I’m not a super fan of people climbing Everest. Lately there have been too many stories of climbers logjammed up there near 29,000 feet. The mountain has grown crowded and dead people and frozen poop reportedly litter the landscape. It’s as if people are determined to pollute every last inch of the earth’s surface with our shitty existence.

But this video at least shows how difficult the climb actually can be. The views from up there are daunting. Those snow drifts and raw rocky ledges are nothing to mess with if you’re not experienced.

Which is the other sad reason Everest is suffering such an insulting fate. People who don’t really belong up there are paying tens of thousands of dollars and the money speaks louder than common sense.

As we all know, the love of money is the root of all evil. But the demonstration of the fact that one has money and the access it provides to those who possess it is the root of corruption. Are the people flying first class on commercial airlines truly better than the rest of us? And are people climbing Everest because they can afford to do so any more soul-conscious than your typical weekend triathlete?

I don’t think so. Not any more. Thirty-plus years ago I wrote an article about an optometrist training for alpine adventures including a shot at Everest. But things have changed over the decades. The idea of conquest has evolved into something other than a sense of triumph or achievement. It is now a consumerist concept. It diminishes the world to approach human endeavors from such an acquisitive advantage. I’m simply not impressed.

Nor am I impressed with the manner in which people who want to own the narrative of this world seek so hard to control it because they diminish the world in other ways, especially with their instincts toward scripture and the insistence on serpents that literally talked and 24-hour days of creation.

.Such is the case with religious creationism, which flatly states that the tip of Mt. Everest was once submerged under a global flood more than seven miles deep. That claim is based on a literal interpretation of a piece of scripture that began as an oral tradition likely based on an actual event, but one of necessarily limited scope.

People simple didn’t know how big the world really was when that oral tradition was formulated. No one did. For that matter, religion did not even understand that the world was spherical, or that the earth revolves around the sun until a mere 500 or so years ago.

So to claim with some brand of arrogantly anachronistic authority that Mt. Everest and every other land structure on earth was once submerged under a global flood is such a disturbingly vicious brand of lie it is astounding that anyone believes it.

Yet Gallup polls show that more than 30% of Americans buy into that narrative and embrace it wholeheartedly.

But I suggest the way to prove them wrong is to send them up the face of Everest with an oxygen tank on their back and see if they can reach the top and get back down again. See if they still believe that a global flood could cover that much height just six thousand or so years ago (according to young-earth creationists) and leave hardly a trace except for a scratch of earth where the Grand Canyon seeps through the plains of Northern Arizona.

The only thing taller than Mt. Everest in this world is the amount of bullshit some human beings are willing to believe because their imaginations are confined to a few words on a page. The same goes for Flat Earth theorists and people who don’t believe the human race has placed astronauts on the moon. These levels of ignorant cynicism are the death of consciousness and conscience because they defy reality at its core. That is the greatest sin of all in this world.

There is no rest for Everest when it is reduced by the limited imagination of those who consume its reputation with no respect for its actual size.