It would not surprise or shock me a bit if oil companies like Exxon were using disinformation to create chaos with regards to global warming and encouraging ignorance—I merely look at the kind of people in the White House, their links to oil and what they are doing to science in America. Still the oil industry builds on a need for sound scientific understanding and its campaign to breed generations of bible idiots and ignorance will result in their own demise. Personally I do not believe that a resource like that of oil should be in private hands. It is said to be directly linked to our National Security (thus to go to war in the Middle East forcing the price of oil up and creating conditions that could cause disruption of its supply is a form of treason) and thus all oil companies ought to be nationalized and the profits invested in creating renewable energy sources and in educating contractors of all industries to build energy efficient homes and products in general, as well as getting kids to think and be environmental “angels” that know the true church history, learn to see the bible's mythology and understand what evolution is and means from a more scientific viewpoint.

I guess I always liked the Philosopher Spinoza's comments on the matter of Christianity as written in his not often read Theological-Political Treatise. Here is a quote from his introduction to this work, a work that was banned from being published because of its unacceptable theological import and this being the case in what was considered even back then to be the “liberal” Netherlands of the 1600's.

“Christian religion, which is a religion of love, joy, peace, temperance, and honest dealing with all men, should quarrel so fiercely and display the bitterest hatred towards one another . . .. In seeking the causes of this unhappy state of affairs, I am quite certain that it stems from a widespread popular attitude of mind which looks on the ministries of the Church as dignities . . .. Little wonder, then, that of the old religion nothing is left but the outward form—wherein the common people seem to engage in base flattery of God rather than his worship—and that faith has become identical with credulity and biased dogma. But what dogma! —Degrading rational man to beast, completely inhibiting man’s free judgment and his capacity to distinguish true from false, and apparently devised with the set purpose of utterly extinguishing the light of reason.” Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, preface

Spinoza is, at least in my opinion, relevant today in ecology from a conceptual perspective because of the idea of a unified whole that runs though out his philosophy, though his philosophy is one of an infinite whole, man is not the center of the universe much less the earth, we are as a species limited by this greater whole of which we are but a tiny part. We are not the “center” of the world, but are a part of the greater whole. Spinoza forces the reader to alter their perspective of who we are in this grand scheme of things which can have the effect of jolting the reader out of their slumber, in a satori manner, but his work is not by any means easy to read due to its rather abstract Geometrical and perhaps archaic style.

I thought it was great to read that quote of Thomas Jefferson, as it spans the differences of time with equal import today as it must have had when it was written.