Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Check out this short but insightful and compelling video by the incomparable Neil DeGrasse Tyson (NDT) “What’s Possible in 15 Years”.
Neil is responding to a challenge promoted by Bill Gates in his Global Citizen initiative and Gatesletter to end world poverty and hunger for ALL in 15 years: SDGS (Sustainable Development Goals).
Daily we read about the horrors of ISIS and Boko Haram. We read of the flogging of an Internet blogger in Saudi Arabia for criticizing his country’s enforcement of sharia law. Another LGBT young person commits suicide. Mike Huckabee, the Conservative Xian Republican is busy promoting the view that the Bible should guide our laws and not the Supreme Court. The list of religion inspired repressions and diversions from productive human activity goes on and on.
While religions argue over how to reconcile their scriptures with the secular world’s complete acceptance of LGBT humans, Bill Gates and many others are aiming higher than the moon: the end of hunger and poverty for all human beings by 2030, in 15 short years.
While the Pope is exhorting people to prayer and penance and pondering the ultimate fate of gays and atheists, his Church’s insane birth control policy condemns millions to crushing poverty all over the world and many an early death.
Like Neil says in the video “we went to the moon in 15 years” from absolutely no space program at all to “boots on the moon” in less than 15 years. Why not continue, even accelerate the incredible progress we have made in reducing world hunger and poverty in developing nations to bring every human up to a secure subsistence level?
Instead of wasting time and resources and incessant rhetoric (and too often, innocent lives) on bogus religious ideas deigned to restrict human behaviors in so many useless ways why not concentrate all our efforts on improving the lot of all humans on the planet?
While Bill Gates is reporting increasing progress on HIV treatment in South Africa, spiritually enamored clowns like Deepak Chopra armed with religious thinking are denying HIV causes AIDS: Check out Bo Gardiner’s analysis of Deepak’s latest bullshit here.
Religion divides us into arbitrary groups of us and them, and gives some of the faithful in positions of power sanction to try to repress others. It also promotes non-evidential thinking as evidenced in the “logic” the Catholic Church uses to condemn birth control or Chopra uses to reason away our modern knowledge of HIV/AIDS and its prevention and eradication.
Instead of wasting so much of our time and resources on absurd religious proscriptions, many of us like Gates, his wife Melinda and so many others ignore any and all religious considerations and take action exercising our normal human empathy, employing our incredible advances in science and technology to eliminate disease, poverty and human suffering…for all.
This is what we can do if we stop wasting our time on fanciful mythologies and ignore religion.
One Species, One Tribe.
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