can argue over the details but at least let’s admit that if the end of the world comes, it will be the work not of an imaginary God, but of ourselves and our ancestors.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist.
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