The head of the Episcopal Church has finally declared something immoral, and even if the headline didn't give it away, it wouldn't take a knowledgeable person 5 seconds to guess what it is.
From here:
The highest ranking woman in the Anglican Communion has said that climate change denial is immoral and threatens the rights of the world’s poorest people. Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told The Guardian that she believes those who deny climate change are not using God’s gift of knowledge. Her comments come at the start of a month-long campaign to encourage the church’s 2.5 million members to reduce their carbon footprint.
A former Oceanographer before her ordination at the age of 40, Bishop Jefferts Schori, one of the most senior women in Christianity, said that the campaign was needed to persuade her fellow Episcopalians of the need to do something about climate change personally, whether it was lobbying governments and corporations to fight climate change, or reducing their own carbon emissions.
So the Gospel-spreading organization, the Church, is instead going to lobby "governments and corporations to fight climate change." Oh, I forgot, for the Episcopal Church, environmentalism is the Gospel, because "the world is God's body."
“I really hope to motivate average Episcopalians to see the severity of this issue, the morality of this issue,” she said. “Turning the ship in another direction requires the consolidated efforts of many people who are moving in the same direction.
Like lemmings.
“It’s hard work when you have a climate denier who will not see the reality of scientific truth,” she added.
You mean like a co-founder of Greenpeace who points out what a lot of codswallop this whole greenhouse gas/CO2 thing is.
But for Jefferts Schori, the question isn’t only scientific, it’s moral too. Referring to those who do not believe in man made climate change theory as holding “a very blind position,” she compared the need to tackle climate change as a moral imperative, akin to the American civil rights movement.
Because we missed Selma, but we can still look important if we convince everybody this thing is real.
“[Climate change] is in that sense much like the civil rights movement in this country where we are attending to the rights of all people and the rights of the earth to continue to be a flourishing place. It is certainly a moral issue in terms of the impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable around the world already.
It is only a sin if it negatively impacts the poor.
“Episcopalians understand the life of the mind is a gift of God and to deny the best of current knowledge is not using the gifts God has given you,” she added. “In that sense, yes, it could be understood as a moral issue.”
Ummm, not buying that "best of current knowledge" canard.
She believes that evangelical strains of Christianity, more commonly associated with a conservative interpretation of the religion, are becoming increasingly concerned with climate change as a social justice issue.
“One of the significant changes in particular has been the growing awareness and activism among the evangelical community who at least somewhat in the more distant past refused to encounter this issue, refused to deal with it,” Jefferts Schori said. “The major evangelical groups in this country have been much more forward in addressing this issue because they understand that it impacts the poor.”
Most "evangelicals" who are jumping on this bandwagon are getting all their news from MSNBC and think having an iPhone is much more important than being a Christian.
But unlike many Christian denominations which are divesting from fossil fuels – the United Methodist Church has just sold its holdings in coal companies from its pension fund – Jefferts Schori does not believe that divestment is the best way forward.
Modern day United Methodists = Episcopalians with less money and bad liturgy.
“If you divest you lose any direct ability to influence the course of a corporation’s behavior,” she said. “I think most pragmatists realise that we can’t close the spigot on the oil wells and close the coal mines immediately without some other energy source to shift to.”
And of course, the Episcopal Church wouldn't dare make any investment changes that might cause it to lose money.
Her words come as the Vatican is preparing an encyclical on climate change, due to be released in June, which the Pope is said to hope will inspire world leaders to adopt tougher measures on climate change in Paris at the end of the year.
Apologies to my Roman Catholic friends, but I keep saying this Pope is only about five years behind the Episcopal Church.
1 comment:
I'll believe it when Al Gore moves into a thatch hut and sheds 150 pounds. I'd believe it if the P.B. hadn't flown to China and other various places at the expense of the poor who, according to her moral theology, must suffer for every molecule of C02 we emit.
Finally, the Episcopal church's support for abortion makes sense. With fewer people, the world will be saved from the C02 those people would have emitted.
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