From the treehuggers at the WSJ : http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108491863397415033,00.html Religious Leaders Urge U.S. Senate to Act on Climate By JOHN J. FIALKA Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL May 19, 2004; Page A2 WASHINGTON -- Leaders from a broad spectrum of religious groups joined leading scientists in urging the Senate to resume work on and approve legislation to regulate carbon dioxide and other man-made gases thought to be causing global climate change. The religious leaders -- including some conservative evangelical groups generally supportive of President Bush -- say in letters to be hand-delivered to each senator today that a recent consensus among international experts shows the climate-change problem is real and that it requires political action "to prevent damage to the common good." The letter adds a new voice to the climate-change debates and indicates political ground on the issue could be shifting. "Scientists and religious leaders are normally allergic to one another," said Peter Raven, a professor of botany at Washington University in St. Louis. But he and other scientists signed the letter with the religious leaders, he said, because "we would both like to get a better hearing on these issues." Richard Cizik, a vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said recent polls among its membership show that "even George Bush supporters believe you have to offer something more here than simply voluntary measures." The group's members include 45,000 churches and 51 denominations. President Bush has called for voluntary steps by U.S. companies to curb CO² emissions, which are thought to be trapping more of the sun's heat in the Earth's atmosphere. The administration also withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, but ordered billions of dollars of more scientific study. "I happen to be one of those Bush Republicans, but I disagree with the president on this one," Mr. Cizik said, adding that in his view mounting evidence of environmental damage from burning fossil fuels puts a responsibility on leaders of industrial nations to limit ill effects, including drought, the spread of disease and rising sea levels. The involvement of conservative evangelicals in the climate-change issue could be difficult for the White House to brush off, given that they constitute a voting bloc whose support may be critical in the upcoming presidential election, which is expected to be close. While Mr. Cizik and other leaders said they don't mean to criticize Mr. Bush, they do want to see him more involved in assessing potential damage to the environment. The letter notes that principles of "stewardship, justice, protection of the weak, inter-generational duty and prudence are universal values when responsible scientific study has identified grave risk." Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, which negotiated the wording of the letter with the various signatories, said it isn't intended as a specific criticism of President Bush or of Congress. "Our fundamental purpose is to lift this issue out of partisan politics, movie exaggerations and soundbites." The letter, also signed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and main-line Protestant, Jewish and Greek Orthodox leaders, calls for the Senate to renew consideration of the Climate Stewardship Act, proposed by Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, which would create the U.S.'s first CO² regulatory system. The bill was defeated in the Senate last year, 43-55, but the letter calls for a new and "reflective" debate.
I've never fully understood why fundamentalists weren't more aligned with environmental movements. God created the world, not just those who believe God created the world.
The fundimentalists want this because they would like the world to have clean air and clean water at apocalypse time.
I don't think there is any confusion about it among evangelicals. I think the problem is simply that environmentalism was seized upon by the Left, which disenfranchised conservatives concerned about the environment. Christians weren't going to vote for pro-choice candidates just because they had agreable positions on the environment. It isn't so important that many Christians would sacrifice other essential interests. More recently, though, you could be environmentally-concerned without being Left, so the partisanship has simmered down.
MOYERS: In the Christian story the serpent is the seducer. CAMPBELL: That amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist that has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall. MOYERS: Does the idea of woman as sinner appear in other mythologies? CAMPBELL: No, I don't know of it elsewhere. The closest thing to it would be perhaps Pandora with Pandora's box, but that's not sin, that's just trouble. The idea in the biblical traditionof the Fall is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter. ...The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned that world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a thing they truly wanted to because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer. The twelfth-century troubadour poetry of courtly love was a protest against this supernaturally justified violation of life's joy in truth. So too the Tristan legend and at least one of the great versions of the legend of the Grail, that of Wolfram von Eschenbach. The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn't something ruling over and above a fallen nature. There was something of this spirit in the medieval cult of the Virgin, out of which all the beautiful thirteenth-century French cathedrals arose.However, our story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature. They want they world to end anyways...
Jospeh Campbell He is talking about how we have come to perceive earth as somehow less than heaven; How we in the west are traumatized by the myth of the fall.
