(This begins and ends the formal religion news coverage for the day. Maybe the new atheists went to relationship counselling?)
Closing off our religion coverage for the day, from Maureen Malarkey at The Federalist:
A Short List of What’s Wrong with ‘Laudato Si’
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There is nothing to admire in its assault on market economies, technological progress, and—worse—on rationality itself. Bergolio, whom we know now as Pope Francis, is a limited man. His grasp of economics is straitjacketed by the Peronist culture in which he was raised. “Laudato Si” descends to garish, left-wing boilerplate. The pope is neither a public intellectual, theologian, nor a man of science. Yet he impersonates all three.
At least he wasn’t lauding Darwinism, mindless evolution, the mind/free will as mere illusion, morality as an illusion created by natural selection, and/or the multiverse? FOr all or several, he could maybe get the Templeton Prize.
The good news is that eventually, honest climate data is evidence anyone can see. Each really bad winter, here where I live, makes a few more people wonder about this latest acrockalypse.
Also, some stats are fairly easy to grasp. For example, the rise in insurance losses worldwide could in fact be related to rising prosperity, not necessarily more disasters. Possibly, more people own more insurable stuff. It’s easier to buy insurance for a plasma TV than for an owner-built mud hut. And at some point, a market develops for common sense reasoning about such questions.
Now, re Peronism: I remember a political science major explaining to me decades ago that what Canadians understood by a market economy was a free economy. Many South American countries suffered under economies dominated by the rich, violent friends of El Presidente. Unfortunately, the South Americans thought that when we said they needed a market economy, that we meant more of those people.
We actually meant fewer of them. We thought, as the farmer sang, “The best thing about hogs is a gettin’ RID of them … ” And, surveying the current scene, I sometimes think, based on faithful Canadian Catholics’ complaints about Francis, that this sort of cultural misunderstanding has grown and spread to many areas.
The encyclical tells us much about the man who delivers it. Straightaway, it certifies the depth and span of this pope’s megalomania. A breathtaking strut into absolutism, it is addressed not simply to Catholics but, like the “Communist Manifesto,” to the whole world. Tout le monde.
The document is steeped in Third Worldism. The imagined plight of the planet is the work of a rapacious West. Ignoring the role of corruption, mismanagement, and counter-productive ideology in failed or deteriorating states, it gives a ruinous pass to Third World oligarchs and despots. The White Man’s Burden now rises to the ozone layer.
If only. The reality is that, generally, well-off people care about the environment. Desperately poor people cannot afford to.
Simply raising more people out of poverty creates a demand for wilderness parks, beltlines, zoning laws, shoreline rules, and workable endangered species legislation, as we have discovered in Canada.
Indeed, it all sometimes backfires on us. Urban twits and layabouts care too much, and saddle us, at times, with foolish policies; lucky if not disastrous ones.
Mullarkey also notes, inter alia:
While Christians in the birthplaces of Christianity are crucified and beheaded for their faith, young girls are kidnapped and sold for the price of a pack of cigarettes, our encyclical whines: “In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish.”
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Resurgent Islam and the spread of Sharia are the church’s enemies, not oil, coal, and gas. None are poorer than those who live, despised, in the path of ISIS. Where, then, is the encyclical calling for the conversion of Islam away from its murderous climate of hatred? Instead, the Vicar of Christ calls all the world—intending primarily the West—to “ecological conversion.” More.
That’s the trouble when people try to be experts about the things they were not asked to be experts in. They are attacked in those areas but useless in their core areas.
See also: Science writer Matt Ridley is concerned about climate change wars
I hope the following vid is false but have little doubt that it represents what is happening. It is hardly convenient for people in high places who were looking for an easier cause to act on ((O’Leary for News)):