This is a really big problem

You can see the oil slick from space. What was once permanently sequestered underground was released in our ever-increasing lust for oil, and with a haste spurred on by that lust, we tapped more wells, wells that were more dangerous, more nearly inaccessible, and more seemingly remote from human civilization, to the point where we started tapping some wells with the deck stacked against us without any idea as to how to mitigate damage in the event of a catastrophe. A catastrophe that was bound to happen.

BP, arguably one of the most environmentally conscious oil companies (though that’s like saying “most tolerant televangelist”), has admitted to having no fucking clue how to plug the Deepwater Horizon tap now that the rig is sunk and the pipes are spewing oil like a firehose at a rate of 795,000 litres (about 5000 barrels) a day. This despite the accident happening on a day when several BP execs were on that very oil rig to celebrate their safety record, and their repeated protestations that offshore drilling is incredibly safe and efficient and nothing could ever go wrong. What’s worse, BP scientists have projected a worst-case scenario of ~9.5 million litres (60,000 barrels) a day if the pressure continues to shear at the comparative pinhole that exists presently. BP claims to have the capacity to handle a worst-case scenario of 162,000 barrels a day, but no action has yet been successfully taken despite the disaster happening 20 days ago and counting.

To compound the issue, Obama’s newfound love of “drill baby drill” appears completely unabated by the situation at Deepwater Horizon. Regulators are rubber-stamping new oil leases and waiving environmental impact studies at an alarming rate, despite the acknowledgement that this is on track to become a worse spill than the infamous Exxon Valdez. Granted, this is well down on the list of worst oil spills of all time, but knowing the damage the Valdez caused, due to human error and finger-pointing, it’s galling to see the current round of blame-game, the Shaggy Defense, between BP, Transocean and Halliburton:

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And frankly I’m getting sick of people dodging blame. It’s also sickening to see people honestly thinking that they can pray the oil away, because I see that as another way of dodging the blame.

We are all to blame, to a degree, for our complacency in maintaining an oil-based economy and energy policy. We are to blame if we give corporations cover to make profits without any repercussions when something goes wrong — as is the case if BP, Transocean and Halliburton all get off the hook for their part of the liability for the cleanup efforts. We are to blame if we elect into office people that deregulate and remove restrictions regarding protecting not only the environment but the sustainability of our present actions. And we are especially to blame if we do not shout loudly and with as much anger as we can muster about the vicious cycles of burning oil and drilling oil and spilling oil despite all the obvious long-term detrimental effects this will have for humanity.

This goes double for you idiots that are on your knees praying for relief from the oil disaster. Understand that there are people with as expansive of faiths as yours, who are praying for the acceleration of an apocalyptic final battle where everyone dies and some select few get to go to heaven. There’s something you can be doing instead — figure out the underlying reasons (hint: our dependence on oil) for our problems (hint: the environmental impact we have on our planet in pursuit of oil) and do whatever it takes to raise awareness and/or elect officials that give a shit about the problem (hint: people that recognize that the vast majority of scientists agree that the evidence shows we need to get the hell off of our addiction to fossil fuels ASAP).

And if you’re one of those people, you can run for office yourself. You know, in a last resort.

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This is a really big problem
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26 thoughts on “This is a really big problem

  1. 1

    I can’t help but wonder why you constantly attack people of faith. They neither caused nor condone the capitalistic practices that lead to disasters like this. True, the vast majority of them are not doing anything particularly useful to stop this, but this can be said for the vast majority of atheists as well.

    Those of faith pray a solution will be found by someone with the intelligence and access to necessary resources to deal with this. Some of the foolhardy I’m sure will even pray that a magic wand will be waved and it will all be better. However, I’ve not heard anything from them pointing at atheists and saying “this is your fault for not praying”.

    Several religious communities shun man’s reliance on technology altogether. They have spoken out for years that man is not careful enough with what they can do, and want no part of it. Yes, this means that they do shun some of the more useful innovations offered, but that is their informed choice, and is not made out of an ignorant disregard for the “magic machines”.

    Your attacks against the various religions of the world offer no solutions, and only distract from REAL problems…

  2. 2

    I happen to think that one of the fundamental and most devastating “REAL problems” is the inability for humankind to winnow out truth from total and complete bullshit. Every religion that mankind has invented has, at its core, some fundamental bullshit that they sell to those incapable of separating out fact from fiction. My sidebar on this issue — the one about prayer — has obviously struck some sort of nerve with you; you either feel that one ought not rock such boats, or see no harm in prayer. I will take your comment as though you meant it in earnest, and not that you see me as being too loud and wanting to shut me up.

    I see several ways that magical thinking (like the thought that prayer is worthwhile, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, and the innumerable times it’s been tried to do everything from fix the stock market, to end wars, to achieve world peace, to cure innocent children of cancer) might be harmful. First, and most obviously, it wastes time that could be spent doing other things, like engaging in vigorous debate over the policy issues that resulted in the grossly damaging states we constantly find ourselves in (e.g., wars, ecological disasters).

    Second, providing cover for prayer provides cover for magical thinking. Magical thinking keeps hijacking our discourse, time and time again, when we need to be looking at the reality that’s around us and keeps punching us in the teeth. Look no further than people who believe the earth is 6000 years old and that nothing humans can do, could possibly ever affect the biosphere we depend on — and even if it did, that would merely hasten the armageddon where Jesus would spirit them away on a white horse. Meanwhile, back in reality, drill-baby-drill is going to net us huge and lasting consequences. Long-term ones. Long-term on the scale that those infected by the 6000-year-old meme can’t even begin to contemplate, because they’re too caught up in the magical thinking.

    And third, that specific “meditation to stop the oil flow” is not only doomed to failure, even if the BP people succeed in capping the well and mitigating the damage they caused in a few days, weeks or months, they’ll take credit for it as though their meditations somehow facilitated the work that people were doing trying to solve the issue. The prayer IS the distraction. It takes credit for real people doing real work. And that grates on my nerves in a big way.

    Yes, most sensible people will realize that it was people doing science that fixed the issue (though some would point out, it was people doing science with a broken moral compass that caused it to begin with). But those people that really believe their prayer helps, may well convince people in positions of power — like politicians — to pray problems away instead of taking the actions necessary to solve them.

    I cannot stand idly by while people in positions of more power than myself fall prey to these pernicious memes and do grievous harm to our society by virtue of replacing good hard work with “good” hard prayer.

  3. 3

    You seem to be assuming that prayer and action are mutually exclusive, while in fact I suspect that prayer actually reinforces action. People who are religious and who pray over an issue of concern are also more likely to go and try to do something about it, while those who don’t pray are also less likely to do something. Religion and prayer are actually often great spurs to action – witness the key role of religion in various reform and humanitarian movements over the past couple of centuries.

  4. 4

    *shudder*

    I still shake my head anytime anyone brings up the 6000 year thing. Nothing in the bible has ever supported this date. Some jackass read into the bible as a 10 year old would and made estimates about how long each event would take and never considered how much time there was in between each event mentioned in the bible, as if they were all in immediate sequence. Yes, I know, there are bible thumpers out there that try to push this belief. There are also “scientists” that do late night infomercials. Yes, this is a fair comparison because you’re pulling from the same stock.

    Blame is a human endeavor, it is not called for by the tenants of any faith. However, very often claims to the contrary are made by political figures in the religious community (boobquake comes to mind). Most of the horrible sides of religion are caused by these politicians who want to amass personal power, and religious followers can make very naive audiences. This is why I will never defend churches, which I don’t see as a necessary part of any religion.

    If you were to take some of these zealous people who pray to the great magic wand, and wipe their minds clean of any and all thoughts of religion, do you honestly think that they would suddenly become enlightened to environmental issues and start acting instead of praying? No, if you think about it, they would likely just sit back and change the channel. Do not blame the religion for the inactivity of people who are simply hiding behind it.

    I do agree with you about the religious nutcases who try to take credit for the actions of others. There’s a huge difference between a father sitting beside his comatose child in the hospital and praying after a doctor says “we’ve done all that modern medicine can do”, and Tom Cruise going on television and claiming that he saved thousands of lives on 9/11 by “thinking” away all of the poisons and toxins in the air from the collapsed buildings. These people who try to take credit, especially AFTER THE FACT, for the work of others piss me off, too.

    And yes, you did strike a bit of a nerve in this article. You start out with a very good read on a subject that has a lot of people in every circle concerned. You add a dash of crude remarks in a humorous manner, which may offend people more sensitive than myself, but I enjoyed. Then, from out of the blue, you wrap up the document as a whole and use it to bludgeon Christians with nothing more than “This proves that religions are bad, and if you need proof, here’s my opinion”. I feel a little letdown by this, I’ve come to expect much more from you. If you have so much to offer, then tell me, where I can I send my ideas/efforts/monetary support to support groups that are dealing with the oil slicks? Who do I write to in order to make my voice heard in preventing “Big Oil” from being as careless as this again? This is a real concern because they believe from samples taken that there is an oil patch stretching from South America to Africa that is larger than all other patches found to date, possibly combined, and I’d like to see them take better precautions if they attempt to tap that.

    All I get from your article is to go burn a church, and everything will be fine…

  5. 5

    While I have more respect for people that both pray AND work, I must still, if I’m being honest, have less respect than for those that do nothing but work. I of course reserve the lion’s share of my derision for the people that ONLY pray, and exhort others to pray as well, as though large numbers of people praying for something could effect any sort of change whatsoever just by thinking about it. And when those latter people are people in power, e.g. politicians, it raises a good deal of bile in my throat.

    Religion is indeed a spur to action. Not all those actions are good, however. Religion itself is the supplanting of your own reason with a theoretically external framework that is, in actuality, a simulacrum of the very deity that you believe in. Since these people are acting of their own volition in either case, but those with the simulacrum ascribe provenance for their actions to divine inspiration rather than their own non-divine thought processes, when they do BAD things to other people, they short-circuit their otherwise natural sense of responsibility to the rest of human society and feel no remorse at, say, killing people in the name of their god.

    And while I am tempted to take advantage of people wanting to do *good* in the name of their god, by directing their desire to take action at the problems we both see in society, I am worried that their specific actions for the greater glory of their invisible friend will take on a timbre that will, long-term, entrench their invisible friend in other people’s thought processes and hurt our ability to take appropriate actions in the issues we’re talking about.

    For instance, if someone believes in a version of Christianity tinged with Republicanism, then rather than fixing the underlying issues with the social security nets that allow people to bootstrap themselves out of poverty, they will work at soup kitchens and give to charity, both of which are good actions, while simultaneously working to eliminate “big government” programs like medicare, or working to perpetuate the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, which produces broken and homeless veterans once they can’t re-assimilate into normal society when they come home. And they do this in the name of their god, because they see short-term charity as good but welfare as encouraging sloth, or because they see Muslims as threats to Christianity and the war as a way to hasten The Rapture.

    As for prayer reinforcing action, that’s nothing but steeling up your own will. People who meditate, who look inward for inspiration in problems, are doing nothing but finding a nice quiet spot to think. People who implore of an omniscient and omnipotent deity with a divine plan that *someone* figure out a way to fix the problem, forget that an omniscient deity would not need your thoughts to be specifically directed at him, an omnipotent deity would have never let the problem happen, and a deity with a divine plan isn’t going to divert that plan based on the number of people thinking these specific things. And people who pray that the deity’s divine will be done will get 100% success rate because ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS IS APPARENTLY HIS WILL. That’s like praying that 2+2 will continue to equal 4 tomorrow.

    And as for your suspicion that people who pray are MORE likely to go do something about it than those who DON’T, I’d definitely need to see some empirical evidence of that. The null hypothesis here is that people are either doing something themselves, or trying to use their brainpower to telepathically make the thing get done. Not that people are doing both. And especially not both at the same time.

    And what about people who organize days of prayer? Or prescribe specific time frames to pray daily? Or spend weeks planning and carrying out a prayer breakfast wherein our political leaders are talking to one another about how awfully good their shared imaginary friend is, and how we all need to pray more to him? How much time is wasted in those efforts? How much money?

    I’m not arguing for a wholly utilitarian approach to life. We can spend our spare time on our hobbies. For instance, we both like ranting on blogs, time that can be better spent volunteering at the aforementioned soup kitchen. While I am pointing out a problem — and a real problem, in my estimation — of people who spend more time attributing their actions to some divine entity that could damn well make the changes themselves, I am identifying and suggesting ways of ameliorating that problem. If you don’t see the problem as a problem, that’s fine. You’re entitled to that opinion.

  6. 6

    You know what I love to do? I love going to blogs that I suspect are going to have a certain political bent, then complain when that bias is confirmed. When I go to Fox News, I don’t expect an anti-religious or pro-socialist bias, and I am never disappointed. Why on earth someone would read a post on Lousy Canuck expecting to read a non-biased post about people praying to fix an oil spill is beyond me.
    Let’s be as clear as possible. The religious people praying for the oil spill made this a religious issue, not Jason. Every reasonable atheist should mock prayer as an effective means to resolve an environmental issue.
    Do not try and make the case that religion has anything positive to offer to the task at hand. At best it is a neutral effect; at worst it is harmful; at the very least it is a gigantic waste of time.

  7. 7

    It’s not the words, it’s the tone. It comes across about as smooth and logically as me saying “there was a car accident near my home caused by poor maintenance on local roads and fuck you for liking a different hockey team than I do” to you.

    I agree with you when you say that people doing nothing but praying are not offering anything constructive. I partially agree that people will perform acts of charity that are merely stop-gap measures when such motivation would be much more useful directed at the causes, not the results. I just don’t see why you have to so harshly and so often criticize people who pray while you ignore the people who will post youtube videos of themselves not caring.

    Yes, there is harm to people being led to believe that prayer is going to have the results of a magic lamp. No, I don’t see the harm in people who draw strength and hope from prayer when there are no other options available to them. If you were trapped in a mine and digging from your position would likely cause a cave-in, prayer is not going to harm anyone. If the people outside decided to pray instead of trying to get you out, well, then you might not be so keen on the power of faith.

    As for wars being carried out in God’s name, that’s not fair. Those are wars of man, for man’s motive’s, and nothing in the original texts tells people to kill each other. There are a lot of contradictions throughout various religious texts, which leads one to believe that a lot of it is pure bullshit written to fulfill the political agendas of individuals who rose to power by lying to the faithful who trusted them. Modern wars are about profits, not prophets.

    It’s my personal opinion that Science and Religion both have horrible histories. Science has given us all of the horrible devices in the world, and Religion has given us all of the horrible people who would use them. Both came about by people who had entirely different intentions.

  8. 8

    YEAH. Thanks man.

    To underscore George: I am a blogger. I make no pretension at being fair or balanced, nor am I an impartial observer. What you read on this blog is commentary — STUFF THAT I THINK. It is not a raw news feed.

    It’s also, in my estimation, very seldom wrong. Though I’m biased in that estimation. At least I feel like whenever I’m wrong on facts, I make an effort to correct the record thereafter. When I’m “wrong” on opinion, there’s no shortage of people to dissent in the comments.

  9. 9

    I agree, there are certain character flaws that a great many of us share, wherein we eschew responsibility for the problems we have today, and those people, divested of their Bibles, would probably turn to American Idol instead. That’s a different problem altogether. You can’t remove bible frameworks and expect the vacuum to be filled with good sense all on its own. Those people that accept the pat answers religion provides, are filling those spots in their brain reserved for understanding of the universe and understanding of cause and effect with the nonsense that everything that happens, happens “for a reason”, that reason being implied to be the divine plan of a deity.

    The Bible-literalists, who generally pull their 6000-year-old date from the Ussher Chronology, are a minority of believers, it’s true. But they are vocal, and they are actively converting people to such belief. My bringing it up helps to counteract the insidiousness of such a meme by ridiculing it. While there are outlier cases where I might accidentally convince someone that there’s something to this 6000-year-old-Earth hypothesis by making fun of it so offhandedly, in the vast majority of cases, these people were predisposed to thinking of the Earth in so unscientific a manner to begin with.

    If you think this final paragraph (which I’ll quote) offers nothing in the way of potential solutions, I’ll helpfully strike out the part that obviously short-circuited your ability to read:

    This goes double for you idiots that are on your knees praying for relief from the oil disaster. Understand that there are people with as expansive of faiths as yours, who are praying for the acceleration of an apocalyptic final battle where everyone dies and some select few get to go to heaven. There’s something you can be doing instead — figure out the underlying reasons (hint: our dependence on oil) for our problems (hint: the environmental impact we have on our planet in pursuit of oil) and do whatever it takes to raise awareness and/or elect officials that give a shit about the problem (hint: people that recognize that the vast majority of scientists agree that the evidence shows we need to get the hell off of our addiction to fossil fuels ASAP).

    If you got, from that struck-out part, that I want people to go out and burn churches (!?!), then you were predisposed to that belief and nothing I said (or didn’t say in this case) would have changed what you thought I was really trying to say.

    Is it the word “idiots”? Is that what did it, is that single solitary word enough to override everything else I said?

  10. 10

    I would accept your criticism about tone if the analogy you used was at all appropriate.

    Actually, no, I still probably wouldn’t, but here, try this analogy instead.

    “There was a car accident near my home caused by poor maintenance on local roads and fuck you for voting into office people that care more about buying themselves big-screen TVs than putting money on the problem.”

    It’s not as non-sequiteur as you seem to think, for me to claim that people are shifting responsibility and that prayer is just one way of doing so.

    As for this:

    It’s my personal opinion that Science and Religion both have horrible histories. Science has given us all of the horrible devices in the world, and Religion has given us all of the horrible people who would use them. Both came about by people who had entirely different intentions.

    The commonality between science and religion is that they both require human beings to be practiced — human beings that are fallible, that are capable of making grave errors in judgment, or that have prejudices that often go undisclosed. The difference is in methodology. One explores the world around us using logic, reason and objective observation, and draws conclusions the same way. The other uses musty old textbooks or supposedly-wise dogmatists to tell you how the world is, and why the evidence saying otherwise is wrong. On the one hand, science can actually develop dire tools of armageddon; on the other, religion actively wants to use those tools but can’t (by itself) develop them. One claims to make no moral judgments about the world or the technologies or the people using them, the other claims to have a monopoly on morality and absolutely *knows*, by virtue of revelation, what is right and wrong. One is open to discussion and modification as new evidence comes to light, the other is as strict and rigid as its authoritarians can manage (and because of this, becomes fractious when enough people decide the interpretations are wrong, with both ideologies surviving).

    Yes, science has helped create the tools of our destruction, and yes, religion will shape the people that use those tools. That’s not to say religion is out to destroy humanity. That’s not to say religion must be destroyed. In my estimation, religion has been a useful tool in stabilizing society in the absence of a “society” to stabilize; but now that there IS a society, and a global one at that, it’s nigh time we pull away the scaffolding we used to build this edifice. Especially since that scaffolding is being used to build some tumorous growths on society now.

  11. 11

    A much more reasonable way of discussing the topic. Much more respect is being shown. I don’t want to force religion down someone’s throat, but I will no more tolerate someone being called an idiot for believing in religion than I will tolerate someone being called a hellbound sinner for believing in science. I would defend both parties. We are a product of our environments, and if someone is raised in a religious community and grows up with faith in a divine creator, that does not make the person stupid. Nor should a person who was raised in a purely logical environment be called a bad person. Neither assessment would be reasonable.

    I fully agree that Religion has a difficult time accepting change in our modern world. Interestlingly enough, however, much of the intolerance within religion is about beliefs that were added and enforced by churches long after the religion was actually formed. Some things have been reinterpreted and expanded upon for so long and so far that modern followers of the faith reject the original teachings.

    Science is just as fractious, however. Anything that you can prove Today will likely have another scientist trying to disprove it Tomorrow. Global warming is a fine example, with the best and the brightest in the world butting heads and hurling accusations of falsification of evidence both ways. Regardless of what you believe, the fact is that both sides of this debate have been doing this for years, and in the meantime it’s preventing anything from actually happening about cleaning up the massive amounts of Industrial and Consumer pollution generated every day. Debates about it are no more useful than prayers.

  12. 12

    No Disrespect intended but….
    Why on God’s green earth are we supposed to be respectful? When pressed to divulge the logic of the argument, Jason seems to be more respectful. He is respectfully telling you why he has no respect for religious people.
    If I may add… two posts in a row now you have made the case that it is not Christianity’s fault that it is intolerant, or evil, or malevolent, or (insert pejorative here). It is a common argument to say that any “un-Christian” action done in Christ’s name cannot be the fault of the religion. When the pattern emerges that the most hateful, hurtful, vile things are done almost exclusively with a religious hat-tip, then we have to start questioning the message and not the recipient. Religion would be great without people to interpret and act upon it is the equivalent of saying that crack-cocaine is just a pretty white rock till someone smokes it.
    If it will make you feel that I am being more respectful then I’ll put it to you this way…..
    I have nothing against God, it’s his fan club I can’t stand.

  13. 13

    The evidence that people who pray are also more likely to actually do something is mainly to be found in the key role of religion in the establishment of large-scale charity. Historically, charity on a large scale has depended on religion until very recently, and a disproportionate amount of charity is still handled by religious groups.

    Re: conservative political views, while there is certainly a considerable overlap with religion, the two are by no means always connected. It is quite possible to be opposed to welfare programs and supportive of military action while also being an atheist (a lot of libertarians are atheist or agnostic), and it’s entirely possible to have the opposite views and be a devout Christian – the Catholic Church in particular takes positions that coincide with the political left on some issues (generally anti-war, anti-death penalty) just as it takes positions coinciding with the political right on other issues (strongly opposed to abortion and birth control, for example).

  14. 14

    Have a list of secular charities. Yes, historically, religion has taken up the charitable functions of our societies, but mostly because those religions were ubiquitous, and certain people put more stock into the “help your neighbor” parts of their texts rather than the “kill them if they don’t believe in your deity” parts. Religion also took up the mantle of being hospitals in times of need, though they sure as hell didn’t do anything to cure their patients by isolating virus strains and developing antibiotics.

    Now that science is ascendant as the chief epistemology that actually produces results, you will see that list of secular charities grow by leaps and bounds. And one really nice thing is, if you’re a secular group, you can make use of Kiva.org to become charitable as well. Meanwhile, the secular charities don’t make their charity contingent on praising Jesus, as the Salvation Army famously does. Everyone gets to benefit from groups like Habitat For Humanity or the ACLU, without any extracted promises of converting to atheism.

    The intersection of Christianity and Republicanism I mentioned is just an illustration. It was by no means an attempt to tie the two inexorably. I’m well aware there are, for example, libertarian atheists, Penn Gillette springs to mind instantly.

  15. 15

    Nightfallz, we aren’t even discussing the topic any more, so I fail to see how we’re treating it respectfully. Not that I shy away from talking about religion versus irreligion, and the point of yelling about people who are doing something ostensibly so harmless as prayer, but we’re a goodly way yonder from the original topic of people blame-shifting and dodging responsibility for the ecological disaster we’re in (one that, markedly, we can do precious little to ameliorate unless you want to donate money to some sort of ecological relief effort).

    The topic has spun out into the utility of religion as a monolithic whole, and comparisons between it and science as epistemologies, and as methodologies for improving lives. Obviously our thoughts on the matter differ greatly, and I appreciate the chance to hash them out with you and Paul. What I don’t appreciate is being told that I’m telling religious people that they’re idiots for being religious. That is decidedly not the case, and it takes some absurd amount of spin to suggest that.

    What I DID say is that people who earnestly believe that praying makes any sort of difference, are idiots. Actually, I pointed out in the very next sentence that there are people as faithful as the people praying for someone to fix the issue, praying for something miraculous to happen to staunch the oil-bleeding, as there are people praying for the Rapture. And yet, what will happen, will happen. This despite Matthew 18:19.

    Meanwhile, no scientist of today honestly and earnestly believes that “flat earth” best fits all the evidence. Yes, some people can get too attached to their pet theories despite the evidence not bearing them out (look at Stalin’s Russia and their dogmatic adherence to Lysenkoism despite better evidence to the contrary). But beliefs within science in contradiction of evidence eventually die. The inverse is the case in religion — those beliefs that are unevidenced seem to be the most fervently adhered-to.

  16. 16

    Sorry, got kinda distracted near the end of that comment. The point of the “flat earth” bit is that there are still people out there that believe the earth is flat. They develop ad-hoc rationalizations for satellites, the ability to circumnavigate the world, triangulation, shadows being at different angles in different places at the same time, and just about every other piece of evidence that has turned up since Pythagoras. Nobody would call these people scientific today. But put them in ~300 BC, and they’d be scientific geniuses.

    Science marches on with new evidence. People might adhere to old ideas that are disproven with newer and better evidence, but you still have the same old Christianity two thousand years later… give or take. You know. Depending on how much of the original religion you think actually exists in the evolved and splintered forms that live on today. And considering how much every single religion must have evolved, what do you figure the chances are that YOUR particular faith is the correct one?

  17. 17

    […] that started off being about people dodging responsibility with regard to ecological disasters and rapidly turned into a “stop bashing religion” thread that’s still ongoing presently. (Well, that is, unless I’VE cowed everyone else into […]

  18. 18

    Praying that the oil spill problem will come to a favourable conclusion will only serve to take away from the hard work that those people on the front line are doing to contain the damage. The folks praying will inevitably praise God for doing those thing that are being done, not by prayer, but by old fashioned hard work.
    To be fair to the religionists, may I suggest a few things to pray for that WILL make a difference in ensuring that things like this does not happen again….
    1. Pray that God will help you to choose a Prius or a Cobalt next time you need a new car instead of the Hummer or Suburban that you “need” to take your 1.5 kids to soccer practice.
    2. Pray you will have the resolve to take the bus or subway or ride your bike to work.(Bonus: pray no co-workers will laugh at your bike helmet or pant leg tucked into your sock!)
    3.Pray that your family will tolerate turning the heat down 5% or turning the lights off in rooms you aren’t presently praying in.
    4. Pray that your gated community homeowner’s association doesn’t cite you for puting a clothesline in your backyard

    Now these things are worth praying about. It would also be helpful to get off your duff and actually just do some of these things. That’s what is so great about being an atheist, I don’t need divine permission to get up off my ass and change my habits.

  19. 19

    I’ve never found anywhere in the bible that it says “don’t bother working, just pray and everything gets done for you instead all tickety-boo”. That being said, I agree with you that anyone just praying and then walking away from it as if they had done their share is really insulting the people who are on the shore scrubbing as well as the engineers who are working themselves into early heart attacks trying to develop a working solution.

    If you had a friend or family member that decided to go there and help with the efforts, and you prayed that he/she would be okay, I don’t think that’s detracting from anyone’s efforts. Praying that he/she is successful is still crediting that person as well. However, praying that SOMEBODY, ANYBODY does SOMETHING, and not bothering to specify who or what or when or how is about as useful as seeing a fire and hoping that someone will pull the fire alarm that you’re standing next to. Useless people are useless people, regardless of background.

  20. 21

    At least we can agree on that point Nightfallz.
    The problem with this is that there has not been a single news story about George The Atheist checking up on the story at CBC.ca and genuinely hoping that the problem will come to a swift solution and how I believe my constant checking is assisting in the efforts.

    For Jason to blog on the non-story of atheist not doing anything constructive, or Hindus having a “ghee is for getting rid of oil spills” ritual or whatever the hell you think he should be reporting on instead of a linked story about Christians trying to make a tragedy all about Yaweh is just plain ridiculous.

    Jason and I have both now conceded the point that atheists can be useless too. That was never the issue. You read into some comments what you wanted to read so that the headline of this post should have read “Atheists claim all the worlds problems stem from Christianity”; decidedly not what any of this was about.

  21. 22

    I just wanted to point out to all parties involved that while I implied by omission (along with Phil Plait, in the linked article) that the people trying to think away all that nasty oil were Christians praying to their specific god, the people involved are actually trying to meditate it away. No big difference if you’re a deist that thinks your deity is in tune with the meditations of the people of Earth, mind you, and equally as effective as prayer.

    I’m not done with this prayer nonsense either. As soon as I can scrape it together, I’m totally going to pour salt on this raw wound.

  22. 23

    Huh. I see what you were trying to link, but that news item seems to be talking primarily about pubs showing sports. And I can’t find any article to do with NS, hair or oil.

    Edit: oh, and now it works. *facepalm*

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