FBI criminal profiling is a method of identifying an “unsub” – unknown subject of a crime investigation – though his/her known patterns of behaviors revealing psychopathologies and personal preferences, allowing investigators to anticipate the next move.
We can apply profiling to Cain’s demonstrated narcissism to anticipate what he will do next.
- Claiming to be at risk for being murdered, he will continue to murder.
- Since his achievement in having dominion over the earth’s production has been rejected, he will turn to destroying the earth’s productivity.
Not only is Cain a murderer and a liar, he is a destroyer of this world.
“O Lord God Almighty…thy wrath is come…that thou shouldest…destroy them which destroy the earth...And the temple of God was opened in heaven…and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.” (Revelation 11:17-19)
In 1967, Lynn White wrote a paper entitled “The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” in which he laid much of the blame for an impending environmental catastrophe at the feet of Christians, due to dominionist views that led to overconsumption of natural resources…
For Jerry Falwell—the dispensationalist pastor who organized the Religious Right’s flagship organization, the Moral Majority, in 1979—legislation that attempted to reduce emissions of fossil fuels ran afoul on two grounds…For Falwell, free-market capitalism, without restrictions such as on the burning of fossil fuels, was Cold- War America’s front-line defense against communism and best assurance of a high value of human life.
But what about the Bible’s clear mandate on righteous behavior? What about the Third World countries whose natural resources are being exploited to keep American constituents glutted with far more than we need affordable cheating our suppliers out of a living wage while Americans suffer from obesity-related diseases and choke the oceans and their inhabitants with masses of garbage?
Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, has long been leading a movement of evangelicals who are calling for climate justice as part of fulfilling the biblical mandate to be stewards of creation. He quotes Isaiah 24:5-6 to show the significance of creation care for Christian faith…
“The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statues, broken the everlasting covenant [to have dominion]. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt” (NRSV).
What is the difference between evangelicals who deny anthro-pogenic [human generated] climate change and those who advocate for climate justice as part of the pro-life evangelical social conscience?
Whether or not sustaining biblical authority requires [an English language] literalist [24 hour days of creation], young-earth approach to Genesis.
What?
For many, biblical authority means biblical literalism…the words of the text can be universally understood outside of their original cultural [and language] contex.
In today’s English culture dominance means King James Only.
Sola scriptura, meaning by scripture alone, is a Christian theological doctrine held by some Protestant Christian denominations, in particular the Lutheran and Reformed traditions of Protestantism, that posits the Bible as the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice…
Young Earth Creationists claim sola scriptura in taking their position that a literal reading of Genesis, by which they mean using the English translation and interpreting day = 24 hours, is necessary if all the rest of the Bible is to be considered reliable. Ken Ham’s Creation Museum visibly displays the position that Creation Science has become the standard that legitimizes the doctrine of Jesus Christ as YHVH’s Savior of the World.
Yet this position is the reverse of the doctrine of sola scriptura. Not only does the Bible in that first passage specifically defines the first “day” as a condition of light, not a length of time ruled by the sun, which doesn’t occur until “day four”, throughout scripture “day” is defined as the condition of light in which God is productive in good works, in contrast to “night” when the Adversary is active in destruction.
We should be able to recognize the destructive work of the devil using unlearned and unstable self-aggrandizing leaders using the King James Bible Only Movement to wrest scripture,
Faith in the Bible as the inspired Word of God which calls humanity to take dominion over the earth and sends Christ to make a new earth from the ashes to which it is reduced by mankind’s abuse are precisely what motivates the call to end our dependence on fossil fuels.
Our dependence on oil has led to wars in oil-rich countries such as Iraq – and now Venezuela – whose wars have decimated local cultures and severely impoverished the people. These challenges in oil-rich countries are compounded by climate change, which is affecting the world’s poorest people at a much more accelerated rate than those in affluent countries that consume the most oil.
Climate justice begins with placing…the centrality of Christ back at the center of the evangelical social conscience.
Climate change and the threat to civilization
In their article, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021”—which now has more than 14,700 signatories from 158 countries—William J. Ripple and colleagues state that climate change could “cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable” (3)…
We define civilization collapse as the loss of societal capacity to maintain essential governance functions, especially maintaining security, the rule of law, and the provision of basic necessities such as food and water…consider three representative scenarios.
In the first, local collapse in specific, vulnerable locations leaves civilization elsewhere largely able to adapt to climate impacts. The Syrian civil war has been suggested as an example. Model simulations indicate that the kind of drought implicated in the war was more than twice as likely to happen given anthropogenic climate change (6). This example illustrates that local collapses can contribute to political instability in non-collapsed places, as illustrated by rising right-wing populism in Europe in response to the influx of Syrian refugees.
In our second scenario, national-level collapses are widespread, but some large urban centers and national governments still exist but experience negative climate impacts such as persistent water and food scarcity. Philosopher Tim Mulgan refers to this type of scenario as the broken world (7); which differs from local collapse in its more widespread scope and in the worldwide impaired functioning of non-collapsed places.
In our third scenario, which we label global collapse, all large urban areas across the globe are virtually abandoned, functioning nation states no longer exist, and the world’s population undergoes a catastrophic decline as an extension of the broken world. The remaining non-collapsed states and urban centers, which are nonetheless highly vulnerable, are pushed over the brink by further climate impacts. Climate collapse, then, might not be an abrupt event but rather an extended process that starts small and plays out over the course of a century or more.
Several mechanisms that might cause global collapse or a broken world have been discussed. We group these into three types: direct impacts, socio-climate feedbacks, and exogenous shock vulnerability.
Direct impact mechanisms hypothesize that severe and compounding climate impacts—rising sea levels, drought, flooding, extreme heat, and so forth—could undermine agriculture, water availability, and other essential bases of civilization (8, 9) .For instance, a global temperature increase of 2°C triggers irreversible rapid collapse of Antarctic ice sheets, releases of methane from permafrost or forest diebacks (10).
Socio-climate feedback mechanisms propose that adverse climate change impacts, especially on food production, may cause political conflict and dysfunction leading to actions, such as bans on food exports or warfare, that spread destabilization and hasten collapse (11).
Exogenous shock vulnerability mechanisms suggest that climate change having weakened adaptive capacities in the first two mechanism lead to collapse triggered by wars or pandemics (12).
Inexorably rising sea levels threaten the coastal cities throughout the world, which became the financial centers of their nations because of their established rapid transport system of peace-time goods and war-time military forces across the world on the sea.
But there’s another destabilizing force in play.
The melting of polar ice is not only shifting the levels of our oceans, Earth’s crust beneath these land masses is warping, observed as tectonic motions and earthquake activity.
And this one effects America’s entire west coast. While once again leaving Russia virtually untouched. As battle strategies go, this makes for good timing for Russia to assert itself as the new world leader.
These changes represent a spiritual impoverishment of the earth, as well as a practical catastrophe for humanity. The time for action has long since passed.
What both Evolutionist and fundamentalist Christian perspectives miss is how the Bible’s prediction of the end of Western Civilization outlined in Revelation chapter 6 lines up exactly with Climate Change’s exogenous shock mechanisms leading to helpless humanity calling for a spiritual solution.
Could be worth investigating…
Kingdom Come 