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"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
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New plagues keep emerging to kill people and animals - at different times smallpox, cholera, typhoid, flu, AIDS, and now bird flu have come out of the normal background of infectious agents and killed very large numbers of susceptible individuals.
Every time there is an epidemic in the human or animal world, some individuals are extremely susceptible to the new disease and die, many individuals are extremely ill, but recover, and some individuals are naturally immune and don't get sick at all. It is this latter group that drives evolution forward.
Seems to me that religion is the new plague in the world. Been around a long time like bird flu, just quietly infecting individuals with small doses, normally not doing much harm, usually restricted to single countries. But every now and then it mutates into new virulent strains that spread around the world causing misery and death to millions. There was an episode in the Middle Ages of course, and we have been in another one in the last ten years or so.
Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do. However if they coincide with outbreaks of disease or environmental damage they can be more serious - religious wars, and religious credulous uneducated populations, not helping to deal with natural disasters.
So the problem with the plague this time is that it coincides with climate change, and we are all going to need our wits about us. So what to do? Well fortunately there are members of the population who are naturally immune to the religious plague. They are called atheists. Normally during outbreaks of fundamentalism they are ruthlessly persecuted. Sometimes jailed or killed, but even in the best cases they are abused, often not permitted to stand for political office, treated as outcasts in their own society. This all needs to be reversed. These immune individuals should be brought out into the sunlight, encouraged, appointed to high office, elected to higher offices, given the job of sorting things out until the plague again runs its course. 'Come on down now', would be the call, or 'come on out, we need you'. With climate change gathering speed we can't wait any longer for irrational human beings with a religious infection to start dealing with the crisis.
And the inspiration of seeing rational, normal, atheistical human beings, going about their business, and not being struck down by imaginary thunderbolts, might just help to bring this latest outbreak to a close, as their natural immunity spreads through populations.
Worth a try you think?
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"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)
"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)
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