A Choice...

I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. - Genesis 9:11

If you were in church on the first Sunday of Lent this year, you probably heard this read from the lectern and maybe even preached on. This covenant between God and God’s people was so important to the writers of the Old Testament that there are actually two stories of the flood both intertwined in Genesis 9.

Martin Luther King Jr. took this story and updated it to his time, the 1960s, a time of racial unrest in America. “It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence” He saw that the threat of violence had become overwhelming. If anyone tried to meet violence with more violence, they would in all likelihood be killed. And so the choice for violence would lead to nonexistence while the choice of nonviolence had a greater chance of leading to life.

Once again, in the 21 century, we are facing a similar situation. We no longer have a choice between believing that Global Warming is False or that it is true. Like with Martin Luther King Jr said above, it is between believing it to be true and nonexistence.

For those within any of the ‘religions of the book’ [Judaism, Christianity, Islam] this choice should be a no-brainer. Clearly in the stories of the flood, the writers had God opting for the continuance of existence. In the creation story in Genesis, God made humans in God’s image to take care of the earth as God would. So why is the earth’s climate in such chaos right now.

That is because we are still debating the wrong arguments. We think we are debating whether the claims of climate change are real or false, when what we are really debating is survival or non-existence.

Think about it. If the proponents of climate change being false news win, then we are all facing non-existence. That does put a different light on the seriousness of the debate, does it not?

Saving this planet so that human life can exist here, is surely the most important work of this century. "Take seriously your relationship to God and take seriously caring about what God cares about in the world" [Marcus Borg in Days of Awe and Wonder]
Do we really have a choice?

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NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

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