Would like to put that translation up (mentioned last time), but am just not ready, and haven’t had time. However, there’s always enough energy to vent, eh? So, forthwith: we have a really terrific magazine in Victoria called Focus. It’s available for free at various locations throughout town, but I’m seriously considering a subscription because it’s that good, really. Unfortunately, it’s not online. (Dear Leslie Campbell, Publisher of Focus: figure out some way to make the magazine’s online availability economically attractive and then do it! Rob Wipond’s December column should be available to everyone — and so should Susan Musgrave’s take-down of Air Canada, and all her previous columns, too.) But no matter that it’s not yet online, because I am (bwahaha!). Briony Penn, dashed interesting environmentalist, writes for Focus on a regular basis. I missed her November column, but she must have compared environmental stewardship to living life according to principles set out in the biblical story of Genesis. That garnered the following reader letter, from a Christian fundamentalist:
The Bible, which is God-breathed, cannot be rewritten to suit someone’s comparison of dichotomies.
The reason Noah and his family survived is due to their faith in the only one, true and living God, no other reason. Lack of obedience has its consequences both then and now.
[Ok, here comes the important part, pay attention:]
Those who think true security is found by respecting our planet and its resources face an eternity devoid of anything but hopelessness. In an ever-changing world that lacks stability, and will not get better no matter how much we respect each other or resources [sic], the only true security is that of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
And there you have it: now you know why and how Christian fundamentalists don’t care a damn about environmental causes or the earth. Environmental causes are in their view a prideful, sinful matter that leads humans to believe (falsely) that they have some sort of human control over their destinies. Talk about being beaten before getting out of the gate!
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Yule, I too read somewhere in my recent clickthroughs on the Net (or was it in one of the newpsapers or mags we get?) that fundemantalists don’t care about environmental issues because they do not believe in the concept of limited resources. In other words, the fundamentalists take it as a literal fact (okay, not the best phrase here) that god will provide in his (and it is his) infinite wisdom the infinite resources that is man’s reward for complete and utter faith in the divine concept of the infinite…. and so the snae goes on biting its tail.
Or, as the fundamentalists would have us believe, the ‘liberal’ idea of the pie of resources to be divided up with care, foresight, and economy in mind is, well, a pie-in-the-sky notion and runs counter to the idea of god and his infinite game plan.
I found one of the sources of what I was talking about in my previous comment — though it’s not exactly the text of what I remember reading. Still, this piece goes into lots of detail about the fundamentalists’ notion of infinite resources and how it plays out in the current political arena:
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2004/10/27/scherer-christian/
Also, a small correction: in my previous comment “snae” should read as snake!
See Bill Moyers address on receiving Harvard Medical School’s Global Environment Citizen Award http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1206-10.htm
Dough: That’s where I read it! Tahnks for the memory jog!
Maria, Doug, thanks for the comments & links. I had read those “raptured” views before, too, but somehow, reading a “letter to the editor” by one of my neighbours (for the letter writer is a Victoria resident), seeing her spew this garbage, made it seem much more real. It’s one thing to have people who somehow seem at a distance — in cabinet posts or in Texas or wherever — spout this crap, but when it’s the gal down the street …well. Made me sit up and pay attention, I can tell you!
Doug, thank you so much for the link to the Moyers article, too. I’m so exhausted and beat right now, I can’t make sense, much less post something this evening, but you know how Moyers talks about “connecting the dots” (or at least I think I just read that, but could be I’m hallucinating from getting run too ragged)? Well, I want to connect his dot or two with Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s take on “Shortcuts to Enlightenment” and link that to scary stuff like Britain trying to pass a law that makes anti-religious speech prosecutable as hate speech (see Rowan Atkinson commenting on this). What I’m finding for myself is that I can no longer assume that “the left” speaks for me. There are too many goddamned stupid people everywhere. You want to turn jibes against religion into “hate speech” in the name of tolerance? You’re fucked. What my friends on the left are doing is making it ok for idiots like these Christian fundamentalists to spew their vicious crap as theology, while despoiling the planet and bankrupting the world for our children and their children. Under the guise of theology — which we’re supposed to “tolerate,” and “spirituality,” which we’re supposed to encourage, and all this other nonsense, we’re letting ignorant bastards take control of our public institutions and our public policy. We’re betraying the Enlightenment, which got people like me out of our position and into a place where we could speak (and possibly, maybe maybe maybe once in a while get listened to), and we’re reinstituting blind obedience to religious authority and dogma and sacred cows and idiotic public opinion and …yes, political correctness. We on the left have to give up the comfort zone that PC-ism gave us, and we have to stick our necks out (ouch) into the politically incorrect areas where things might get a little choppy.
Goddamn, I never thought I’d see the day when Rowan Atkinson makes more sense as a philosopher than …oh, I don’t know, just about anyone. Well, I always did adore Black Adder, especially in those smashing tights. But godamn it all, we are living in End Times, although they have nothing to do with that nonexistant God, and if the fragile human construct we currently have, the one which is holding total war at bay, breaks down, we’re fucked up and down and sideways.
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