How much of the Pope's recent letter do you agree with, and how much do you disagree with, and why?

Your logic would serve you well but it doesn’t address the other logic, or lack of it (and plain common sense), to some others. And all it takes is a few bone-heads to screw things up for everybody else.
Take the miners and loggers of the 1800’s. Strip the land bare because God put it there for us to use! It didn’t matter that it was being depleted because, at the time, life was good and money was being made! Hydraulic mining, dredges, logging, overfishing,... The list goes on and gets longer. My grandfather had that mentality, like “other people before me did it, why can’t I? Besides! Out of sight, out of mind, right?”
In a mining operation in northern Nevada in 1962, a WWII halftrack threw a track and was abandoned on a switchback turn on a US Forest Service road. Grand Dad could have reinstalled the track and drove the vehicle off the mountain where it might have been removed from the canyon by salvagers years later. Or towed it by bull dozer one of many times a dozer passed it. But it sits there to this day, shoved back in the brush. Who cares??
The message might seem to have been “Live for today, don’t worry about tomorrow. Today, there is bread on the table, money in your pocket, and all is right with the world. Tomorrow, with God’s help, will take care of itself.”
How these people managed to sleep at night is beyond me!
Yes, technology cannot save us. We must save ourselves if there is any saving to do.

@kritiper so you don’t think technology will make any difference when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint, which his the biggest cause of green house gasses? Wind power instead of coal plants? Cars that run on electricity instead of gas? Harnessing sun power in a meaningful way, maybe to run our houses? You don’t think any of those things, which will come about through technology, not just by Man doing their own personal things differently, will really mean anything in the end?

I agree with your objection to the second statement, but prefer to think that he meant “technology alone won’t save us.” This Pope is certainly Hell on rigid dogma. I’m very impressed with his grasp on reality and his forthright willingness to express it. This pope breaks with the Church’s traditional fate of finding itself forever on the wrong side of history.

@Dutchess_III All good ideas, even when not always practical. Too little, too late, not enough people want to go that way to make it work.
Technology can’t reduce our carbon footprint when people the world over are cutting down the forests that absorb CO2.
Electric cars can only get you so far until you need a lengthy recharge, or the expensive battery needs to be replaced, but you can’t afford to replace it, and it’s expensive to recycle, and the car depreciates too much too fast to make the electric car really feasible so it really isn’t cost effective, and so there’s no trade in value, etc., etc.. And money is the bottom line!
All technology is doing, with certain people’s attitudes in consideration, is delaying the inevitable.

We have to TRY @kritiper. Everything gets better in the long run, electric cars are not the exception.
People are trying to save forests.
We have to at least try. We just can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing without trying, and that includes on a personal level.

As a Trekkie, I hold Star Trek to be a higher cultural good and heritage than all religions combined. Captain Picard is more important and valuable than Jesus, Muhammad, Abraham, and “God”.

As such, inherent in me is the axiom that Science and Technology can save us.
Provided that it is applied correctly.
The fundamental problems of society, past and present, are war, oppression, famine, disease.
None of these are caused by technology or science, but science and technology offer solutions to all of them.
The ability to grow and distribute enough food for everyone on the planet.
The ability to combat and even eradicate disease.
The possible eradicating the main reasons for war, resource and energy scarcity.
The interconnectedness and common ancestry of all life on the planet, discovered by Science, reveals that all life is a family and equal, and thus removes any rational reason to believe that someone is superior or inferior to another.

What will certainly doom humanity to an existence in misery and eventual extinction, is neglecting and abandoning technology and science.
Without it, you will be ravaged by disease, you will suffer from insufficient food, ignorance will cause you to put yourself above and oppress others, resource scarcity will cause wars, and being trapped on earth will mean inevitable extinction once the sun turns into a red giant.

@Dutchess_III Yes, we have to try, But that’s not what the Pope said. Technology alone won’t save us. But of course we have to try. Our instinct for survival drives us in that direction. Just like a condemned man going before a firing squad tries to get away.
If I remember the report correctly, an area totaling the size of Ohio is being stripped of trees and vegetation every day. How do you fight that? You can only try.

It’s a little ambiguous. Because right on the heels of praising scientific efforts he says, “But “the degree of human intervention,” he continues, “is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey.””

What intervention is he talking about, and how is it making things worse?

@Dutchess_III I think he means overpopulation. Nobody is trying to slow that madness down, and he knows that it’s a major problem. The intervention to reduce, not just stabilize, the Earth’s “plague of men.”*
(*a quote from the movie “Zardoz”)

Actually, if we look back on @ragingloli post, we are doing just the opposite of trying to control population, albeit for humanitarian reasons:

“The fundamental problems of society, past and present, are war, oppression, famine, disease.
None of these are caused by technology or science, but science and technology offer solutions to all of them.
The ability to grow and distribute enough food for everyone on the planet.
The ability to combat and even eradicate disease.
The possible eradicating the main reasons for war, resource and energy scarcity.”

First off, using a popular Fluther ploy, religion is not a relationship with the Father. Religion is manmade, I can have a religion based around playing the saxophone, but that is all it is. God still reigns.

This Pope (and let’s not forget he is just a man, he was an ordinary man until a bunch of other men made him Pope when the last one died, as he will too, one day) got some things right, somethings part right, and was way off wrong on some things.

He is more direct in his own voice, knocking down the idea that humans have “dominion” over nature, a biblical right to harvest the earth without limit. “This is not a correct interpretation,” Francis writes. “We are not God. The Earth was here before us and it has been given to us.”
Way off wrong, if he doesn’t know what God intended man’s role to be as governor over the Earth, I was right to bypass Catholicism as a faith. If you are going to teach millions, you ought to be learned on what you are teaching. The Bible never meant for man to just plunder the world for his own gain, greed, or pleasure.

He was right that technology will not save us (the straight up science types might believe that), we have gotten more technical (at least the fortunate ones on the west) but we have not gotten much civil, if at all.

I’m just saying that the Catholics ares supposed to believe that the Pope has a direct line to God that no other human has. As such, things should never change because God is unchanging! Doesn’t really work that way, does it.

Anyway, this really wasn’t a discussion about religion. The AMA thread is a better one for that.

The Pope is right; the destruction we cause is now on a planetary scale and we only have one planet.

Well, that’s obvious.

“who cares if the planet is destroyed? I am already ‘saved’ ”
– “born again” christian

I don’t agree, but I totally understand the context in which he operates.

The Pope has a constituency and the Church has a standing notion about the nature of Man-We are all sinners, we can’t help it, and no matter how hard we try we are destined to fuck up.

The only way to avoid this is to surrender to the notion that we cannot make it without divine guidance.

And the Pope is this material (and tech driven) world’s head front man for the source of divine guidance.

Nothing new here. It’s what the Pope should say. He wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t say it.

But no other Pope before him has had the nerve to buck the “system” even a tiny bit.

Technology can save us as long as we use it properly. There is no reason why we can’t have modern technology without destroying the planet. It’s all about maintaining homeostasis of the ecosystem. We can have our cake and eat it too provided we reduce the caloric load of the cake and also exercise a little. Just takes proper engineering. Once we get to the point where we can move resources on and off world easily things will get better very fast. We’ll get there so long as politicians and fundamentalists don’t fuck it all up first.

—Our problem is we let people who exploit technology run the show. The designers should be running things.

Returning to the stone age will not solve the problem. Even then human intervention caused some environmental degradation such as deforestation, the extinction of a number of large mammalian species such as the mammoth. The only solution is for the human race to commit mass suicide.

You first @basstrom188.

@basstrom188

How are you going to do it? Gun? Drugs? Hang yourself?

Anyway, make sure you set a good example for the rest of us. We’ll be right behind you.

I’m just glad he was pretty realistic and didn’t go with “god will sort it out”.

I do believe there are technical solutions but they are not cheap. And we know that shit will get bad (at least the reasonable ones do) but we will sit there and watch until it is to late.

And by too late I don’t mean the world explodes. I mean that Florida is no longer a state. And yeah.. It is to late for Florida. Miami will be in science textbooks in 100 years. Just not in Texas.

@johnpowell Hey that Miami will be quite the place in 100 years! With climate change, buildings sticking up out of the water 100 miles from the nearest shore! And how about New Orleans? Those dikes will have to be 50’ high!

I very much agree with the parts you reference.

You ask, “It was human intervention that caused the problem. If human intervention creates alternate energy sources, like the windmills, then that is allowing us to cut down on the fossil fuels that make our earth ”...less rich….and grey.” And exactly how do we STOP human intervention without going back to the stone age?”

- My take is that he is saying technological attempts to help are good, but will not be enough, which is also what climate scientists have been telling us for a very long time. They’ve been saying we may be screwed even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels immediately. Slowly replacing dirty tech with clean tech, is probably not enough. Allowing things like the Keystone XL pipeline, drilling in the Arctic, China’s coal emissions, etc., are adding nails to the coffin, and aren’t necessary. There’s a huge gulf between what we’re doing, and reducing us to the Stone Age as you say. Francis is pointing out though that it will require a lot of re-framing the way we and our decision-makers think, away from thinking that we should be racing to destroy the natural world and replace it with man-made things.

You also asked, “Who ever suggested there was an “infinite supply of the earth’s goods?” Common sense will tell you there isn’t! Unless that is something spouted by fundamentalists…“God wouldn’t let us run out of the supplies HE put there for us!””

- No, I believe what Francis is referring to is the mindset we get from the so-called science of “Economics”, which has people, corporations, and governments thinking inside world views where more is better, economic growth is always a good thing, and company profits should strive to always increase every year. And the thinking of “3rd world” countries looking at the most industrialized counties and aiming to become like them, including how much they consume. And the choosing to produce goods based on profit and loss, and so producing masses and masses of disposable and built-to-fall-apart goods at the lowest prices, resulting in consumption of many more resources than are needed. I think he’s suggesting that those patterns of thought need to change, because they lead to us using everything up, and causing lots of misery along the way, which will get worse and worse.