An Inconvenient Truth
Tonight I saw the Al Gore/global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It was extremely persuasive.
There were gobs of science, interspersed with just a tiny bit of heart-tugging (for the first time, polar bears are drowning because of the melting of polar ice caps), and topped off with a "what you can do."
This last part was not comforting; after all of the horrifying explanations of what a twenty-foot rise in sea level will do to the world (and how unfair it is that it's going to swallow half of India, as well as entire island nations in the Pacific, when the US has caused such a highly disproportionate share of the damage), the addendum on "buy a hybrid car!" and "write to Congress" kind of made me go "um, I think we'll still be fucked."
I highly recommend taking an hour and a half of your life to see this film.
That said, the reason Americans are not on board with stopping global warming isn't a lack of factual information. It's that 50 million (!) of us believe that we are living in the biblical end-times. I just googled "Christians" and "global warming" and found this article:
This hilarious image looks like a programming bug in
The Sims, but is actually from this site, which helps Christians
prepare for the Rapture (and not by buying hybrid cars).
(Note: looks like only thin people go to heaven!)
At the end of the film, a list of "things you can do" includes something like "if you believe in prayer, pray that people will have the courage to change." That watered-down sentiment probably didn't provide much persuasive power to any religious folk who actually showed up for the movie, especially considering the Melissa Etheridge song playing in the background. (When did Melissa stop rockin' out and turn to exclusively recording anthems about social problems for the Oprah set?)
"Earth in the balance," indeed, and the outcome depends on...
Cameron vs. Gore!
There were gobs of science, interspersed with just a tiny bit of heart-tugging (for the first time, polar bears are drowning because of the melting of polar ice caps), and topped off with a "what you can do."
This last part was not comforting; after all of the horrifying explanations of what a twenty-foot rise in sea level will do to the world (and how unfair it is that it's going to swallow half of India, as well as entire island nations in the Pacific, when the US has caused such a highly disproportionate share of the damage), the addendum on "buy a hybrid car!" and "write to Congress" kind of made me go "um, I think we'll still be fucked."
I highly recommend taking an hour and a half of your life to see this film.
That said, the reason Americans are not on board with stopping global warming isn't a lack of factual information. It's that 50 million (!) of us believe that we are living in the biblical end-times. I just googled "Christians" and "global warming" and found this article:
The Left Behind set is really not concerned with preserving the planet for future generations, as their souls are being airlifted out any day now.Many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future. They believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. They may also believe, along with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming Apocalypse.
This hilarious image looks like a programming bug in
The Sims, but is actually from this site, which helps Christians
prepare for the Rapture (and not by buying hybrid cars).
(Note: looks like only thin people go to heaven!)
At RaptureReady.com, the "Rapture Index" tracks all the latest news in relation to biblical prophecy. Among its leading environmental indicators of Apocalypse are oil supply and price, famine, drought, plagues, wild weather, floods, and climate. RaptureReady webmaster Todd Strandberg writes to explain why climate change made the list: "I used to think there was no real need for Christians to monitor the changes related to greenhouse gases. If it was going to take a couple hundred years for things to get serious, I assumed the nearness of the End Times would overshadow this problem. With the speed of climate change now seen as moving much faster, global warming could very well be a major factor in the plagues of the tribulation."See, it's, um, not really the science at issue here.
At the end of the film, a list of "things you can do" includes something like "if you believe in prayer, pray that people will have the courage to change." That watered-down sentiment probably didn't provide much persuasive power to any religious folk who actually showed up for the movie, especially considering the Melissa Etheridge song playing in the background. (When did Melissa stop rockin' out and turn to exclusively recording anthems about social problems for the Oprah set?)
"Earth in the balance," indeed, and the outcome depends on...
Cameron vs. Gore!
Labels: Christianity
posted by JenIsFamous at 6/09/2006 12:11:00 AM
6 Comments:
Why of course only thin people go to Heaven. Gluttony is one of the 7 Deadly Sins. lol...
I felt the same way about the Gore movie. It was informative and impassioned but a "what can we do to help?" section was conspicuously absent. Maybe leaving the audience on a note of impending doom makes for better ticket sales.
Love the rapture pictures by the way. I hope there is a rapture, just for awesome the visuals.
That's true Savvy but so is pride.
Kinda makes you wish Al Gore really WAS nuts...
LOL at "a programming bug in the SIMS." I mean, really LOL, as in "aspirating my Diet Coke."
You have to watch a movie called, 'Uncle Todd for Breakfast', it's about an American travelling salesman who is disillusioned with life, has a mental breakdown and diagnosed with depression. He drives out into the desert, where he joins a UFO cult which is run like a military, forced to perform ritual masturbation and worship unseen UFOs in the sky at night. So one night he hears a voice, that tells him that Jesus will come back in the form of Elvis, and decides to leave the occult to go to Las Vegas. To cut a long synopsis short, he ends up creating a very powerful bomb which destroys all of the United States.
Strandberg's "Rapture Index" lists several dozen "indicators" that supposedly precede and therefore warn about a coming rapture. But all of them can just as easily happen AFTER the time he reserves for the rapture, that is, during a future tribulation. So his "indicators" are NO proof of a pretribulation rapture. For more info visit Google and type in "Open Letter to Todd Strandberg," "Pretrib Rapture Diehards" (long hidden facts about that view's short history), "Thomas Ice (Bloopers)" (the "respected researcher" LaHaye and Falwell etc. have long leaned on!), "Pretrib Rapture Hypocrisy," and "Appendix F: Thou Shalt Not Steal." Of course LaHaye and his fellow rapturists have been trying to suppress this damaging new info that even leading evangelical scholars have checked out and endorsed!
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