With environmentalism routinely attacked as "Green Religion", I am prompted to ask where various Christians (and other religious) stand on issues like loss of biodiversity, climate change, environmentally destructive practices and the intersection of religion, ethics and environment.
Clearly there is a broad sweep of views out there - from believing that God's Creation should be cared for and husbanded to believing that Jesus will only return when the world is alight with war, evil and environmental degradation - "After the Last Tree is Felled, Christ Will Come Back" (James G. Watt - Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary) and therefore to be welcomed.
Is climate change a sideshow or is is our response to it central to God's relationship to humanity? Has God given us the minimum we need to make informed ethical choices - along with the freedom to choose to completely screw things up, not only for ourselves but for future generations? Will God intervene if we choose wrong or leave us and future generations to suck it up? And is God okay with influential religious voices counting themselves competent to do the assessing and making the choice on behalf of their flock, supplanting individual choice with their own? Would that be a sin of the leaders or of the followers or both?
™ Version 4.2