Christians don’t give a crap for Mother Nature,only Mother Mary. After vall, they all plan it live in heaven after the rapture!! :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: 
No, it’s only those heathen CATHOLICS that worship Mother Mary!
I was raised fundie, in a GOP-dominated corner of the country. Screwed me up, bad. I had strong pro-nature influences early on, but in my teens, I came to believe that society in general was against what I believed important (sustainability, etc.) & sort of shut down my conscience & stopped looking for anything but short-term gratification, because I felt so alone. It wasn’t just the fundies, but consumer culture, too.
The “you can’t trust the infidel/sinner” programming contributed to this, of course.
I am shocked every time I meet an environmentalist.
So, yeah, it’s real.
Would it make anyone feel better if I said that a couple of weeks ago I taught a church lesson (to teenage girls) about the importance of taking care of the earth, and the concept of stewardship?
Probably not.
Good for you, dangermom!
I think my mom & I just drifted into “Christian Coalition” dominated churches when I was a teen. And as a teen, one is surrounded by knee-jerking teens, so it seemed worse. A lot of those people may have matured.
Well, it might help to ease the fears of some who think that all (Fundamentalist) Christians believe as former Secretry Watt did. (Of course, iffen yo’re one o’ them lib’ral Episcopalians, it might not affect them at all, since yo’re not one o’ them.)
(I have still seen no evidence that a majority of Fundamentalists are against environmental protection. The percentage of anti-environmentalists may be higher among Fundamentalists than among other groups (a point that has also received mostly anecdotal evidence), but that percentage has not yet been demonstrated to be greater the 50%.)
Years ago I heard Rush Limbaugh dismiss the environmental movement on the grounds that it was arrogant for man to believe that he could destroy God’s creation.
I’ve heard him make a slightly different argument this week. As regards the hurricanes, he used that as an example of nature putting us in our place, and the sheer scale of the world and the force of nature should humble us, and prove the lie of the arrogance implied in the environmentalists stance that we will fundamentally change the world by using too much freon or somesuch. We are essentially powerless in the face of nature for good or ill.
I suspect he has a point as concerns the more esoteric nutty environmentalists, but I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on the “our actions don’t effect the earth” thesis.
If you define “God’s creation” as the whole universe, it would indeed be arrogant for us to believe we could destroy it. One planet’s biosphere is a different matter. We’ve been making profound and mostly destructive changes to Earth’s biosphere ever since our ancestors figured out how to make fire-hardened wooden spears.
All we’re doing is changing the ecology. We can’t destroy it. We’re not that powerful. All that rot about mankind destroying the planet is just that: ROT!
Of course, it’s quite likely we’re changing the ecology in such a way that humans (and a lot of other things) won’t be able to survive on it anymore. But frankly in 50 million years (a blink of an eye in planetary time) equilibrium will be re-established and lots of new species will be filling those ecological niches again.
Everything humankind did will have been just a minor blip, really.
So it goes.
Scylla: * As regards the hurricanes, [Limbaugh] used that as an example of nature putting us in our place, and the sheer scale of the world and the force of nature should humble us, and prove the lie of the arrogance implied in the environmentalists stance that we will fundamentally change the world by using too much freon or somesuch. We are essentially powerless in the face of nature for good or ill.*
Cool-o. I collect examples of “conservative eco-mysticism”, and this sounds like a prime specimen. You can easily find examples of nutty enviros on the left making mystical arguments about some sort of transcendental concept of the environment (“Nature”, “Gaia”, the “biosphere”, whatever), irrespective of whether there’s any scientific data to support them. But what many people don’t realize is that lots of people on the right, who often consider themselves more “rational” or “hard-headed” or “scientific”, make the same kind of air-headed hand-waving assertions—just in the opposite direction, as far as policy goes.
This one’s a classic example of what I call the “Puny Humans” subspecies of such arguments. “We human beings are much too weak and trivial to be able to alter God’s Creation in any significant way, and it’s merely arrogant to suggest that we could!” (Implication: we can go on polluting as much as we want however we want, and there won’t be any consequences worth worrying about. Gee, how convenient.)
As BG and QtM point out, the “Puny Humans” argument has a point if we’re talking about anthropogenic effects on the eventual fate of the universe, or even the eventual fate of the planet. Not likely that there’ll ever be anything Homo sapiens can do that would have a noticeable effect on that scale.
If we’re talking about anthropogenic effects on the environment insofar as it affects us, though, the “Puny Humans” argument is total bullshit. Of course we can cause major changes in our environment on a local or regional scale, and we often have. Moreover, it now looks as though we are quite capable of causing some major changes in our environment on a global scale; in fact, it seems to be pretty generally agreed that we will do so if we don’t reduce emissions, and it may well be that we already have done so. Conservative eco-mystics like Limbaugh who try to use “Puny Humans” rhetoric in this case are talking out of their unscientific asses.
Limbaugh’s citing hurricanes as evidence in support of the “Puny Humans” hypothesis strikes me as particularly lame. “Oooh, look, it’s a tremendously big and powerful natural phenomenon with massively destructive consequences and humans are powerless to stop it! So it’s obvious that there’s no way humans could have contributed to causing it, or any other big powerful natural phenomena! We’re just too puny! Whew! Not our fault! Go back to what you were doing, folks!”
Look, doofus, major forest fires are also tremendously big and powerful phenomena with massively destructive consequences that humans are essentially powerless to stop. But that doesn’t mean that human activity never contributes to causing them, now does it?
Not that I’m arguing this point of view of Limbaugh’s mind you, just trying to accurately portray it. The “puny humans” summary of yours is indeed a good one. Now that you mention it, I see that that’s what he was shooting for.
If we were not such puny humans and can change the earth willy-nilly, why can’t we even stop a simple hurricane? Was more like the thesis.
Scylla: If we were not such puny humans and can change the earth willy-nilly, why can’t we even stop a simple hurricane? Was more like the thesis.
Thanks for the clarification, Scylla. As you recognize (although Limbaugh probably doesn’t), his thesis is still fallacious. By Limbaugh’s logic, I could argue that humans are never responsible for starting massive uncontrollable forest fires. After all, if we were powerful enough to cause such a huge impact on the environment “willy-nilly” like that, then we’d naturally be powerful enough to put the fire out, right?
But since we’re not, then obviously we shouldn’t be “arrogant” enough to think that our actions could have caused it. Well, isn’t that comforting. Go ahead and toss those lighted butts into the dry pine needles, campers; Rush said it’s okay because we’re “powerless in the face of nature”, so anything bad that happens isn’t our fault. Conservative eco-mysticism has absolved us from blame, yay!
(Me, I always thought conservatives were big on “personal responsibility”, but I obviously haven’t been keeping up with some of the latest developments.)
Well, not necessarily. I read a lot of SF – one thing that teaches you is to consider all the possibilities. Possible futures of life on earth include:
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What you described: We humans render the environment incapable of supporting us. We go extinct, along with a lot of other species. But Earth’s biosphere keeps ticking along and eventually returns to equilibrium. See After Man: A Zoology of the Future, by Dougal Dixon (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998): An imaginative exercise – after mankind is gone, along with a lot of other large mammals, others emerge to fill the niches – e.g., the penguins evolve into whalelike creatures to replace the extinct cetaceans.
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We humans destroy ourselves, and Earth’s biosphere, entirely. We do have the technology, you know. One good global thermonuclear war . . . the result might not be complete extinction of life on earth, but it would be close enough that it might be tens of millions of years before the planet can support any lifeform larger than a cockroach.
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We humans destroy the biosphere while still preserving ourselves, after a fashion. See Larry Niven’s collection of stories, The Flight of the Unicorn, set on a future earth which is lifeless except for humans, who live under domes, and the “dole yeast” they grow in vats for food. The air outside the domes is polluted and unbreathable.
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We manage to preserve both ourselves and the biosphere – in many SF stories, we do this by establishing space-based industries, thus relieving Earth of the burden of absorbing our pollution.
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Jesus comes back, the damned go to Hell, the saved go to Heaven, and what happens to Earth’s biosphere after that is essentially irrelevant in the more important divine scheme of things.
Cite?
I’m still dubious that we could impact the planet in such a way that it would make a difference in 50 to 100 million years from now. Remember, I agree we can wipe ourselves (and many other species) out quite readily. But even with our current long-term half-life radioactive toys, I’m not convinced we could do lastingdamage.
And citing SF writers don’t count!
Here’s a cite to a Wikipedia article on nuclear winter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter It concludes, I must admit, “Although such nuclear war would undoubtedly be devastating, the degree of damage to life on Earth as a whole remains controversial.”
But, look at it this way: Do you honestly believe an all-out nuclear exchange – one that would involve a majority of nuclear warheads now in existence being detonated – would have less impact on the biosphere than that comet that wiped out the dinosaurs? I think we really are talking “extinction-level event” here.
You missed a couple, BrainGlutton:
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We manage to save ourselves, & a passable environment, but the diversity of species never manages to bounce back, because it was based on dumb luck in the first place.
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“Jesus” “comes back” & removes all the humans to an illusory heaven. The world (which is the more important thing) muddles on haphazardly, with mass extinctions still happening due to previous human actions & no human caretakers to stop it. E.g., the Mediterranean becomes entirely a single mutant alga (which is already happening.)
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Zeus smites most of the Western World for believing in that pernicious superstition of Christianity. (Actually, this is already happening, too; look at the hurricanes. Oh, wait, this was the joke item. :eek: )
What exactly do you mean by “dumb luck” in this context?
Arguably, biodiversity isn’t a given. A system doesn’t necessarily grow in complexity because you dump more energy into it. It may just grow more energetic.
We lucked into a world where life spread over the planet & adapted. Some of those environments could as easily not become fertile. Some never did.
So what now? In an era of global trade, competition may tend to eliminate species. In an era of humanism, human competition will obliterate biomes. It happens all the time, now. It could reach a point when the state the planet would be left in, & the species that would be left, would be doing well to just hang on. Biodiversity could continue to drop for a million years.