(no subject)
* Warning: Possibly offensive to very religious people*
Last week one of my classmates asked my opinion of global warming while at lunch. So I told her what I thought, that it's a cycle but we're also helping it along with CO2 emissions, and that the earth is going to find an equilibrium and the world as we know it (and perhaps even humanity) will change drastically. Then I asked her opinion. She said that global warming is happening because God said so, and that we have no effect on the environment.
I didn't even know what to say. I've never heard that from someone at the Coast Guard Academy before.
I've heard things like that in Southeast Missouri, and I normally just shake it off as people without scienctific backgrounds a little too brainwashed by organized religion. It doesn't bother me too much. But to hear it from someone at a technical college with a hard degree in engineering that is about to become a Coast Guard officer, that scares me.
Granted, I'm a science major, and for me my science classes build onto my religious beliefs, not work against them. How could people blindly accept that they have no responsibility for the environment or for their actions, and don't see a cause and effect relationship between what we do to the earth, and what it does back? I'm not sure if these people are arrogant, brainwashed, or just plain stupid.
This isn't to say I don't respect religious people. Or think there is value in organized religion. But when that organization is used to mobilize people to vote for or against a certain issue, or when it teaches that science (argueably, another religion) is wrong, or tells people to exclude others for not being "Christian" enough... there's something wrong.
Last week one of my classmates asked my opinion of global warming while at lunch. So I told her what I thought, that it's a cycle but we're also helping it along with CO2 emissions, and that the earth is going to find an equilibrium and the world as we know it (and perhaps even humanity) will change drastically. Then I asked her opinion. She said that global warming is happening because God said so, and that we have no effect on the environment.
I didn't even know what to say. I've never heard that from someone at the Coast Guard Academy before.
I've heard things like that in Southeast Missouri, and I normally just shake it off as people without scienctific backgrounds a little too brainwashed by organized religion. It doesn't bother me too much. But to hear it from someone at a technical college with a hard degree in engineering that is about to become a Coast Guard officer, that scares me.
Granted, I'm a science major, and for me my science classes build onto my religious beliefs, not work against them. How could people blindly accept that they have no responsibility for the environment or for their actions, and don't see a cause and effect relationship between what we do to the earth, and what it does back? I'm not sure if these people are arrogant, brainwashed, or just plain stupid.
This isn't to say I don't respect religious people. Or think there is value in organized religion. But when that organization is used to mobilize people to vote for or against a certain issue, or when it teaches that science (argueably, another religion) is wrong, or tells people to exclude others for not being "Christian" enough... there's something wrong.