"In so far as it helps the individual to forget himself and his ready-made opinions about the universe, religion will prepare the way for realization. In so far as it arouses and justifies such passions as fear, scrupulosity, righteous indignation, institutional patriotism, and crusading hate, in so far as it harps on the saving virtues of certain theological notions, certain hallowed arrangements of words, religion is an obstacle in the way of realization."

Aldous Huxley in the Devils of Loudun

Issac Newton and Edmund Haley were friends.  They once had a
discussion on alchemy.  You may know that Newton spent half his labors on the study
of alchemy. When Haley protested this foolishness, Newton responded, "I, sir, have
studied the subject, you have not."

No mercy for first offenders

The laws of thermodynamics allow no leniency in the court of cosmic justice. An inflated
Greenhouse effect due to increased CO2 and CH4 is even now yielding vast pools of
buoyant freshwater from the world’s shrinking icecaps, and these are already beginning to
shut down the giant gyres that drive the world’s abyssal currents. Readings from one arm
of the Gulf stream currently show a 30% decline in just 50 years.33 If that process
continues, fingers of warmth will reach down to unpin the methane hydrates that carpet
many seabeds and methane eruptions will send global temperatures rocketing upwards.
Agriculture will collapse under the climatic onslaught, and our energy-starved civilisation
will implode. Within a century the population will shrink below its 30% point, completing
the symmetry of a transitional pulse. Human population growth and decline will then
display the elegant waveform that typifies all animal plagues.

As one of 30–100 million extant species, ours does not differ from the others in any
fundamental respect. It follows that those who contend we are not in plague and will not
collapse are merely displaying one of our species’ most hallowed (genetic) delusions:
anthropocentrism. Such belief hinges on a bet that has odds of at least 30-million-to-one
stacked against it, and while astronomical odds like those might seduce the odd obsessive
gambler, no respectable scientist should fall for it.

-Reg Morrison

Evolution’s Act-of-God clause

“Our time bomb is mysticism. Its delivery system is language. And its hiding place? The
unfathomable coils of our DNA.” I first wrote those words in 1997 simply because the
process of evolution dictated them. At that time I had no inkling of the immediacy of that
prediction nor did I foresee how this lethal evolutionary mechanism would be launched
on a global scale.

Adaptive specialisation in any species is a two edged sword. Disproportionately
productive in their birth environment, specialisations usually become lethal handicaps
when conditions change. A peacock’s tail is the standard illustration for this crucial
evolutionary principle. The peacock-tail of our species is our predisposition to
mysticise—to assign peculiar, even supra-natural, significance to people, events, places
and things that matter most to us. As the late Carl Sagan wrote: ‘We’re significance
junkies’.

-Reg Morrison