The Spin Continues

I’ve remarked several times in the last week that the PCUSA has essentially short-circuited the debate over changing its constitutional ordination standards by passing the Authoritative Interpretation that gives presbyteries the choice ot ordain gays and lesbians. One of the proponents of this approach, the Witherspoon Society, offers an analysis of the General Assembly actions that I think encapsulates the dishonesty of this:

Some commissioners may have been uncomfortable about letting the AI go into effect immediately, feeling that the Assembly would be “jumping the gun” on the proposed amendment. But it appears that most of them thought it appropriate to let the AI go into effect, since it changes the climate within which the proposed rewording of G-6.0106b will be discussed and debated in the presbyteries.

Opponents will say, of course, that adoption of the AI tilts the discussion in favor of the amendment. In a sense that is true — but only in the sense that it lets the church discuss the amendment on its own merits (including the improved wording, more in keeping with the whole context of the sixth chapter of the Book of Order) without the oppressive presence of the AIs predating the insertion of G-6.0106b in 1996/97.

Uh, no. Discussing the amendment “on its own merits” would have left in place the status quo, given that there is an internal consistency between the AIs and G-6.0106b. If the change in G-6.0106b was approved, the AIs would, in effect, have been nullified by virtue of the constitutional change. Instead, by going ahead with the AI they’ve changed the rules of the game before the Book of Order amendment has been voted on. Now, it doesn’t matter whether the amendment is approved or not–presbyteries are free to ignore the standards if they choose to, and no one can say otherwise. That is to say, Witherspoon and its allies have gotten what they wanted by doing an end run around the process for amending the BOO.

If this is the best that those on the left can do to assure themselves that they haven’t rigged the game by virtue of their approach to the rules, they shouldn’t waste their effort. Pathetic.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

After over a week of all-PCUSA, 24/7, it’s about time that we remember that there are other mainline churches out there, and that continue to do stuff that’s appalling, silly, dumb, heretical, etc. Though you’d never know it from me, Anglicans from around the world met in Jerusalem for the purpose of turning the Anglican world upside-down. I’ll have more on that later. First, an item of minor silliness that demonstrates the captivity of mainliners to an orthodoxy not of biblical origin. In this case, it’s the orthodoxy of anthropogenic climate change, and the mainliners in question are from the Lutheran World Federation, according to the Christian Post:

The environment is “under stress” and animals and plants are disappearing, alerted a church leader at the Lutheran World Federation’s Council meeting last week where climate change and its effect was the main focus.

LWF’s general secretary, the Rev. Dr. Ishmael Noko, said climate change is a global problem and the melting snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is an indication that the environment is “under stress,” according to the Lutheran World Information.

He was explaining why the LWF and the Council’s host church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania (ELCT), had chosen the theme, “Melting Snow on Mount Kilimanjaro: A Witness of a Suffering Creation,” as the focus of its meeting, which took place June 25-30.

ELCT, a church that has long raised concern about climate change, said although experts may disagree on whether significant amounts of snow has melted on Mount Kilimanjaro, there was enough evidence of change on Africa’s highest mountain, its forests and other habitations over the past few decades.

LWF president Bishop Mark S. Hanson, who is also presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, added that shrinking water bodies and receding glaciers are also indications of the climate change problem.

“Global climate change is an undeniable reality,” Hanson said. “The documentation is voluminous and the consequences are inescapable.”

There is evidence of change in the eco-system around Kilimanjaro; the problem is that the Lutherans are at least five years behind the times in terms of the cause:

Global warming, however, is not to blame for the retreating Kilimanjaro ice cap, according to a November 24, 2003, article published in Nature magazine.

According to Nature’s Betsy Mason, “Although it’s tempting to blame the (Kilimanjaro) ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is the more likely culprit.”

Forests at the base of Kilimanjaro have been steadily disappearing for decades. “Without the forests’ humidity,” Mason reports, “previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.”

“Why has [the Kilimanjaro ice cap] been melting so relentlessly?” asked climatologist John Daly. “The greenhouse industry say ‘global warming,’ but then they would say that, wouldn’t they?

“The only problem with that knee-jerk explanation is that there has been no measurable atmospheric warming in the region of Kilimanjaro,” noted Daly. “Satellites have been measuring temperature since 1979 in the free troposphere between 1,000 and 8,000 meters altitude, and they show no tropospheric warming in that area. None.”

This is not to say that the argument about Africa’s highest mountain is over. The truth is that there are a lot of factors involved, and it’s not easy to say what is most important. The New York Times in 2004 quotes an Austrian scientist:

‘We are entirely against the black-and-white picture that says it is either global warming or not global warming,” said Prof. Georg Kaser…a glaciologist at the Institute for Geography of the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. ”As a scientist I’m happy it’s more complex, because otherwise it’s boring.”

See here for a more recent item. The point is this: climate change is not a black-and-white, settled beyond a reasonable doubt issue. There’s still an awful lot that is not known, a lot that is more complex than we can grasp, and a lot that is just plain disputable, on both sides of the issue. When Christian organizations such as the LWF–with zero understanding of the issue, except what they selectively read in the newspapers and swallow wholesale from snake-oil salesmen such as Al Gore–make pronouncements on matters like this as if their descriptions of the problems and preferred solutions were written on stone tablets from the hand of God Himself, they do nothing but bring ridicule down on the Church as a whole. The truth is that, by titling their shindig after a phenomenon that very likely doesn’t prove what they think it does, they show no more understanding of the dynamic of Kilimanjaro than this guy: