I had lunch with Luke and Martha the other day.

I like Luke and Martha a lot, they’re lovely people and great committed Christians who’ve dedicated the best part of their lives to Christ and to ministry. We disagree on one or two issues, and unfortunately — prompted by Al Gore staring at us from the cover of ‘The Melbourne Anglican’ — our conversation immediately turned to the most contentious of these, the supposed problem of ‘Human Induced Climate Change’.

I began to explain the reasons why the correlation between human activities and observed climatic variations is at best an extremely speculative and unlikely theory, and at worst a deliberate fabrication — an outright lie — but we were unable to engage in any interesting debate of the topic, because merely questioning this theory was making Luke and Martha angry.

Their reaction: horror and pity, that curious combination heretics against any of the doctrines of the times quickly get used to.

To change the subject

So I changed the subject, which is what I’m about to do here.

Despite us being friends there is no prospect of me convincing Luke or Martha any time soon even to listen to any of the arguments against the Human Induced Climate Change doctrine, let alone to seriously consider whether the theory could be false. And if I can’t persuade my friends, certainly I can’t persuade a reader of this story, so I won’t try.

But there is one point that I would invite readers to consider, especially those — which is probably most people these days — who believe humans are destroying the Earth.

During our conversation, Martha said something I think was very telling. She said (and I’m paraphrasing this rather roughly from memory) that as Christians we need to accept that humans have to take responsibility for the effect we have on the planet. She stated this is supported by scripture — because God made us stewards of the world.

Presented cleverly, as it always is presented cleverly (not to mention passionately, fashionably, incessantly, ubiquitously and continuously from early childhood onward), the Green philosophy can appeal to Christians. It seems to connect with so many things we know to be true, that God placed us over the rest of Creation, but that Man is fallen and contaminated by evil, and so we must control our innately destructive nature.

But this is a subtle and seductive alteration to Christian wisdom. By rewriting the Genesis revelation into an environmentalist narrative, it transposes the spiritual message of the Bible into a purely materialistic plane — a plane in which God is absent.

And it is immensely seductive. I was there too. I also grew up with the songs, the books, the movies, the slogans. ‘Where will the children play?’ ‘We have to get ourselves back to the garden.’ ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.’

I love all that stuff!

But it’s not my religion.

Please consider this

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

There is an ancient spiritual belief that sees man as an inherently negative being, whose very existence is destructive, a blot, an insult to God and an assault on God’s creation, but it is not the Christian view.

Christians know that Man is fallen, but that he is also a higher spiritual being, and is also saved. Man has wedded his higher nature, his intellectual gifts, with love for God’s creation curiosity for the secrets of creation.

Man — divorced from God — gave us Communism, Nazism, the Mongol Horde and the French Revolution.

But Man is also he who has solved world hunger (although not yet the deeper problem of tyranny). Man is he who currently drives disease from the world like a routed enemy fleeing before a victorious army. Beasts kill and rend each other without conscience. Man is the only one whose heart cries out in love for all living beings. Man doesn’t pollute like the beasts who drop their waste on the ground. Man is he who replants the forests, who constructs great projects of public health and welfare. He devotes the power of his intellect to improve the well being of human, animal and plant. It is he who created a garden where there was wilderness; in the Nile valley, the two rivers, the terraces of Asia, and in the beautiful, green and leafy suburbs of every Western city.

Man tends the roses and sweeps the driveway.

Man is he who built a whole culture on the bond of family love, and the spiritual quest for righteousness (for what are freedom and justice if not manifestations of righteousness).

This is the Christian understanding of Man, made in the image of God.

If you want to get metaphysical, there is one who says ‘Man is that low creature of dust and clay, unworthy of God and unfit to rule God’s creation’. That being is Iblis the proud!

Think about this.

I don’t ask you to deny your dearly held beliefs on Human Induced Climate Change or even throw away your Joni Mitchell albums (I kept mine), but just give some thought the philosophical assumptions that underlie such theories, and consider how much of what is believed about Man’s influence on the environment is simply premised on these assumptions rather than proven by solid evidence.

The rest will follow.

Update:

Ezra comments:

Technology isn’t a neutral thing which is self evidently good. It’s morally qualified by the philosophical commitments of those who use it.

My reply:

Technology is an abstract term, so necessarily generalised statements about it will rapidly break down in specifics. Furthermore, I agree that philosophical commitment — as one aspect of spiritual awareness, the essential component of a meaningful life — is very important. Wicked tyrants can twist any good thing to evil purposes, as the Communists have proven on countless occasions.

Even then, however, the tyrants who deny the benefits of technology to their people — such as the Maoists, with Pol Pot their most infamous example, Saddam Hussein withholding food and medicine to his population, or the many Communist slave-masters who ground their people down to near mediaeval subsistence — cause harm more often than the technologically sophisticated exceptions like the Nazis, although with the latter the power of technology makes them more lethal.

But such abominations aside, is starvation a moral good? Or disease? Or childhood mortality or premature death? Perhaps an extreme Green would see these as necessary, justified or even righteous, but no sane individual. What about destitution? Ignorance? Unfulfilled potential?

Technology represents the fruits of Man’s intellectual gifts — given to him by God. And on balance it is indeed an enormous moral good, both to ourselves and ultimately all living things.

Ha ha! What a brilliant post!

[T]he same way a brain-damaged child simply cannot perform the basic mental functions of speech and reason is said to be mentally retarded, a man whose conscience cannot reach the most obvious, practical and necessary conclusions of moral law is morally retarded.

Moral retardation can be detected when man’s conscience is not telling him the moral information he needs to live his day-to-day life. If your conscience tells you human life is no more valuable than that of a cat or pig, then, logically, you should be able to castrate your son with no more moral ramifications than gelding your tomcat, or likewise cut up your wife for bacon. This is not a practical way to live.

…

Are we pre-eminent above other species in acts of justice, charity, oblative love, beauty, in pomp and circumstances, in the building of cathedrals, the writing of symphonies, the launching of moonshots? The question is absurd in the asking. No animal cares about these things, or has the capacity to understand them. You can have a space race between Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe Stalin. We are not competing with the bears to see who puts the first pawprint on Mars.

So in what sense is it “perversely comforting” to contemplate the annihilation of our species and the vanity of all human hopes and aspirations? Only someone who looks on man with a shudder of distaste is comforted.

Someone who is rooting for mankind, a human, would not ask these things. Someone who is cheering for the death of humanity, a monster, to him it is the most natural thing in the world.

So here is my question. When did the atheists suddenly turn into monsters?

Read it and relish it!

This is a very nice short history of how Christians ended the slave trade. I read it in printed form at church a while back. An uplifting and enlightening piece.

It veers off into nonsense right at the end — something about climate change — but that doesn’t detract much from this very good essay.

I just posted an essay I really like on my political Blog — littletinsoldier.net.

These are the main historical characteristics of Christian/Muslim history:

• 1500 years of peace
• brothers in honourable combat
• a bulwark against invasion
• a zone of tolerance
• allies against the real monsters

…

Only in recent years has a brand of terrorist totalitarianism thrown on the fleece of the Islamic religion. And a handful of shabby bandit leaders and their rabble of cut throats have presumed to declare war on the West on behalf of the great Religion of Peace.

Is that really enough for us to forget what beloved cousins the Muslims have been to us all these centuries?

Read it here.

Here’s another John Donne poem. I love John Donne. Short poems, but you can read and ponder them for hours. On the surface, he’s so cool — in the old sense of emotionally restrained — and his poems are very delicate and mannered, but the more more you ponder them, the more the emotional and spiritual depths, as well as his gentle humour, reveal themselves.

THE DAMP.

by John Donne

WHEN I am dead, and doctors know not why,
     And my friends’ curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part,
When they shall find your picture in my heart,
     You think a sudden damp of love
     Will thorough all their senses move,
And work on them as me, and so prefer
Your murder to the name of massacre,

Poor victories ; but if you dare be brave,
     And pleasure in your conquest have,
First kill th’ enormous giant, your Disdain ;
And let th’ enchantress Honour, next be slain ;
     And like a Goth and Vandal rise,
     Deface records and histories
Of your own arts and triumphs over men,
And without such advantage kill me then,

For I could muster up, as well as you,
     My giants, and my witches too,
Which are vast Constancy and Secretness ;
But these I neither look for nor profess ;
     Kill me as woman, let me die
     As a mere man ; do you but try
Your passive valour, and you shall find then,
Naked you have odds enough of any man.

I especially love the opening lines; the delicate switch from the witty (black humour of his friends cutting open his corpse) to the touchingly sentimental (’they shall find your picture in my heart’).

The rest of the poem maintains this gentle balance between witty wordplay (you can almost imagine him recalling a humorous conversation with his beloved wife) and the touchingly personal poetry of love.

Playfully he begins inserting those charming Christian sermons his poems are so beloved for - kill the giant Disdain, slay th’enchantress Honour, and such. A good Christian, he doesn’t flatter his beloved with high sounding falsehoods, but speaks to her honestly and uncondescendingly.

Then he gets more serious, describing his witches Constancy and Sectretness. Most would think of these as virtues, but to a devout Christian like Donne there is no doubt a pride, selfishness and even a little idolatry in these emotions. Perhaps after his bereavement, he felt there was something a little unhealthy in clinging so devotedly to his memories, in loving a memory — and yet our flaws are what make us human and our humanity is what connects us God.

Finally, the musical double couplet at the end; kill me as woman, let me die as man … naked you have odds enough of any man. What a beautiful compliment he pays his lover, ‘naked’ — her true self stripped of camouflage — would make any man overcome with love for her. He looks into his heart and sees anew that his constancy is not mere play-acting.

So witty, with its cheeky lovers’ riddles, and underneath a sincere and devoted love poem, made achingly poignant by his dear wife’s untimely death.

You’re a true heart, John Donne. And this is the poetry of true love.

There’s a Sudanese family who come to the little church. They’re refugees from massacre and persecution by terrorist bandits. They certainly seem to be a long way from home.

So many people travel and migrate these days. My wife is from Japan. We get back there when we can, but she’s a long way from home, too.

I grew up in New Zealand. That’s not so very far from where I live now, but I’m a long way from home. In fact, even in the town I grew up in I sometimes felt like I was a long way from home.

The Vicar and his wife, in the little church, were both born and raised within a few miles of here. But the truth is they’re both an equally long way from home.

If you read this, you know I’m thinking of you. We may never meet again in this life, but we’ll have plenty of time to catch up when we all return home.