Life is risk and fortune favors the bold. Presently not one of the dweebs in DC would have the balls to sail to the New World on the Mayflower. The milksops should stick to what they're good at: whining about the fat in school lunches. Everything else they should leave the hell alone, even for a year.


Rachel Carson? Bad, bad example. By lying about the risks and consequences of using DDT, which caused it to be banned, Carson and the then-head of the EPA are guilty of 30-plus years of eco-genocide.

While indiscriminate spraying of DDT is obviously stupid and dangerous, the rise in worldwide malaria rates in response to the restrictions on DDTs use have killed hundreds of thousands to millions of humans.

Now, unfortunately, it's too late. Like not using all of one's prescribed antibiotics, we allowed mosquitoes to develop a resistance to DDT when we stopped using it and it doesn't work anymore (at least not as well).

By the early 1960s we had malaria cases in India down to almost zero from 75 Million in 1947. Sri Lanka went from 2.8 million cases in 1946 to 17 cases in 1963. Malaria was on the verge of extinction in these places.

Then we lost DDT thanks to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring". By 1976 there were 6.4 million cases in India. Today it sits between 2 and 3 million cases a year and India is one of the luckier ones. Throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa more than 50% of all children are infected. In Zambia, in 2005, there were 1353 cases for every 1000 children under 5 years old. That means a huge percent of the children are infected more than once a year.

Was DDT dangerous to spray indiscriminately? Absolutely. Was it saving millions of lives? Without a doubt.

I'm trying to figure out your troll angle here.

Does a troll-angle have three sides? My right to comment is as valid as yours.

Are you saying that having faith in general is sacrosanct? I always took you for a conservative Christian, not a panentheist.

I am not a Christian; I believe Christianity is a legitimate pathway to God-Consciousness, as are many others.

I find it hypocritical to accuse only religion of influencing science while ignoring the politics that gave us junk science resulting in imaginary polar bear genocide, man-made global warming, and tobacco smoke that would have already killed most of the human race by now were it as lethal as claimed. What fueled the ban of DDT? Politically motivated junk science. Well, that self-righteous attitude and Rachel Carson's lies are now responsible for needless deaths in the millions from the resurgence of malaria. How often blind faith and modern junk science share the same toothbrush.

Atheism will never catch fire because humans are not logical, or robots.
Humans are creatures of imagination and emotion, and listening to Dawkins talk about DNA, while interesting, will never replace religious storytelling. I understand the beef with fundamentalists, but they are small in number in most religions.

Fraudbama is a perfect example of how the power of myth trumps logic. He's gotten this far appealing only to imagination (a bright future) and emotion (hope) with only vague hints and promises of what he'll do.

As a former atheist, I'm not asking anyone to convert. I'm (occasionally) requesting atheists to consider the utilitarian usefulness of faith, and lose the bigotry long enough to grudgingly admit religion's done more good than harm.

really fantastic stuff. very reminiscent of janine benyus' work on biomimicry (the farm as prairie concept) and, by extension, rachel carson's work in raising awareness that we cannot farm by just covering our soil with chemicals forever.

anyone interested in this should also look up william mcdonough's 'cradle to cradle' work in architecture and design