You think you’ve read all the stupid. You think there couldn’t possibly be more stupid. Not in 2014. You go to sleep at night, sure the stupid has run out and all the stupid you come across from here on in will be repeated stupid – stupid you’ve heard before. You wake up in the morning, not fearing new stupid; how could there be any more stupid? You saunter into the kitchen sleepily, remembering some of the past stupid and think, “shit, I’m glad that’s passed.” You naively pour yourself some fucking cheerios and confidently open your laptop, and… motherfucker! There’s more goddamned (#NoHoly) stupid before you can even fully wake up. It’s a brand new stupid. Something so stupid, you can’t even finish your cheerios.
Meet Connor Wood, ladies and gentle thinkers. He wants us to know in this article, that avoiding ecological doom requires religion.
Yes, I said religion.
He did not say that reversing our environmental holocaust would require scientists to sort out, empirically, what tangible solutions exist. He did not say we need tech and innovation to come up with a cleaner, more sustainable sources of energy. Nope, he said we need religion.
Does he give a reason, Godless Mom?
Several. But they’re not going to make you feel any better.
…other news – mostly from the New York Times, admittedly never a wellspring of uplifting inspiration – reminds us that things aren’t all peachy for the Earth. With some experts placing the odds of total ecological collapse by midcentury at 50/50, it’s time to start mining our religious and spiritual traditions for all the hope and insight we can get.
Chicken Soup For The Climate Denier’s Soul
Let’s just ignore the fact that our terminal tither has reacted strangely to there being a lack of uplifting inspiration in a legitimate news source (you might want to try Chicken Soup For The Idiot’s Soul instead… probably have more luck there… just saying), and jump right on the tradition mine.
Let’s face facts here, saying you want to mine “religious and spiritual traditions for all the hope and insight we can get” is tantamount to saying nothing because it means nothing. Sure, there are a lot of words there that just amount to fucking nothing, but that’s what that line of fuckhatted gibberish means: FUCK ALL.
How does one go about “mining” tradition? What physical actions must be taken to have successfully “mined” hope and insight? Is this guy talking about prayer? Maybe he’s talking about scouring sacred religious scripts for a clue about ecological harmony? For all the sense this guy makes, he probably means he’s going to sit on his shitter until it comes out green.
He makes sure to assure the tech world that their jobs are secure, though, so that’s super fucking nice of him :
Calm down – I’m not claiming that religions will mumbo-jumbo away our problems. It’s going to be scientists, garage inventors, and daredevil investors who create sustainable energy infrastructures or tools for neutralizing atmospheric CO2. So rest assured, tech folks: your jobs are secure. We need you more than ever.
Oh Connor, didn’t your Mama ever teach you never to tell a woman to calm down? I find it hilarious that he followed up his assertion that religions will mumbo-jumbo away our problems, with the assurance that religions will not mumbo-jumbo away our problems. Honey bear, editing and re-reading your posts is key.
I say this of course, as the entire tech world breathes a sigh of relief that Connor Connor Bo Bonner insists their jobs are safe. Phew!
Shockingly, the article says something I totally agree with after all this nonsense:
But here’s the thing: our biggest challenges in dealing with climatic and ecological threats aren’t going to be technological. Our biggest challenges in tackling these large-scale problems are going to be overwhelmingly social. I’m talking about securing consensus and agreement on these looming ecological and systemic catastrophes, and how to marshal our shared resources to address them.
Agreed, Conny-baby! Now We’re gettin’ somewhere!
He follows this up by talking about how, over the past few decades, just providing scientific evidence for the declining state of the natural world has not been sufficient enough to get the world’s support to do something about it. All very true. However, let’s not forget who does not accept scientific evidence as evidence. Let’s not forget who has had the most trouble swallowing the ecological collapse pill. We’re talking about creationists, Christians and the religious right. We may not be in as dire a situation as we are now if it weren’t for religious climate change deniers. But now, all of a sudden, they are the answer to solving the very issue they deny.
Connor then adds:
This is why religion is going to be one of the most important “technologies” of the coming century. There is literally no other social phenomenon capable of unifying and motivating people as religion does.
“Technology”, I do not think it means what you think it means. And there is plenty of other phenomena capable of mass motivation. I’ll give you a few examples:
Money
Riding The Boloney Pony
Food
Survival
I’d go so far as to say all four of those things are far more effective motivators than religion, being as even the most devout religious people have sought riches (lookin’ at you Mama T), they’ve abused their positions of power and trust to molest children for a sexual thrill, a good lot of them, especially in North America are morbidly obese and every last human on this earth has survival instincts.
There are plenty more motivators, such as power, fame, the well-being of our offspring, and so on and so forth that span all types of people who have all levels of faith or lack thereof. To suggest that there is nothing more capable of motivating people is to be fucking blind in a world that so fully and completely revolves around money. You, sir, read far too many fairy tales.
But there are tools, he says, that are used by the religious that can help us in our quest for earthly healing:
A bunch of disparate people who conduct the same ritual together for months will be a tight, cohesive collective at the end, for good or ill.
Or we could spend those months working on tangible and effective solutions? I mean, are you actually fucking suggesting that climate change can be slowed or reversed if we just do a long enough goddamned (#NoHoly) rain dance? Did someone put paint chips in your fucking Corn Flakes?
Connor becomes even more hysterically insane when he suggests that in order to save shit (the earth) we must view said shit as sacred and that the only way to place the label sacred on any shit at all, is through religion or spirituality. What in the actual fucking fuck.
What sacred means to the religious is something connected to god. It’s just a really fancy, fluffy, touched way of saying something is of the utmost importance. Some of us don’t need god to see things as being important. Some of us hold the Earth, our home, to be as important, if not more than you say your god is. This is how we discovered climate change in the first place. This is why we have scientists, politicians, and all other manners of people out there trying to get your robed dick lickers to hear the truth: we are in ecological trouble. It came from our equivalent of your sacred, it came from the profound reverence we carry around for the planet, the solar system, the Cosmos. Now, you’re trying to say the religious of the world should try to drum up motivation for reversing environmental damage by applying the label “sacred” to our world? You’re a bit late, dunce-squad, we’re past that stage.
The solution to our devastating ecological predicament lies in the sacredness of money. This is the fucking truth. To change anything, we must appeal to the men with the biggest wallets. Not the men with the biggest myths.
Do you disagree? Do you think our ecological doom can only be staved by believers?
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