Christians believe humankind is God’s all-time favorite creation because He tells us so in the Bible. But leftist/socialists often known as Democrats think humans are an evil, toxic blight bent on destroying the planet through heinous activities like gassing up our cars. Boom. This is the war of the opposing worldviews going on today and it’s worldwide. It encompasses every important issue including man-caused global warming.
Leftists think homo sapiens started out as a random blob of cells zapped by electricity (no word on where the cells and electricity came from without a primal source such as God) that evolved into a greedy, evil animal with the magical ability to control the climate. Never mind that we can’t control or even predict tsunamis, earthquakes, or next week’s weather -- all we need is a few computer models and a religious faith in our own brilliance to foretell the temperature 30 years from now.
Arrogant leftists who think that by banning the earth’s homemade fuels like coal, oil and gas they can control the climate should heed God’s challenge to Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding, Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Have you commanded the morning since your days began, And caused the dawn to know its place…Have you entered the treasury of snow…By which way is light diffused, Or the east wind scattered over the earth? Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, That an abundance of water may cover you? Can you send out lightnings, that they may go, And say to you, ‘Here we are!’? Would you indeed annul My judgment? Would you condemn Me that you may be justified? Have you an arm like God?” (Job Ch. 38: 4-5, 12, 22, 24-25, 34-35, Ch. 40: 8-9)
God uses some divine sarcasm to school us that He alone, not man, commands the weather, from the snow and frost to the wind, rain and lightning. Get over yourselves, measly humans; I’ve got this, He says. So Christians aren’t worried if the climate changes. It’s obvious to us that God set up natural elements that shift the climate over the eons from warmer to cooler and back again in historically well-known cycles. Just a few decades ago the big panic was global cooling that would freeze the planet in its tracks. The latest raving lefty bugaboo is global warming. Big whup.
Leftist non-believers who call God a bearded sky-monkey ignore that ten years after Al Gore’s dark warnings, literally none of his predictions have come true: no islands have drowned; nor have the huge populations who were to die from rising seas or heat-blasted crops actually expired; the polar ice caps not only stubbornly refuse meltdown but ironically their ice is so thick it traps climate research ships. And the polar bears are just fine, in fact thriving.
Despite NASA scientists finding global temperatures have only increased 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, despite Al Gore and the UN’s serious errors in promising massive climate disasters, despite the fact (from the U.S. Geological Survey among others) that only .038 percent of earth’s atmosphere is actually carbon dioxide so to reduce it would be totally futile, liberals insist that carbon fuels must be eradicated to save the earth. Since those fuels drive economic prosperity both here and in desperately poor countries, the leftists who like to think they’re compassionate “progressives” are really in the most basic sense anti-progress and anti-poor people.
Christians aren’t worried about climate change because they hold the biblical view that God has a master plan that favors His human children: “’For I know the thoughts that I think toward you,’ says the Lord, “thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.’”( Jeremiah 29:11- 13)
The Lord God even considers His human creation so special He made us “in His own image…male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27) Shocking: a Supreme Being so politically incorrect he thinks there are only two genders!
We are the only creatures God made as images of Himself, sharing with us some of His spirituality, His ability to love, to forgive, to reason, and to live creatively. Human consciousness is inarguably different from and far more advanced than that of animals. While God clearly thinks humans are very special, the left reviles us as just another animal but more irredeemable and deplorable; they think dolphins are a superior species..
Yet we’re so special that God entrusted us to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:28 This includes dolphins. Lefties’ heads explode in thunderous volleys over this one. “Dominion” is defined in the dictionary as “power or right of governing and controlling” --- anti-Christians insist that God here gives evil man permission to despoil and demolish the planet.
But of course this is nonsense; why would a person bulldoze his own home? We are to be caretakers and good stewards of the planet. God meant we should care tenderly for his creation as a farmer tends his crops or a rancher her cattle, horses, and sheep. But because we are in charge of the animals we can also eat them.
When the Creator gave humans the duty to protect the animals he made, He gave Christians even more responsibility as environmentalists than non-believers can ever claim. Of course, humankind can, and sometimes has, been derelict in our duty and we must strive to do better.
But notice God never gives man dominion over the climate: over the skies or the rain or the thunderbolts, or the atmosphere’s greenhouse gases. God makes it clear He will take care of all that. In the beginning He very carefully calibrated earth’s atmosphere to support life. The atmosphere contains 99 percent oxygen and nitrogen. A bit more or less and earth would be uninhabitable. Carbon dioxide is only a trace element like about a dozen other gases.
Christians know that God makes generous provision for His creation, in ways unbelievers never grasp. Is it an accident of evolution that the earth provides a free, all-you-can-eat grass buffet for the herbivores that depend on it, while those animals in turn supply the carnivores with entrees? And could it be that God in his pre-planned genius placed the dinosaurs and plants here millions of years ago so their carbonized remains would eventually give us humans the carbon fuel we need to run civilization, thereby improving our lives?
What a crazy idea – that God actually wants the best for us.
God is likely very pro-carbon since the coal, oil, gas, and water power He gave us took His humans out of their caves and huts, transforming their meager camping-out-all-the-time existence into the miracle of modern prosperity. Carbon fuels have introduced us, via electricity, to the joys of cooking, heating, air conditioning, dishwashers, microwaves, flat screen TVs, computers, and car road trips, to name just a few.
But I don’t think God is in favor of the “renewable energy” of wind and solar because turbines and solar collectors are murder machines for the precious birds that God wants us to protect. Millions of them have been sliced and diced by the turbines and scorched to death by solar panels. Big problem, greenies. Plus they need carbon fuel back-up.
To believe global warming will destroy the planet you have to believe that God placed a carbon poison pill in His creation that would lead to human prosperity and then to human annihilation. But God promises us good, not malevolence. So we answer: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” Psalm 24:1 And we’re good with that.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and author who writes for Townhall.com, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, American Thinker, BarbWire and elsewhere. More columns: https://www.facebook.com/JoyOverbeckColumnist Follow her on Twitter @JoyOverbeck1
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