[Buddha-l] Accuracy

[Richard Hayes]

On Jun 15, 2010, at 9:42 AM, Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:

> There are many human practices I'm not 
> particularly fond of.

More and more I find myself looking in vain for any human practice I DO approve of. The most cheerful news I heard recently was from a biologist who thinks the human race is on the brink of extinction, but the cockroaches will probably survive. It was almost enough to make me believe in God.

On the second of the CBC Ideas programs on the pros and cons of a vegetarian diet that I mentioned yesterday, someone suggested that the earth can probably sustain a human population of around 2,000,000,000 (which in American English is called two billion but in civilized parts of the world is called two thousand million). That figure seems a bit high, but perhaps he was right. What is interesting is to contemplate what will happen to the 4,800,000,000 human beings that the earth cannot support. I think we are already seeing the answer in the form of famine, pandemics of antibiotic-resistant diseases, "ethnic cleansing" in places like Kyrgyzstan (although I never did trust those shifty-eyed Uzbekis!) and Sierra Leone, brutal executions of peasants by Mexican drug cartels and by Los Federales who are busy trying to execute peasants before the drug cartels get to them, assassinations of indigenous people in Bolivia and Peru probably sponsored by various international mining corporations who can't understand why those primitive native people don't want their environment destroyed so that people can have lithium batteries for their mobile phones and laptop computers, and the desiccation of two-thirds of the planet as the other one-third consumes products the manufacture of which contaminates waterways and takes it out of agricultural use. The richest people on the planet are irreversibly into unsustainable patterns of exploitation of the earth's resources, and the remainder can't wait to get into those patterns themselves. Oh, did I forget to mention all the people dying in senseless wars waged by nations led by governments for which greed, hatred and delusion are considered virtues to cultivate rather than vices to discard? Taken together, it is not difficult to look forward to the human race either going extinct or evolving into an intelligent life form. On the other hand, thank God there are people like Geert Wilders around who have seen clearly that all this malaise is being caused by Muslims.

Richard