Beware Annie Leonard’s presentation about all of our Stuff, unless you’re ready to implement big changes

Annie Leonard is the author of The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change. I am only partially through her excellent book at this time. Tonight, however, I clicked over to her site to see what Annie had to say in her 20 minute video, ""The Story of Stuff." It turns out that upbeat Annie, surrounded by cartoonish images, will fill your head with dozens of depressing statistics that will inexorably lead you to the conclusion that we've got to change our ways. Annie starts out with a warning that we have a "system in crisis." We have is a "linear" system on a "finite planet." We also have a big problem getting our government to pay attention. More than 50% of our tax money goes to the military, and our corporations seem to own our government (51 of the largest economies in the world are corporations). Consider also Annie's well honed argument that our official government policy is that we should purchase lots of unnecessary stuff and trash the planet. Many other sites that can give you comparable statistics, but few of them have worked n my conscience as much as Annie Leonard's site. The United States has 5% of the world's population, but uses 30% of the worlds resources. If everyone lived like people in the United States, we would need 3 to 5 planets. Every minute, seven football fields worth of trees (about 2000 trees) are cut down in the Amazon. There are 100,000 chemicals commonly used in our products, and very few of them have ever been tested for human safety . Annie points out that almost none of of these chemicals ave been tested for "synergistic effects (to see how safe they are when used in combination with other chemicals). BFR's (used for fire retardation) are commonly used in computers, couches and the pillows on which you rest your head on each night. The food with one of the highest concentrations of toxins is human breast milk. [More . . . ]

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If the Bible is really the word of God, why aren’t more people actually reading it?

Sit back and enjoy Bart Ehrman's research regarding what we know about the origin of the Bible. Ehrman is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . I've previously posted about Ehrman's 2007 book, Misquoting Jesus. Ehrman starts by telling the audience about a question that he asked his students recently: If the Bible is really the inerrant word of God, why aren't all believers actually reading it? Many of Ehrman's own students truly believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, but large numbers of them haven't yet read the entire Bible. Ehrman asks: "If God wrote a book, wouldn't you want to see what He said?" Most of this lecture concerns the origin of the modern version of the Bible. Ehrman presents a fascinating history of a book based upon thousands of incomplete and conflicting earlier versions. These versions are riddled with mistakes. The oldest copy that we have of any book of the new testament is a tiny scrap from the Gospel by "John" called "P52). It is about the size of a credit card and it only contains a couple sentences. It is dated at "the first half of the second century" (minute 15 of the video). Our earliest surviving complete copy of the Gospel of "John" was created about the year 200 A.D. Most of our manuscripts of the Bible are not anywhere near this old. Most of our manuscripts were created around the beginning of the third century (around the year 200). The earliest manuscripts of most of the books of the Bible date from the 7th or 8th century. By the time that a man named John Mill actually tracked the conflicts among the 100 manuscripts he reviewed (about 300 years ago), he noted about 30,000 differences. We now have about 7,000 manuscripts, and nobody has been able to add up all the differences among these copies (21:30). "There are more differences in our existing Greek manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." So, then how can we really know what any of the writers really said? Ehrman characterizes this as "a problem." Most of these differences are "completely insignificant . . . mistakes." I especially enjoyed Ehrman's description of one scribe's mistaken version of the alleged genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam and Eve (27:00). Many other more significant translation problems have been detected by modern scholars (32:00). Unfortunately, this video has a glitch and it ended at the 34-minute mark. This is as far as I got tonight. I now see that there are other versions of Ehrman's lectures available in ten-minute chunks, starting here. I'm planning on viewing the remainder of Ehrman's lecture, and I'll report on it in the comments. I would add a few questions to the one Ehrman asked at the top of his lecture: If the Bible really is the inspired word of God, why aren't more believers taking the time to understand the genesis of the Bible itself? Why aren't they more interested in learning about the things that Ehrman has researched throughout his career. Why don't they care more about the inaccuracies and contradictions? As Ehrman asked, don't you need to be confident that you know the accurate version of the Bible before telling others how "important" it is? I raise these questions because, in my experience of having discussed the Bible with hundreds of Christian believers, almost none of them know about these critically important issues raised by Ehrman, and it's a rare American Christian believer who exhibits any curiosity regarding these issues. How strange, unless, as Daniel Dennett suggested, that most believers believe in belief, rather than in the religious stories that they claim to be true. [More . . . ]

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Use of public transportation keeps you fit and protects you from accidents

From Huffpo, commenting on a new report from the American Public Transportation Association:

Use of public transit simply means that you walk more which increases fitness levels and leads to healthier citizens. More importantly, increasing use of public transit may be the most effective traffic safety counter measure a community can employ,” noted APTA president William Millar. Apparently communities with vast public transportation networks don’t just live longer because of the exercise — they’re also less likely to be the victim of a fatal auto accident. The traffic fatality rate in the Bronx, New York is four in 100,000 contrasted by the traffic fatality rate in auto ridden Miami, Kansas which is 40 in 100,000.

Using public transportation also saves you a lot of money: "Riding public transportation saves individuals, on average, $9,381 annually and $782 per month based on the August 10, 2010 average national gas price ($2.78 per gallon- reported by AAA) and the national unreserved monthly parking rate." It is also important to note that when you pay $35 to fill your tank with gasoline, you haven't actually paid for most of the costs of using gasoline.

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Whose oil spill was it?

The Editors at Scientific American have reminded us that oil users (and that includes all of us) are pushing the big oil companies into taking the drilling risks they take:

[I]f we expect oil companies to manage risk better, then society as a whole needs to do the same. The market forces that encouraged BP to take ill-considered risks are largely of our own creation, as stockholders, consumers and citizens. The hodgepodge of subsidies that masquerades as our current national energy policy invites disaster; it fails to grapple with the urgent need to stop wasting energy and start encouraging clean sources. Every day we still need 85 million barrels of oil—the equivalent of more than 25 Ixtoc spills—to keep the wheels of our society turning.
If you do the math, you'll see that 85 million barrels of oil equals 3,570,000,000 gallons per day. That equals 148,750,000 gallons per hour, 2,479,166 gallons per minute, and 41,319 gallons per second. Americans are currently using an amount of oil that makes us staggeringly dependent on a dwindling natural resource that is mostly imported. And most of that imported oil is sending huge quantities of American dollars to regimes whose interests run counter to American interests. Our oil dependence should thus be seen as a major risk to our national security. We could slash this usage dramatically with reasonable conservation measures. But politicians believe that it is suicide to ask Americans for any form of sacrifice, even when national security depends on it.

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