Will GOD stop climate change for us?
Pondering delicate issues in desperate times
SOS #119 J. Morris Hicks (8-17-21)
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Just eight days ago, the most terrifying climate change report ever from the IPCC -- was front page news all over the world. That lasted exactly two days.
Now that kind of news has once again been relegated to the "climate and science" section.
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Back to the question in today's title. Who is responsible for taking care of our planet and slowing or stopping climate change? Who is responsible for preventing our demise as a species?
For both questions: Is it God or is it us?
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A little background. Raised in a Southern Baptist family in Mississippi and Tennessee, my dear mother counseled me about God in a loving, caring and thoughtful manner. This is what I remember her telling me numerous times during my youth:
Jim, God gave you a brain, and
he expects you to use it.
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So, I have tried to do just that -- and I have had some doubts along the way. At times, much of the religious dogma that I was taught just didn't feel right to me.
Maybe that was because of the evidence-based thinking process that was featured in the math and science courses that I took in high school. No doubt, my interest in those subjects influenced my decision to major in engineering upon entering college in 1963.
As we all know, math, science and engineering are all about solving problems, debunking mysteries and improving processes. And, all of the above begins with collecting and analyzing real data.
- On a side note, my mother often reminded me that she knew I would be "successful" because I was born on "Success Road."
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The address on my birth certificate reads 2200 Success Road, Memphis, Tennessee.
And our former house may have once been where these aircraft are today -- at the Memphis, TN Airport, hub of FedEx.
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Back to my saga. One particular night stands out in my memory. While a senior in high school, I was sitting alone on our front porch -- in Nashville, Tennessee.
While gazing up into the heavens, I saw millions, maybe billions, of stars -- while contemplating how all of those stars fit into the religious stories I had been told.
I also thought about the prospect of a never-ending existence that would be spent in either heaven or hell. An extremely difficult-to-grasp concept at any age.
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Fast-forward ten or fifteen years. I began having more doubts as I learned about the many thousands of religions in the world and the fact that each of them had a different "story" about the big three: creation, salvation and the after-life.
Ultimately, I asked myself: Is it possible that all of those other religions are wrong about how we were created and what happens to us when we die?
Back to my opening question about who is responsible for taking care of our planet and preventing our demise as a species.
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Is it God or is it us?
If it is God, then which God is it?
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Let’s look at some numbers. Like I said before, my mother always taught me that God expected me to use my brain, so that is what I always tried to do. For me, using my brain begins with gathering data.
According to my research, there are roughly 4,000 religions in the world and they each have their own stories about creation, salvation and the afterlife. There are also thousands of denominations within the four largest religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.
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Various forms of these four are practiced by roughly 75% of the human population -- almost six billion people: 2.4 billion Christian, 1.8 billion Islam, 1.1 billion Hindu and ½ billion Hindu. The total of these four groups is close to six billion.
Let’s take a closer look at the 2.4 billion Christians, a huge group that includes Catholics, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostal and many more.
Approximately, how many Christian faiths are there?
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According to a recent piece in LiveScience, Christian followers of Jesus span the globe and are divided into thousands of denominations.
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Back to my opening questions. Who is responsible for taking care of our planet and slowing or halting climate change? Who is responsible for preventing our demise as a species?
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This is where my mother would want me to use my brain. And maybe that’s what God, our creator, would also want.
She led me to believe that our creator is pleased to see people using their brains to pragmatically devise comprehensive plans for preventing God’s creations from going extinct.
She also said that sometimes God might work in mysterious ways
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Maybe this revealing story below is an example of God working in mysterious ways. Remember New Orleans during the Katrina hurricane disaster?
Here's how the story goes...
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- A devout Christian man in New Orleans ignores all the warnings to evacuate his home and neighborhood and instead, believes that God will save him, chooses to ride out the storm.
- When the waters reached his front porch, a rescue boat motored by and offered to take him to safety. He waved them off and yelled out, “I am staying right here, God will take care of me.”
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- A few hours later, the man is on the second floor of his house as the water continues to rise. Another rescue boat motors by, and the driver pleads with him to join them before it’s too late. Once again, he waves him off and yells, “I am staying right here, God will take care of me.”
- Another two hours pass and the man has retreated to his rooftop to escape the rising waters. He hears a noise above the storm -- the sound of a Coast Guard helicopter with a crew member yelling through a megaphone for him to climb into the basket that they are about to lower to his rooftop.
- Once again, he screams back, “I am staying right here, God will take care of me.”
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But God did not save him. He drowned and the next scene is this bit of drama in the Christian heaven in which he always believed.
- St. Peter greets him and asks loudly, “What are you doing here? You’re not due for another thirty years." The man replies, “Well, I prayed to God to save me and I believed that he would. I guess I was wrong.”
- To which St. Peter angrily responds, “We sent you two lifeboats and a helicopter, what more could you possibly want?”
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What does this story mean to you? To me, it means that God means different things to different people.
The guy on his roof waving off the rescuers is one way of looking at things. Not me. I would be more inclined to say "Thank God" when the first lifeboat arrived.
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Rather than try to make sense of mysterious things that are believed by billions of people around the world, I choose to believe that God would want all of humanity to use their God-given talents to take responsibility for themselves. |
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That Katrina story puts things in perspective for me. And the late Cornell astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, seems to have felt the way that I am feeling now.
Here is how he responded to a question about God that was put to him in the early 1980’s. I strongly encourage you to watch this five -minute video on YouTube. I believe that people of all faiths will appreciate it. From the video:
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Moderator: Do you think that there is any kind of God? Is there any kind of purpose to our existence?
Sagan’s Response: Now, I don’t like to duck any questions and I’m not going to duck this one -- even though there are close friends of mine who are highly religious in the room tonight. So, let me ask you, what do you mean when you use the word GOD?
Moderator: We humans have always created mythical frameworks that have involved some kind of higher spiritual powers. But now, as we know more and more about how we evolved -- it seems harder and harder to prove that there is a God, where does that leave us?
Sagan. On our own! Which to my mind is much more responsible than hoping that someone will step in and save us -- so we don’t have to make our best efforts to do it ourselves.
And if we’re wrong and there is someone who steps in and saves us, okay. That’s alright, I’m for that. We kind of hedged our bets in the event that God doesn’t’ step in and save us.
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Another question about our creator is this? Is GOD a he, a she or an it? I think the best word we can use is "they."
In the absence of physical evidence from any of the thousands of religions, let's just assume that there could be thousands of GODS who would all work together to preserve all forms of life on this magnificent planet.
I totally agree with Carl Sagan's answer to the second question above. And I would like to think that his answer is what GOD would expect from "their" most intelligent species ever created on this end of the universe.
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The Bottom Line. Most humans seem to be willing to abdicate responsibility to use our God-given knowledge and talent to preserve life on this planet -- believing, instead, that their “GOD” will physically step in and save us.
If the world's largest religion prevails, that would mean that at least five or six billion humans (other religions and unaffiliated) would die a horrible death followed by an eternity of hell.
I simply don’t believe that a compassionate and benevolent GOD would let that happen.
Hence, I agree with Sagan. We should hedge our bets and assume that we are on our own. If GOD steps in and saves us, okay. That's alright. I'm for that.
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Similar to the Katrina story. If GOD sends us a lifeboat, we must get in it.
- If GOD gives us powerful brains, we must use them to do a much better job of nurturing the biosphere that gives us life.
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A Final Word About Science. While the scientific world has learned a great deal about our universe since 1945, when I was born -- we still don’t know exactly how it all happened. Science has still not been able to tell us exactly how our universe began or how many other universes there might be.
But we have learned a great deal about how we evolved as a species and that it took billions of years -- and the whole process involved the proven laws of the universe: physics, chemistry and biology.
That doesn't mean that GOD did not create our planet or the entire universe. It just means that we now have proven scientific evidence that it took billions of years.
Mother, if you can hear me, I am just trying to use my “God-given” brain as you always encouraged me to do. If you’re looking down at me from up in heaven, and I turn out to be wrong about all of this, please put in a good word for me.
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What can you do to help spark the global conversation about crucial topics that affect our future as a species? Invite me to conduct a free Zoom session (from 30 minutes to one hour) with your group.
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The image above is a clue regarding the essence of my "family game plan" that is revealed near the end of my talk.
Finally, please do whatever you can to help spark the global "conversation" about our need to urgently transform our way of living into one that has a much better chance of keeping us alive indefinitely.
The billions of innocent children
of the world deserve no less!
I am confident that if a few million people carefully read and digested OUTCRY, that there might at least be a more robust conversation taking place about our grossly unsustainable way of living in the developed world -- and what it will take to get us focused on maximizing our chances of survival as a species.
To be sure, we must do a lot more than change what we eat -- and OUTCRY helps explain the "why" and the "how" of that proposition.
To my knowledge, OUTCRY remains the only book ever published that features an envisioned, totally-green, ultra-sustainable, super-desirable, future way of living for humans -- along with ideas for how we might get there as quickly as possible.
J. Morris (Jim) Hicks
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PS: Regarding the free Zoom conferences with your group, Send me an email and let's get started.
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Our book, for a host of environmental reasons, is only available as an e-book on Amazon. As such, it contains hyperlinks to hundreds of references and videos, is less expensive, does not kill any trees and does not have to be manufactured and delivered.
The links below to earlier SOS Memos will help you understand how these ideas unfolded since 2018.
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As always, I am just trying to help spark the all-important "conversation" about what is needed. By sharing a vision of what I believe is possible, I hope to influence others to think bigger, faster, better and bolder.
You will find that there aren't many books that cover both the health of your body and the health of your planet. This is one of them. It was published in 2011.
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What else can you do to help? Two things:
1. Live as greenly as possible while doing all that you can to raise the awareness of "big picture" solutions that are crucially necessary for saving our civilization.
2. Share this BSB and my "Mama Ain't Happy" BSB with prominent journalists, thought leaders and/or elected officials whom you respect. They need to learn a lot more about the many reasons why Mama ain't happy.
Promoting health, hope and harmony on planet Earth
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