“... why, then, do we now seek to destroy ourselves?”
Not all of us do seek to destroy our species, only the angry, unreasonable, and filled with self-guilt seek to do so.
Remember, research shows that liberalism is a mental disease. The least we can do is to help the liberals end their torment.
One argument that should always be carefully scrutinized is the assumption that mankind is somehow “powerful”.
I don’t mean so from the point of view of all the neat gizmos we can invent, but from the Tower of Babel point of view. That is, that we will build a tower that will reach unto heaven, and we shall be like gods, ourselves. Because we are so powerful.
Be it Dr. Frankenstein, who imagined that he “created” life, by reanimating dead tissue; or Al Gore and company, who think that by producing a fraction of a percent of a gas that itself only exists as a fraction of a percent of the atmosphere, that somehow mankind can push around forces that control the world’s temperature. Talk about a bacteria pushing around a flea, that is pushing around an elephant.
Truthfully, mankind’s greatest claim to fame is that we currently outnumber mice as the most common mammal on Earth. Beyond that, not so much.
And even from a religious point of view, stating that “Man is made in God’s image”, should be looked at from the same humble point of view that a drop of water is in your image, at least when it is reflecting you. It’s not saying much about how “person-like” a drop of water is.
But the point of the article was ironically, about how thinking of ourselves as important leads to villainy, which it shouldn’t, because we are better than that. No nod to the value of humbleness, here.
Right now, there is a good chance that as many as a billion people could be wiped out in short order by the Avian flu, if it emerges in an easily transmitted variety. Mighty and powerful mankind taken down a notch by a virus that isn’t technically complex enough to be a life form.
Ordinary plankton can raise sea surface temperatures by a few degrees over a wide area. And if a hurricane comes about, that could turn it from a Cat-3 to a Cat-5. Let’s see humans do that.
Many, many lifeforms are tremendously older than man, and will probably still be here after we are gone, or evolved.
This isn’t to say that mankind isn’t important. But it’s a big stretch to say that we are “powerful”. We do make some neat gizmos, though.