Very true, Diver Dan,

Just one comment - Buddhism is not a humanist religion. You mentioned it yourself in the description of Ahimsa.

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Great observation, Atman!

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Daffy Duck,

"In my opinion the deleted posting by DavidL was one of the worst cases of in your face verbal abuse that has ever appeared on this forum."

Yes it was, but under the provoking circumstances it reminds me of the question: "What's the ultimate insolence?", for which the answer is: "To poo on a stranger's doorstep, then ring the bell and ask for toilet paper. But there's yet one more level of insolence - for that home-owner to say 'just a minute' and return with sandpaper."

JN281111

John Ness,

Thanks for your two posts. The first one astounded me and I could not help feeling that you had wasted the product of an ingrained habit of thinking on an electronic publication where passions are many and contributors have diverse agenda bar that of helping humanity out of the throes of self harm.

Your first assertion: “Religion arose from inherent moral values not the other way around,”- must have taken a long time and the most apt circumstances to formulate.

What you say cannot possibly enter the minds of people shaped by institutions called Schools whose function is to uniformly clothe children just out of infancy and instruct them in the art of competing against each other.
” even though religious leaders have throughout the centuries claimed to be the guardians and interpreters of the moral code” escaped the observation of the readers of this publication.
“Which they have presumed was delivered exogenously from a superior being.” is outside ordinary learning.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809-1865 expressed these problems in theoretical terms; you made them seem immanent.

My take on what John Ness says is that our economic system is based on use of finite resorces which produce effects detrimental to our environment.

I'm no greenie, but I agree with John Ness.

He is even more right when he says

'The way ahead is to move economics, in the macro sense, from this basis and put it on a physical one. The world is such a wonderful place because we have had over 3 billion years of the most primitive life forms taking energy from the sun and changing the atmosphere into a stable, oxygen rich one with very effective feedback mechanisms that keep the system stable.

Our economic system must do likewise,...'

I agree wholeheartedly.

'To do this, the economic system must be based on and measured by the use of energy and the production of entropy as an empirical quantification of which system should be adopted.'

John Ness is also exactly right when he says

'This is well within existing capabilities ...'

In a few words: Nuclear power generation.

Well done John.

I'm miserable because of so much idiotic bureaucracy which simply doesn't give me a light at the end of the tunnel.

I'm miserable because miserable people keep trying to tell me how I have to live my life so I can be miserable like them. The current government and all those before it are a classic example of miserable people telling happy people they need to be miserable like them to be happy!

I know, lets start an NGO with miserable government funding to ban happy people. Oh wait...

It was surely a mistake for the author to mix religion into a discourse on economic sustainability, let alone to infer that these largely separate concerns could somehow be cooperative co-valencies responsible for some supposed common emotional malaise infecting society at large. Rather a long bow, needing only the addition of global politics, the problems of drug and alcohol abuse, the prophecies of Nostradmus and a view from classical philosophy on the nature and origins of the cosmos, to become almost completely incomprehensible.

However, the state of the world economy, and its future operational integrity and reliability are of concern - as is its current inequitability, at least for the communitarians, the compassionate, and potentially the far-sighted. I always thought economics was supposed to be about value for money and value for effort - as a kind of general insurance policy against unforseen turmoil. Most recently however, global economics appears to have operated like some kind of pyramid or Ponzi scheme, with the operators benefiting enormously at the expense of everyone else.

Future sustainability should also be of concern, at least for those who recognise the insanity of testing nature to destruction, or near to it, either in pure and malignant self-interest, or in some mistaken belief in miraculous intervention, or otherwise in blindness or devil-may-care disregard.

As for religion, it should be fine as long as it promulgates an appropriate moral code, integrity and respect for universal human rights, and does not pit one group against another - and doesn't get too involved in politics or economics.