A short excerpt from Religion and Ethics
by Ben Huot
Time in the West is perceived as linear and progressive. We believe that Science will always bail us out of our social problems. We believe that we can create a Utopia if we learn enough about Math and develop Social Science enough.
In the Non-Western world, time is perceived as a cycle where we have different problems at different times but the cycle repeats itself indefinitely. Most belief systems see our present time as a period of social problems and moral decline.
We are coming to an energy crises because we in the West want to have more and more material things to make us happy. We are especially addicted to personal transportation and we consume so much that we are running out of resources that are not renewable.
We continue to push our way of life to the limits, wanting free reign to do basically whatever we want and not prepare for the future. We don't want to invest in education; we would rather spend our resources on entertainment. We don't want to be moral sexually and we feel we have a right to unlimited amounts of others' property that we can easily copy. We are eating ourselves to death and dying as a consequence of our sexual immorality.
We are already fighting wars over oil and will continue to do so until there is non left and not even the promise of any. We are addicts to cheap energy especially oil and continue to expand our needs exponentially. And the multinational corporations are getting more and more control of the government and don't care what the consequences are as long as they can make one more dollar.
Those who are far sighted will prepare now for how to live without personal transportation and to live using less energy. We are at a time of crises and we may very well fight a civil war over this. The time to really worry about is when we elect our first environmental president. By the time that happens things will have gone too far and instead of helping the ecosystem gradually recover over time, we will take great risks in the hope of solving our problems quickly. But the solution will create even bigger problems.
If we can get our consumption under control, we may well live thousands of years into the future as the human race, but if we are unwilling to do with less now while we rebuild, we may not make it to the end of this century. Ultimately it is in God's hands. If God wasn't bailing us out then we would have destroyed ourselves long before due to nuclear holocaust or a prolonged world war.
The best thing we can do is to pray for God's help and repent of our gluttony. The Lord our God is slow to anger and quick to forgive, so we still have hope in Him.