But, I was just cheered up enormously on the way home yesterday listening to Cardinal Pell on the radio. I am proud to be associated with a religion whose #1 spokesman in Australia is sane and sensible.
On climate change: 'It's much less important than the fate* of the five or ten or fifteen per cent of the poorest Australians; it's much less important than the problem of marriage breakdown, it's much less important than the problem of abortion.'
Amen, alleluia, amen, alleluia, etc.
Contrast this with the breathtaking probably-quoted-out-of-context statement that appears to contradict 2000 years of Christian thought by the Jesus-didn't-really-mean-that-stuff-about-divorce-to-apply-to-kings-ican bishop of Canberra and Goulburn: 'The Cardinal, for whatever reason, put private morality as number one, and private morality is important, but the public agenda, the social agenda, the contribution that the world community makes to its common welfare is essentially part of the Christian agenda, this is our core business.'
Hmm. The fate of poor Australians is part of the social agenda. Marriage breakdown is part of the social agenda. Abortion is part of the social agenda. These things are part of the core business bit of the Christian agenda, because Christian saints and theologians have been saying they are for thousands of years and because there is a very clear, very solid, very well attested link between the private sin and the public welfare. It is not the core business of Christianity to uncritically accept the loopiest catastrophic extrapolations of global warming trends and advocate actions to avert them that (a) have no chance of stopping climate change anyway, (b) will hurt the poor, and (c) constitute a dreadful waste of resources that might be better used in other ways.
* Not 'faith', as it has in the transcript.
1 comment:
Talk about climate change is relegated to something like talking about the weather. It's smalltalk before getting to more meaty topics :)
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