[Andyman_1970]

I'll see N8's astronomer and raise him 85 evangelical (and some "normal ones at that") leaders.......

Evangelicals urge action on global warming
By Alan Elsner
Wed Feb 8, 3:24 PM ET


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of 85 evangelical Christian leaders on Wednesday backed legislation opposed by the White House to cut carbon dioxide emissions, kicking off a campaign to mobilize religious conservatives to combat global warming.

 

[Changleen]

Good. Don't just leave it to Jeebus!

 

[Andyman_1970]

From ABC news...........

Feb. 8, 2006 — "The question is, do we want to destroy the Creation — with a capital C [as in the Bible's Creation story] — because that's what we're doing, and at an accelerating rate."

The speaker was not one of the evangelical leaders at today's news conference in Washington announcing a major initiative to fight global warming.

The speaker was one of America's preeminent scientists, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, who believes that "an alliance of science and religion" over questions of global warming and of the destruction of species can be a powerful force to prevent the catastrophe.

"It doesn't matter whether you believe Darwin got it right or that the Genesis story is literally true," Wilson said in his office on campus. "We can all agree that, however it got here, the living creation — on which we all depend for our existence — is something we don't want to see destroyed."

New environmental movements among conservative Christians suggest Wilson is right. One of them is named "Creation Care."

For decades, Wilson has been drawing attention to the extinctions of species and entire ecosystems caused by habitat destruction.
But now hundreds of scientists around the world are reporting that the rapidly rising average global temperature is already causing widespread extinctions of species and the dispersal of delicately balanced ecologies of plants and animals — and doing so at a rate that may already be greater than that of habitat destruction.

"I am an optimist by nature," Wilson said. "But I have to admit, it's getting kind of scary."

Scientists also warn that the rising average global temperature, which the vast majority of them agree is caused chiefly by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, will continue to devastate the poorest on Earth first and, in the coming decades, have a catastrophic effect on civilization itself unless the oil, gas and coal emissions are sharply curtailed.

Today's Washington news conference announcing the initiative by 86 evangelical leaders seemed only to confirm the practicality of Wilson's hoped-for alliance.

"We are concerned about the degradation of the environment, and especially the smallest nations that have the smallest room for error," Wheaton College president Duane Litfin said.

"They are much more vulnerable," he added. "Our margin in the United States is much larger."

The Rev. Leith Anderson, senior pastor at the Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minn., said simply: "We are concerned about the effect of global warming on the poorest of the poor and the marginalized of society."

The Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, said that political and economic pressure would come from the group as well.

"We're calling for national legislation. … What's needed is a requirement that carbon emissions need to be reduced," Ball said.

President Bush has long counted on the votes of evangelicals, but has steadfastly refused to focus on global warming or offer any solution other than encouraging new technology. Climatologists say that will not be widely available soon enough to prevent serious climate disruption. They also say that voluntary emissions cuts won't work.

A growing religious sensibility on global warming — especially coming from so conservative a base as America's evangelicals — would seem hard for politicians to ignore.

Wilson, who won the Pulitzer Prize twice, has written a new book, "The Creation," due out in September. It's written in the form of a letter to a southern minister that explores the mutual concerns of science and religion in matters pertaining to the protection of "The Creation."

 

[Andyman_1970]

Evangelicals urge action on global warming By Alan Elsner
Wed Feb 8, 3:23 PM ET

A group of 85 evangelical Christian leaders on Wednesday backed legislation opposed by the White House to cut carbon dioxide emissions, kicking off a campaign to mobilize religious conservatives to combat global warming.

The group which included mega-church pastors, Christian college presidents, religious broadcasters and writers, also unveiled a full-page advertisement to run in Thursday's New York Times and a television ad it hopes to screen nationally.

"With God's help, we can stop global warming for our kids, our world and our Lord," the television spot declared.

The campaign by evangelicals coincided with a call on Wednesday by a leading U.S. think tank for the United States to take immediate steps to fight global warming, including working with other nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Pew Center for Global Climate Change said in a report that America has waited too long to seriously tackle the climate change problem and spelled out 15 steps the United States could take to reduce emissions it spews as the world's biggest energy consumer and producer of greenhouse gases.

"This transition will not be easy, but it is crucial to begin now," the Pew Center said. "Further delay will only make the challenge before us more daunting and more costly."

The campaign by the evangelical leaders represented a possible split in President George W. Bush's political base, in which Christian evangelical voters are heavily represented.

However, the names of most of the president's most influential Christian political backers were notably absent from the list of signatories joining the campaign. Possibly the best-known signer was Rick Warren, author of the best-selling book, "The Purpose Driven Life."

TRADING SYSTEM

Specifically, and mirroring a proposal by the Pew Foundation, the leaders called on Congress to pass laws to create a trading system that would spur companies to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which scientists say is a major cause of global warming.

One such bill, The Climate Stewardship Act, first introduced in 2003 by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) and Connecticut Democrat Sen. Joseph Lieberman (news, bio, voting record), would require that U.S. emissions return to their 2000 levels by 2010.

The United States, with around 5 percent of the world's population, accounts for a quarter of its greenhouse gases and U.S. emissions rose by 2 percentage points in 2004 alone, according to government figures.

The McCain-Lieberman bill has failed to win passage twice in the Senate, although a majority there did adopt a non-binding resolution to cap emissions. The issue has not come up for a vote in the House of Representatives.

The Bush administration opposes imposing mandatory limits and backs voluntary efforts by companies. It has also refused to join the Kyoto Protocol, an international accord signed by the European Union, Japan and most other industrialized nations that sets hard targets for cutting emissions.

The Christian leaders said they were impelled by their faith to launch the campaign out of a growing realization that the threat of global warming was real and that the world's poor would suffer the most.

Paul de Vries, president of New York Divinity School, said: "However we treat the world, that's how we are treating Jesus because He is the cosmic glue."

The leaders said a poll they commissioned of 1,000 evangelical Protestants showed that two thirds were convinced global warming was taking place. Additionally, 63 percent said the United States must start to address the issue immediately and half said it must act even if there was a high economic cost.

The Pew Foundation also recommended boosting renewable fuel output and providing financial incentives to farmers to spur absorption of greenhouse gas emissions on farm lands.

U.S. government weather forecasters reported on Tuesday that the nation's January temperatures were the warmest on record, beating the average for the month by 8.5 degrees Fahrenheit (4.7 degrees C). Two weeks ago NASA scientists confirmed that 2005 was the hottest year ever recorded worldwide.

 

[The Amish]

jeebus is cosmic glue? who knew?

 

[Andyman_1970]

Actually Paul alludes to that.........I think the passge goes "in Him all things are held together" something to that effect, that's where the dude being quoted came up with that.

 

[Old Man G Funk]

It's about time. Too bad they aren't all on the same page here. Some of the most powerful evangelical leaders have vetoed this idea....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020102132.html

Evangelicals Will Not Take Stand on Global Warming

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 2, 2006; Page A08

The National Association of Evangelicals said yesterday that it has been unable to reach a consensus on global climate change and will not take a stand on the issue, disappointing environmentalists who had hoped that evangelical Christians would prod the Bush administration to soften its position on global warming.

Over the past four years a growing number of evangelical groups have embraced environmental causes, urging Christians to engage in "Creation care" and campaigning against gas-guzzling SUVs with advertisements asking, "What would Jesus drive?"

In October 2004 the leadership of the NAE, which says it has 30 million members and is the nation's largest evangelical organization, declared that mankind has "a sacred responsibility to steward the Earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part." At about the same time, the umbrella group's president, the Rev. Ted Haggard of Colorado Springs, called the environment "a values issue."

But this fledgling movement -- dubbed the "greening of evangelicals" in a front-page Washington Post article a year ago -- has also met internal resistance. In a letter to Haggard last month, more than 20 evangelical leaders urged the NAE not to adopt "any official position" on global climate change because "Bible-believing evangelicals . . . disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue."

The letter's signers amounted to a Who's Who of politically powerful evangelicals, including Charles W. Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; the Rev. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries; the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University; Donald E. Wildmon, chairman of the American Family Association; and the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition.

In a written statement yesterday, Haggard denied reports that the NAE had circulated a draft paper calling for the Bush administration to support mandatory limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

"Allow me to confirm at the outset that the NAE is not circulating any official document on the environment. We are not considering a position on global warming. We are not advocating for specific legislation or government mandates," Haggard said. His statement added that the NAE's executive committee recently passed a motion "recognizing the ongoing debate" on global warming and "the lack of consensus among the evangelical community on this issue."

Calvin DeWitt, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin who is a leading evangelical supporter of environmental causes, called the statement "a retreat and a defeat."

"A year ago, it looked as though evangelicals would become a strong, collective voice for what we call 'Creation care' and others may call environmentalism," he said. "This will have negative consequences for the ability of evangelicals to influence the White House, unfortunately and sadly."

But E. Calvin Beisner, professor of social ethics at Knox Theological Seminary, a conservative Presbyterian school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., applauded the NAE's non-position.

Beisner, who helped draft the letter to Haggard from evangelical leaders, said they had feared that the NAE was going "to assume as true certain things that we think are still debatable, such as that global warming is not only real but also almost certainly going to be catastrophically harmful; second, that it is being driven to a significant extent by human activity; and third, that some regime, some international treaty for mandatory reductions in CO2emissions, could make a significant enough drop in global emissions to justify the costs to the human economy."

 

[Andyman_1970]

It's about time. Too bad they aren't all on the same page here. Some of the most powerful evangelical leaders have vetoed this idea....

I saw this first on ABS news last night, and sadly saw Richard Land the president of the Southern Baptist Convention (I'm currently a memeber of an SBC church........but that may not be for too very much longer) speaking out against this. What can I expect though coming from people who believe they'll call get "raptured" out of this evil world and it will be destroyed..............too bad the Bible doesn't teach that........LOL

 

[MudGrrl]

What can I expect though coming from people who believe they'll call get "raptured" out of this evil world and it will be destroyed

I was just thinking about this last week.
Why keep something clean when it's going to get destroyed anyway?
Why keep it in good order when it was given to you to use up?

God: I gave you a pristine Earth
Evangelical type: Yeah, we fcked that sht up, man!

 

[Andyman_1970]

I was just thinking about this last week.
Why keep something clean when it's going to get destroyed anyway?

This mindset is so pervasive in most conservative evangelical churches. When people I go to church with found out I sold my truck so I could get something that got better gas mileage and that I recycle they look at my like.........."why are you wasting your time with that?"

It's interesting how Gnosticism has had such an influence on the church for some 2000 years, the unspoken mindset is still "earth bad heaven good".............

 

[Old Man G Funk]

This mindset is so pervasive in most conservative evangelical churches. When people I go to church with found out I sold my truck so I could get something that got better gas mileage and that I recycle they look at my like.........."why are you wasting your time with that?"

It's interesting how Gnosticism has had such an influence on the church for some 2000 years, the unspoken mindset is still "earth bad heaven good".............

That's a pretty normal teaching though. The Earth is bad. It's a holding place until someone can die and go to heaven to be "saved." While here, you have to live with a whole bunch of sinners that are inherently evil and wicked.

 

[Andyman_1970]

That's a pretty normal teaching though. The Earth is bad. It's a holding place until someone can die and go to heaven to be "saved." While here, you have to live with a whole bunch of sinners that are inherently evil and wicked.

The Hebraic understanding which I perfer and IMO is more "accurate" is that Heaven is not separated by a huge gulf but is an interlocking dimension to our own. Several times Jesus teachs about Heaven being a present reality in our life right now rather than where we go after we die. The whole Jewish concept of eternal life (olam haba) is the understanding of one living in harmony with God now on earth and in the afterlife, not just one's eternal destination.