I have noted on previous occasions the over-the-top rhetorical approach of evangelical global warming warrior Richard Cizik. But according to Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, it appears that Cizik’s leaving the National Association of Evangelicals has resulted in any restraint he might have had left to disappear:
Long-time National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) lobbyist Richard Cizik, now working for Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation, is comparing his global warming alarmism to the Civil Rights movement. And he says skeptics of the climate apocalypse are akin to the naysayers who ignored ascendant Nazism in the 1930’s.
“If the `civil rights’ campaigns of the late 20th century were aimed at restoring the voting rights of African-Americans, a new kind of `civil rights’ campaign is needed to protect the lives of a billion of our fellow human beings,” Cizik pronounced in a recent interview with Religion News Service (RNS). The RNS report paraphrased Cizik as saying that humanity’s “mistreatment of the planet will be questioned as much as silence about the rise of Nazism and toleration of slavery.” Apparently Cizik cited a British relief group’s warning that global warming ultimately could victimize one billion people.
Right. Public skepticism of global warming hysteria has grown tremendously as the so-called “scientific consensus” (if indeed such a thing ever existed anywhere other than in Al Gore’s imagination) has crumbled under the weight of accumulating inconvenient evidence. For folks such as Cizik, that means only one thing: it’s time to up the rhetorical stakes, even if it means running afoul of Godwin’s Law.
Tooley has more on what my fellow EPC Presbytery of the East member Cizik has been up to, but I expect all you really need to know is that he went from the NAE to Ted Turner’s pet project for propping up the world’s most corrupt and useless international organization. The United Nations Foundation is a well-heeled advocate of universal abortion rights, extracting money from U.S. taxpayers to throw down the U.N. rathole, and radical population control measures. I hope Cizik is happy to be working for the outspokenly anti-Christian Turner.
The Reformed Pastor 
May 13, 2009 at 3:11 pm
I love watching the right eat its own. 🙂
May 13, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Cizik isn’t one of our own (as least not with regard to public policy). That’s why he’s thrown in with the likes of Ted Turner.
May 13, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Well David, it seems unlikely that a bleeding heart pinko commie is going to rise to the level he did as head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Of course he’s not one of your own *now* because he had the audacity to veer from the talking points and that simply isn’t allowed. This is what happens any time someone departs from your talking points on any issue, no matter their beliefs on all others. Strict ideological purity is what’s destroying the far right these days. Thus you’re definitely eating your own. Please continue. By all means. 🙂
I have some suggestions if you still have an appetite. 😉
May 13, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Try again, A. They’re called “debates.” You know, actual disagreement and debate of this or that issue, trying to work out what it is we believe and why, as opposed to turning on the MSM, MSNBC, Huffy or one of Barry’s news conferences to find out what we’re supposed to be thinking this week. It’s why we’ll be picking up the pieces when the left implodes in a year or two.
May 13, 2009 at 5:48 pm
LOL. Let’s see we’ve got “Barry” that’s at least one talking point. I guess you’re still in the club, C-dog.
May 13, 2009 at 6:46 pm
And you’ve also get to watch your boy spend the country into oblivion:
so, you’re right, you lefties are smoking these days.
May 14, 2009 at 8:06 am
Leftie? Nah, not even. Mostly libertarian here, but like most on the far right, you figure if I don’t agree with Rush on absolutely everything, I must be a “leftie.”
That’s fine, though. I’d rather be called nearly anything these days than “Republican.” 🙂
May 14, 2009 at 9:42 am
“They’re called “debates.” ”
Debates???!!! You call Political and Theological pundits slobbering all over themselves arguing scientific issues “debates”? As if Cizic, Tooley, Turner, and, oh yes, Fischler have anything of value to say on the subject of global warming. I just call it amusing background noise. I would rather listen to Alan when it comes to scientific matters; at least he’s trained in a scientific discipline.
May 14, 2009 at 10:00 am
Ah, Arthur, but there’s a danger of playing the “So and So is a scientist and therefore an expert in anything card.” (No offense to Alan intended.) I’m published in a couple of refereed journals myself, but it sure as heck doesn’t make me an expert in anything but the content of those papers. In fact, there’s nothing more humbling than realizing how little one knows about one’s own work; how much more there is to learn. Even in my former field, entomology, I could walk out the door of the lab and drop in on the folks next door for coffee and barely understand the broad view of what they were working on.
Gotta run, but I’ll post more later on the fun to be had in trying to take scientific results and apply them to public policy debates.
May 14, 2009 at 10:06 am
Actually I don’t pretend to be an expert in global warming, nor do I really care to debate that here, nor do I even actually care about the debate itself.
I’m just entertained by watching the far right implode is all. It could be about this or any of their other sacred cows.
And yes, if history has shown us anything, it is that the pendulum does swing in both directions. But while this is the direction its taking, I’m going to enjoy watching the show. 🙂
May 14, 2009 at 4:18 pm
“but there’s a danger of playing the “So and So is a scientist and therefore an expert in anything card.””
Not by me. I evaluate the background and the discipline of the Scientist. Alan is a Chemist, which gives him some insight into the chemical processes involved. I assume he’s had some instruction in Physical Chemistry, which, among other things, studies reaction kinetics and thermodynamics, both of which are important areas to study if one is to really understand the mechanisms of Global Warming. Then of course there’s me, a published PhD Physicist and former University Professor, I really am an expert in everything. 🙂
“In fact, there’s nothing more humbling than realizing how little one knows about one’s own work; how much more there is to learn.”
Yes, of course, but I wouldn’t take that to an extreme. How little we know in comparison to the knowledge left unlearned is humbling indeed, but I think I would still tend to pay more attention to a Chemist than I would say an Entomologist when it comes to understanding the Global Warming issues most commonly being discussed.
May 15, 2009 at 8:31 am
Ah, but when the zombie mutant ginormous cockroaches start taking over because of global warming, then who will you want to talk to?
May 15, 2009 at 9:09 am
“who will you want to talk to?”
The answer to that one is easy:…..God!
Sorry, but you will either be gone or have outlived your usefulness at that point.
BTW do Entomologists actually study zombie insects?
May 15, 2009 at 9:15 am
Has the Presbytery of the East approved Cizik’s call to work for Turner?
May 15, 2009 at 9:33 am
James: POTE was never approached regarding Cizik’s new work (which I doubt would be approved as a call in any case). Simply for the sake of good order, I think some clarification of his status with the presbytery is needed.
May 15, 2009 at 9:49 am
Arthur:
Me? I’d just run over to this blog, it’s 100% zombie proof. But maybe the chemist the physicist, and the entomologist turned pastor could unite their skills to repel the zombie mutant ginormous cockroach menace.
Sounds like a summer blockbuster to me? Want to pitch the script to Spielberg?
Oh, and you would be amazed how long bugs can last with vital parts missing. Or how well those parts work absent other parts. A grasshopper’s hind legs retain their jump reflex even when the head is removed, which can be disconcerting when you’re trying to dissect that portion and it leaps out of the dissection dish all on its own.
May 15, 2009 at 10:09 am
Speaking of zombie bugs, I just read about this yesterday:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/photogalleries/zombie-ants/
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
May 15, 2009 at 10:56 am
David,
I’ve been coming to POTE meetings for about 4 – 5 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Richard Cizik at one. I have to look, but what does the book of Order says about people like him operating without a call? I get the impression that he just stays on our rolls as operating without a call, but I could be wrong.
He is clearly over the top regarding the global warming issue, but if he thinks that it is a man-made situation, and if his understanding of the mandate to be good stewards of the earth is then to do something about it, I don’t have a problem with that. The data, it seems, allows you to be on either side of the issue of global warming. I don’t even think this is entirely a Christian/non-Christian issue, or a conservative/liberal thing, though there are elements to each of those thoughts in the debate. As Christians, even if we are pre-millenial, we still have a responsibility to care for the earth until the Lord comes and burns it. That would be real global warming! Until then, I think I will recycle my coke cans and try to be fairly organic in the way I garden. (Praise the Lord and pass the compost?!) I would agree that he should probably tone down the rhetoric.
May 15, 2009 at 11:45 am
Doug,
I’ve never seen him at a POTE meeting, either. I assume he gets an excused absence from Ron Meyer every time, given that he’s such an important person and all, and can’t find a few hours to meet with the peons, even when we’re meeting in his backyard (as we did at Dundalk in January). As to his status, while he was at the NAE he was officially laboring “outside the bounds.” Now, I assume he is officially without a call. But his continuing refusal to associate with the presbytery in which he holds membership raises questions, at least for me.
I don’t have any problem with him advocating for the position that he believes in. I agree that there is no “Christian” position, nor is it even a matter of political liberal/conservative. With Cizik, it is a matter of two things: 1) his abuse of theological language and ideas to push a very specific political agenda; and 2) the over-wrought, frequently intolerant and uncharitable way that he deals with disagreement. I doubt that I ever would have started commenting on this issue at all if it weren’t for the frequent expressions of apocalyptic doomsaying, combined with the charge that one is being unfaithful to God if one doesn’t take the most extreme pronouncements regarding global warming with the mindset of a fundamentalist–“Al Gore said it, I believe it, that settles it!”
May 15, 2009 at 11:51 am
“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
OK, I see the zombie part, who’da thunk it?
I guess the mutant ginormous part is a result of Global Warming then? Controlled by electrical implants and radio controlled by a cabal of evil Electrical Engineers.
“Sounds like a summer blockbuster to me?”
Lots of dead teenagers maybe?
May 15, 2009 at 1:19 pm
That link… ewww. Just, well, ewww.
May 15, 2009 at 2:38 pm
[…] WARMIST CULT-BOSS: “I have noted on previous occasions the over-the-top rhetorical approach of evangelical […]
May 15, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Alan: There’s nothing unusual at all about that sort of thing in the bug world. I still think the writers of the Aliens movies had an entomologist on the payroll. I once collected a not so healthy looking grasshopper for my collection; I wondered why it was so easy to catch. So I kept it around in a jar for a while. In a few days, out popped a fly, that had been ‘developing’ inside the hopper.
Yeah, I’m great for conversation over dinner. Just ask Kim.
May 16, 2009 at 8:07 am
My husband had a childhood friend whose dad was a coroner, and insisted on talking shop at the dinner table. ewww.