Where Our Ruling Classes are Going

with the whole Climate Change thing. More babykilling.

Somehow, the conventional wisdom of the modern era, both left and right, always ends in our need to ignore the teaching of the Church and murder as many innocent people as we can before we drop our current panic and move on to a new urgent reason for ignoring the Church and murdering more innocents. Forty years ago, we needed to kill innocents in order to avert the population bomb and the inevitable global famines of the 80s that we all remember not happening. Then it was global cooling. More recently, we needed to rush into Iraq to stop the WMDs that weren’t there. Now we are being stampeded toward a global one Child policy (I’ll see our ruling classes in hell first). Once again, I’m reminded of the curses of Leviticus for those (like our culture) who forsake the covenant:

And as for those of you that are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. 37 They shall stumble over one another, as if to escape a sword, though none pursues; and you shall have no power to stand before your enemies. 38 And you shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up. 39 And those of you that are left shall pine away in your enemies’ lands because of their iniquity; and also because of the iniquities of their fathers they shall pine away like them. (Lev 26)

One of the things that strikes me most about our culture is how increasingly afraid we are of the future. I was in Denver recently and wandered around the capitol building with Sherry W. The artwork in the building was done in the early forties and is full of exuberant excitement about the future.

One of the marks of our generation is that we no longer really believe this. Oh sure, our politicians still have to talk that way. But really, our rhetoric is full of fear and apprehension about the future. We’re afraid of ourselves, of nature, of the weather, of the disasters we imagine are inevitable. So we undertake to be afraid of climate change and we undertake to try to stop the climate from changing (which is all climate does).

We (rightly) are fearing the judgments we deserve. But we are too frightened to admit that’s what we’re doing. The happy news is that God is much more interested in our repentance than he is in judging us:

40 “But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers in their treachery which they committed against me, and also in walking contrary to me, 41 so that I walked contrary to them and brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled and they make amends for their iniquity; 42 then I will remember my covenant with Jacob, and I will remember my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. (Lev 26)

But as long as we avoid our guilty consciences, we will continue to feel the fear of the future mount. And, in the end, we will enact the judgement ourselves. That’s how sin always works. The punishment for sin is not “God brings the hammer down.” The punishment for sin is “The flower of sin we cultivate finally bears poisonous fruit and we stubbornly and stupidly eat it and die in torments.”

The message to our generation, like all previous ones, is the same:

Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brethren, what shall we do?” 38 And Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39* For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, every one whom the Lord our God calls to him.” 40 And he testified with many other words and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”

For the last ten years, we’ve been being told by the Right that we are threatened by an evil of such unprecedented awfulness that we have to commit grave and intrinsic sin to save ourselves. For the next ten years, it looks like the Left will take up the identical cry in order to stampede us toward more baby killing. Both sides, in their own ways, insist that we can only be saved by embracing sin that spits in the eye of the Living God.

Christ proposes the radical idea that if you really want to be saved, you must lose your life by obeying God, not by clinging to it like a coward and sacrificing your soul in the process. Defeat radical Islam, fine and dandy. But don’t become a torturing monster to do it. Protect God’s creation, fine and dandy. But don’t become a baby-murdering monster to do it.

What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?