God WIll Provide And He Has A Plan

Tinyfrog gives an example of how callous and uncaring nature really is. There are crater lakes in Africa which, by accident of their altitude, geographic situs in calderas, and the geology below them, trap immense amounts of pure gaseous carbon dioxide, which periodically burst to the surface of the lake and release tens of thousands of tons of this gas into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is heavier than the nitrogen-oxygen-other stuff mix we call "air" and therefore flows along the ground until it disperses. Since most animals, including humans, cannot breathe oxygen, they find themselves blanketed by a flood of carbon dioxide.

This has to be an absolutely horrible way to die. Carbon dioxide is colorless and odorless. You're just walking along outside, enjoying a beautiful day, when suddenly the air around you no longer nourishes your lungs. Instead, it suffocates you. The more you gasp, the more poison you're forcing into your body, until you pass out and asphyxiate to death. Drowning while above ground. And then it passes, and when people come by later, they see you're dead but without advanced forensics, there's no way to figure out how it happened.

Holy crap, no wonder people in that area beileve in evil spirits and demons.

The answer, though, is not religion. It is not prayers to appease the evil spirits and demons. It is not faith in a sky god. The answer is science. Drill holes and plant pipes to the bottom of the lake, to vent the carbon dioxide. No bubbles of the gas builds up, then, because it's always being vented in small, effectively harmless amounts. Once again, education and science provide the approach that provides an effective solution to a problem and saves lives; religion would obscure the truth, permit the problem to persist, at a cost of unknowable amounts of death.