350

I happened upon Speaking of Faith as I was running errands this evening. Every time I've heard the show (on NPR) I've been intrigued. Krista Tippett was interviewing Bill McKibben about climate change. His personal journey led him to somewhat accidentally become an activist in this field.

I've been on the somewhat concerned side about climate change for a while. Some of those close to me have said, "Oh it's just a natural cycle." Others have said the now infamous, "It's all going to burn anyway." May God grant that this self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't come true.

My position has been, yes, climate always changes on a long enough scale. But humans have never caused an ice age. My major concern is whether we're causing the climate to change. If we are, we must stop! If it's other "natural" causes, so be it.

Bill McKibben gave the clearest perspective I've heard on the matter. He's not an alarmist, but he's sounding a very loud alarm. For millennia the count of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been 275 ppm +/- 10. This started to climb shortly after the industrial revolution when coal became the fuel du jour. With coal, gas, and oil burning becoming ubiquitous, we have now reached about 390 ppm. A couple of years ago, scientists using pluriform models calculated that our Earth can sustain a maximum of 350 ppm. According to McKibben, we're in desperate shape.

However, all is not lost. He likens this to a visit to the doctor. A doctor might tell you, "You need to watch what you eat or you're going to have trouble down the road." That's where we were 50 years ago. Now the doctor is saying, "I'm surprised you haven't had a heart attack. Stop your bad habits now, or you're dead!"

McKibben is campaigning to get people to live more neighborly. That's what I love about his climate approach. He doesn't think we need more technology per se, though that will help. Fundamentally we must change our lifestyles or, for instance, hundreds of millions of people will die from dengue fever. With a small increase in temperature, the dengue bearing mosquito is becoming far more prevalent. And it's an all-day mosquito, so netting won't help. Four percent of the world's population accounts for 25 percent of the carbon emissions. And that says America isn't being very neighborly if we're helping to inflict debilitating diseases on folks in Bangladesh who ride their bikes everywhere.

This has already gone long and there are several other fascinating ideas to share. Listen to Bill McKibben on Speaking of Faith or at Q, and he mentions how we've flipped the script in Job. That was the thing I set out to write about! But he tells it well. McKibben's website is www.350.org.

It is the distant future . . .

There's outrage swirling in a very small portion of America, namely the portion that thinks James Dobson is still relevant but disagrees with him. His organization, Focus on the Family (which does a lot of wonderful things, and would be fine if they didn't talk about culture or politics or Bible translations), released a letter from a "2012 Christian" bemoaning life after Obama. As the fifth element of journalistic integrity, I have chosen not to read either the letter or even Jim Wallis's response to it before I respond. The very idea of a letter from the distant future gives me my own wonderful idea.

I'm going to write a letter as a 2008 Christian to all the chumps in 2000 (the year the robots sang the song "The Humans Are Dead"). Because I'm generous, I'll even address the letter to the chumps in 2004. (Chagrined confession: Generous epistolator=double chump.)

Dear Voter in, you pick, 2000 or 2004,

It's 2008, and we mercifully have an opportunity to try to salvage America. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of people here who want to continue destroying it. Does this greeting shock and appall you? Good. But let me explain.

There was a terrible attack on New York City in late summer 2001. Turns out some peevish Muslims hate us, and they changed the New York skyline forever. They killed 3,000 people in the process. I hate hate like that, and there probably wasn't a whole lot that could have been done to prevent it. I do know that President Clinton and the guy you're going to elect both ignored a quite a bit of intelligence that pointed toward the attack. But don't worry . . . your new President will respond appropriately. He'll invade Afghanistan to root out the terrorists who fostered this attack. The leaders won't have been captured by 2008, but whatever. The President will try to establish democracy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but that will be somewhat questionable. It will be a pretty good effort, though.

The President will then follow faulty intelligence (this isn't irony juxtaposing this with the thing about the Muslims earlier; I'm serious) and invade Iraq. Saddam Hussein is developing nuclear weapons and harboring "terrorists." The awesome thing is, "terrorists" will come in and wreak havoc in Iraq after we invade and eventually capture Hussein and watch the "court" pop his head off (by hanging, not by a technical "beheading").

You might want to savor your civil liberties. There will be a significant trend to undermine established legal procedures for intel gathering in the interest of "national security." This includes eavesdropping on phone calls without warrants, monitoring internet traffic with impunity, and having access to library records.

Your new President will look into the souls of Vladimir Putin and Angela Merckel and discern that they are good people. I will hear a dude on the bus a few days ago saying that Putin will eat the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate alive if he's elected. Is that why your future President thinks Putin is a good man?

Your future President will pour something to the tune of a trillion dollars of your money into wars that, while they may make life better for some people, were entered into under faulty premises, particularly in virulent contravention of just war practices.

Under the President's watch, the national deficit will balloon to something like $7 trillion. (I'm just going from memory here. It's not like I'm the quintessence of journalistic integrity or anything. Sad thing is, I'm doing a lot better than most of the future media.) It might be worth noting that your President's party is symbolized by an elephant, just to give perspective on the whole spending thingy. What's that legend about elephants? Do they have really good memories or really bad memories? Either way, it's startling how little your future elephants will remember or pay attention to history. Also, if it happens that elephants legendarily have good memories, it doesn't matter if I can't remember that; I'm turning into more of a donkey every day.

There's a lot of water under the bridge. I don't remember if you've seen the Dow hit 10,000 yet or not. As shocking as that would have seemed to people just a few years ago, it happens. In fact, it'll get up to 14,000. But don't worry; all our future money is in the pooper now that the Dow has crashed to 8,500 or so. Yeah, the whole market system has crashed pretty well. And you have elephants who are scrambling to save the economy (read: rich people's backsides) by using government funds to buy stock in banks. Sound socialist? That's funny! There will be a campaign on right now, and the elephants are clamoring that the donkey candidate is going to bring socialism to America. They already did. A bunch of people are playing supposed laissez faire capitalism on a Monopoly board with my real money, and it's not working. It never will. So they resort to even more intervention in the markets, claiming that capitalism is the answer. Huh. Anyway, if there's any way to get rid of this two party system, take the opportunity. The party polarity really sucks here. Both sides are awful.

I'm gonna do a favor for you. I'm gonna tell you now that there will be a Republican running in 2008 who seems somewhat centrist. He's going to distance himself from your future two-term President because of all the awful stuff I've just told you and his abysmal approval rating. Yet all the same people who convinced me to vote for your future President twice are now clamoring for this guy. I don't know if I can trust them anymore. Christians bought into this future two-termer, because he prays and is a Republican who opposes abortion. Not a thing has been done about abortion other than create an economy that makes having a family pretty dicey. Go ahead and think through whether you should vote for him. Oh, by the way, depending on how you define a "valid" "ballot," he may will have never been elected in the first place.

Sincerely,

Your Radical Centrist Friend Who Is Voting Democrat for President for the First Time

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For you FotC fans out there (not to be confused with FotF), it's time for the binary solo: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one; zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one, one; zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one, one, one; zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one, one, one, one!

The gospel of anything but the gospel

Yesterday at lunch we talked about political parties. My position is that a two-party system is lousy, because it creates potential polarity. We've done okay for a couple of hundred years, but now the polarity has become actual. "If we disagree, and I'm right, then that must make you . . . " If I label myself a Republican, then naturally all Democrats are wrong. (This is why I'm registered as an independent. We're all wrong someplace, but if we have to stick to a party platform, then suddenly my party is right and everyone else is wrong.)

In the biggest scheme, that may not be very consequential. What is consequential to me is the fact that Christians are attacking each other because the other belongs to another political party. Right now the Evangelical polarizers are abortion and gay marriage. Obviously, the Republicans are "against" that (or not), so the Republicans are godly and right. Which means the Democrats are evil. (I've heard this logic spoken in my workplace.) What would happen if we realized that the Republicans were pro-life for unborn babies, whereas the Democrats are pro-life for basically everyone else, including innocent Iraqis, American soldiers, the poor, etc.? If we had a single party that was consistently pro-life, I might become partisan.

However, I think I'll have to take my religious convictions and find the best middle way possible. I don't see a third party coming in to destabilize this inhuman behemoth that many have touted as the glorious Two-Party System. This leads me to my actual point, which is how Christians have sold out by making politics the important thing rather than engaging themselves as actors in the biblical story. I've started a class called "Reconciliation and the Healing of Persons," which is Systematic Theology 2 in a much more palatable form. I read a quote in one of the required books that answered the question at the lunch table yesterday: Shouldn't Christians take a stand for the appropriate party?

"I am concerned that the gap between theology and the church has become so great that most Christians actually know more about sports, hobbies, and national politics than they know about Christian doctrine. As a result, Christians often explain their faith in terms of their own experiences or political stances that they hold as Christians. They don’t know much about the gospel, and their knowledge of the gospel isn’t nearly as profound as their knowledge of other areas of life" (Jonathan R. Wilson, God So Loved the World, p 13).

We worry ourselves about many things, which are fine pursuits in themselves, but when sports or politics or some other gospel becomes the controlling metanarrative rather than the gospel of Jesus, I guarantee you'll end up with today's America.