Qualifying and quantifying impactors (was Shooting down meteoroids)

The current move to secure the oil fields is an act of desperation because the west negated it's role in protecting the property rights the western oil companies had to those oil fields-there really isn't much of a choice when one considers the disaster the world will face should the oil fields fall under the control of despots.

Religion, regardless of one beliefs, is full of moral codes that are honorable: humility, justice, prohibitions against murder, avarice, and sexual licentiousness. Freedom of religion is one of the West's important accomplishments. The abuse of religion, however, I grant you, has been one of humanities ongoing disasters. But religion, in it's basic essence, IMO is not the problem. It asks mankind to question our existence, to transcend greed, lust, hate, etc. It has been closely tied with art, philosophy, and man's search for meaning since the dawn of time. I hardly think Baptists in Ohio sending their kids to Sunday school to hear the teachings of Jesus (do unto others as you would have them do unto you, love thy neighbor as thy self) are the root of human violence. The oil wars are what they are; the failure of our industrial civilization to halt the influence of current business interests, pigenholing us into a dependence on oil. Putting it on the backs of conservatives is unfair IMO-soldiers take their orders and do their duty. The west has had plenty of time and warning that our dependence on fossil fuels is sending us down the road to disaster, and the real powers that be in government and industry are perhaps USING religous people to get in office, and USING their loyalty to the nation to effect wars. But the essential nature of the Christian is empathy, love, compassion, charity and love. None of them sit around on Sundays preaching "Let's get them SOB's". Sit through a sermon some time and they are usually about people mastering the uglier side of their nature and becoming better human beings according to the moral framework (honor your parents, don't covet, don't steal, forgive others).

To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.comFrom: joe@...: Tue, 27 May 2008 15:20:27 -0600Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Qualifying and quantifying impactors (was Shooting down meteoroids)

On May 27, 2008, at 3:02 PM, Don DAnthony wrote:> Communism was atheist and managed to kill hundreds of millions of > innocent people.>True, but because they were totalitarian, not because they were atheist. There's no particular correlation there; most dictators in history were in religious societies (and used religion to help maintain their power). But today, most of the large-scale violence in the world is caused by religious extremists or by religous-backed U.S. Republican leaders.> Religous nuts? LOL, humanity hasn't managed to stop using violence > and in fact with every leap of technology merely increases the scale > of the carnage.>I don't think your assertions are supported by the facts. War has been pretty much a constant of human civilization since pre-historic times, up through WWII -- and since then, we've shown increasing restraint. Is it because we're afraid of the atomic bomb? Is it because we're an increasingly interconnected global economy? Is it because modern travel and communications make it harder to divide ourselves into "us" and "them"? Is it because the tide of technology has created such a positive-sum game that it makes more sense to ride it together than to fight each other? I don't know, but whatever the reason (most likely some combination of these), the last half-century has been, globally, the most peaceful in history.This is not to say that there haven't been atrocities. But there have been atrocities for as long as there have been people (and no doubt longer than that). On the whole, though, things are better than they've ever been. A lot of serious, intelligent thinkers at the end of WWII were quite sure, based on history up to that point, that the nuclear holocaust would be coming within a decade or two. That didn't happen, and it's looking increasingly unlikely to ever happen. Times have changed.> Religion had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with WWI WWII and all the > other assorted death fiascos of recent history.>Not with WWI and WWII, but they have much to do with the current spate of violence -- namely Muslim extremists in the Middle East, and fundamentalist Christian-backed war mongers here in the US.Best,- Joe

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