Home/BlogI seldom post original material by other authors, but this is one of those cases where someone I agree with has said something better than I ever could. I hope you will visit his blog.
Originally posted by Pointman on October 2, 2014
TELL ME WHY
I posed some simple questions a number of articles back and I’d like to begin this piece by asking them again, because they’re fundamental.
Don’t they know how many of our own poor can no longer afford to heat their homes? Don’t they know how many millions die in the developing world from malaria because we won’t allow them access to DDT? Don’t they know that a million children a year die or are simply blinded for life by withholding the distribution golden rice? Don’t they know how many lives could be saved by supplying the poor with drought and disease resistant GM seeds? Don’t they know that switching from growing food staples to growing biofuel crops for cars only the rich can afford has more than doubled prices of basic foods? Don’t they know about the people killed in the food riots? Do they actually know anything? Do they care anyway?
There’s no oily sophistry about those questions, no sophistication, no tricky debating traps, no guile, no hidden agenda but always an essential inhumanity to the silence or uneasy evasiveness with which they’re met. I’ve raised an impolite subject. The truth is people are not dying, they’re being killed and we’re the ones through inaction doing the killing. I make no apology for being so blunt because they’re needed questions, simple questions, brutal even, and yet there’s always that awkward silence in response to them.
There really isn’t a party line on the moral dilemmas which are at the very heart of those questions, because morality is no longer about people or ones behaviour towards them, but simply about what’s good for the Earth or not. All else is subordinate to that consideration. In a deeper sense though, any wider altruistic morality is now about nothing more than projecting a good image of oneself rather than any notion of common humanity.
What we’re talking about are the lives of the most vulnerable being needlessly sacrificed atop a green altar, because of an almost automatic obeisance to a new and terrible earth goddess called Gaia.
You might think those questions were addressed at the real climate fanatics, those who’re absolutely determined to save the Earth even if that means over the megadeath, rigour-mortised and stacked-high burning corpses of humanity, but you’d be wrong because as must be obvious by now, those zealots simply don’t care about such collateral damage. After all, a smaller, more “sustainable” number of people on the Earth is one of their oft expressed aspirations. Humanity is a plague on the Earth, to quote David Attenborough.
Those questions were originally directed at the religious bodies of our rich developed world but with the sure and certain expectation of nothing in reply, not only because they were rhetorical but because the churches are by now in denial or wilfully blind to the moral issues presented by those questions.
They’ve fallen so far down into the abyss of the governing elite’s unquestioned dogma, which puts the Earth before the human cost of protecting it, that they now effectively worship a graven but green image in their desert of moral desolation. They’ve lost touch with that most basic imperative of all religions – the duty of care we all have towards the poor and vulnerable. Common decency, if you will.
Those questions, like this article, are now being addressed to the footsoldier clergy of those churches; the priests and the pastors, the imams and the rabbis, the holy men, the human beings representing their respective faiths and trying to make a difference in the lives of their local congregations.
This issue is not about science, since climate science has long ago allowed itself to become a compliant and willing harlot to politics. Like the great whore of Babylon, it sucks greedily on the teat of notoriety and all integrity has long since fled. Political sentiment can be changed because it’s driven by the fickle beast of popular opinion, which you still have a measure of influence over. What can’t be changed is that this is at heart a basic moral issue and morality is an invariant which should never be subject to the passing vicissitudes of fashion or alarmed public opinion.
The killing of the innocents is wrong, standing idly by when that’s done for nothing better than a mistaken idea grown into a well-intentioned but homicidal monster or for a quick buck, is wrong. Don’t delude yourself, the moneylenders are busy at work in your temples, doing brisk business under the righteous cloak of that false goddess Gaia but in reality serving nothing other than their own god Mammon. Your silence is helping them.
I’ll pose some new questions just for you, but I’m going to help you out by giving you the answers to them.
Will you ever read this article? Probably not. Will you ever read past the first page of Google’s reassuring results from various well-heeled green NGOs about any of the above questions? No. Will you ever stop to wonder how we eradicated malaria in the developed world using DDT and still have plenty of birds and bees? No. Will you ever try to calculate how many lives have been saved by us being malaria-free for over half a century? No. Will you think about why we’ve spent 800 billion dollars to fight global warming when the Earth’s temperature hasn’t risen in nearly two decades? No. Will you consider the effect that amount of money could have had on poverty relief around the world? No.
Will you at least admit that standing idly by and not speaking out means there’s some blood on your hands? Just a touch, a smidgen even? No.
You are this very day in the midst of a silent ongoing genocide, a slowmo invisible annihilation, a new shoah of such dimensions as to put the Nazis to shame and yet you will not acknowledge it or speak out about it. You do nothing. Nothing, nada, nada and nada every time. It’s Hemingway’s prayer and that’s the prayer of those who not only believe they’ve been abandoned by God, but have ceased to believe there can even be such an entity.
“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
Can there actually be a god? What sort of god could countenance such needless cruelty, suffering and callous waste of innocent lives? Deus irae? An angry god? Is there a reason? Do you have a reason? An excuse? Anything?
All those millions of preventable deaths are the direct result of political policies driven by nothing more than fashionable ideas about what our relationship with the Earth should be. In the midst of it all, you ignore the pressing issues, preferring instead to hotly debate schismatic irrelevances like female or gay priests. It’s no wonder that whole sections of churches in the developing word are considering decoupling themselves from what they consider to be out of touch mother churches in the developed nations, who simply won’t engage with real problems.
You plant saplings in your leafy suburbs doing your bit to save the Earth while the poor in the developing countries are running out of shrubs to burn to keep themselves alive. You talk about living in harmony with God’s good green Earth to your plump congregations while the world’s poor can do nothing more than lay damp towels over their dying children and hope for the fucking best. Tell me, who exactly needs your God’s forgiveness there? All my tears outside the walls of Babylon have long ago been wept; there’s nothing left in me now but an abiding anger towards you.
You are a part of the problem when you should by any decent notion of religious conviction be a major part of fixing it.
I am nothing and nobody, a small man with a small voice who long ago despaired of any faith in some sort of god. And yet I beseech you in the name of whatever god you follow to do something, or at least speak out. Like the Nazarene, you will not be rewarded for telling the simple truth.
Don’t tell me why god allows such things because there can be no reason, don’t bother debating god’s existence with me or his mysterious ways, just tell me why as a human being and a supposed man of god with some influence, you aren’t standing in your pulpit at every opportunity, raging and thundering to your congregation against such an obscene and preventable waste of human life and worse still, allowing that inhumanity to grind on day after pitiless day without doing a single thing about it.
Tell me why.
©Pointman
Well written. All of us are obliged to consider the harm we do in the name of noble causes.
I have always asked some of my ‘green supporting’ acquaintances and friends: Have you ever thought that being against GMO, pro Global Warming Mitigation and such, makes you pro murder? If you consider there is more world outside the Western developed side where we live and bask, you’ll start seeing a different reality from our chest thumping ‘green approach’.
There is a clinical name for such behavior. Pathological altruism.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FPtwdmXtjmoC&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
This essay needs to be distributed to every church ,green organisation, news organisation and government around the world. We have a moral duty to make this essay go viral.
One suggestion, it is a bit lengthy could do with editing by someone with skills to make it more appropriate for publication in national and local news papers. There are approaches that would make it attractive to produces of documentary programmes for radio and television, they need to be explored.
What’s a virgin or two (or more) tossed into the volcano compared to angering the gods?
Reading that brought me close to tears.
Puts us back into some kind of perspective, doesn’t it?
Here in the UK, BBC Radio 4 has a morning spot called “Thought for the Day”, whereby the BBC tells the chattering classes what to think about the issue du jour. This piece would be ideal for that, if the BBC hadn’t long since disappeared up its own green a*hole.
Pity the foolish humans who covet that which is meaningless – the idea of power. Humans have fought, killed, and died trying to gain and hold power for thousands of years. The “educated” elite supporting the continuous filling of their gluttonous egos through the actions that make them feel good, are the ones who are demonstrating their lack of evolution. Compassion for those less fortunate and a willingness, no a drive, to help improve their lot, is the evidence of ones humanity, not blaming global warming on automobile exhaust that is killing “the planet.” The article is excellent.
It is a wonder. In 1983 my SF Team was deployed to Liberia. Our mission was as a follow up MTT (Mobile Training Team). A former team had set up the Liberian military NCO officer academy. My team of 12 strong were to ensure that the Lessons plans and principles upon which they were founded and the method of instruction had not been distorted and to provide further training to the Liberian cadre.
We medics were informed that we would have plenty of time to practice our skills. The Army classified SF medics as “physician substitutes” (These days MOS18D) and the course of training to be an SF medic is longest in all of US Special Operations (Almost a year) with a very high attrition rate. Very tough academically for an enlisted man. The SF medic is one of the very few trained using the didactic methods. Trained to do physicals,take a history, do essential lab, treatment, and nursing and even to some extent physical therapy. Trained to do the essentials of dentistry. Trained in preventive medicine, slaughter and preparation and inspection of food stuffs storage and preparation facilities. This is not to say we were experts in everything but we were trained in the essentials. And could do war wound surgery and cut downs, chest tubes, intubation, etc.
But unfortunately, back in those days we had no civilian certification for many of the skills we had or procedures we were trained so well to do. IOW we could not practice much of what we had learned in the US. So any trip to the third world was a much sought over blessing for a motivate medic to do so many things he had been trained to but could not in the states without a physician or some specialist with their hand hovering over them.
So we were let loose to plan and do what ever we wanted. We scoured the DoD system for pharmacuticals pulled because they were within 60 days of their expiration and thus slated for destruction. We found surgery prep packs, out of date dressings, foley caths, etc, etc, etc, and we packed all of that military surplus along with a GPS medium tent and a command tent into a small conex and it was shipped over ahead of our departure.
We had everything we needed to set up a pretty nice primitive clinic. And once there the Army Physicians Assistant assigned to the US Embassy in Monrovia committed 110% to help us.
And so we set up our clinic and we treated all the dependents of the Cadre, their trainees, and any other Liberian military in the vicinity that showed up. We ran our clinic day and night. When one medic had to go out with the trainees the other was there. If both of us medics went out the PA would do his best to be there.
We are talking about conditions where we had to eventually had put CS powder (teargas powder) over our garbage pits because the local women would sneak in at night to scavenge in it. Where one walks down the street and every block some guy says “God a dollar white man?”. Where Ivory was cheap if one was inclined to buy the jewelry they made from it.
You sleep on a cot in a hootch with mosquito net. Your immunized for everything under the sun before you go and get your golf balls worth of Gammi Globulin in your butt for Type A hepatitis. Your taking prophylaxis for Malaria and you need it.
Every day one or two mothers carry in their mud crusted babies. The babies are mud crusted because the woman had first taken the child to the local Shaman because the child was sick and lethargic. Almost invariably it was Malaria. The Shaman had done his spells and then had the woman cover the baby in mud. Actually a pretty practical way considering the circumstances to help cool the child’s fever as it spiked when the gametocytes coursed through it’s little body. Then when the fever spiked again they would bring them to us.
Of course we diagnosed and treated many other diseases. But some were beyond our realm and our treatment could only be symptomatic. Men, 40 years old, dieing of “black water fever”, the permanent damage done.
We did what we could and I wish every spoiled American could have lived it. And as a final note I would like to say that no matter what you think of religion or what you think of God, as far as I’m concerned the Christian Missionaries I saw there were truly doing Gods work. A few of us hiked out 30 K in the bush from the nearest road to recover the body of one of these fine people who had crashed his plane. It was the first time I had smelled human death and there is nothing like it. We wrapped his body tightly in ponchos, strung it under a pole and carried him out.
My experience there as an SF medic is not unique by any means. Rest assured that for many years and today right now as I write this there are others out there all over the place doing the same kinds of things. You just never hear about them, even when some of the die doing it.
“Patch ‘em up and pack ‘em off went the routine but for him, as for so many of the Medics, it wasn’t enough. For the first time in his life, he never felt so needed nor so inadequate. He cared deeply and desperately, every man he lost became a bitter personal defeat. He began to spend his army pay ordering medical books and drug catalogues from the States. He stopped carrying the M-16 on patrols. Leaving it behind allowed him to carry more medicines and dressings. Nobody argued with that.”
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/line-of-descent-chapter-2/
Hey Bro.
Pointman
[email protected]!
How dare you lay this mess on the feet of theist foot soldiers! By what standard of common sense are they supposed to be able to discern the intricacies of climate science, economics, and risk management? Where are the hundreds, nay thousands, of scientists with pertinent credentials standing up with the brave few who have stood against this nonsense like Lindzen, Soon, Spencer, Christy, and Curry? Where are the economists other than another handful of brave souls shouting out that mitigation makes absolutely no economic sense and that our money would be better spent elsewhere? No, it’s not the scientists and economists job to say ‘wait just one doggone minute’, it’s the job of the clergyman down the street to make the determination that “97%” (LOL) of climate scientists are misdirecting the entire world into believing their “solutions” will result in less suffering in the long run.
Sorry, I can’t agree with that.
I have some sympathy with your position; we can’t expect someone who spent his time studying Hebrew, Koine Greek, Latin, the scriptures, and whatever else it is they study to have developed much of an appreciation of the hard sciences or any judgment about its practitioners’ credibility.
But such folks should exercise some judgment about what is a moral issue and what is a fact issue. They should preach aid to one’s fellow man but be a little more humble about which policies are most effective at achieving that moral goal. Unfortunately, too many clergymen stray outside their areas of expertise–and they compromise their authority in the process.
Those of us who got ’em should be sure to push back when our clergymen do so. I know I have.
“But such folks should exercise some judgment about what is a moral issue and what is a fact issue.”
Of course, but unfortunately this is rarely straightforward. Take for example the ultimate consequences of foreign aid:
“Why Foreign Aid Is Hurting Africa”
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB123758895999200083
Then there’s the hyperbolic climate alarmists’ claiming the entire planet is in grave danger (Is there any other kind?). How could condemning all of humanity (as far as they can tell) be moral?
What I would hope from at least Christian clergy is to expound upon the example/message of Jesus (Yeshua) on charity: supply the need preferentially over giving money (to paraphrase). This by and large is what most religion based charities do: supply the need. They build schools or dig wells or send medical personnel etc. etc. While governments tend to send $ far too often which in turn merely lines the pockets of the corrupt. If we applied Jesus’ approach to charity in responding to climate change it would look like what many have termed the no regrets option. Build up our infrastructure to deal with climate change rather than vainly attempting to stop it. That’s what JWD IMO.
Before you go worship at the Church of Hemingway please remember George Plimpton’s story about Hemingway enjoying the spectacle of Che’s firing squads with a fruity drink in hand. Not long after that he sucked on his shotgun and went on to nada. I am sure he found it.
The only people I know personally who are doing real work to save lives in the places you mention are Christians. They do so because Christ calls them to do so. My sample is skewed to be sure because I live in the South and I know a lot of Christians.
To paraphrase: You buy a new iPhone in your big house in a suburbs doing your bit to “save” the economy through unnecessary consumption while the poor in the developing countries are running out of shrubs to burn to keep themselves alive. If you really worry about the poor, Pointman, don’t limit yourself to berating people who think green, go all out and attack consumerism. Let’s raise taxes, stop buying more than we absolutely need and send the rest to help the poor. It’s, after all, the decent thing to do.
Somehow I doubt your dedication to helping the poor really run that far. This is more of a hatred of the environmental movement and the poor are just an excuse.
Thomas you have no right. You chastise a man for his writing about a quandary and try to tell him what he should be doing when you prove in your own response you don’t even have a clue in understanding the problem. The problem is not one of quantity of food world wide. The world produces far more food than needed to feed the world. The agricultural per capita caloric production on this earth has been rising longer than anyone here has lived.
So what is the problem? The problem is in getting it to those that need it! And it is GOVERNMENTS which fail to do that or to establish the conditions by which it could be done.
Why? That is simple. Denying food, water, and disease control are the ultimate weapons for control of any population. Famine, lack of potable water, and disease kill far more than any weapon.
Malaria to this day remains the greatest killer of human beings on earth as it has down through the ages for as long as there has been human history. That could have easily been changed within the 59 years I have been alive but it hasn’t? Why?
There is only one answer really! Because those that have to power to change it don’t desire it be changed. From the local “President for life” of some very poor country to the powers that be in the capitals of the developed nations. There is no motivation for solving the problem because there is much more to be gained by allowing it to continue.
And yet it can be done. Let me tell you a little story of how it can and has been done. Merck labs developed the very effective antifilarial Ivermectin. If your a responsible pet owner then your contact with it has been when you buy medications with heart worm prophylaxis.
Well Ivermectin is very potent against many other filarials. One of those Ivermectin is very potent against is the trypanosome that is responsible for the famous “African Sleeping Sickness”. Merck started a very successful program in west Africa to fight the disease. Every pet owner that bought the treatment for for their pets were unknowingly also paying for that program and it was and is still very effective.
And from the program and a few others has grown THIS: http://www.who.int/neglected_diseases/Donation_table_2012.pdf
So LEARN a little about who is doing what next time before you go on some anti consumerism anticapatitalist rant.
Rah, if you didn’t get it I was being ironic with my “anti consumerism anticapatitalist rant”. I’ve just heard too many people saying “we have to stop wasting money on X and help feed the poor instead”. Another time it might be someone saying that we should stop space exploration or get rid of all pets that eat too much food etc. It’s just a bad argument, we can do many different things at the same time, and I had hoped that people who read my “rant” would understand the flaw in it. Caring for the environment matters too, even if some Christians seems to consider it a form of paganism and threat to their faith.
You are way too conspiracy minded. Funding to fight malaria stopped mainly because governments stopped seeing it as an important problem to spend money on when the number of cases dropped off so fast. They figured it was a solved problem and moved on to other issues. Shortsighted and stupid, yes, but no plan to kill off the poor, or they wouldn’t have even started the campaign.
Same with DDT. Scientists warned that if you used it too much for frivolous purposes insects would develop resistance quicker so they recommended it should be reserved only for disease control, but did people listen? No, of course not, they used it in agriculture or just to get rid of harmless insects that were considered a nuisance. No conspiracy, just stupidity that made DDT more or less useless in many parts of the world. Nor has there ever been a ban on using DDT to fight malaria.
Thomas….at least your post shows you have a conscience, but don’t fight against it with diversion.
Thomas, I am sorry if this article attacks your “religion” but I suspect your attack on the writer of this article means that your belief system has been wounded. I pay taxes and donate to worthy causes. When I hear the cry “raise taxes” I know that it comes from a “progressive” because their higher power (government) donates to worthy cronies for them. Progressives do not have to take ownership for their gods decisions.
Read the article several times, how many people have died since DDT has been banned? Try googling “DDT thick egg shells” to see how false your “religion” is.
Reader, by all means, do a google search on DDT, or you could start at wikipedia and the references there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt#Effects_on_wildlife_and_eggshell_thinning
There are lots of myths about supposed DDT bans and how they have caused millions of deaths, but there is little truth behind them.
Thomas, I believe that you know the date on the article produced by google must be checked. I have performed the task for you in the hope that I can enlighten you.
http://books.google.com/books?id=HOpcT-KtkSwC&pg=PA131&lpg=PA131&dq=ddt+thick+egg+shells&source=bl&ots=YsHeCJsE-8&sig=uJwFJN-VpjPhEok9WryElscLPWk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Eg80VKaPDsb9yQSco4KAAw&ved=0CEQQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=ddt%20thick%20egg%20shells&f=false
Champion.
Pointman as the name suggests is hitting exactly where it hurts , or should hurt if these insane fuckers had a clue about reality instead of some fixed notion about their own moral rectitude and their ability to salve their conscience with a protest about the weather!
The Mad Hatter would be entirely proud of these idiots wearing their ignorance on their sleeves and crying in to their Givanche handkerchiefs.
It is so sad to see millions of people strutting their stupidity,displaying their total lack of ,it is not integrity , it is something much deeper, it is almost like they are the ISIS of the liberal left, they care so little for mankind that they would see it die for their crass,moronic belief in some sort of CO2 monster.
I have noticed over the past 18 months a certain desperate final stand type of behaviour amongst them , the alarmists are facing their Alamo and they are going down fighting.
Sad Twats.
“Those questions were originally directed at the religious bodies of our rich developed world but with the sure and certain expectation of nothing in reply, not only because they were rhetorical but because the churches are by now in denial or wilfully blind to the moral issues presented by those questions.”
Pointman is dead wrong about this. If he has traveled to the poorest parts of the world and not seen the massive works of humanitarian service and aid being done by religious organizations across the entire spread of human religious belief, then he has traveled with his eyes closed.
Catholic Charities, LDS Charities’ Humanitarian Services (the Mormons), free hospitals established by the 7th Day Adventists — this list goes on and on. I know for myself — my wife and I worked with LDS Humanitarian Services in the Dominican Republic for many years–not competition with but in cooperation and partnership with these other religious outreaches. The positive, real effects of these efforts to individuals, families and communities is beyond words. Religious charities are often the first on the ground, giving effective, life-saving aid in disasters such as Typhoon Haiyan.
Pointman
You request of preachers
” just tell me why as a human being and a supposed man of god with some influence, you aren’t standing in your pulpit at every opportunity, raging and thundering to your congregation against such an obscene and preventable waste of human life and worse still, allowing that inhumanity to grind on day after pitiless day without doing a single thing about it.”
The opportunities do occur and I take them when I can. But as a preacher I have other priorities: my job is to give my congregation constructive doubt not merely righteous anger.
Importantly, it is NOT my duty to tell people what to do, what to think or what to say. I have made enough mess of my own life to demur from telling others how to run theirs.
My responsibility is to challenge my congregation to be uncomfortable in their faith so they can deepen, broaden and grow their faith from where it is to become more powerful.
And if any one of them accepts the challenge then I have helped a little.
Importantly, as a person’s faith grows it drives the believer to respond to it. “Love your neighbour as yourself” is fulfilled in practical action or it has no meaning, and it is at this stage that responses to your points occur.
Those responses are most likely if the matters for righteous anger which you relate have been used as sermon illustrations to shake a person from complacent belief.
Please be assured that I am posting this as a sincere attempt at a succinct answer for you, and I am not in any way attempting to evade your reasonable demand (I would not have replied if I wanted to evade the issue).
Richard
Hello Richard,
thank you for your frank and considered response, with which I find very little I’d disagree with. In a sense though, you’re an exception in that you do actually raise the issue on occasion with your congregation. There’s nothing more I’d ask of you.
What’s at the heart of the article is the almost complete silence on these contentious issues by religious bodies because there’s a huge unquestioned assumption that what’s supposedly good for the Earth is good for people, when in so many cases, that simply isn’t true.
I’ve a friend who’s a good man with a true faith, which leads him to volunteer his time helping people who’re struggling for various reasons. He was telling me that he spends increasing amounts of time just filling in forms for people so they can get financial help with paying their utility bills. I asked him if he’d ever wondered why the epidemic of fuel poverty, self rationing and disconnections in the UK had increased so much in recent years. It hadn’t so I pointed him towards some articles on renewables, subsidies and energy policy in general.
He obviously read a lot deeper into the subject. The next time I met him, he was angry. Not at the dodgy science, because his education leant more towards the humanities. Not at the politics, because he’s not political. It was at the unfairness of it all. The poor and bottom of the earnings ladder people were being scalped to increase the bank accounts of the already rich.
For him it was a moral question.
If the article goes some way towards reframing the debate into a moral context, then it’ll have achieved its intended objective.
P
Pointman
Thankyou for that reply. Especial thanks for its concluding paragraph which I applaud.
Richard
Oh no, not this tired DDT canard again.
DDT is not banned internationally; in fact, it is available for sale from many suppliers e.g. in India, and cheap. It is also currently applied to kill mosquitoes within dwellings. What really happened when it was “banned” was that the U.S. stopped distributing it for free, and the inept governments in Africa, ever more keen to spend their cash on weapons and gilded toilet seats than on things that actually benefit their people, simply stopped using it. The real cause of preventable deaths due to malaria is the same as with the even more numerous preventable deaths due to tuberculosis – namely, the total lack of responsible governance in too many countries of this world.
Moreover, DDT is not exempt from resistance. Had its use continued unabated, it would very likely by now have become completely useless. I’m not saying banning DDT was necessary or a great idea, but the consequences have been totally blown out of proportion.
According to the Wikipedia article on DDT, the worldwide ban is only for agricultural use. DDT is allowed for vector control except in 26 countries with total bans, mainly ones without malaria problems.
Exactly. Moreover, some of the “countries without malaria problems” are not primarily immune to it, but they have found alternative solutions to the problem. This notably includes the U.S.
Why?
Because it is easier and “distant” for many?
“Many” seem to have an issue with the basics of “right and wrong” now days…….
Just sayin》
Yes, the DDT ban myth lives on, despite the many debunkings of it:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/DDT
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/12/21/ddt-ban-myth-bingo/
And, Rachel Carson did not say that DDT should be banned for control of disease transmission. In fact, she was concerned that the indiscriminate use of DDT in agriculture would cause mosquitoes to require resistance to it making its use in controlling disease transmission ineffective, exactly the sort of thing that ended up happening in India, where malaria deaths skyrocketed as DDT use continued to increase.
The real people with blood on their hands are the ones who were so greedy that they supported the sort of indiscriminate use of DDT for agricultural purposes that ended up making its more limited indoor use for malarial control ineffective in many places due to the build-up of mosquito resistance to malaria, exactly as predicted.
In addition, there were other problems, like malarial strains acquiring resistance to anti-malarial drugs and, as Michael Palmer noted, the ineptness and corruption of many of the governments in places where malaria has spread, along with the international community losing focus on eradication of malaria.
“in many places due to the build-up of mosquito resistance to malaria”
That should read
“in many places due to the build-up of mosquito resistance to DDT”
For the case of India, see Figure 2 of this paper from Nature magazine in 1981: blogs.univ-poitiers.fr/n-yeganefar/files/2014/05/Chapin-1981-Agricultural-production-and-malaria-resurgence-in-Central-America-and-India.pdf
Another good site on the DDT ban myth, which alas is now defunct but available via the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20110203114102/http://info-pollution.com/ddtban.htm
A Christian is not to preach another gospel but to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, the faith that was once delivered to the saints.
To many are already preaching a social gospel or a “green” gospel. Some even preach a racist gospel.
But the gospel to be preached and taught is that which opens Romans 1:1-4.
The fruit of that gospel being heard and believed may be some of what Richard and Kip mentioned above. Or it may be something like the Salvation Army or the Red Cross. Or maybe just helping out a neighbor.
(Mat 22:35-40 KJV)35 Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,
36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
To preach the second without the first isn’t just putting the cart before the horse, it’s leaving “The Horse” out altogether.
Richard is right. It’s not his job to tell his congregation what to do. It’s to teach them what He did for them. Then they can give of what’s been freely given to them.
I’d like to add that I’m not indifferent to what Pointman has said but he’s asking those who are to preach and teach the Bible to preach a social gospel that is more to his liking.
He also seems to be blaming God for things that are not His doing. (Unless giving Man freedom of will is a mistake.) He’s been on a rescue mission to save any and all who choose to accept His solution to Man’s wrong choice for quite a while now.
I made this long comment on another blog several months ago. In it I covered some things that may answer Pointman’s “Tell me why”.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/14/exploiting-human-misery-and-distorting-the-science-an-environmentalists-critique-of-years-of-living-dangerously/#comment-1613079
PS I ask that you not respond there or on Caleb’s blog if you follow the second link.
As an atheist, I nevertheless find the moral/ ethical teachings of Jesus Christ compelling; his second commandment being foremost. I don’t understand why those who choose to believe in a deity feel the second commandment unworthy/ meaningless without the first. My belief is simple: we live with our fellow man and thoughtful analysis will demonstrate that honesty and non-violence except in self defense — i.e., loving others as we love ourselves — will lead to the best outcomes for all. And what is best for all is best for me. I can live a life no different from my “believer” brethren despite our different beliefs in whether God exists or not.
Jesus wasn’t the author of the ten commandments.
FAIL
Well Said
Why do bad things happen?
God is the living, infinite universe that created mankind and endowed us with “Free Will” to choose between:
1. Fulfilling the purpose of each part: To make the universe more benevolent because we’re here.
2. Living selfishly as if we were not all connected parts of the same living universe or God.
Life is a daily battle for each of us to choose path #1 over path #2.
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