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We need to recognize that for the past three hundred years we’ve headed down a dangerous path—the fossil-driven economy—that’s dangerous to stay on and difficult to get off of.
There’s nothing in recorded human history and scripture, in the past ten thousand years or so, that can prepare us for this situation.
Clinging to old commandments like being fruitful and multiplying is something we need to think twice about.
The United States is, per capita, one of the worst greenhouse emitters on the planet and part of the reason for that is, of course, conservatism. A short-sighted and cruel ideology that aims to gilt the prison bars. From Buckley’s racist “don’t immanentize the Eschaton” to today’s senate-floor snowball-throwers, it’s the politics of molasses, of getting stuck in the quicksand as the tide is coming in. They’ll have the least immanentized Eschaton on the cinder.
Conservatives, probably better known as our enemies, the enemies of our continued existence on this planet, the prophets of the haves stomping on the have-nots: they have quoted scripture again and again in order to justify their tyrannical status quo (opposing abolition in the antebellum era, opposing civil rights in the Jim Crow era, opposing police reform in the BLM era, and opposing taking serious action against climate change throughout the entire industrial age) or to introduce new tyrannies by finding new groups to hound and harass.
And, I don’t have a “theist” view of God. I don’t see the book as supernatural, or supernaturally applicable. It’s a book, an old one, that’s all.
But thanks to the life-changing magic of apophenia—our human brain-glitch to over-apply pattern recognition—we can find passages that are reminiscient of our current situation. Damn, son, you don’t even have to go further than the first chapter! They say the original sinners never felt a drop of pain until that second in the garden.
Then they felt it each and every day.
Shoulda left it in the ground like God intended. That woulda been pretty smart.