There are so many things wrong in this world that man has made that the urge to oppose them rises easily. Here, in the U.S., we now use torture as a means to defend ourselves.
And, among the Islamic Fundamentalists as well as within the Christian Conservative Right, reason has fallen away before the meme of blind faith. There are no easy solutions for those who would oppose the gathering darkness. The fundamental underpinnings of how man has organized his civilizations contains the deep flaws that beget all the rest. Nothing less than a rethinking of how we govern ourselves and how our economic systems are organized, what the explicit purposes of our intentional structures are and a valid conception of what we think our long-term purposes are, as we consider our species' future, will be required. And all of this requires an advance far greater than any we've achieved so far, despite how impressed we are with ourselves. It requires that we intentionally transcend our inherent biological imperatives and replace them with new intentions based on that which is in our own and the biosphere's best interests into the indefinite future. Given how few of us rise to transcendence of our personal biological imperatives, the outlook seems bleak. Those structures and systems we have implemented to this point in time, are simply the high level derivatives of those same biological imperatives. Capitalism and all forms of the gathering of power being prime examples. We are coming to an end time quite different from that envisioned in the Bible. It is one wherein the consequences of our biological imperatives and their derivatives, unleashed by the power of our generalized intelligence and unrestrained by a clear perception of our own best long-term interests and deeply blinded by the fairy tales of our prescientific religious beliefs, will lead us inevitably into a tragic collision with the inability of this global cradle, this precious biosphere, to support such folly. gallagher 24 Feb 2006
— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —