Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is A Place on Earth"

In this world we're just beginning
To understand the miracle of living
Baby I was afraid before
But I'm not afraid anymore

Ooh, baby, do you know what that's worth?
Ooh heaven is a place on earth
They say in heaven love comes first
We'll make heaven a place on earth
Ooh heaven is a place on earth

THISHOWISEEIT

Islam does not forbid birth control. In fact, the pill, condoms and other birth control methods are available in every Muslim country because the purpose of sex in Islam is not just procreation but also pleasure and boding as long as it is between a married couple.

"We stand as helpless sinners in the hands of an angry god" you say? I would like for the folks who claim to "know" about such things to explain something. "An Angry God", "A loving and merciful God", a forgiving God", "A Jealous God".
These believers paint God as a creator who created the earth simply as a playboard for his amusement, to watch mankind react to his (or her) making various moves with the live chess pieces. Thousands of helpless people die in Africa,many innocent children are killed each year. He is painted as having chosen the Israelites as the favorite folks, yet millions were killed in Germany in recent history. Millions of people spend their time on earth with wealth, health and goodies, while others suffer the worst of times during a sometimes very short life. I wish that these preachers, who seem to always enjoy a life of "blessings", would decide what the reasons for such uneven earthly rewards are and show some proof and not hide behind their old "have faith", or "send money" answer. And please, do not quote the sayings of primative people, who jotted down handed-down stories, which were edited and re-edited over the centuries, by folks just like themselves.

Well, seems like we've had ample illustration of what we're up against, here.

Actually, Fuji, the author *did* suggest that all religions get together on this...

Pretty clearly, the meeting between Muslim and Christian clergy was partly about getting together on the environmental crisis *because* of the particular rivalries and quarrels between those particular religions.

Kind of hard to clean up the neighborhood when there's a *battle* on, and all.

ANOUAR MAJID

You wrote, "The message that came across from the very start is that if Christians and Muslims cannot come together to do something about environmental degradation, both communities will have, in essence, forfeited their missions, if not abdicated their faiths altogether."

The mission of Christianity is not about "environmental degradation", it is about the SALVATION OF ALL HUMANITY.

Take care, be ready.

Sincerely, Thomas Paul Moses Baum.

Fuji: "Two faiths, one planet ... where exactly does that leave the Hindus and Buddhists? And Jews? Just wondering."

Guess you'll have to try to muscle your way into the next big faith conference. Maybe some atheists should be there too. They don't believe in any gods, but they are concerned about preserving the earth - home of the only life they expect to have.

I think, Jack, claiming that 'If everyone's of my religion, the world will fix itself while we continue to behave irresponsibly,' is a big part of what got us *into* this mess, among other messes.

Certainly ain't worked yet, and we're out of time on the climate thing.

*Maybe,* though, if people looked around and cared for the Earth and the environment, and therefore the others in it, they'd *by so doing* start *becoming* 'better Muslims and Christians.'

How bout that?

What is the mission of religion - to teach a man, woman or child to love the Lord thy God with his/her whole heart, soul, and being without reserve.
And love his/her neighbor as her/himself.

Now show me enough people like that and we won't have a problem with the environment or war or a lot of other evils that plague us.

But such people are rare in any religion - so lets not kid ourselves the number of true christians or muslims are few.

The quest is to become true to your highest beliefs and the rest of it will take care of itself.

Or as St. Augustine said - love God and do what you will.

Anouar Majid,
Human overpopulation is the major cause of damage to our planet.
In 2007, per annum growth was 77 millions, with the highest in Middle East, South Asia, South East Asia and Sub Sahara Africa( areas with high
Muslims) and Latin America ( with high catholic population). Leaders of these two Religions are not in favor of birth prevention by mean of pills or condoms, because they know that there is "strength in high numbers".

As an example of what is missing in the major organized religions today, the ordinary person has absolutly no idea of a transcendental goal, a purpose beyond a mundane day-to-day existence. This should be the goal of organized religion. However, most organized religions have assumed the necessity to destroy other religions in order to have peace on earth and in the universe. An exception may be Buddhism, which is almost wholly discounted by other religions. Apparently citing a transcendent goal for humanity can only be accomplished by a militarily successful religious dictatorship.

The common ground described by Anouar Majid is the only alternative to holocaust. It is necessary not only to save the planet, but also to save our souls.

Two faiths, one planet ... where exactly does that leave the Hindus and Buddhists? And Jews? Just wondering.

Dear Professor Majid

It is always a pleasure to hear from Muslims who have dedicated themselves to unconditional acceptance of all and are actively involved in interfaith dialogue.

Global warming, the greatest man-made environmental disaster is also the greatest spiritual blessing in disguise. Now we have empirical proof of how interdependent we are as a human family for our survival and welfare, and none of us can afford the luxury of doing our own selfish thing without affecting the rest of the world.

I wish that the work you have begun continues to widen to include ever more Muslims from around the world, working in harmony with people of all religions and none towards a common goal.

Soja John Thaikattil
Sydney, Australia

I'm not certain that I could trust Christian and Muslims to cooperate in such a major endeavor considering that: 1) they do not represnt all religious peoples; 2) each faith can barely agree amongst its own followers what they represent; and 3) this would require the sacrificing of ego for the greater good and not the Pope nor Ayatolla Khomeni nor many other of the worlds religious leaders seem to be able to cooperate without trying to dictate.

I have no faith the the worlds major religions to accomplish anything as long as each proclaims to be the only true faith which leads to constant bickering and disrepect between the different practices.

Interesting article. Made some sense too. Maybe it would have made more sense to include people from other religions too, after all the planet needs to live more.

However deep inside the problem of environmental pollution can also be linked to some extent to the desire or fear of religion conversion; if you feel that your opponents religion does not deserve to exist, you are well prepared to bomb and pollute his country out of existence.

So the relgious leaders need to look at each other with respect and not try to convert each other or some other religious sect...

" Crusader:

"If Christians and Muslims wipe each other out, then the other faiths shall inherit the Earth!"

Yeah, cause if they got to 'wiping each other out' they'd be real considerate about making sure no one else got hurt, and we wouldn't be left with a horror of bodies, toxic waste, and nuclear plants capping off.

This thread's supposed to about *less* wiping out, believe it or not, including who gets wiped out by rising waters and famines cause monotheists been standing around saber-rattling at each other and condemning people to their hells and all.

If Christians and Muslims wipe each other out, then the other faiths shall inherit the Earth!

Yes, Garyd, some lawnmowers are electric. Those don't burn gas, of course. They're good that way.

Speaking of 'all over the place,' would-be science critic:

Let me spell this out for you.

A two-cycle engine puts out many times the number of pollutants per gallon of gas or given amount of run-time, cause they don't burn the gasoline as completely or cleanly: this means many more times the hydrocarbons and other pollutants (which are worse than just CO2, molecule for molecule,) come out the other end, compared to a car's engine. And then there's the engine oil. Stuff that becomes acid rain and other unpleasantries.

Can't you smell the difference? What's coming out of those little engines is a lot nastier than that from a modern car's tailpipe, especially with a very hot bunch of stuff in the catalytic converter to clean up some of what *does* come out.

If you can't understand that concept, forget about trying to gainsay the scientific community.

Oh good grief. Main stream science which UCC definitely does not represent is all over the ball park. Get Chricton's book Fear and check out the foot notes and become informed rather than deluded.

Again do the math on the lawnmower thing and lets not forget that an increasing number of lawnmowers are electric.

Ah, got quiet. It's true, though, ...no excuse for wasteful driving, but all those little cacophonous engines running all over the neighborhood every weekend (Just plain inconsiderate, ecological concerns aside, ain't they?) particularly gas leafblowers and the like that still tend to be two-cycle engines, really do more than their share of the polluting, for the work output they do...

They can be cut out, pretty painlessly: go electric, or better yet, skip a drive to the health club and go human-powered... If someone half-crippled like me can push a reel mower once in a while, I'm sure all these manly SUV drivers can manage it. :)

I should also note that a four-cycle gas mower is still pretty dirty: it doesn't have a catalytic converter and fancy emissions controls on it to take care of unburned hydrocarbons and such like cars do.

Garyd, the climate change deniers' 'science' doesn't inform anything. The projections by mainstream science have been pretty on with predictions so far, and there are certain tipping points, like melting permafrost, shutting down of the Arctic Conveyor current, and melting ice, itself, that can intensify the effects we've seen so far. We don't want that, believe me, even if you like breathing smog. I'm not going to eplain the whole scientific consensus to you here, though.

On this, though:

"Please tell me how that 1/2 gallon of gas I get from the same pump as that I fill my car from has contains 32 times as much in the way of pollutants when I put it though my lawnmower as it does when I put it through my car"

Cause a two-cycle engine doesn't burn as completely or efficiently, and in fact burns *lubricant* at the same time. The ridiculous amount of pollution is cause it ...burns a lot dirtier. For all that huge numbers of cars and other engines do, ideally they produce just water and C02, and on the whole, do it fairly well, comparatively speaking, when they're in good order.

First things first!!!

i.e. Muslims can talk about anything they desire or talk to ever they want as soon as the following is accomplised: Deflaw the koran, "febreze" all mosques, and pacify the Shiites and Sunnis !!!!!!!!!!

Pick those eyes up and put them back in you are being had. The rate of change is in fact far slower than the run up to the last mini Ice age about 200 years ago. Temperatures have yet to reach the the average interglacial peak temperature. The Medieval Warm Period was warmer than this.

And by all means cite something other than The UCC which is a bunch of pro big government hacks if there ever was one.

There math is screwy by the way. My lawn mower in and hour will burn less than half a gallon of fuel. If I drive eight cars at fifty five miles and hour for 1 hour I will burn conservatively between 12 and 16 gallons of gas. Please tell me how that 1/2 gallon of gas I get from the same pump as that I fill my car from has contains 32 times as much in the way of pollutants when I put it though my lawnmower as it does when I put it through my car.

*rolling eyes at GaryD.*

" Garyd:

"The leftist greens aren't trying to save the planet the are trying to make the case that it should not change ever."

I've tried to explain the concept of 'rate of change' to you at least once already, Gary. Barring the occasional catastrophic event like, the occasional asteroid or super-eruption, climate changes occur on a scale that most species... and in fact, societies, can survive by migrating or adapting to.

It's the *rate* of change, and also certain tipping points that we can expect will be reached, that present the problems for survival of most species... and very many people on Earth and what we've built. In evolutionary terms, or even historical ones, the time since we started polluting on mass scales is an *eyeblink.* Without time to adapt, people and species and ecosystems *die.* Sometimes in massive bottlenecks

I dunno if *you* feel like you feel like your great-grandkids living in Precambrian Park, but I do know you like to deal in absolutes and a notion of the world where GaryD's opinions will go on in deathless eternal glory somewhere, but a 'few billion years' is a long time, and a lot of effort. It'd be a shame on us all to screw it up cause you don't like 'liberals. '

I know you like blaming 'leftists' and 'atheists' for things, Garyd, but yes, the world's like five billion years old, and 'saving the planet' is short for 'Saving the planet as we know it.' Let's get past that.

"Speaking of stupid, why haven't I heard anything from Mr. Al "Keep recounting until we've won" Gore on lawnmower pollution? According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, "One gas mower running for an hour emits the same amount of pollutants as eight new cars driving 55 mph for the same amount of time." And they're not the only one's who make this claim."

Was pretty sure that was in 'An Inconvenient Truth,' but it's well known to the environmental crowd... And in fact, last I heard, there were measures pursued to mandate all new gas mowers have four-stroke engines, (the reason the old ones, (and yer leafblowers and stuff, still) are so dirty is because of the two-cycle engines in the old ones.

"So if we already have electric lawnmowers available, why don't we attack the quick and easy problem first and encourage homeowners to replace their gas lawnmowers with electric?"

Why wait? Get together with your neighbors on one, and save the manufacturing waste. Or plant something besides grass for ground-cover and don't mow at all. :) ...And you say you don't like 'big government,' Brambleton. :)

Always welcome news to hear about things like that... Too long have people involved with 'Earth Spirituality' felt we're up against both a world of greedy corporations and consumerism *as well* as major world-scorning and denying religions who've seemed hell-bent on bringing about the very 'end of the world' they seem to both fear and yearn for...

Or just letting everything go to ruin while competing against each other and everyone else.

Not a happy place to be, in that way. Feels kind of helpless, at times, no matter what you observe in your personal or even activist life. We're just too few, though there's more of us, and environmentalists out there than most are taught to believe.

It's always good to see the major religions at least *talking* about being a positive force...

"We may ache for our embattled planet and the losers among us, but we are way too embedded in our long-dysfunctional economic and political structures to see our way out to natural safety."

Here, I think, is exactly the place folks like my lot can help. We don't have the numbers or wealth or influence to reorganize society on fundamental levels, but we *do* have some perspective and some new adaptations that I think you guys could use, particularly before the West *really* exports this wasteful way of life to the developing world. (I was kind of hoping that by the time this much development was going on, we'd have cleaner and safer and saner things *to* export, but I guess the West got kind of sidetracked.)

'Saving the Earth,' so to speak, doesn't have to be a drag or a penance or a sentence from an angry God, for instance. It's actually pretty recent in history, where any number of the common people to speak of really experienced 'Too Much,' for instance, never mind learned to *cope* with too much.

I mean, a lot of preachers *know* on some level that it makes people miserable, this 'Too Much,' but don't understand why making people kind of miserable with more of the same blame and guilt and theological anger only causes them to cling harder to the cold comforts of consumerism and greed... Maybe making it too shameful to look at doesn't enlighten the situation very much.

Scorning things like joy and pleasure and a love of life and the Earth itself doesn't give people a grim virtue that'll make all things right, for instance, ...it just makes people desperate for more diversions and things to buy to try and fill the *holes* such attitudes create. A sense of power, too, people will try to use that to fill the holes.

If you believe that this Earth is for humans to take care of, then learn to *love* Her, in whatever terms make sense to you.

Our relationship with the Earth can be like a *love affair,* not some kind of 'battle.' Set it up in the usual war-based terms of endlessly fighting implacable 'sin' or overwhelming temptation, and the *relationship* with the world isn't there.

One thing I have seen about this decadent Western life, is it's a treadmill... people working more hours so they can drive to the health club and pay someone else to tend their yard and buy a big TV to plunk down in front of to assuage the sense of pointless exhaustion. Then go to Church to assuage the guilt, and vote to hurt gay people to feel like they deserve the 'forgiveness' by blaming someone else.

The way through the effects of this is not to scorn the world or modernity, even, but to embrace the positives and freedoms that come of doing for ones'self, and organizing things well.

Too many religious people are still essentially claiming, 'Everyone wants more more more personally, you should be embracing holy deprivation, and 'sacrifice,' and all the rest... Just don't share in any way that looks too Commie.'

Yeah, share. That's a big one.

A lot of old points of view may decry waste and selfishness, but still tend to reinforce a notion that everyone in the world is basically in it for themselves. But community and all that, that's one of those things a lot of the same religious feel has been lost from some 'traditional values' ...which they try to get back with more zealotry and public piety and condemnation while essentially remaining helpless in the way the corporate-consumerist world *isolates* people, ..even in 'nuclear families.'

There's other ways to think of it. Happier ones.

I shudder to think what we'll be dealing with when the developing world, having so long experienced privation and all that, does when they finally feel they got a shot at the 'Good Life' corporate America's been advertising... Cause I think America's just cluing into the notion, some faster than others, that the prepackaged treadmil life ...isn't* the Good Life.

Now, not to blow smoke up anyone's ...aspirations about dealing with the effects of how we've lived being painless, but there's a lot we're not doing that *is* painless, and there's joys to be taken in much of the rest.

Especially if we pull together. Call it a devotional or something. :)

Tom,

Speaking of stupid, why haven't I heard anything from Mr. Al "Keep recounting until we've won" Gore on lawnmower pollution? According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, "One gas mower running for an hour emits the same amount of pollutants as eight new cars driving 55 mph for the same amount of time." And they're not the only one's who make this claim.

So if we already have electric lawnmowers available, why don't we attack the quick and easy problem first and encourage homeowners to replace their gas lawnmowers with electric?

My guess is that the liberal base of the democratic party wouldn't get whipped up into a frenzy about lawnmowers. Far easier to point to SUVs and blame them for everyone's lot in life. But I guess you never know. Somehow the Dems found passion and excitement over a Federal minimum wage bill that helped about a dozen people. Go figure.

If the atheist are right, this planet was here a few billion years before man came along and absent a direct hit from a planetoid will be here several billion years after we exit stage where ever.

The leftist greens aren't trying to save the planet the are trying to make the case that it should not change ever. It is a damn hard case to make given that climate has been in a constant state of flux for most that previously mentioned few billion years and will continue in that regards for the forseeable future.

Good luck getting the Christian Right, which runs the Repuke party in the US, to agree to fight Global Warming.

They are in denial that Global Warming even exists.

And they don't want to fix the planet because they think Jeebus will come save them.

You want to fix global warming? You need to fix all the stupid people first.

strangely enough, just seconds ago i posted this on arun gandhi's board in response to sopmething else- (an unkind comparison and words)but your city analogy made me think it could translate-

i envision it something like this- imagine we're all in a small pool with a limited amount of water-
we are all dependent on that water to sustain and keep afloat-
every slur or hurtful thought (or act of greed) is like taking a bucket and scooping it out and throwing it over the sides-
while attempting to weaken the "other" all we end up accomplishing is depiving others and ourselves too- of the life sustaining water that we all interdependently need -
by lowering the level all are lowered simultaneously-

even though it doesnt fit perfectly- (i added the greed) still, it is somewhat apt-
peace and salaams