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I write in Saving Gaia that humans are destroying the Earth. A basic premice of the book is antropocentricism is a horror to all living creatures, even humans. The Bible says humans "have dominion" over the other life forms. No wonder human history is so screwed up. It was a sad day for non-humans animals when some ignorant goat herder or fisherman wrote it and today billions of people live by it.

Aristopus 7 Mar 17
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There are also those who use the extremtises from god controls the planet to Jesus is coming back soon so it doesn't matter what I do.

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FUCKING A and along with so much beautiful life will die by it too.

Leigh, this is from the back cover of my book. It's the ending of the promo. Explains your use of the F word.

At the turn of the twenty-second century, 80 years from now, on seeing and living with the devastation, the citizens of the new century are bound to ask, “What were you thinking? How could you let it happen? Did you all believe you were the only ones that mattered?”

In a nightmare I see them weeping with tears on their eyes, “Didn't they have any brains?” And worse, “didn't they have a heart?”

very good words and the answer is no heart or just complacency.

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I think an understanding of what Dominionism consists of and the harms it threatens us with, is often lacking in my fellow atheists.

Dominionism, AKA Christian Reconstructionism, is not just a threat to the enviornment, but to civil society. It is a "sea change" that has happened in Christian Fundamentalism over the past 2 to 3 generations. Old-school fundamentalists felt political or public policy advocacy was beneath them, that believers should patiently await the second coming while keeping the faith. But starting as far back as the 1950s and gathering steam in the 1980s, they became restive and resentful enough to begin to listen to various voices that led them gradually down a path of greater civic engagement, not just arguing legitimately and respectfully for their "values", but imposing them on others. This led to organizations like Moral Majority, and the concoction of totally new official dogma designed to be a rallying cry for the religious right, such as "the doctrine younger than a McDonald's Happy Meal", the notion that life begins at birth and abortion is murder.

Ultimately dominionism is the advocacy of totalitarian theocracy. Every individual fundamentalist I've confronted with this disavows this as an overt position, and may even pay lip service to the importance of our secular democratic republic. Yet, their policy positions and aspirational ideas contradict this denial. It has been (without too much hyperbole I believe) called "Christian Sharia Law".

Examples are the current desire to undo decades of progressive policy and openly dreaming about unwinding Roe v. Wade; installing (fairly extreme) evangelical "chaplains" to conduct "Bible studies" in the Trump cabinet; climate change denial based in the soverignty of god (god alone, not puny man, controls the weather, ergo, god would not allow humans to undermine the environment); and a host of others.

Thanks for the info. But this whole discussion is in terms of "anthropocentricism". Placing mankind in the center of the universe, such that we're God's gift to nature, is the problem. As far as the moral majority and the evangelicals go, they are just an aberration, a freak of nature as far as I'm concerned. In Saving Gaia, I emphatically argue that our only hope, and the life on Gaia, is a startling, even miraculous change in consciousness. It'll start with the realization that humans are part of nature, not God's gift.

The idea of a theocratic American sends chills through me. If it ever happens I'm going to join my remote ancestors.

we are a toxic virus that by our own rules if not human we would do our best to cull or wipe out. the irony is we are going to because of what we do to nature.

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Humans don't need excuses to kill and exploit things weaker than them. But they take religious excuses anyway.

They don't need it but it helps

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