A View from the West Coast... Faithful to the Holy Catholic Church & All it's Teachings www.westcoastcatholic.com
Friday, February 02, 2007
Global Warming - weighting in on the issue
I'm still trying to figure out this issue on Global Warming. I tell you I have some reservations about supporting this having done some studying. I'm in the middle of reading a few booking on this topic including Gore's input, some scientific studies, many news articles and first and foremost the Catholic teachings on Stewardship of God's creation.
...I'm still studying the issue.
I do have some interesting articles to share with you this evening. One is entitled 'A Necessary Apocalypse
A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West.
For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands.. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it's not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in "the rock higher than I" - a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy.
Despite the claims of our current crop of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, this is not simply brain-dead foolishness. Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don't yet understand. (A much wiser atheist, the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote in On Human Nature that he intended to demonstrate that religious belief played an evolutionary role and could thus be explained by Darwinism. That was thirty years ago - if he ever succeeded, I haven't heard about it.)
When religious belief is subverted, it does not, as Chesterton implied, simply vanish. It is almost immediately replaced by another set of beliefs on a similar level of abstraction and serving the same purpose. Sometimes it's an import, such as Buddhism or TM. Sometimes it's a creed deliberately created to serve a political agenda, as we see in Nazism and Communism. Sometimes it's the goofy SoCal syncretism currently expressed in Wicca and Neopaganism. ("If people seriously want to be pagans," the late Joe Myers, a Christian brother of my acquaintance once said. "They'd become Roman Catholics.") And sometimes they're a combination, a weird melange of ideas picked up from various sources that (and usually not coincidentally) also serve a political purpose. Which brings us to environmentalism.
An interesting perspective, one I hadn't read/heard before.
Here's another from the same author. ' Resisting Global Warming Panic'
This one I read this morning:'Global warming sees polar bears stranded on melting iSwimming 100 miles is not a big deal for a polar bear, especially a fat one," said Dr Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service.
"They just kind of float along and kick. But as the ice gets farther out from shore because of warming, it’s a longer swim that costs more energy and makes them more vulnerable."ce'
What are they trying to say ? If the bear has to swim 105 miles it's doomed? Are they saying that the bear doesn't' know to swim within it's own limitations? If it's getting too far from shore it doesn't know that it should start swimming for the main land? If that were true we wouldn't have Polar Bears today.
For me Global Warming is a given in the sense that there have been other periods in time when the earth has been both warmer and cooler. the LCO ( Little Climatic Optimum or Medieval Warming Period) time period is very interesting.
Anyway, for me GW is a fact of life, and man does contribute to this affect. Yet how much he contributes to this affect is still up in the air for me. Yes man has a responsibility to be good stewards of God's gift of Creation, but I hate the politics involved with this Global Warming.
My goal is to find the real facts what ever they may be, not the '08 election talking points.
More on this later...
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