Commuter said...... "We all have different beliefs & viewpoints. Can't we all just get along?"

Yes Commuter, yes we can all get along, but not before people of religious creed stop using their power and beliefs to pervert the course of political democracy! It's not just Australia, it's happening all over the World.

Also, as another poster rightly pointed out, people of most religious persuasion have this misguided view (in my opinion) that the World is facing major upheavals as described in the Bible or Koran or whatever book they live by and that it has been caused by evil versus goodness, but that soon their "God" will return to take the good to better place (call it what you will) while the evil suffer accordingly. So, they then proceed to make the most of what we have before their God comes to claim them. They take no stock of the fact that we need to conserve for future generations, they don't care about Global warming. In their narrow view, they don't need to. Their God will come back before peak oil causes destructive energy wars, or their country fries.

I'm beginning to see now just why John Howard's policies are so anti-environmental. Go for Growth he cries! Use up all the resources! Who cares. God won't let us suffer too much. He'll be back before climate change bothers us greatly!

By the way, has anyone ever taken a look at the preachers in those "happy clapper" churches? One might have cause to ask as to why many of them drive expensive imported cars, wear the best cut suits and wear their hair done in that slick, US evangelist style. The answer is simple. Their religion is their life blood. They make obscene amounts of money in many cases, while their gullible congregation keeps on giving.

And yes Commuter, my post was harsh, but if it makes just one person take a good hard look at his religion and decide that I'm right and his "mob" are wrong, then I've just saved one person from a wasted lifestyle.
Aime.

To last word: The tooth fairy has nothing to do with how the universe came into existence. Use your noggin!

Aime, I appreciate what you're saying. There _are_ many religious people who think that climate change, peak oil (less so though because its not as well known) and environmentalism in general are wrong because they can't reconcile them with their beliefs. Also there is plenty of behaviour in the happy clappies that so out & out materialistic it personally makes me shudder.

I can only speak for christianity - I don't know the Koran that well - but I do know that the problem isn't with christianity at all. The Bible teaches that man is to care for creation, not exploit it. It also teaches self sacrifice and caring for other people's needs rather than chasing a life of selfish greed. Hence a Bible-believing christian should be an environmentalist and certainly not a capitalist. Less like Peter Costello & more like Tim. Personally it astounds & alarms me why the churches in the US are so right-wing.

The problem is that the people you've described are not behaving as Christians, but rather as "religious" people who are choosing to believe whatever fits their world view. They wear a Christian, or a Muslim label but ignore whole swathes of teaching from their holy book, prefering to cherry-pick what they like & twist it until they think it says what they want. Despite this, they're somehow called "fundamentalists".

Btw, I don't think John Howard believes in anything much other than rampant free-for-all, survival-of-the-richest capitalism. Oh, and getting re-elected.

GP, your critique of materialism is highly simplistic and just a tad out-dated (by a good century or two). In both the natural sciences and philosophy, deterministic theories such as Newtonian Physics have been well and truly superseded by theories that use the paradigm of ‘chance’ and ‘necessity’.

That is to say, the theory of evolution (and the facts that support the theory), together with the knowledge of modern chemistry, micro-biology, geology and physics, provides overwhelming support to the idea that humankind owes its existence to nothing more than a roll of some cosmological set of dice.

Furthermore, necessity in the form of non-random processes is always involved, but this is largely reducible to further rolls of the dice and so on. The great philosophical-scientific mistake is to attempt to trace these random processes back to an almighty demiurge – some kind of ultimate (Christian-Platonic) realm of pure Being (or God) that is the final, ultimate cause of all things. Yes, it is generally acknowledged, there has to be SOMETHING driving these random processes, but I (and many others) think that it is much more plausible conceiving this ‘something’ in terms of a ‘force’, like ‘energy’ or ‘power’, for example.

Thinking in terms of ‘force’, ‘energy’ or ‘power’ has the advantage of explaining causal relations and events (such as human action based on will) without the need to posit an ultimate beginning or source – which inevitably takes the flawed and anthropomorphic form of a God or realm of ultimate Being (like Plato’s Forms).

Ironically, if anything, it has been revealed that strict determinism is simply the flipside of religious thinking, insofar as it relies on precisely such an ultimate beginning to give coherence to its claims.

This, GP, is the new materialist paradigm (well, it was new about 100 years ago), and I’d advise you to go and do some reading before you launch your next anti-materialist rant.

Personally I couldn't care less who made the world. The immediate thing for all of us is that we have to live in our particular part of it, and our particular part is supposed to be a democracy. Ideally that means that everyone gets a say, but the people elected by the majority are supposed to govern according to the will of that majority, not according to who they think made the world.

The article puts science up against religion as determinants of policy, which confuses the issue. We'd be better off arguing over whether science or God gave us computers and the internet to enable these brawls in the first place. The main point is that our elected representatives have been listening to religious doctrine instead of the people who elected them, which is contrary to their job descriptions.

Individuals can choose to believe whatever they want, school their kids wherever they want and spend their Sundays wherever they want. As individuals, politicians are entitled to make those same choices. But as politicians the choice is not supposed to be theirs, but ours. And our collective choices are not being taken into account by our government.

LSH - you need to try and explain yourself more clearly. You say you disagree with me yet I don't see where you have refuted my position and in a way you sort of even seem to be agreeing with me!

You say that "humankind owes its existence to nothing more than a roll of some cosmological set of dice". My point exactly! The materialist says we are just chance events, having no freedom or control. Therefore it makes no sense to crticise others as they cannot help saying or doing what they say or do. In fact, in a materialistically determined world nothing makes any sense.

You need to explain how you have any control over what you say or do, assuming you believe you have such control. (And if you don't believe you have, then you are just wasting yours and everyone's time.)