First things first, I would like to clarify that I identify myself as non-denominational and that I respect everyone's religious beliefs. I believe that everyone has the right to his or her own views and opinions, as long as they do not harm other people of society. I was baptized a Catholic and have since taken a step away from organized religion for several reasons. Since then, I have researched many different religions and I even attended a Muslim service with my girlfriend for her class project. With that out of the way, I want to take a step back into history and start exploring how I have arrived at the conclusion that I have.
When paired side-by-side, religious scriptures present a problem: the world was created in several different ways and we are all worshiping our deity/ies improperly, which is bound to create disagreements, and in my eyes, has. Throughout history, people of different religions, religious sects, and countries have clashed in wars and committed genocide in events such as The Crusades, Eighty Years' War, French Wars of Religion, Thirty Years' War, both of the Sudanese Civil Wars, and many more than I can possibly name. I'm not going to dwell on the main cause of each one, but the overarching concept of each one is that each side of the wars/conflicts was composed of people of a religion. With this problem, the history of disputes, established, I would now like to examine another area of the global timeline.
It has been argued that global warming is a natural part of our planet's cycle when you observe that there have been about five major ice ages in history. Whether you agree with the natural occurrence and pattern is up to you; this paragraph isn't about persuasion. According to NASA and NOAA, 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history and that every month of this year (2016) has broken a record (heat-wise) for that particular month. If one observes the amount of greenhouse gas emissions due to man, it can be seen that they have spiked significantly within the past 200 years which can be related to our industrialization of the world.
"The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Scaling to 46 years, humans have been here 4 hours, the industrial revolution began 1 minute ago, and in that time we’ve destroyed more than half the world’s forests."- Greenpeace.com
Now there is something else I would like to say, in no way am I drawing a correlation between religion and greenhouse gas emissions. What I am saying is that people need to start focusing a whole lot less on who created the world and more on who is destroying it. We are all seemingly turning a blind eye to what is happening to our planet and focusing too hard on things that I would respectfully deem "distractions" to a much larger problem. It has been found by numerous studies that the current lifestyle that many people of the world live is unsustainable and highly destructive and that drastically changing our diet, making small changes in our daily life, countries switching over to renewable energies, buying organically grown food, and changing other aspects of life can reverse these trends. I'm really not going to go into depth on this because I think that these links do it a whole lot more justice than I ever could, but we really need to change something if we want our grandchildren to be able to enjoy a world that doesn't require breathing masks and tunnels leading from one building to another to avoid too much exposure from our climate and air. All I have to say is that it won't matter who created our planet if there is going to be nothing left to live on in the next 200 years.
