First the politicians back out and now this. Guess its all up to geoengineering (no pressure). God won't protect humanity from environmental 'doomsday', warns Archbishop
By <http:// www. dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=y&authornamef=Daily+Mail+Reporter>Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 11:32 AM on 26th March 2009 God is not going to intervene to prevent humanity from wreaking disastrous damage to the environment, the Archbishop of Canterbury warned last night as he called for a 'radical change of heart' to prevent runaway climate change. Dr Rowan Williams said there needed to be a 'conversion' by humanity away from selfishness and greed that leads us to turn a 'blind eye' to the destruction of the environment and to our interdependence with the natural world. He warned in a lecture at York Minster that God would not guarantee a 'happy ending' and as just as God gave us free will to do 'immeasurable damage' to ourselves as individuals it seemed 'clear' that we had the same 'terrible freedom' as a human race. 'I think that to suggest that God might intervene to protect us from the corporate folly of our practices is as unchristian and unbiblical as to suggest that he protects us from the results of our individual folly or sin,' he said. 'This is not a creation in which there are no real risks - our faith has always held that the inexhaustible love of God cannot compel justice or virtue - we are capable of doing immeasurable damage to ourselves as individuals, and it seems clear that we have the same terrible freedom as a human race. 'God's faithfulness stands, assuring us that even in the most appalling disaster love will not let us go - but it will not be a safety net that guarantees a happy ending in this world.' Without a change of heart, Dr Williams warned, the world faced a number of 'doomsday scenarios' including the 'ultimate tragedy' of humanity gradually 'choked, drowned, or starved by its own stupidity.' He said: 'The disappearance of humanity from a globe no longer able to support it would be a terrible negation of God's purpose for a world in which created intelligence draws out the most transformative and rich possibilities in its material home.' In his address, Dr Williams warned that the poorest and most vulnerable and our children and grandchildren would pay the heaviest price for climate change. He attacked climate change sceptics, saying that for the residents of Bangladesh or the island nation of Tuvalu in the Pacific Ocean, denying the reality of global warming was 'precisely the opposite of reasonable' in the face of rising sea levels and the need to understand how this was affected by rising temperatures. Setting out the Christian argument for preserving the environment, Dr Williams attacked an 'unintelligent' and 'ungodly' view of the natural world. He said intelligent life was not the 'triumphant imposition' of human will upon a 'defeated natural order,' but the 'reasoned discovery' of how we live in such a way as not to destroy a balance in the natural order. He attacked the view that the reference in the Old Testament Book of Genesis to 'dominion' over non-human creation authorised the exploitation of the earth. In the Book of Genesis, he said, humanity is given the chance of 'cultivating' the garden of Eden and is not left to simply observe and stand back but is endowed with the responsibility to preserve and direct the powers of nature. In his lecture, Dr Williams said there was a need to find ways of promoting environmental responsibility through Government policies. We need ways of 'redefining business excellence' in terms of sustainability and deliberate encouragement of low carbon technologies, he added. 'An economic world in which environmental responsibility was rewarded, was assumed to be a routine aspect of practice that was both ethically defensible and profitable, would have a very different flavour from what we have generally seen for most of the last couple of centuries,' he said. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
