Monday, March 10, 2008

New Sins...

...and only to reiterate the point — or "my" point, if I was going to be an asshole — that Christians are instructed to be good stewards of the land. See the new one below:

Thou shall not pollute the Earth.

[add labels -- ai]
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4 comments:

Tecumseh said...

Cell phones pollute the Earth. Polluting is a sin. Ergo, cell phones are sinful. I've been saying that all along, but I don't think JJ got it.

3/10/2008 1:32 PM
Shyster said...

I couldn't get into the other article, but if the comment about Christians being instructed to be good stewards was a serious one, I'd disagree. There are two famous quotes in the bible which I cannot remember, but they are quite different in terms of stewardship ethics. One instructs humans to be stewards. One instructs humans to, basically, dominate nature. We go back and forth. On the bright side, if we are stewards our species survives, and if we continue our domination ethic, maybe we'll all go to Heaven soon following an Armageddon-like break-down of the Earth's natural systems. It's win win really.

3/10/2008 3:38 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

but if the comment about Christians being instructed to be good stewards was a serious one, I'd disagree. There are two famous quotes in the bible which I cannot remember, but they are quite different in terms of stewardship ethics. One instructs humans to be stewards. One instructs humans to, basically, dominate nature. We go back and forth. On the bright side, if we are stewards our species survives, and if we continue our domination ethic, maybe we'll all go to Heaven soon following an Armageddon-like break-down of the Earth's natural systems.

Eco-Revelation is quite similar to televangelists who want to scare you into believing them rather than convince with logic. And the geological record which is measured in billions of years suggests — even in light of planetary warming — we're due for an ice age in about 15,000 years. Shyster, I'm looking at the bible as literature, and it certainly does have a shepherd element in there, along with an ethic that instructs the Christian to take care of their planet. This has been expounded on by academics and, to put it bluntly, a shit-ton of other players in the past who have themselves interpreted and made a case for the Bible as telling them to be good ecologists. Don't take my word for it, though. See this latest piece of Oxford University Press scholarship:

Roger S. Gottlieb, A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future (Oxford University Press, 2006).

3/10/2008 3:48 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

Thanks for adding the labels, too, AI.

3/10/2008 8:39 PM

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