If it's God's will...

Just when I thought people could not get dumber.

A conservative religious group is bashing evangelical church leaders for being concerned over levels of mercury in the environment.  The collective, known as The Cornwall Alliance, has also said this of Global Warming: “we deny that carbon dioxide … is a pollutant” and that “we deny that alternative, renewable fuels can … replace fossil and nuclear fuels.”  They have also called environmentalism "one of the greatest threats to society."

Let's unpack what's going on here for just a moment.  An organization called the Evangelical Environment Network, composed of Christians, is supporting pollution standards and regulations.  Evangelicals tend to be fairly conservative.  Even they are beginning to come around on the subject of environmental protection and climate change.  Then another group of Evangelicals attacks them for not being conservative enough. 

But wait.  Aren't conservative evangelicals "pro-life?"  Won't reducing mercury levels in the environment be good for children?  Wouldn't the unborn benefit from having a world that is not suffering from the effects of Global Warming?  Here's what they have to say about that: "The life in pro-life denotes not quality of life but life itself. The term denotes opposition to a procedure that intentionally results in dead babies."

Wow.  I mean, wow.  Seriously.  What is wrong with these people?

Then again, maybe they have their own theological reasons for not caring.  A research survey from last year found that 67% of evangelical Christians believe that natural disasters are indicative of the "end times."  This includes Global Warming.  By way of comparison, only 34% of mainstream Protestants and 30% of Catholics believe the same.

So if I understand this fundamentalist Christian line of reasoning, Global Warming and its related effects are not caused by humanity, rather it is God punishing us for our sins and bringing about the end of the world?

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

It shouldn't surprise me.  Evangelical leaders have said dumber things.  Pat Robertson asserted that the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was due to that nation's involvement with voodoo and that the 2005 flooding of New Orleans was punishment for abortion.
Why if I didn't know better, I would say that this is really the political disguised as the theological.  After all, this does sound an awful lot like what the teabaggers have argued as a central issue.  If you hate Obama, you need to be against environmentalism, too.  It's a socialist movement out to keep you from making money, you know.  In my belief, God granted humans intelligence in order to think our way out of problems like Global Warming.  God didn't do anything to bring about climate change, this one is all on us.  These aren't the "end times" by His edict.  But they are if we allow them to be.

There is hope, however.  There was a great comment on one of the articles linked above and the post is so inspiring that I am going to paste here in its entirety:

"As an evangelical Christian deeply concerned about climate change (I am currently working on a PhD in Christian climate ethics), I apologise for the lunatics who also profess to follow Christ. Some are misguided, some have let their faith be driven by their political ideology, some have simply sold their soul to the Devil."


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