Sweeping Condemnation of Industrial Society
You know something’s not right when the AP calls a papal encyclical a ‘sweeping environmental manifesto!’ Isn’t that code for maniacal rant?
In a sweeping environmental manifesto aimed at spurring action, Pope Francis called Thursday for a bold cultural revolution to correct what he said was a “structurally perverse” economic system in which the rich exploited the poor, turning Earth into an “immense pile of filth.”
Is Pope Francis a refined, knowledgeable or spiritual man? He only strikes me as clever, brutal, and determined. Do you get the impression that his first version said something like, “a huge pile of s***?” I’ve read that the pope can be quite vulgar in a closed door meeting. I don’t know. I know he didn’t produce this 200-page pile on his own, but I doubt that particular line was anyone else’s. Either way I resent this characterization of the Earth, and I think you should too.
Where exactly does Pope Francis want the culture to go? A free market has no structure, only protections for life and property. To make a new structure or model is really just central planning; adding some new regulations and requirements. That kind of thing almost never helps.
Francis framed climate change as an urgent moral crisis to address in his eagerly anticipated encyclical, blaming global warming on an unfair, fossil fuel-based industrial model that harms the poor the most.
So the model warms the globe because it’s unfair and it has fossil fuels? Fossil fuels are just dead. You can’t really make fuel from things that are alive. The more dead things are, the more fossil-like. Even a tree has to grow in some dirt. You use dead fuel for living things, since they take precedence.
Oil burns cleaner than coal. Coal burns cleaner than wood. In Ireland they burn the peat. Somewhere they cook lizards over dung fires, but something is going to have to burn if you don’t want poverty and starvation. The world is built for this. It can support prosperity as well as poverty.
The document released Thursday was a stinging indictment of big business and climate doubters, and aimed to inspire courageous decisions at U.N. climate negotiations this year as well as in domestic politics and everyday life. Citing Scripture and his predecessors, the pope urged people of every faith and even no faith to undergo an awakening to save God’s creation.
Liberals are always courageous. The more destructive and evil they are the more courageous they feel. Even Al Gore, Raul Castro, and Elton John are getting heroically Catholic.
“It is not enough to balance, in the medium term, the protection of nature with financial gain, or the preservation of the environment with progress,” the pope wrote. “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster. Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress.”
No more balance! No more financial gain! No more progress! Redefine all your notions!
The world has gone mad, the Church has slipped into the catacombs, and what of Peter?
If adaptation and mitigation are what’s needed, then the do-gooder dictatorship of Francis’ “world authority” is precisely the wrong direction to go. The reason is precisely because regulation forbids adaptation.
The greater the authority, that is the less subsidiarity there is, the more the very same mega-corporations that leftists rail in their boilerplate rhetoric will be entrenched because they are the ones that will ally themselves with the authorities to destroy competition. The resulting economic system becomes one where success is impossible through entrepreneurship and instead through patronage and cronyism…kinda like Argentina, now that I think of it.
Coincidence?
Yes, we are damaging nature – human nature.
The natural environment is important because we, and the other living things, get all that we need to live from it. This is why we need to care for this environment and, thankfully, we have been well equipped to do so.
We exist also because we have been gifted with life, marriage and family. But, unfortunately, we do not truly appreciate these gifts. We abort and euthanize vulnerable souls, change the nature and significance of marriage, and create dysfunctional families. Dysfunctional families generate dysfunctional societies.
If we want to get the world right we need to first get man right. If the aim of this Encyclical is to get man to appreciate his nature and purpose then this is what should be emphasized by the Vatican.
Nothing in this world is indifferent to us
Indifferentism, liberal and infidel, has been vigorously promoted during the past half century by the dominance of Rationalism in all the lines of scientific inquiry which touch upon religion. The theory of evolution applied to the origin of man, Biblical criticism of the Old and New Testament, the comparative study of religions, archaeology, and ethnology, in the hands of men who assume as their primary postulate that there is no supernatural, and that all religions, Christianity included, are but the offspring of the feeling and thought of the natural man, have propagated a general atmosphere of doubt or positive unbelief. As a result, large numbers of Protestants have abandoned all distinctly Christian belief, while others, still clinging to the name, have emptied their creed of all its essential dogmatic contents. The doctrine of Scriptural inspiration and inerrancy is all but universally abandoned. It would not, perhaps, be incorrect to say that the prevalent view today is that Christ taught no dogmatic doctrine, His teaching was purely ethical, and its only permanent and valuable content is summed up in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. When this point is reached the Indifferentism which arose in belief joins hands with the Indifferentism of infidelity. The latter substitutes for religion, the former advocates as the only essential of religion, the broad fundamental principles of natural morality, such as justice, veracity, and benevolence that takes concrete form in social service. In some minds this theory of life is combined with Agnosticism, in others with a vague Theism, while in many it is still united with some vestiges of the Christian Faith.
I cannot decide if this pope is evil or merely stupid, either way he scares me.