While I might think my country can make some pretty stupid choices, they aren't the kind that would destroy civilization.

Three more words: Anthropogenic climate change.

Bazinga.

8) Stop voting for the members of corporatocratic parties (for this and many other good reasons), voting instead for people who will reduce the $749 trillion military budget, and spending it instead on preventing ill people from being bankrupted by medical bills. You know, like in other developed countries.

Vegetables and fruit can't feel pain. Some people think causing unnecessary pain and suffering is unethical, and should be avoided. Some Jains take it further and feel it's wrong to kill anything, including insects and root vegetables.

In a PSA Paul McCartney said that "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." The idea was that if someone actually saw the way animals are enslaved, tortured, and slaughtered by the billions (birds and mammals) and trillions (sea food) every year, that they'd become vegetarians or vegans. This turns out not to be true: some people manage to somehow forget when told the truth about where their food comes from and what unfathomable harm is done to get it cheap. Some people simply don't care - enslavement, torture, and slaughter just doesn't bother them if it's not done directly to them - they don't even care about what world they're leaving their overpopulating offspring.

According to 1 Thessalonians 4:16 (the sentence just before the rapture verse) "the dead in Christ will rise first."[1] Those zombies will then join the living raptured in the clouds.[2] All praise be unto zombie ghost Jesus!

I suggest that people who leave clothes around on the 21st, leave clear signs that the now naked raptured were Jewish, Pagan, or Muslim - signs on their shirts, burqas, etc.

[1] 1 Thessalonians 4, The skeptic's annotated Bbible
[2] 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, Bible gateway

Think about the Holocene extinction event and anthropogenic climate change - they make the Tohoku and 2004 tsunamis, Haiti earthquake, and wars look like small potatoes.

Is it also sinful for postmenopausal women or sterile people to have sex? Or people who realize that human overpopulation is the root cause of almost every catastrophe facing the biosphere?

but I am curious to find out if I have a more interesting ancestry than family history suggests. The most recent immigrant in my family AFAIK came to the US

"a 2005 scientific review [Bellis] of international published studies of paternal discrepancy found a range in incidence from 0.8% to 30% (median 3.7%) [...] A study [Schacht 1963] in Michigan of 1417 white and 523 black children found non-paternity rates of 1.4% and 10.1% respectively.[...] A study [Ashton 1980] of 1748 Hawaiian families with 2839 children reported a non-paternity rate of 2 to 3%." -- Rates of non-paternity

"it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve." -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, p. 70

assuming people visited ridiculously low numbers of foreign countries

Maybe they figure slashdotters have a better realization of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change.

"a flight from London to Paris or Brussels emits more than 10 times the amount of carbon per passenger than the train." "To offset the carbon impact of flying to Athens you would have to go without heating, cooking, lighting and all forms of motorised transport for 2 years and 3 months." -- wandsworth.gov.uk

See also the lowflyzone pledge site.