Warming will affect sea levels and food production, he grants, but the problems thus caused would be manageable by an ever-wealthier human race. Environmentalism fills a spiritual emptiness and gives meaning to many people's lives, Shellenberger suggests. The book is a sustained argument that poverty is humanity's most important environmental problem and that rising prosperity and increasing technological prowess will ameliorate or reverse most deleterious environmental trends.
Jacob Sullum The world convulsed by war as never before! Men slaying each other like wild beasts! I dare not relinquish all hope. The horrors of the two World Wars caused a widespread change in the way that serious people understood history. For biblical interpreters, these events radically altered how they read apocalyptic passages in the Bible.
When we study Scripture, we find that apocalyptic writing comes out of catastrophe. The Israelites were a favored people; God had promised them a future of safety and prosperity.
But then they were conquered and forced into exile in the distant, pagan, Babylonian empire. Humanly speaking, there was no hope for them. It appeared they had been entirely abandoned by the God who brought them out of Egypt into the Promised Land.
Indeed, their God did not seem powerful after all compared to the mighty gods of the Mesopotamians, whose gigantic statues loomed over Babylon. It started with the second half of the prophecy of Isaiah chapters 40—55 —written during the Babylonian captivity, when everything seemed so hopeless—and it blossomed from there. By the time of Jesus, apocalyptic language was everywhere. It was in the air and the water, so to speak.
After postwar biblical interpreters began to pay attention to these apocalyptic themes in Scripture, a whole new emphasis in theology started to appear. That word is hope.
Apocalyptic theology is above all the theology of hope, and hope is the polar opposite of optimism. Optimism, as Carnegie discovered, fails when it is swallowed up in darkness.
By contrast, hope is found in something beyond human history, with its cycles of optimism and despair. It is found in an incarnate God. He is speaking of himself and his Second Coming.
He possesses sovereign power that is independent of human history. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, in spite of the apparent darkness, God in Christ is shaping our history in accordance with his divine purposes. The apocalyptic BS is a metaphor for this psychological plague that happens at the end of every year. The mayan sensationalism is fantastic, because it really allows us to see this powerful trend in human behavior:.
We desperately want to forget about the future. We want to forget pragmatism, realism and common sense. We want to indulge ourselves with fantasies about how amazing our will be. See, the apocalypse is really a fantasy. Disaster goes full circle and actually becomes a marvelous transformation and revolution. Go check your Facebook feed. Your friends who are most convinced the world is about to end?
That some mystery piece of the puzzle would arrive and fix their lives. This is the microcosm. We ALL think this stuff, every year. The biggest obstacle is thinking about the future at all. The present is all that matters. The decisions you make now are all that matters. The future is always one day a way.
Apocalypses have, since the seventeenth century, always been rescheduled. Doomsday predictions are, by their very nature, limiting. They drain hope. They make us feel as if our efforts to achieve, communicate, and love are futile.
This is disastrous. Rather than focusing on the end, Christians should be focusing on the life, on loving God and loving one another as Christ commanded. It is in this that we find out meaning, our purpose. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
So why not change the narrative: predict impending hope, love and beauty. Join Beliefnet Today! See all our uplifting newsletters! Add some inspiration to your inbox.
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