{"id":3368,"date":"2009-09-21T08:51:32","date_gmt":"2009-09-21T12:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=3368"},"modified":"2009-09-21T14:54:19","modified_gmt":"2009-09-21T18:54:19","slug":"environmental-sinners-in-the-hand-of-an-angry-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2009\/09\/environmental-sinners-in-the-hand-of-an-angry-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Environmental Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God"},"content":{"rendered":"

BreakPoint<\/a> | by Chuck Colson | Sep. 17, 2009<\/p>\n

If we can\u2019t convince people to change their behavior to save the planet, maybe God can. Or so one atheist thinks. These are discouraging times for environmentalists. The momentum to adopt sweeping measures to combat man-made global warming has slowed, even ground to a halt in some places. <\/p>\n

Australia and New Zealand, for example, have rejected and repealed their attempts to reduce CO2 emissions. And the French public is up in arms over the government\u2019s plan to impose a \u201ccarbon tax.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even after all the scare stories, people are having second thoughts about the cost of\u2014or even the need for\u2014reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What\u2019s needed, according to one prominent environmentalist, is a more reliable source of motivation\u2014that is, religious belief.<\/p>\n

At the British Science Association Festival, Lord May, the group\u2019s president, said that population growth, climate change, and other environmental offenses \u201cthreaten our existence on this planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

This litany is a familiar one whose power, judging by recent events, has diminished. May, the former chief science adviser to the British government, told attendees that better motivation for changing behavior is needed.<\/p>\n

So what better motivator than religion? May noted that \u201creligion had historically played a major role in policing social behavior through the notion of a supernatural \u2018enforcer.\u2019\u201d Since \u201creligion may have helped protect human society from itself in the past,\u201d it may be able to do it again by invoking this \u201csupernatural punisher.\u201d<\/p>\n

Actually, what May wants isn\u2019t so much the threat of punishment as the respect for authority and the obedience produced by religion, Christianity in particular. If people won\u2019t reduce their carbon emissions for the sake of Mother Earth, perhaps they will do so for their Heavenly Father.<\/p>\n

Mind you, Lord May is an \u201cavowed atheist.\u201d Still, as the British magazine Spiked summed it up, \u201cdesperate times call for desperate measures.\u201d<\/p>\n

For people who believe that \u201cwe are already exceeding the ecological footprint which Earth could sustain,\u201d having others invoke a non-existent deity is a small price to pay for averting catastrophe.<\/p>\n

The transparent cynicism of this appeal is almost amusing\u2014what\u2019s not is the willingness of religious people, including some Christians, to play along.<\/p>\n

In providing a religious rationale for the policies of people like Lord May, they are not, as they suppose, caring for creation. As Robert Acuff pointed recently pointed out at our new website, ColsonCenter.org, the kind of environmentalism espoused by May and others is a kind of idolatry. It elevates the creation above the Creator\u2014and everything else.<\/p>\n

As I have said before on BreakPoint, for this kind of environmentalism, the problem is people. \u201cNature\u201d can only thrive if human beings are diminished. It\u2019s why a new study by the London School of Economics, revealingly entitled \u201cFewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost,\u201d concludes that contraception is the most cost-effective way to reduce global warming.<\/p>\n

Christians ought to have no part in promoting this kind of anti-human environmentalism. If May and company desire the aid of a deity, well, their own idol will just have to do.<\/p>\n

. . . more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BreakPoint | by Chuck Colson | Sep. 17, 2009 If we can\u2019t convince people to change their behavior to save the planet, maybe God can. Or so one atheist thinks. These are discouraging times for environmentalists. The momentum to adopt sweeping measures to combat man-made global warming has slowed, even ground to a halt in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[68,76,75,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-environment","category-global-warming","category-junk-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}