Excerpt #115 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but they’re not entitled to their own facts.
The data is the data.
WE ARE FREE TO CHOOSE OUR ACTS BUT NOT THEIR CONSEQUENCES.
We didn’t invent nature.
Nature invented us.
Nature bats last, the saying goes.
Life is intimately interconnected, and as a culture, we’ve made a basic systems’ error to believe that we exist separate from nature, or from one another.
That illusion could prove fatal at this momentous cusp where our turbo-charged technologies and overwhelming numbers have given us, for the first time in history, the capacity to blow it on
a planetary scale.
THE BELLIGERENT DO NOT UNDERSTAND OUR INTERDEPENDENCE.
Gary Larsen once did a great cartoon that sums up short-term thinking.
A ship is sinking, and a pack of dogs crowded into a lifeboat are watching it go down.
The lead dog says to the others, “OK—all those in favor of eating all the food all at once, raise your paws.”