Al Gore's Amen Corner
By: Mark D. Tooley
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, February 11, 2008
Hailed as a "Baptist prophet," Al Gore
brought his Gospel of Global Warming to Jimmy Carter's rally for leftist
Baptists at a New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta last week. Gore
toted a green Bible as he warned of Old Testament style famine and flood unless
the planet hearkens unto the most apocalyptic of Global Warming scare stories.
"The evidence is there," Gore implored in ever-rising, apocalyptic
tones. "The signal is on the mountain. The trumpet has blown. The
scientists are screaming from the rooftops. The ice is melting. The land is
parched. The seas are rising. The storms are getting stronger. Why do we not judge
what is right?"
No hyperbole there.
Gore likened climate change to "a rising storm" eerily like the rise
of Nazism in the 1930's. In case anybody missed his point, Gore quoted
Winston Churchill for good measure: "The era of procrastination, of
half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its
close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."
Very stirring! And very appropriate for Carter's new confab of Baptists, who
are rallying around political themes of the Left rather than Christian
doctrinal creeds.
Gore was addressing about 2,500 like-minded, left-leaning Baptists at a special
Global Warming luncheon. Reportedly, 15,000 attended Carter's overall
event. The former president left the Southern Baptist Convention several years
ago, miffed over that denomination's conservative shift in the 1980's.
Carter, and some other Baptist refugees, prefer the Social Gospel
activism of failing, mainline denominations to conservative Christianity.
Employing some of his slide show of melting glaciers and mourning polar bears
that fueled his apocalyptic documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth,"
Gore added Bible verses to the scenes of environmental disaster so as to "put
it in the context of my own faith as a Baptist." Quoting the prophet
Isaiah, the former vice president urged, "Come let us reason
together," he said, "and tell one another the truth, inconvenient
though it may be, about the crisis, including the opportunity that we now
face." Shifting to the Book of Deuteronomy, Gore then declared:
"The ancient prophet laid the choice before the people," he
said: "Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore choose life so both
thou and thy seed may live."
Like the prophets he quoted, Gore outlined the various calamities that will
unfold if wicked humanity does not repent of its environmental sins: flooding,
hurricanes, tornados, and droughts of biblical proportions. "Never
in the past has all human civilization been at risk," he insisted about
the "crisis" of Global Warming. He quoted more Scripture:
"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon
and the stars that you have set in place, Lord what is man that you are mindful
of him, the son of man that you care for him?" And he offered hope of
repentance: "I think that there is a distinct possibility that one
of the messages coming out of this gathering and this new covenant is creation
care-that we who are Baptists of like mind and attempting in our lives to the
best of our abilities to glorify God, are not going to countenance the
continued heaping of contempt on God's creation."
When pro-life Christians cite the Bible this way, they are derided as
fundamentalist whackos; when Al Gore screams that God is going to drown the
East Coast if we don't change our global warming policies, he is called a
prophet -- specifically, a "Baptist Prophet." That's how Robert
Parham, executive director of the Nashville-based Baptist Center
for Ethics, feted Gore during his introduction.
Like the true prophets of the Bible, Gore provided his audience a way of
redemption; unlike true prophets, his salvation would come through left-wing
politics.
"We have everything we need to do the right thing to save its grace and
beauty for our children and their children," he asserted.
"Everything, that is, with the possible exception of political will."
And "solving the climate crisis" will be inexpensive.
"With one week's worth of the money spent on the war in Iraq, we'd be
well down the road."
In fact, the entire cost of the Iraq War would potentially be only a down
payment on the ultimate bill of the Global Warming alarmists'
political/economic agenda, which could reduce world economic growth by trillions
of dollars in pursuit of a phantom-like, climate equilibrium. All skeptics who
question whether the cost in reduced wealth and perpetuated global poverty is
worth the supposed benefit of a slight temperature adjustment are, of course,
motivated only by profit.
"Too many spokespersons-who don't really speak for me but who claim to-have
said global warming's not real, this is just a myth and etcetera," Gore
said, in an oblique reference to conservative Baptists who are not yet ready to
join Gore's green fire brigade. "When did people of faith get so
locked into an ideological coalition that they've
got to go along with the wealthiest and most powerful--who don't want to see
change of a kind that's aimed at helping the people and protecting God's green
earth?" Presumably, Gore and his Global Warming allies are themselves
free of any ideological baggage.
Gore's allegedly non-ideological solutions to climate change include new,
international regulatory bureaucracies to restrict economic growth for decades.
Its tenets are merely the Left's old economic agenda. They include expanding
carbon taxes that would penalize free enterprise while enriching government
treasuries in perpetuity.
"We need to combine the struggle against climate crisis and the fight against
extreme poverty," Gore proposed, seemingly unaware that reducing global
economic activity will require keeping hundreds of millions chronically poor.
Naturally, Carter loved Gore's climate scare-mongering and warnings against
dissent. "How many of you think we should join Al Gore in being one of the
strongest voices on earth?" the former president enthusiastically asked.
"Does anyone disagree? OK, now you see that was a unanimous vote.
Thank you very much."
Ostensibly distressed over theological "fundamentalism" among
Southern Baptists, Carter's new coalition of left-leaning Baptists seems to
prefer a political fundamentalism of the left that tolerates no skepticism
about the most alarmist Global Warming theories.
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