Chasing Fantasies

We live in a society that is certainly in need of a good dose of Godly wisdom.  Humanity's ideas pale
in comparison to the principles of Scripture. Romans 11 states:
33 Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!
34 "For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has become His counselor?"
35 "Or who has first given to Him And it shall be repaid to him?"
36 For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.

The wisdom that we find in God's Word can help us to develop a sense of discernment regarding current events.  We can make sure that what we are being told lines up with God's truth and recognize that there are many who elevate human understanding about His principles.  We can reject fear and fantasy and hold fast to what is true and right, so that we can become people of trust in a self-deceived generation.

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We need an injection of godly wisdom and correct appraisals in our world today.  James chapter 3
states:
14 But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth.
15 This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic.
16 For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there.
17 But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.

It was supposed to be a groundbreaking moment in the pursuit of truth regarding alien life.  Matty Roberts, a California college student, had created the Facebook page, “Storm Area 51 – They Can’t Stop All of Us," and so attendees and law enforcement began to prepare.  Local officials in the area of Nevada surrounding Area 51, notorious for its supposed housing of alien life forms, were preparing for some 30,000 people to "storm" the government facility.

They were ready.

Except the expected crowds never materialized.  According to USA Today, the crowd was more like 3,000 - at its peak.  Only 100 showed up on the first night.  The article states:

“We planned for 30,000 with contingencies above that,” said Lincoln County Emergency Manager Eric Holt. “Anything less than that was acceptable.”

In the end, the storm was more of a September shower.

The middle-of-the-night meme that exploded into a viral space spectacle in this far-flung Nevada town served as both a challenge to law enforcement and county leaders with many lessons learned and an opportunity for other world seekers to be a part of something they thought could become the next Burning Man or Woodstock.

But, as the article said, "...to the people who showed up to open a new chapter in the extraterrestrial saga, being here was enough." One attendee said, “Fifty years from now...we can say we were here.”

Oh, to be part of history, right?

Those who did show up at Area 51 were seemingly driven by curiosity and were chasing some sort of extraterrestrial fantasy.  And, while some were following the unproven fallacy of captured aliens, there were many, many more over the weekend who were following a different sort of fantasy - climate alarmism.

CBS News declared:

Millions of people around the world walked out of their schools and workplaces Friday to demand urgent action on climate change. The global climate strikes, which are taking place in more than 150 countries, were scheduled ahead of the opening of the United Nations General Assembly and the Climate Action Summit on September 23.

In New York City, 1.1 million students were permitted to skip school.  Hundreds of employees of Amazon walked off the job.  Their view of saving the planet, according to the article: end fossil fuels. That's right: influenced by an apocalyptic ideology, in which some circles say that the planet only has a few years to live, protesters are calling for radical energy policies that would certainly interrupt life as we know it.  On Monday, Shut Down DC occurred, described by USA Today on Twitter as:

#ShutDownDC aims to "disrupt the systems that created and perpetuate the climate crisis" and block key intersections across the city to disrupt traffic.

I'm not sure that inconveniencing commuters in a hurry to get to work is the best way to deliver a message, but I digress...

And, then there was the Climate Summit at the United Nations - President Trump made a cameo appearance, but his main focus was a Religious Freedom event that occurred at the same site.  Good call - people, including scores of Christians, are actually dying all around the world due to a wave of persecution for their faith.  Assyrian Christians, for instance, are facing real and true extinction.  Prisons in North Korea are full of Christians who do not have the freedom to live out their faith publicly.

Yet, you have the unfortunate case of Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old so-called "climate activist" who went on a rant at the U.N. straight out of a movie, think, Hunger Games, or some other dystopian fantasy film, claiming that greedy capitalists are wiping out a generation.  The Hill reported:

“My message is that we will be watching you,” Thunberg said during the U.N. General Assembly climate summit. “This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here, I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean, yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you.”

She also said that world leaders "have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones."

"People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of the mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you,” Thunberg added.

Cal Beisner described this sort of climate alarmism in a recent post at the website for his organization, the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.  He took to task a recent so-called "fact checker," who pressured Facebook to flag an article and force it to be removed from the original publisher.  Why? Cal wrote:

Because we absolutely must abandon fossil fuels and adopt wind and solar come what may, even if it means trapping billions of people in poverty that will shorten more lives by more years than anything having to do with climate change. Because we absolutely must abandon capitalism as the dominant global economic order and adopt socialism since nothing else will stop greedy people from using those evil fuels and frying us all.  

 Gregory Rummo had written in a Townhall commentary, later removed:

A graph of the Earth’s mean temperature over the last 2,000 years shows two previous periods when temperatures were warmer than they are now; from 1–200 A.D., an epoch called the Roman Warm Period, and more recently the Medieval Warm Period from 900–1100 A.D. [Emphasis added.]

Beisner also wrote:

You can read some of the backstory on this in Hannah Harris’s “The fake news police: Who checks Facebook’s fact checkers?” in World Magazine. And when you do, don’t miss Marvin Olasky’s followup, “What are the facts?”, in which he cites a major new scholarly history that credits, in part, the Roman Warm Period, aka Roman Climate Optimum, covering the two centuries before and after the birth of Christ, for Rome’s great growth—and blames the reversion to cooling afterward, in part, for Rome’s collapse.

Rummo had used the research of noted meteorologist Roy Spencer as his source.  Spencer was also mentioned in a piece on the Institute for Creation Research website from last year. The subject was how sensitive that the planet is to changes in the levels of carbon dioxide. He cited a new study, in which Nicholas Lewis and Dr. Judith Curry "concluded that climate sensitivity is relatively low..." The article states that, "Low climate sensitivity is consistent with evidence that our climate system 'self-regulates' to avoid extremes."

ICR states:

That the climate system would be relatively insensitive to such changes is expected by biblical creationists. Since Earth and its climate system were designed by an all-knowing, loving Creator who promised us a degree of climate stability (Genesis 8:22), one would expect the climate to be relatively insensitive to changes that would tend to push it toward extremes.

So today, we can consider how we should not be chasing fantasies and be grounded in truth.  Certainly, there are and have been incremental changes in climate - are those changes, man-made or otherwise setting the planet on the path to destruction?  I think probably not. Absolutely, we should be good stewards of the environment, because in Genesis, God assigned us that responsibility.  But, in our care for the planet, human stewards should not resort to fear, apocalyptic language and political overreach, using climate change as a tool to further a socialistic agenda.

Christians should be known for our accuracy, not alarmism.  That's important.  And, there are many causes that deserve our attention - abortion, upholding God's view of sexuality, guarding against greed and gossip, and plenty more; there's a list of the works of the flesh found in Galatians 5.  We need godly wisdom and power in order to address the issues that we face as individuals and as a culture.  We should rely on truth, not fear, to make our arguments, consistent with a Christian worldview.

Finally, we have to guard against placing too much emphasis on the power of humanity.  Unfortunately, people who do not have a reliance on God or the Bible feel they can turn to their own superior wisdom, which can lead to frailty and futility.  There are people in leadership who claim to be working toward solutions, but their so-called "solutions" just lead to further empowerment of themselves.  For instance, if champions of the poor really eliminated poverty, they would be working themselves out of a job or a cause.  We can lean on the God of true solutions.