{"id":4769,"date":"2012-05-02T03:25:14","date_gmt":"2012-05-02T03:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/?p=4769"},"modified":"2012-04-24T00:59:28","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T00:59:28","slug":"year-3-month-5-day-2-a-50-watt-bulb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/year-3-month-5-day-2-a-50-watt-bulb\/","title":{"rendered":"Year 3, Month 5, Day 2: A 50-Watt Bulb?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The faithful are opening their eyes. Or are they? The News Virginian reports \u2014 you decide:<\/a><\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Global Warning Reader: A Century of Writing about Climate Change,\u201d Dr. Bill McKibben presents \u201cThe Evangelical Climate Change Initiative,\u201d a 2006 document signed by 86 American Christian evangelical leaders. Signers include: Rick Warren (\u201cThe Purpose Driven Life\u201d); W. Todd Bassett, National Commander of the Salvation Army; Ron Sider, President of Evangelicals for Social Action; and advisors and columnists for Christianity Today magazine. \u201cIn the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord,\u201d they said, \u201cwe urge all who read this declaration to join us in this effort\u201d of teaching and acting on the following four claims.<\/p>\n

1. \u201cHuman-Induced Climate Change is Real.\u201d Among the evidence the signers studied was that collected by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose 1988-2002 chairman, John Houghton, is a committed Christian. They remembered that the science was settled enough for the Bush Administration to state in a 2004 report, and then at the 2005 G-8 summit, that humans were responsible for \u201cat least some of it (climate change).\u201d The IPCC, however, holds that human activities are responsible for \u201cmost of the warming,\u201d according to the evangelical leaders.<\/p>\n

2. \u201cThe Consequences of Climate Change Will Be Significant, and Will Hit the Poor the Hardest.\u201d The signers emphasized the impact of even the smallest increases in human-caused world-wide temperature upon people in poor countries: tropical diseases, hurricanes, flooding, reduction in food crops, famine, and the vulnerability of refugees to exploitation and violence, even internal and external military oppression. \u201cMillions of people,\u201d they wrote, \u201ccould die in this century because of climate change.\u201d They also noted the destruction it could bring to \u201cGod\u2019s other creatures.\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not going to take this one on faith. Sent April 23:<\/p>\n

The rejection of climate change has long been a shibboleth of political conservatives, who have a record of denying inconvenient facts and expertise that goes back at least fifty years. Why, then, are evangelicals \u2014 one of the most consistently conservative voting blocs in the country \u2014 beginning to accept the scientific reality of global warming? While some may be encouraged, I am less sanguine about the motivations behind the faithful’s abandonment of long-held denialist positions. <\/p>\n

Environmentalists are interested in the long-term survival of the planet; talk to a “tree-hugger” and you’ll hear someone whose worries about humanity’s future in the year 3000 motivate them to conservation and the wise use of resources. By contrast, evangelicals eagerly anticipating the End Times may have little reason to practice sustainability. Is climate-change acceptance among conservative Christians accompanied by a growing conviction that industrialized humanity needs to change its ways to avoid catastrophe? Or are they cheering on the burgeoning greenhouse effect, assuming that the souls of the faithful will be providentially rescued from a disaster of Biblical proportions?<\/p>\n

Warren Senders\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The faithful are opening their eyes. Or are they? The News Virginian reports \u2014 you decide: In \u201cThe Global Warning Reader: A Century of Writing about Climate Change,\u201d Dr. Bill McKibben presents \u201cThe Evangelical Climate Change Initiative,\u201d a 2006 document signed by 86 American Christian evangelical leaders. Signers include: Rick Warren (\u201cThe Purpose Driven Life\u201d); […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,87,6,44],"tags":[284,331,253,911,1125,329,1097],"class_list":["post-4769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-education","category-environment","category-politics","tag-apocalypse","tag-armageddon","tag-denialists","tag-eschatology","tag-evangelicals","tag-religion","tag-theology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4769"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4770,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4769\/revisions\/4770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.warrensenders.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}