Slashdot Mirror
Why Our Brains Can't Process the Gravest Threats To Humanity
merbs writes: Our brains are unfathomably complex, powerful organs that grant us motor skills, logic, and abstract thought. Brains have bequeathed unto we humans just about every cognitive advantage, it seems, except for one little omission: the ability to adequately process the need for the whole species' long-term survival. They're miracle workers for the short-term survival of individuals, but the scientific evidence suggests that the human brain flails when it comes to navigating wide-lens, slowly-unfurling crises like climate change.
Jared Diamond openly wept seeing malaria patients struggling to survive in an African hospital. He has illustrated the intelligence of the so called primitive tribes people in so many anecdotes in his book. And the climate change denialists managed to mire him into a law suit. They have instigated some Papua New Guineans mentioned in his last book to sue him for slander and other stuff. That is the extent they are willing to go, and that is their favorite weapon, law suits and puppet legislators.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm a Christian. I have no belief that God will save me from anything Earthly at all, unless it suited his purposes.
God let his son hang on a Roman cross after a torture session and humiliation. While it was done to generate a particular event, it does not strike me as though God is all that concerned about protecting me from climate change, or any other disaster. Particularly ones that I can work on preventing personally.
The point about Christianity is that you do well and you get a good afterlife. No one who has ever read the Bible believes that God is going to personally intervene to prevent you from screwing up in your current life. It is unclear what the end goal of having an Earthly life is, but it certainly is implied that testing is involved.
To me that means that you work for heaven here, but that you take care of yourself while you're here.
There may be people who do believe as you suggest, but that has nothing to do with being religious, and more to do with people who don't care about long term effects because they can't see how it affects them.