The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, Circle of Ijtihad, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Interbelief Conversation Café for our 301st Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue by Zoom, “Where Is Overconsumption Taking Humanity?“
In the 1950s, we said, “A man’s house is his castle.” It was the era when oil barons first saw irrefutable (but not irrepressible) evidence that fossil fuel burning was triggering global warming, and when industrial farmers first heard of ecological collapse.
Seventy years later, have our coastal “castles” weathered the new “weather”? Do the larks still sing and the bees still pollinate the plains of Round-Up Ready crops? Where has our ravaging the Earth with whom we once gently lived done to us? Where is sucking its lifeblood taking us? In whose image are we remaking ourselves?
Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, said about consumption, “Beauty -- and all the values that derive from beauty -- are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar.” Even Ayn Rand, whose literal symbol for her “objectivist” lifestyle in Atlas Shrugged was the U.S. dollar sign, said about consumption, “The man who consumes without producing is a parasite, whether he is a welfare recipient or a rich playboy.” Is “conspicuous consumption” a form of overconsumption? Are either of them even a “right,” whether God-given or innate?
Karl Marx also opined on how consumption affects both us and the Earth – and strikingly approved it, in its ability to reduce social alienation: “The less you express your life, the more [money] you [hoard], the greater is your alienated life.”
Among the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere, who variously named its continents “Abya Yala” (Land In Its Full Maturity) & “Turtle Island,” Chief Seattle said why they refused to overconsume, “Your dead cease to love you and the homes of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb. They wander far off beyond the stars, are soon forgotten, and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its winding rivers, its great mountains and its sequestered vales.”
Have we lost our past moral code to live lightly on the land, and in so doing to live lightly within our hearts? Is that now passé? The barons of new industry no longer want to drill & burn more oil. They now want to colonize planets barren of all life. When birds foul their own nests, they fly away to build new ones. But where will we fly?
The Bible says God sees every sparrow’s fall, and even more so sees ours. Is God still asking us to be good stewards of our planet? Or is that an outdated covenant, replaced by a one where Heavenly Gardens are restored to us only once we’re raptured from the consequence of our apocalyptic wars, pestilences, famines, & deaths?
The Quran says Allah dislikes wastefulness, that we should responsibly steward rather than heedlessly consume, practice moderation rather than overconsumption, & trade with rather than financially exploit others.
Buddhism espouses the Middle Way, not self-abnegation & self-starvation, nor overindulgence & overconsumption, but mindfulness of & compassion for all that’s around us.
Humanists & scientists point out that most of Earth’s creatures have lived in “The Land of the Free” long before us. Possums lived in our backyards since before human beings were even creatures with wombs.
We shoot those possums.
Earth’s 7th Great Extinction is unusual: the Anthropocene Extinction is only the 2nd time a species that evolved here – us – grew so unrestrainedly that it poisoned all life. (The 1st time? That lifeform, cyanobacteria, created photosynthesis, whose waste oxygen poisoned Earth’s entire biosphere of methane-eating anaerobes, until one such species managed to metabolize oxygen without dying -- siring Earth’s aerobes.)
So should we be good stewards of our planet? Or not be its stewards at all?
Should we exercise, or relinquish, our liberty to gasify our air, grease our water, crater our soil, & smelt our minerals?
Should we consume everything we can, for as long as we can, until we’re the last to die atop the hill of corpses we piled?
Should we borrow from Earth or ravage it?
Should we put off this issue until far too late to change it?
At 7PM CDT Mo 7/21/25 by Zoom we'll reasoningly share our diverse or even disparate views on how conspicuously we should consume. Our agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, & confidentiality should prevent our reasoning dialogue from either inhaling or expelling too much hot air!
