Godly Denialists Won't Be Raptured from Climate Hell
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Godly-Denialists-Won-t-Be-by-Patrick-Walker-Armageddon_Bible_Climate-Change_Climate-Change-Deniers-140130-260.html
Godly Denialists Won't Be Raptured from Climate Hell
OpEdNews Op Eds 1/30/2014 at 08:38:07
By Patrick Walker
As an irregular parishioner of a Columbus, Georgia Unitarian Universalist church--better symbolized by a question mark than a cross--I keep an open mind about whether an ultimately benevolent deity rules our universe. But I've long noticed (and climate's increasingly dire effects on the Bible Belt make it only clearer) that whatever god or goddess reigns in glory doesn't spare the stupid. Especially the arrogantly stupid.
But will the Bible Belt notice? Or will it take the climate equivalent of Egypt's ten plagues? Because they've started arriving here. And according to the same climate-science models that have uncannily prophesied their arrival, many more--something like ten raised to a "higher power"--are on their way. And as those same "climate prophets" further admonish, the plagues' number and severity depend heavily on how soon we repent of our pigheaded wallow in climate sin. For even at the irksome risk of confirming modern science, God seems very willing to send the plagues.
Probably that's a good thing. Because it gives us all a chance to repent of our fossil-fuel folly before being pitched headlong into climate hell. But will we? A lot depends, as it did for Babylonian king Belshazzar, on whether we learn lickity-split to read God's "handwriting on the wall." For God, as with Belshazzar, is none too obvious in His climate clues, and may force us to consult a long-belittled foreigner, like that uppity Hebrew Daniel--or modern climate brainiacs--for an "insider's" perspective. And, like latter-day Belshazzars, we face a savagely sharp learning curve to decipher God's troubling wall scrawls and repent.
But, reverting to Pharaoh's plague-riddled Egypt, one thing is extremely clear: faced with our stiff-necked sinfulness, God seems very willing to rapidly up the climate plague ante. Perhaps there's no better example--of both God's enigmatic climate signs and His readiness to up the climate ante--than the freak two-inch snowstorm that just wreaked a week of climate hell on Atlanta.