Sandy Bulman
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

Dear Leaders of the World’s Religions

Sirs:

There are an unprecedented 65.5 million refugees around the world. It’s clearly a number too big for any given country to absorb, and is growing by a staggering 20 people a minute who are forcibly displaced. (UNHCR.org) From Paris to San Francisco, western streets are filled with homeless people. We are, as a species, overpopulated and underprovisioned.

The sad truth is that when resources are reduced, humans cull the herd. We kill each other. In Europe, during the early 20th Century, we had two major wars which killed off between 60 and 80 million people. That gave Northern Europe and Russia almost 75 years of peace. But we’re catching up there, and growing exponentially, peopled, if not from our own, from those areas spared by WWI AND WWII going through their upheavals now. Modern medicine has increased life spans without addressing birth rates. Nowhere has this had more impact than in those parts of the globe between the 30th parallels, where there has never been enough food.

Racism, tribalism, homophobia, differing religions… these are just reasons we use to hold whole groups of people in abeyance for the time when we have to kill each other off to survive as a species. It’s that old, “Ya ain’t from around here, are you?” which results in murder, mayhem, war. We are getting perilously close to another massive, world wide convulsion like those of the first half of the twentieth century.

Which brings me to why I addressed religious leaders. You, gentlemen, can do something about it. You’re just about the only people who can. Pope Francis. Your Holiness. You, sir, are in control of 1.2 billion humans. That’s almost 1 in 6 of all humans on earth. If you sanctioned birth control, you could change the rollicking charge towards another world war in a generation. If you could get the Dalai Lama to join you, as well as the Secretary of the World Evangelical Union, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Ayatollahs, rabbis, the various Patriarchs…in short, an entire ecumenical council determined to save the world, you could do it. You men could save the world! Real life superheros of the kind we could only envision through comics.

It’s the definition of stewardship. Save the world. Save the future. If God gave humans self determination, surely he didn’t intend for us to wipe ourselves and all other creation with us. Please. All you guys have to do is say it’s okay. Women will do the rest.

Thank you for your time, gentlemen.

Sandy Bulman

    Sandy Bulman

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