Ever have one of those moments when you either literally or metaphorically hit your forehead with the palm of your hand thinking "Of course!" When I saw this blog post (
link) by Stephen Stromberg of the
Washington Post, I thought, "Of course, climate change deniers kissing cousins of creationists. The inbreeding is obvious."
- Creationists imagine an impossible past and demand from scientists certainty that is contrary to the scientific method;
- Deniers imagine a nearly impossible future and demand from scientists certainty that is contrary to the scientific method.
Please notice the insertion of the word "nearly" when referring to the future. Anyone who believes that s/he has the future on lockdown should be sentenced to watching endless reruns of the movie
Minority Report, where "precogs" are used to arrest people for "precrimes" that haven't happened yet. Naturally, in the movie someone messes with the system to get the results he wants. The fact that I can't predict how many people will die from climate change next year--much less in 20, 50, or 100 years--is not an argument against acting now.
Reading the comments below Mr. Stromberg's post, I feel like I'm in a rerun of
Inherit the Wind, a thinly veiled retelling of the
Scopes Monkey Trial. In this case, the wind we will inherit will be fatal, especially to the poorest and most vulnerable. Are the deniers making these foolish and offensive comments real people, or are they the paid minions of Big Coal?
Posts
AND ... have you read "Left Behind"?
ReplyDeleteI think every UU should. Not because it's good -- it's absolutely awful. But because the belief in the future it draws, drives so much of the political action of the US, most especially towards Israel and against any sort of environmental action.
In simple terms: if you believe "the rapture" is coming, then you also assume you're one of the elect that will be saved. You want this to happen, ergo, you want all of the signs (a world with environmental disasters everywhere, a strong Israel that rebuilds the Temple) to occur.
And, if you believe in the rapture, you are assuredly a creationist. So, the question -- are rapture-ites climate change deniers or climate change hopers?
I dunno. They're not exactly logical on this. To those rapture-ites who claimed Obama was the anti-Christ, I would ask, "Well, then, aren't you going to vote for him, to make the events unfold as foretold in Scripture?"
I usually got blank looks.
Take them now Lord! Take them NOW!!
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