Please, Baby Jesus, save our soul;
And Oh, Dear Lord, let us burn coal.
AL.com from Alabama reports deep concern by some Alabama officials about the U.S. Government’s EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) plan to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants by 30%. The tragedy of the commons takes over:
Two members of the Alabama Public Service Commission, a member-elect and an Alabama representative to the Republican National Committee said proposed EPA regulations that aim to reduce power plant carbon emissions by 30 percent represent “an assault on our way of life” and are a purposeful attempt by the Obama administration to kill coal-related jobs.
“We will not stand for what they are doing to our way of life in Alabama,” said PSC President Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh. “We will take our fight to the EPA.”
Damn that U.S. government! First they dismantle segregation—also once touted as Alabama’s “way of life,” and now they have the temerity to tell the good people of Alabama that they have to cut back on carbon emissions. God forbid that they cramp their way of life for future generations. After all, didn’t God promise that He wouldn’t destroy the Earth again after Noah’s Flood?
(Only in the South, by the way, will you find someone named Twinkle [ten to one a pedant will do some Googling and find Twinkles elsewhere].)
It gets worse (my emphasis):
At their news conference today Cavanaugh and PSC commissioner-elect Chip Beeker invoked the name of God in stating their opposition to the EPA proposal. Beeker, a Republican who is running unopposed for a PSC seat, said coal was created in Alabama by God, and the federal government should not enact policy that runs counter to God’s plan.
“Who has the right to take what God’s given a state?” he said.
Cavanaugh called on the people of the state to ask for God’s intervention.
“I hope all the citizens of Alabama will be in prayer that the right thing will be done,” she said.
Does it take a biologist to tell them that God didn’t create coal? It came, of course, from aeons of pressure applied to plant material buried in the sediments. And really, a public official asking people to pray? Have they, at long last, no sense of decency?
Yesterday’s Wire also shows a video (below) from July 17 of last year in which Twinkle—I can’t help laughing when I write that—starts her commission’s meeting with a prayer. That, of course, is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment. Here, John Delwin Jordan, a Baptist minister, gives an invocation before a meeting of Alabama’s Public Service Commission. (Alabama is, of course, one of the nation’s most religious states, and it has not escaped my notice that it’s also a heavily dog-loving state.) The YouTubes notes include this:
This Public Service Commission special proceeding in to Alabama Power’s rates took place on Wednesday, July 17 in Montgomery, Ala. This clip was taken from the PSC’s own video.
After an introduction by Twinkle, the invocation begins about 1:50 in:
The YouTube site also has a full transcript, which you might need as the volume is a bit low. It starts like this:
Father, first of all we want to thank you for being a God of laws, for giving us a night’s rest, giving us another day. We thank you for the rain you’ve sent upon our state this month, God. And we pray, Holy Spirit, that you will fall fresh on us, Father, that you will send spiritual rain on each one of us. God, you saw each hand that was raised, know our thoughts, know our needs, you know the intents of our heart. So God, whether there be physical, spiritual, mental, financial needs … meet ’em, cause you’re the Lord our God that healeth thee (?) You’re Jehovah Jireh, our provider. And we give you praise for that.
Father, your word says that if any of us thirst, let us drink of the water. And Jesus, we know that you’re the living water. And if we drink of you, we will not thirst again. So God, I pray that you will, um, send spiritual rain upon each one of us, upon our families, upon our churches, upon our cities, upon our state, upon our nation.
Note as well that two minutes in, Jordan asks for a show of hands of how many people believe in prayer (all hands go up) and how many people believe prayer works (all hands go up again). So much for the Sophisticated Theologians’™ claim that prayer isn’t supposed to importune God for favors, but merely allows us to commune with him, or even talk to ourselves.
h/t: Joseph
And God put so much oil in the Middle East because… He just loves them more?
Not all religious people are stupid, but it sure helps.
God moves in mysterious ways. It is not for you to ask why God put our oil in the Middle East.
As a test of your faith. Come and get it if you dare kafirs!
Obviously because God is a Muslim.
I think that “perverse” is more accurate than “mysterious”.
To-may-to, to-mah-to.
Well, the world’s top fossil-fuel energy producers are Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States, thus giving rise to many possible conflicting interpretations of divine intent.
Twinkle?
It must have been tough in grade school. Maybe he had parents who listened too much to Johnny Cash.
I didn’t think I could stomach much of the video, and I was right, but since Twinkle kicks the proceedings off with prefatory remarks I wasted 4.8 seconds of my life to determine the gender of the poor unfortunate with that name. I suppose the parent’s had their reasons; maybe somebody knows what that moniker is all about.
Yes, I should have bothered to verify the gender. I got lazy.
She was her. Parents’ little star …
/@
No idea about the name, but way back when I was in high school we hosted some 4H exchange students from Florida whose names were Rooster, Lighting, and Buckshot.
Do those names mean something in Floridaian? Like, they’re brands of high-failure-rate condoms, perhaps?
That made me LOL but I think “Rooster” would be an excellent condom name. Better than Trojan, who lost the war and let in the Greeks – doesn’t give me confidence in the physical integrity of their product.
The family was all Palinesta-Tea-Party redneck conservative, so I’m pretty sure that birth control of any type was not a factor.
Dear God, I pray for your spiritual rain
So that the conductor doesn’t stop my train.
My train is still moving! Prayer works!
Q.E.D.
Not ask people to pray? But that’s our way of life. Doncha remember when the beloved Rick Perry led an entire stadium in praying for an end to the drought of 2011? You know, the drought that subsequently deepened into the worst one-year drought of Texas-Oklahoma history?
That prayer sounds pretty demanding. Instead of killing you, your god killed himself and that isn’t enough? It has to provide your every need now? High maintenance cretins.
I know how greedy to ask for all that stuff – distracting god from ensuring victory at various sports and delivering ponies to little children.
If prayer worked, I’m pretty sure unicorns would exist.
Fixed that typo for you.
🙂
Holy cow what blatant coercion and establishment. Those acts are, IMO, constitutionally worse than the actual prayer.
Imagine being a nonchristian citizen at that meeting, with some request on the Commission’s agenda. Do you raise your hand against your beliefs in order to be accepted as part of the community, or do you risk the Commission members marking you as an outsider?
And of course that’s what all these participatory public prayers are really about: not the right to commune with God (which they can do privately and individually), but the right to force non-Christians to reveal themselves.
With all the talk about showers, it’s merciful that her name isn’t Tinkle.
The Who are way more reverent about this topic plus they can do homonyms:
Only love can make it rain
The way the beach is kissed by the sea
Only love can make it rain
Like the sweat of lovers layin’ in the fields
Love, reign o’er me
Love, reign o’er me
Rain on me, rain on me
Only love can bring the rain
That makes you yearn to the sky
Only love can bring the rain
That falls like tears from on high
Love, reign o’er me
Rain on me, rain on me
Love, reign o’er me
Rain on me, rain on me
On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool, cool rain
I can’t sleep, and I lay, and I think
The night is hot and black as ink
Oh God, I need a drink of cool, cool rain
Love, reign o’er me
Reign o’er me, o’er me, o’er me
Love, reign o’er me, o’er me
Love
“Father, your word says that if any of us thirst, let us drink of the water.”
Sure, by all means, drink the polluted water that your irrational meddling will keep the EPA from cleaning up. Breathe the poisonous air, too. Enjoy the droughts and the severe storms. I’m sure your imaginary friend will provide, then.
Ah, but God is a god with many facets and contains multitudes. Plus all that handwaving Unknowable Mystery stuff.
That’s why prayer is both — totally all about nothing but communing with God and learning to accept whatever happens with peace in our heart AND sometimes like what happens when a strict but loving Heavenly Father is asked a favor by a child who is properly meek and deferential. Pointing out a contradiction here misses the whole point of religious faith.
The whole point of religious faith is to not worry about things like that. And then the calm insouciance wraps itself around the gentled believer and extends blithely into the EPA standards on coal emissions.
Indeed, and the lack of coherence is maddening. My Facebook feed currently contains many requests for prayers for the Christian doctor who was recently infected with ebola. He seems like a good guy who was genuinely trying to help ebola victims. He has a family too. I am impressed with his courage and determination to help and feel very sad for him and his family. I really hope he recovers.
But the things people say about prayer and God with respect to this incident are strange to me:
“URGENT Prayer 24/7 for ALL Ebola victims including DR KENT BRANTLY & NANCY WRITEBOL infected with Ebola Please PRAY NOW where you are. No need to wait or go anywhere. PRAY NOW in Jesus’ name.”
Or
“Lord we thank You for Your healing touch on Dr. Brantley, and Your comfort for His family.”
The calls to prayer are passed around like they are raising money. If we only get $30,000 (30,000 prayers), we can get the treatment (notice of God) this guy needs.
It’s so very bizarre that all of the following seems to be the case:
1. It is important to pray now, not wait to tonight. I guess because he might die by tonight and then it’d be too late? Is God not already aware of this Christian out working in his name and infected with this deadly virus? Is God like 911, useful if you call right away but less so the longer you wait?
2. Pray 24/7. Without ceasing. This is a reference to 1 Thes 5, but still, what is the theory? That God is moved by the effort you put into it?
3. The more people who pray the better. Once again, is God not moved by the suffering of one family? In what way, exactly, does it help to have 10,000 people pray as opposed to 1000, 100, or 10?
4. It helps somehow to presume God will step in, even though the odds are he won’t (30-40% is it?). This comes as obsequious groveling before a capricious king. That does seem to be the model in the OT, and I think that sense does inform points 1-3. Who knows what will move the inscrutible and capricious king? But maybe if enough of us make a ruckus he’ll take note.
And then there is the overarching bizarreness of not praying that he doesn’t get infected in the first place, the lack of concern that whatever prayers were offered in that regard didn’t work, and the even more bizarre appeal to the creator of ebola for help. Surely if God cared in the slightest, there’d be no ebola, or at least some kind of documented treatment plan, or something.
Anyway, the cacophony of cognitive dissonances I vicariously experience when I read these many prayer requests makes my head want to explode.
People ask why atheists care what religious people believe. One reason is that I grow exhausted of living in the funhouse asylum. Who can listen to crazy talk forever and not eventually say something?
Two humorous comments on the efficacy of prayer. The first is an old Catholic school joke:
In a similar vein, a joke from comedian Emo Phillips:
Phillips’ joke seems to be right in line with the attitudes of many contemporary Christians.
The priest I had in my parish during most of my childhood used to tell that joke. I wonder where it originated and if it wasn’t perhaps a thinly veiled nod toward the truth about the well-known arsenal of “powerful prayers” that Catholics use.
Of course, I constantly heard from my parents while I was growing up how this priest is much too liberal (his sermons and thus, the Mass, used to sometimes be cut to 35 minutes if he had to get out to catch Notre Dame football). I sometimes wonder if had he been a generation later, if he wouldn’t be a member of Dan Barker’s Clergy Project.
That makes me wonder if anyone has actually published (Sokal-like) on the mathematics of prayer. For example, is the operation of “praying for forgiveness” (let’s call it “P” for brevity) commensurable with the act that you’re praying for forgiveness of (we’ll call that “A”)? Or in more standard notation
P * A = A * P ?There’s more, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the student, as I’m going swimming.
Because some of those religious people are making laws that force their religion on the rest of us.
I meant to say, “Even if they weren’t passing laws…”. Even if their only effect were to have to listen to them babble incoherently, the incoherent babbling itself is pretty hard to take.
I thought your answer above was terrific:
“People ask why atheists care what religious people believe. One reason is that I grow exhausted of living in the funhouse asylum.”
“People ask why atheists care what religious people believe.”
Religiosos go out of their way to bloviate about atheists. They shouldn’t hypocritically complain about incoming return fire.
(For some reason the Alice Cooper song, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” comes to mind.)
“No need to wait or go anywhere.” If this doesn’t sum up the harm that more innocuous religious belief does, then nothing will. In fact, I’d even grant that the intentions are good and it does distinct harm. Perhaps ebola is a bad example since there’s really not much anyone can do about it, but this same logic applies to numerous quotidian things for which something can actually be done, and yet it isn’t. I believe it was Sam Harris who once asked if you’d prefer a bus driver with a vehicle full of kids on it to pray that they survive or resort to quick thinking and planning for what to do in a situation like that. Even if he is performing some action, part of his attention is being focused on praying. For a real word scenario, it’d be interesting to know whether most people would prefer an experienced pilot like Captain Sullenberger, who landed a disabled plane in the Hudson River a few years ago, or an inexperience pilot who really can belt out a heartfelt prayer.
This is part of the incoherence. I am sure that almost everyone, even the very religious, would prefer a skilled pilot. I am sure that the devout Christian ebola doctor took all the precautions he knew how(*) to avoid being infected with ebola, he didn’t just pray not to get infected, etc. Most devout Christians regard the sects that forgo medical treatment in favor of prayer as fringe crazies. It is not at all mainstream to refuse chemo, blood transfusions, etc. They are not stupid, after all. They are fully aware of cause and effect in the world. What they have is a sort of prayer-of-the-gaps. They operate as rational people but where there is a gap in what skill or ability or preparation can accomplish, where chance is involved, they pray that the chance elements fall their way. Theirs is, or has become, the God of Luck.
(*) Although, I also suspect that strong faith could lead one to be a little more sloppy if you came to feel you have an extra layer of protection in the hand of God.
I will cautiously say, at the risk of being misunderstood, that prayerof-the-gaps where the gap lies at the end of the continuum of responses can be innocuous. However, this is the best case scenario. It hasn’t ever been shown to be demonstrably useful. So, as a last resort, it may cause no harm. However, the caveat is that determining when there is absolutely nothing left to do that could possibly effect the outcome of a situation isn’t always clear.
In obvious cases such as a free fall in airplane, a passenger who is properly braced and can’t control the plane doesn’t have anything else to do that would be consteuctive. Unfortunately, most cases of prayer are not in situations where it is so blatantly obvious that a useful action can’t be taken.
I think if the majority of people realized the futility of prayer in every day situations, the “last resort” prayer probably wouldn’t even be considered. Why not do something equally useful like counting backwards from 100 by 3s if it calms your mind?
In the movie Speed there is a scene where a cop commandeers a civilian auto, forcing the owner into the passenger seat while he takes the wheel. A high-speed chase scene ensues, the owner hanging on for dear life and repeating “Shit, shit, shit …” throughout.
This has been my experience, more or less, on several occasions in sliding cars and plummeting river craft, treading on the edge of disaster. No praying, no thought of prayer. Sometimes I said god, or Jesus, or f*ck, I may have screamed once, and at least one time I was throat-constricted silent and unable to breathe.
If one is inclined to devout belief, and has a lot of time to process the imminent but relatively measured approach of calamity, prayer may surface. I can’t say it won’t. But I have serious doubts about that happening during fast action crises.
I liked the prayer Bill Murray offered when his tractor-trailer cab tilted forward and he was pressed against the windshield above the steering wheel while the rig rolled out of control down the highway for ten seconds or so: “Oh god, I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done.”
Your scenarios illustrate a very important distinction. Yelling out curse words or prayers may indeed have a calming effect on an individual. There’s no reason, under naturalism, to say that this should be impossible. Perhaps just as a result of my upbringing, I may reflexively call out to God if I was under great duress.
The obvious difference here is that you’re equating yelling “shit shit shit” with praying, with both having potentially natural effects that help the person release stress. A person who prays with the belief that an entity may intervene is not helping the situation.
“(*) Although, I also suspect that strong faith could lead one to be a little more sloppy if you came to feel you have an extra layer of protection in the hand of God.”
As with all those who proclaim, “I just think that when it’s your time, it’s your time,” as to why they shun helmets, seat-belts, etc.
In one of his books highly liberal Christian Bishop John Shelby Spong described how he had once been enthralled and charmed by “the power of prayer” — specifically petitionary prayer. ‘Ask and ye shall receive.’ He preached and wrote positively on the topic, all the time.
Then his wife got cancer.
And thousands of people prayed that the Bishop’s wife would get better.
And she did.
She went to the hospital and did the chemo and all — but she still beat the odds and the cancer was gone. A miracle! Everyone exclaimed and praised God for His goodness in answering so many fervent prayers, including those of a man who had inspired them all with the certainty that prayers can indeed be answered, for God listens. They gave thanks to God.
Except for Bishop John Shelby Spong.
Instead, this remarkable man started thinking it over. How did the prayer work? What went on? Would his wife had died if he had been, say, a plumber instead of a church leader and there were fewer prayers? No prayers? What the hell sort of God works this way? Does this system make any sense?
And so he gave up believing in the power of petitionary prayer. Not because his wife died. But because she didn’t — and he still decided to rethink it anyway.
That is my very favorite Christian story, btw.
Excellent story.
It’s been a long time since I read that book, but wasn’t part of his problem the way that the people in his congregation started to take credit for his wife’s recovery because they’d prayed for her?
Possibly. It’s been a while since I read it too. Though I think that if that was the major part of his problem it would just be the conventional not-granting-credit-to-God schtick. No, as I recall the entire issue was the issue and Spong’s rejection was inspired by intellect and integrity.
I told that story in a Christian chatroom once and they had trouble understanding my point. Their framework had Spong showing lack of faith and gratitude. The wife lived! How could he/I not see that? But I think some of them got it.
To put it bluntly, no these political hacks don’t have any sense of decency. It wouldn’t shock me if I were to learn that many of these Alabama politicians are just feigning devout belief in order to bank some political currency.
By invoking “our way of life” the PSC is connecting the interests of the coal industry to the lives of Alabamians via an emotional appeal, which is usually an effective political strategy. In Alabama, appeals to christianity are lifestyle politics.
The comments about the correlation between dog ownership and politics from yesterdays thread got me thinking. I think that there is a correlation between being really good at college football and passing really bad public policy. In Florida, we’re really good at college football and our legislature is like a Monty Python sketch, but sad.
I think you are right. There are many kinds of prayer enablers. There are the types who use prayer as a sort of rallying point, a place that feels safe to the pedestrian person. Then there are those who feel constrained not to say anything bad against prayer because that type of criticism is a serious show stopper for the remainder of their beliefs.
A very sad existence to be a prayer enabler.
I wonder how many sociopaths are among them. It would seem a perfect position for a sociopath.
I always feel embarrassed for them when I hear people express their religious beliefs…especially someone who I have known for a while without ever suspecting them of being religious. It’s like hearing a mature adult suddenly speaking like a naive child. Embarrassing.
I know. Me, too.
And yet they seem to think they ought to be credited with their “strength” and “courage” to look and sound like that.
Just as bad is to see it at the work place. We recently had our manager (PhD scientist) get up and tell people a recently injured employee is in his prayers. I was not sure, honestly, that he actually thinks prayer works or that he said it because the majority of people might have wanted to hear that. In either case, it’s like watching an adult transform into a kid in front of your very eyes.
Me three. Sometimes I am so embarrassed for them I can’t even look at them anymore. It is twice as intense when it is family or friends.
As an American, my personal favorites are the ones who have to start gushing to you about Jesus- do you know who he is? Like it’s somehow possible to live America without having heard about it, but they’ve got to jump in your face and start shouting about how you need to learn about Jesus!!!
I feel the same way, and I can never feel entirely comfortable with them again because I know they have this terrible brain disability, faith.
Here’s what I posted on Raw Story, slightly cleaned up for current company:
“God also gave Alabama asbestos:
http://www.cccarto.com/asbestos/al/index.html?COL=0+ROW=0+ZOOM=a+GPSX=-1+GPSY=-1
Why don’t you a$$h*les make some thousand-dollar suits out of it and wear them?”
I was in a bad mood at the time.
The best government maximizes happiness and well-being.
Government should pay to relocate all the Republicans to below the Mason-Dixon line, and to move all the Democrats in the opposite direction.
Let people enjoy the government they want.
… and it has not escaped my notice that it’s also a heavily dog-loving state.
OTOH, I’m confident that Alabama vastly exceeds Vermont in cowboy boots-per-capita.
I think we need a big map of the US showing cowboy boot wearing okra eaters 🙂
Well now you touch on an interesting demographic. One of my standard breakfasts is grits, cooked with a beef bouillon cube, OKRA, something containing capsaicin, and a few chunks of Scott Petersen’s polish sausage (made in Chicago in the same plant that produces Nathan’s hot dogs.
How many atheists do you suppose come close to that one? (I’d be happy to trade for some cherry pie if someone would make me one.)
🙂
Boots per capita? That seems a silly place to wear them.
I’ll get me coat…
Sorry, that was meant as a reply to comment #13.
If we attack their way of life again, and they try to secede from the Union again…
Do we try to stop them again, or do we just let them go and be rid of them?
I have often thought that it might have been vastly to the benefit of the North to have simply let the South secede. Maybe they should be encouraged to have another go, I doubt there’d be the heart for second civil war to stop them.
Don’t many of the southern states receive a lot of government aid? I imagine the sudden loss of Medicare and Welfare in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama would be pretty devastating. I doubt that the richer southern states would be too keen on subsidizing them.
In general, money flows from blue states to the federal government, and from the federal government to the red states. So who are those mooching 47% again?
Chuck Thompson wrote a book titled Better Off Without Em: A Northern Manifesto For Southern Secession. I have sometimes said that one of the first uses of a working time machine should be to send someone back to tell President Lincoln to let them go.
Unfortunately we still have to share an atmosphere and biosphere with them, so letting them screw things up as they please isn’t really an option.
Yes, that’s the point that occurred to me. If it were possible to encase Alabama in a huge glass bubble then we could let them do what they liked…
God also gave us marijuana, and opium poppies*, so why hasn’t Alabama legalized them?
*Along with a biblical mandate to use all the plants.
The ‘lilies of the field’ mentioned in Mathew are apparently not lilies, but are poppies.
And brains. I don’t see any big movement to use those, however.
“Who has the right to take what God’s given a state?”
Right! (well).
Maybe it escaped the esteemed gentleman that it’s not the Government that wants to ‘take’ it: on the contrary, it wants to keep as much of it where it is.
It’s the Alabama folks who so desperately want to ‘take’ it (and then, God forbid, burn it!).
Oh, the irony.
Yes, God put those mountains there, but the coal companies want to remove the tops of those mountains so they can sift the coal out.
No! Don’t take the coal! Leave it there so that god can turn it into precious, precious oil!
Or diamonds – tell the citizens of Alabama that god wants to turn the coal into precious diamonds for them because he so loves them. 🙏✨
Twinkle, twinkle, PSC star;
Show us how dumb you really are.
Meanwhile, further North, the devil makes people do nasty things:
http://www.northjersey.com/news/cliffside-park-man-found-guilty-in-fatal-sauce-pan-beating-in-fairview-1.1058897
The only other Twinkles I know are Indian female entertainers, and one of them changed her name !*from*! Twinkle (Tia Bajpai born Twinkle Bajpai) and the other changed it !*to*! Twinkle (Bollywood actress Twinkle Khanna born Tina Jatin Khanna). According to a Baby Names website, it’s a popular girl’s name in the Gujurati part of India.
The Caucasian Brit ’60s pop singer known as Twinkle was Lynn Ripley.
According to my magic window, 1 in 702,203 Americans are named Twinkle.
That’s a lot of little stars!
Sub
It’s interesting to observe what secular causes (such as environmentalism- the one relevant to this post but I’m discussing it last) are the easiest and hardest to reframe as Christian causes.
Very successful would be abolitionism:
William Lloyd Garrison and Henry Ward Beecher were very good at framing this in Christian terms (but it resulted in atheist activists in same movement such as Harriet Martineau being written out of history!!)
Equally successful would be race-based civil rights:
Martin Luther King was a genius at this (but it likewise resulted in atheist civil rights activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois having news of their atheism suppressed!)
Less successful would be women’s rights. Christian feminists remain somewhat marginal in both their religion and their cause. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Women’s Bible didn’t go down well with either secular feminists or Christians.) And only slightly more successful (IMO) is gay rights. And as Jerry Coyne has pointed out here many times BioLogos is floundering in it’s efforts to “baptize” evolution.
And back to the subject of JC’s post, one side of me would wish for greater success for groups like Evangelical Environmental Network, A Rocha, Earth Ministry, etc. but I’m not holding my breath. As with evolution, climate change denialism seems to remain the dominant paradigm among American Christians, in spite of the endorsement of environmental causes from Pope John Paul 2 (no word on the issue from his successors) and the full backing of environmental initiatives by the Seventh-Day Adventists (also the denomination with the strongest support for full church-state separation!) Ann Coulter’s claim that the Christian doctrine concerning the earth is “Rape it. It’s yours” (AC’s exact words) seems to remain the prevailing sentiment, even if not phrased so vulgarly by Twinkle and Company.
When considering how and to what extent Christianity/Christians integrate secular issues like environmentalism et al into their ideology framework (or not), the studies discussed at this link indicate that the degree of conservativism of the group/individual may be the determining factor:
‘… but meanwhile our goose is slowly being cooked by global warming, and conservatives have convinced themselves it’s all a liberal hoax. If that kind of thinking isn’t wrong—then what is?’
http://www.alternet.org/secrets-right-wing-brain-new-study-proves-it-conservatives-see-hostile-world?akid=12070.1920402.gBVE38&rd=1&src=newsletter1013382&t=5&paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
As an apocalyptic cult, Christianity is structurally fairly hostile to long term thinking. 41% of Americans think Jesus will return by 2050, 58% of white evangelicals do [1]. The rest probably think it won’t be much longer, or that the general arc of things like the Earth’s climate are part of the plan. Why put yourself out to try to preserve the Earth when the Earth is slated for destruction in the near future? And, in any case, what really matters is souls and eternity. That’s why homosexuality, which may land you in Hell is so much more important an issue than climate change.
In a very real way, Christianity is deeply nihilistic about the actual real world. It is this deep nihilism and apathy that disturbs me most about my many Christian friends. Their apocalyptic view of the universe absolutely prevents them from taking a long term view. Even if you convince them to be good “stewards of the Earth”, they are still doing it not because it is necessary as this is our only place to live, but as a kind of test of their faithfulness. For them, it is like dressing up a body before it is sent into the crematorium.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/jesus-christs-return-to-earth/
I once heard the number of Americans who believe the Jesus will return in their lifetimes but I can’t remember what it was.
Agreed. Overall, fundamentalists Christians are not interested in being stewards of the Earth, and in large part due to the apocalyptic strain in Christianity. Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, was an especially scary case in point.
Christians like J. Patrick Dobel (author of “Stewards of the Earth’s Resources”) are commendable (and even creationist John Silvius is on board with environmentalism) but relatively few Christians in America seem to listen to these guys or care. They’re much more fired up about homosexuality and alleged threats to the free market. As Mitt Romney put it at the Republican convention, “I’m not here to save the planet but to save the family [for Jesus-JLH]” a remark followed by loud applause.
When you have well-known verses telling you to take no thought for the morrow, what do you expect to happen? The idea of environmentalism being a liberal goal in the United States corresponded with the rise of fundamental Christianity taking over the Republican Party.
It’s getting harder and harder to slip a sheet of graphene between the Republican Party and Christianity.
Did they have any time left for the meeting? I hope the meeting was a little more than just an afterthought. Two sermons and then, oh by the way a meeting.
Given their aims, are you sure you want them to accomplish anything?
My jaw is still on the floor after watching this christian church service taking the place of a government meeting. When people are asked to raise their hand to affirm their christianity, to be considered a true member of the governing body in power, we see the true beginning of an American brand of fascism.
As Sinclair Lewis famously said: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
Jerry, you paraphrased him incorrectly at one point. In his second question he didn’t ask whether they believed that prayer worked. He asked whther they believed that God answers prayers. It is important to remember that God’s answer may well be “No, I’m too busy handling football game outcomes to worry about your kid’s brain tumor.”
How impossibly stupid…I’m surprised people don’t burst out laughing at such inane pandering.
Where’s Joe Christmas when you need him? (The church rant, not the violence.)
” . . . So God, whether there be physical, spiritual, mental, financial needs … meet ’em . . . .”
Sounds more like a directive to, rather than a request of, God.
After leaving Chattanooga on I-59, one finds at the first south-bound Alabama rest stop a granite tablet stating the “our-way-of-life” mindset, “We Dare Defend Our Rights.”
My take is that god buried coal deep in the ground and that is where he wants it to stay stay
“After all, didn’t God promise that He wouldn’t destroy the Earth again after Noah’s Flood?”
The first time, He used H20. Maybe for the second destruction, His molecule of choice will be CO2.
“After all, didn’t God promise that He wouldn’t destroy the Earth again after Noah’s Flood?”
Do I correctly recall that the rainbow was offered as some kind of sign or proof of the efficacy/certainty of this promise? (That is, rainbows had apparently not existed prior to “The Flood.”)
Prior to “The Flood,” did all water droplets in the air agree amongst themselves – had God ordered them? – not to create a rainbow when the rays of the sun passed through them? 😉
(I wonder what kind of rainbow colors are created when droplets of ethanol or other compounds are subjected to light. Cyan? Cobalt Blue? Cerulean? Teal? Distressed Pumpkin?)
All those colours are there already. (Mostly. Maybe not teal, which is a less bright cyan.) Any clear liquid will create the same spectrum, because all those different wavelengths still exist in the incident light, but the dimensions of the rainbow will be different because of the different refractive indices of the different liquids.
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