{"id":32530,"date":"2013-05-10T16:09:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-10T15:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/does-god-hate-climate-change\/32530\/"},"modified":"2013-05-10T16:09:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T15:09:00","slug":"does-god-hate-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/does-god-hate-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Does God Hate Climate Change?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Credit: Shutterstock<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

During a 17-minute long speech on the senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R-HI) cited an interesting source to urge his colleagues to get serious about climate change: the Bible.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cI was recently at a Senate meeting where I heard a member of our Senate community say, \u2018God won\u2019t allow us to ruin our planet,\u2019\u201d Whitehouse said.<\/p>\n

Sen. Whitehouse, an Episcopalian, chastised other lawmakers for using religion to abdicate responsibility when it comes to protecting our planet. The Hawaii senator dismissed the notion that \u201cGod \u2026 won\u2019t allow us to ruin our planet\u201d as completely removed from reality.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe statement that refers to God is couched in religious terms, but is it really an expression of religious inquiry? I think not. It is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking,\u201d Whitehouse explained. \u201cThe statement that God won\u2019t allow us to ruin our planet sweeps aside ethics, responsibilities, consequences, duties, even awareness.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The senator also referred to Biblical passages to challenge his colleagues\u2019 religious rhetoric. For example, he pointed to Galatians 6:7, which reads, \u201cDo not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.\u201d To put this in plain English, Whitehouse remarked, \u201cWe are here to do God’s work. He’s not here to do ours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Whitehouse continued, reminding lawmakers that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, explaining, “If we believe in an all-powerful God, then we must then believe that God gave us this earth, and we must in turn believe that God gave us its laws of gravity, of chemistry, of physics.\u201d Of course, this should go without saying. But as the Huffington Post\u2019s Michael McAuliff points out, too many members of Congress still use religious hysteria to advance their agenda, at the cost of science and logic:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) recently called evolution<\/span> \u00a0<\/span>a lie from the pit of hell<\/a>, and \u2026 the Science Committee is weighing ways to exert<\/span> \u00a0<\/span>political control<\/a>\u00a0on the National Science Foundation. Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.)\u00a0<\/span> has quoted scripture<\/a>\u00a0to deny that climate change will destroy the earth.<\/span> \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With so much ignorance in Congress hiding behind the mask of religion, a stronghold in American politics, it\u2019s understandable why Whitehouse would feel the need to argue on the divine playing field\u2013especially with our planet at <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo Credit: Shutterstock During a 17-minute long speech on the senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R-HI) cited an interesting source to urge his colleagues to get serious about climate change: the Bible. \u201cI was recently at a Senate meeting where I heard a member of our Senate community say, \u2018God won\u2019t allow us to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-32530","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}