Charles Johnson
Puritan Board Junior
You're probably right about that.That might not be a can of worms you wanna open here. lol
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You're probably right about that.That might not be a can of worms you wanna open here. lol
Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well....
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For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them — how Plato would have every infant "a bastard nursed in a bureau", and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women, and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry — we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.
To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to body-snatchers' is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them. We are always conquering Nature, because 'Nature' is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain.
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of ManI have described as a 'magician's bargain' that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak.
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious — such as digging up and mutilating the dead.
If God is using the weather to punish or warn man for his sin (which He has done in OT times, so very easy to conceive of today), the answer is not to raise taxes and burn less coal: the answer is to repent of our sins and cry to God. These global warming nuts do not have God as their Father, and thus they're afraid of the wrong thing.I believe global warming is a legitimate concern, though not the apocalypse some claim, and I believe that those who are using scripture to claim global warming is impossible are abusing scripture in much the same way as our forefathers did in their condemnations of heliocentrism. If it may be the secret will of God to bring famine or floods by such means to punish man for his iniquity, why should we deny that such is possible? Our Puritan forefathers saw the war of the three kingdoms as God's righteous judgment on their kingdoms for their hardness of heart and fasted, and our nations are far more ungodly than they were, so with our scientists telling us that the climate is becoming more hazardous, perhaps we should be willing to fast too, rather than imagining that it is impossible that God would judge the nations before his final judgment and give them an opportunity to repent and receive mercy.
No reference to Scripture is needed to establish that 'global warming' is a hoax.
Even the proponents of the theory, having gotten caught more than once manipulating data, have switched to 'climate change' to cover their bases on the downside as well as the upside.
Global warming is a globalist (sorry, bad pun) plot to take away American freedoms. Most of the polluting countries are China and developing countries in Africa and Asia.
That is too funny, brother.Taken me a month to find this on a dodgy USB stick. Maybe not 100% kosher but a good conversation starter.View attachment 5880
Attached please find (I hope -- I'm new at this) a letter to Contra_Mundum.
Thank you CW for your contribution. It might have been long for a post (danger of TL/DR) but it was a helpful addition to the thread, in my opinion.I'm not disagreeing that man is responsible for proper stewardship. Nor, that he is incapable of doing LOCAL damage to the environment. But all mankind together has not a tiny fraction of the influential energy toward this planet that the sun has. It is God's sun (Ps.148:3), and it praises its Maker. They are his clouds, and they do his bidding. The weather is something ENTIRELY out of man's puny controls.