One of the few western leaders in this part of the world to speak out against the climate change hysteria we are now witnessing, is Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney. Here are some excerpts from a recent interview with him on the subject.
Related Link: Interview with Cardinal Pell on Global Warming and Pagan Emptiness ~ The Catholic World Report
Your recent remarks questioning the claims about man-made climate change have drawn fierce criticism here in Australia. How do you account for that?He links the lack of religion of many of the adherents with climate change, something he noticed many years ago with those who were most scared of the bogeyman of the past - nuclear war.
Cardinal Pell: Despite the fact that Australians like to see themselves as a ruggedly independent, rational, and democratic people, in some respects a herd-like mentality still prevails. Right now, the mass media, politicians, many church figures, and the public generally seem to have embraced even the wilder claims about man-made climate change as if they constituted a new religion.
These days, for any public figure to question the basis of what amounts to a green fundamentalist faith is tantamount to heresy. The angry editorials and letters to newspapers certainly suggest this.
It is true that some of the more hysterical and extreme claims about global warming appear symptomatic of a pagan emptiness, of a Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature.Cardinal Pell is also up with the play on the science involved, so read the interview for more.
Years ago I was struck by the fears that middle-class kids without religion had about nuclear war. It was almost an obsession with a few of them. It's almost as though people without religion, who don't belong to any of the great religious traditions, have got to be frightened of something.
Related Link: Interview with Cardinal Pell on Global Warming and Pagan Emptiness ~ The Catholic World Report
The DomPost also ran an editorial on Friday reminding people to be very afraid of over-population. Of course, it was linked into Climate Change to make a double whammy.
ReplyDeleteThe result is the ability for politicians to push through an increasingly extreme response to the doom and gloom predictions, and yet manage to avoid undertaking sensible action that any rational person would be happy with.
The Catholic Church are great promoters of looking after the environment and looking to sustainability.
Cardinal Pell's article will however, be seized upon to make it appear that he is anti-environment rather than anti-stupid.
Ah yes, that editorial. I remember wondering to myself when I read it if the Dom Post had let loose one of it's more junior writers on that one, as the other editors were most likely on holiday.
ReplyDeleteThe end of the world due to overpopulation has been a continuing theme for centuries. And we're still here!
The Catholic Church are great promoters of looking after the environment and looking to sustainability."
ReplyDeleteI dunno...with all those heritics and witches and gays and Jews your mob torched over the years your Carbon footprint must be a whopper!
In that case the carbon footprint of the left must be about the size of a small galaxy.
ReplyDelete"In that case the carbon footprint of the left must be about the size of a small galaxy."
ReplyDeleteAuthoritarians of any stripe are at odds with the Carbon boo hoo bullshit...
"Getting worried, James? What category do you fit into? Definitely a heretic, though you'd get a trial first and if you refused to repent, you'd be handed over to the civil authorities who wouldn't even give you a slap with a wet bus ticket."
Beats the torture and mutalation inflicted by the followers of a "loving God" gag.
"Witches were mostly dealt to by the Protestants. I haven't heard of any gay persecutions by the Catholic Church. Maybe you could enlighten me on this one."
You are kidding right? It wasn't for nothing that Gays were named after the fuel used to light their "cleansing fires" by the lovers of their fellow man...faggots.
"Authoritarians of any stripe are at odds with the Carbon boo hoo bullshit..."
ReplyDeleteRubbish--authoritarians are very happy to use the whole AGW scam to further their aims.
Authoritarians of any stripe are at odds with the Carbon boo hoo bullshit..."
ReplyDeleteRubbish--authoritarians are very happy to use the whole AGW scam to further their aims."
I meant Authoritarians who kill and burn humans....Catholics,Prodestants,nazis,Communists etc....the usual scum.Sorry for not clafifing this ...
okies James. Thanks. :-)
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine who's well up on the subject of Catholics and their treatment of Gays tells me...
ReplyDelete"I don't know of them going out to intentionally look for people who were gay but certainly if they stumbled upon them they were none too kind. As for burning people the Church usually bound such people over to the State to do it so that they could pretend they had clean hands. Homosexuality was a capital offense and the Catholic Church most certainly supported that.
Of course we need to be clear that people of that time did not see homosexuality as a state of being but merely as an action. People acted homosexual but weren't homosexual if you know what I mean. For them it was an "act against nature". (To me an act against nature is an act that isn't possible within nature.) And we must remember that the Church, when it wanted an excuse to persecute accused people of having had homosexual sex -- as in the case of the Knights Templar. The Templar’s were basically accused of sodomy, tortured until they confessed and then executed for it. Strictly speaking no one thinks the church really thought the Templar’s were gay but that it used that accusation leading to execution tells you how the Church did think of the matter.
John Boswell, in his book Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality showed that the early Roman government was rather tolerant but as Christianity arose, and Rome ceased being a Republic and became an Empire, it became less and less tolerant. Contrary to lunatic fundies who know nothing about history, Rome fell after it embraced Jesus and persecuted gays, not after the reverse happened.
But the Greek and Roman cultures were strange compared to the modern Western concept. They had no problems with homosexual acts provided it was between men and boys. But they weren't so keen on it taking place between men of the same age. So the idea of peer relationships was rarely discussed.
But there can be no denying that the first attempts to punish gays came after Christians took control of the state. Constantine established Christianity as the official religion and his sons imposed the first anti-sodomy laws in 341. Both Theodosius, in 390, and Justinian in the 6th century, mandated that people be burned at the stake for homosexuality. Since there was no effective separation of church and state until centuries later I'm not sure you can exonerate the church for what the state did. They were too closely interconnected.
With the barbarian invasions the empire was destroyed and each locality had more power over its own affairs. So during this period, with no centralized power structure, it was more difficult to impose one moral code and things were slightly more lax. People would be punished but not necessarily killed. By around 1100 to 1200 the various regions started returning to the old laws which were stricter. By around 1250 the Church was regularly equating sodomy with heresy. Under orders from Pope Gregory IX the Inquisition started rooting out heretics and they frequently included homosexuals in that list. Those convicted were then given over to the state to be burned alive.
The Church has always conveniently handed over those deemed to be guilty of capital crimes (including sodomy and heresy) to the state for punishment. That the church had immense power over the state is not denied. The state then carried out that which the church approved of but the church could pretend that its hands were clean. I don't find that distinction persuasive."
Hmmmmmmm!
James, your friend is a little behind the times and really not up with the play on the recent information on the Knights Templar. Not to mention your friend's slanted view of history - intentional, I bet.
ReplyDeleteIt's seems to me you personally know very little and work off commonly held myths and misconceptions that you've picked up.
That is enough with derailing my thread, which is on global warming - not on how gays have been treated throughout the ages. If you want to explore that subject, do so on your own blog.
I'll let your comment stand, but I'm not giving you any more of a platform here.
Wow, he's a pretty boring skeptic. He managed to get all the tired old clichés (cooling in the 70s, warming from the sun, cyclical patterns of climate change....)in about 2 answers.
ReplyDeleteHis theology is also of the sort I find very hard to understand. People might be less prone to get hysterical about climate change (and many of the dire scenarios painted by some people are surely hysterical) or nuclear war or the Y2K bug if they believed there was a loving god behind the universe. So? Surely the test of a religion is not the society it would generate but whether it's true?
"Wow, he's a pretty boring skeptic. He managed to get all the tired old clichés (cooling in the 70s, warming from the sun, cyclical patterns of climate change....)in about 2 answers."
ReplyDeleteFirstly, it's not his job to be entertaining.
Secondly, inconvenient (to the warmenistas) science doesn't become "cliches" just because it's not part of the current 24hr news cycle.
If it's the latest fad you're after, perhaps YouTube would be the place to go?
I must say, it's thoughtful of Pell to offer us atheists this free gift of comparing global warming hysteria to belief in religion. Why, yes Cardinal Pell, hysteria about imaginary events that may or may not happen or have happened is exactly like religion - any bells ringing for you yet?
ReplyDeleteAnother tip for Pell: those of us who didn't much fancy the idea of nuclear war a few decades back were rather aware of the fact that we were all at risk of being wiped out at a few minutes notice by men we wouldn't trust to look after our cat for a few days. I personally didn't find that knowledge encouraging. Pell, of course, has this delusion that death won't in fact kill him (don't ask me why, the evidence seems pretty damn solid to me), so it's perhaps not surprising that he could be so blase about his life being in the hands of a swag of corrupt buffoons. Not so for the rest of us.
"..by men we wouldn't trust to look after our cat for a few days"
ReplyDeleteThat's no way to speak of your beloved Politburo!
KG,
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't have a responsibility to do anything, but it would be nice if he didn't just repeat utter garbage. The things he talked about in that interview are not scientifically sound objections to the fact that the planet is warming. In fact, I think all of them are covered in known journal of leftist agitation New Scientist's guide to climate change myths .
It would be nice to have voices going against the most alarmist predictions (metres of sea level rise etc) but sadly this man is just another troglodyte.
Your "troglodyte" is an honest, principled man who doesn't pretend to be a scientist--but he knows hysterical, dishonest bullshit when he sees it.
ReplyDeleteAnd since New Scientist (like Scientific American and The Lancet) has been caught out several times publishing propaganda, try this link:
ReplyDeletehttp://nzclimatescience.net/index.php
Well,
ReplyDeleteThe only people I know to have accused New Scientist of propaganda are creationist - a group climate change deniers keep getting closer to.
I actually agree that there is a great deal of hysteria surrounding climate change. It's real, it is one the great challenges we face and we need to take measures to make sure we give our grand children something better than we have but the world if not going to be underwater in 10 years time.
But idiots like Pell do nothing to get that point across. It lets voices of moderation get boxed off with loons like him who think the recent warming is on a par with previous glacial-interglacial cycles or something to do with the sun.
I might be tempted to claim Pell's ignorance is informed by his Christianity - once you start believing in the all loving sky-fairy running the earth then you know that everything is going to be just fine. But in deference to the people behind this blog I should make it clear that Pell does not speak for all Catholics on this matter - JPII made a number of statements about how his flock ought to treat the environment, including the atmosphere, better than we do