With the exception of his admittedly atheistic conclusions, Brendan O’Neill nails it over at Spiked [emphasis added]:
In his Christmas sermon, delivered at Canterbury Cathedral, Dr. Williams [the Archbishop of Canterbury] finally completed his journey from old-world Christianity to trendy New Ageism. His sermon was indistinguishable from those delivered… by the heads of Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Williams did not speak about Christian morality; in fact, he didn’t utter the m-word at all. He said little about men’s responsibility to love one another and God, the two Commandments Jesus Christ said we should live by. Instead he talked about our role as janitors on planet Earth, who must stop plundering the ‘warehouse of natural resources’ and ensure that we clean up after ourselves…
The reduction of man to an eco-janitor, a being who creates waste and thus must clear it up, is more than a cynical attempt by isolated Christian leaders to connect with the public. [They] no doubt hope and believe (mistakenly, I’m sure) that adopting trendy Greenspeak will entice people to return to the church. But the move from focusing on love for God and one’s neighbour to focusing on ‘respect for the planet’ represents more than a rebranding exercise: it signals a complete abandonment by the Christian churches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
The cult of environmentalism embraced by the Christian churches does away with morality altogether. Some sceptics claim that environmentalism is a new form of moralistic hectoring; it is better to see it as amoralistic hectoring. In judging everything by how much CO2 or pollution it creates, environmentalism dispenses with questions of moral worth and judgment… When human actions are judged by their levels of pollution alone, the issue of meaning – of why we do things, who we do them for, and how we might do them better – is implicitly downgraded.
Sadly, I’ve observed some of this firsthand. It seems to be spreading. But wait, here’s the kicker. Put down your coffee:
…in his Christmas sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury quoted extensively, not from the Bible, but from Richard Dawkins…
Interesting, one of the things that I have noticed is that in many denominations including my own. The major doctrinal problems are starting in the 1st World. The faith is strong and growing in the same old way that it always has in places like Africa, Korea, and South America.
Another interesting point is that the Episcopal churches and now an entire Diocese have left the American denominational structure not for the Church of England (CoE) itself but for one of the African CoE spin offs. If I remember the reasons correctly, they were entirely doctrinal in nature.
I’ll close with one last item. The Bible is by its very nature viral. This both explains the extremes that have been gone to over the ages to extirpate it from the world, but also its success in the face of the Inquisition, the KGB, and other similar organizations.
The story of the HMS Bounty Mutineers is a perfect example of the principle, however I will leave it as an exercise for the interested student.
By: Tigger23505 on December 29, 2007
at 8:43 pm