SOMETIMES FRIGHTENING THOUGHTS ENTER MY BRAIN

Most modern peoples now know that the human animal has evolved to the point where it is outside of evolution and has the capacity to tamper with its own evolutionary destiny. The tool for its escape from its animal “fate” is human consciousness. When that appeared on the scene, humanity had kicked open the cell door of its bodily prison. Such knowledge ought to bring us hope, but our boundless human ignorance puts a damper on that because we humans are now able to act on “conscious thoughts” and some of those thoughts are non-adaptive and possibly very harmful to human survival.

Almost every week I go down to my local library and check out three to five films, usually foreign films with those “horrid” subtitles. I say “horrid” for the benefit of those of you who hate subtitles, but of course, I don’t mind subtitles myself because, decades ago, I voluntarily switched to foreign films in order to escape from the boring and predictable American fare that was polluting movie theaters and the Tv in American homes. I’d do anything to catch a glimpse of a female body other than my wife’s. Yes, I was a bad and very human animal/boy when young. Anyhow. . . three of the movies I brought home this week dovetailed with and provoked another thought drifting around in the human biosphere during these past few years. One of the thought-provoking films was “Leila”, an Iranian film, another was “Kadosh”, an Israeli film, and the third was “The Vertical Ray of the Sun”, a Vietnam film.

The Iranian and Israeli films had to do with fundamentalist religious ideas about procreation and filling up the earth with male religious armies. Both showed the plight of barren women in those two backward religious cultures in which a wife may be replaced so that the man can find a fertile woman. Of course, no one is allowed to find out if it’s the man who is infertile. The whole blame for barrenness is put on the women of the culture. Meanwhile, the beautiful Vietnam film just shows ordinary people dealing with ordinary family travails in an exotic and lushly filmed atmosphere. Watching it, I could almost imagine I was watching an Ingmar Bergman film or the plot of a Tennessee Williams play, and Vietnam is, I believe, both communist and Buddhist.

The frightening idea to emerge in my brain from these films and environmental studies is the horrible effect that the religious ignorance and brutality of Orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Islam can have on our environment. Not to mention, the stupid procreative ideas of the Catholic and Mormon Churches which also put emphasis on overpopulating the earth so that their personal religions can close the population gap with those other religions. That’s right. . . we’ve got a population arms race going on at the same time we are reaching the limits of population numbers which the earth can safely sustain. Those three major religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) are polluting the earth with their numbers and hastening the demise of the human species. They encourage and spread “conscious” ideas which are non-adaptive and self-destructive, and I don’t know if they can wise up in time to stop the carnage of fucking creation. The sad part is that the more backward and primitive the culture which harbors the religion, the more likely the government will encourage the stupid religious ideas which threaten even the most reasonable and rational of us human animals. I hate to point out where that puts America under our current Bushite regime.

In short, a little study of the situation shows us that these three major religions are the source of stupid backward ideas which are not only irrational but actually counterproductive and non-adaptive to human well being. Of course, the irony, and there’s always irony in religions, is that these religious peoples have rationalized the biological imperative to increase and multiply at all costs. Funny but those, who rage against the facts of evolution, are actually, as usual, the most under the power and influence of their evolutionary drives and impulses, and they’re totally ignorant of it. But, you know, perhaps we haven’t escaped evolution yet. Some great plague or atomic war may erupt out of this population arms race and drastically reduce the numbers of this human ape population, waving its religious standards on every street corner of our earth cities. The irony stacked on irony in this situation is that human consciousness, if only there were more of it, is the key to stopping the population arms race. All we have to do as a species is open our conscious eyes and look about us. A new dawn awaits us! You can see that dawn in the Vietnamese film, “The Vertical Ray of the Sun” and other films of the enlightenment.
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“I’d be astonished if this planet is still going by fifty years from now. I don’t think it will reach 2000. It would be miraculous.” —Alistaire Cooke [Anybody can misstate his case by a millennia or so. Just ask those who believe in the coming of the rapture every hundred years or so and sort of can be accused of praying for their own demise.]