Why does God Allow
Evil? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
Should God’s existence be
proven? /Apologeticshtml/Should the Bible and God Be Proven
Fideism vs WCG.htm
Does the Bible teach blind
faith? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Gospel of John Theory of Knowledge.htm
Is
a Sign of Jesus’ Impending Return the World’s Environmental Problems?
How bad is the world’s environment? Is its condition a sign of the end times? However, is the environment really all that
bad, especially in the United States? Are
all or most of the environmentalist scare stories really accurate?
Instead of directly arguing the case with my words
mostly, I’ll leave that task to others cited here. Consider what’s in Dixy Lee Ray and Lou Guzzo’s Trashing the
Planet and a series of opinion pieces taken mostly from the Detroit News
over the years. These stories show we
in the church have to be a lot more careful about pushing the panic buttons
concerning environmental problems as proof that Jesus’ coming is near. We in the Worldwide Church of God got
ourselves into the 1972 mess largely by focusing on the deep crisis that struck
American society and government during the 1960s and early 1970s (i.e., race
riots, assassinations, anti-war protests, the counter-culture, the rise in
crime and illegal drug use, the mammoth growth in the welfare state, etc.) as
proof the end was nigh. Then we got
burned, big time.
While I agree that the end can’t be that far off, we
have to be careful, nevertheless. The
following three books show we in our church subculture have badly exaggerated
the environmental problems of the United States and the world over the past
four decades: Edith Efron, The
Apocalyptics: How Environmental
Politics Controls What We Know About Cancer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), Dixy Lee Ray
with Lou Guzzo, Trashing the Planet:
How Science Can Help Us Deal With Acid Rain, Depletion of the Ozone, and
Nuclear Waste (Among Other Things) (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), and Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical
Environmentalist: Measuring the Real
State of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring has been decisively refuted scientifically on
many of its contentions, such as about DDT’s being a major threat to the
environment. The claim about DDT
thinning the eggshells of birds has been decisively refuted by laboratory
experiments. A friend of mine in the
local church, who at one time studied chemistry, did lab experiments in the
field which showed how quickly DDT broke down in the natural environment. It’s hardly a persistent chemical. It’s carcinogenicity has never been proven
scientifically by solid evidence.
We should be wary of misleading others by assuming
the environmentalists are automatically right.
By reading the books I mentioned above, we can know they have been
guilty of many exaggerations. Here, on
the issue of environmental problems, we in our church subculture have generally
accepted the liberal left line hook, line, and sinker, while we reject it on
other issues. I maintain it’s time to
be a lot more skeptical of this part of the liberal package deal also.
Eric
V. Snow
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Why does God Allow Evil?
Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why
Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
May Christians work on
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the New Covenant Abolish the OT Law.htm
Do you have an immortal
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and Hereafter.htm
Does the ministry have
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There an Ordained Ministry vs Edwards.html
Is the United States the
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We the Beast vs Collins.htm
Should you give 10% of
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the Argument from Silence Abolish the Old Testament Law of Tithing 0205 Mokarow
rebuttal.htm
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Jesus God.htm
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