Human Rights

Letter to the Next Incarnation of Intelligent Life on Earth

I am a human, writing very close the extinction of my species. We humans are our own worst enemies. The two most immediate causes of our demise are climate change and nuclear war.

We humans have done so many things leading to our early extinction. Perhaps you can avoid some of them:

• You must abandon religion as soon as possible. It makes you believe that which is not so and to become addicted to wishful thinking.
• As you eliminate the predators and diseases that carve into your population, you must control your population yourself.
• You must never leave the soils less fertile than you found them. You must never leave the rivers less suitable for fish than you found them. You must never harvest to the point that fish or other wild populations are reduced.
• You must never increase the share of the planet’s surface for your species’ use.
• War must be highly ritualised, more like a professional sport. You must not tolerate any evolution in weapons.
• You must control the wealth gap so that one individual has no more than ten times the wealth of a another.
• Don’t make any drastic changes to the composition of the air, water, seas or soils.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

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The Crucifixion

The Crucifixion is one of the goofiest stories I have ever heard. Jesus, without any history of depression, decides one day he would enjoy a painful protracted death. He goads the Romans to crucify him by breaking the blasphemy laws.

Apparently, this suicide-by-cop was to help him forgive everyone all their sins. There was no need for forgiveness. These were general sins, not sins against Jesus. Further, he could have just forgiven the sins without all the drama. Similarly, there is no need for me to forgive Hollywood starlets who insult each other. It is none of my business. It was none of Jesus’ business either.

I have forgiven lots of people, including two employees who embezzled my life savings. I did not need a crucifixion to prod me along. I did not need to sacrifice anyone else or even a goat. Why does Jesus require all this suffering? It is a masochistic delusion. It is absurd that I would be more skilful at forgiving than Jesus.

It gets even weirder. Jesus’ suffering is supposed to magically neutralise the effects of sins, of all people, for all time. Christians are implicitly endorsing human sacrifice as effective. I wonder if they think Aztecs ripping the hearts out of sacrificial victims actually helped the crops.

Suffering obviously does no such thing. When somebody murders a young child, everyone still suffers. The child stays dead. Jesus is absolutely useless. It is a nutty idea that suffering 2000 years ago has any effect on suffering today. What possible connection is there?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

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