The Apocalypse is Now!

“When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, 'There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and lowering.' You know then how to discern the face of the sky, and can you not know the signs of the times?”Matthew 16:2-4

Today I read yet another story about the grim news of climate change. I am not waiting for an Apocalypse because there can be little doubt now that the Apocalypse of Selfishness of which I have written is the Apocalypse of Now. The changes in climate that herald a drastic change in the Earth's climate that has welcomed humanity are now accelerating at an unprecedented rate and severity.

In Scripture Christ mocked those who could not see the signs of what was happening. Are the Climate Change Deniers guilty of the same shortsightedness and is the result going to be an ever acerbating destruction of humanities' habitat?

When I read and hear the rhetoric of the Republican candidates for President (all of them) I am reminding what Jefferson wrote:

"I tremble for my county, when I reflect that God is just." Make that tremble for the world. Of course the irony is that slaveholder Jefferson never acted personally to alleviate the evil that brought the greatest destruction in his country's history.

Yet, in three months we will be celebrating another holiday: Easter. It is the hope of Resurrection that fueled the growth of Christianity but Pope Francis has recognized that God's mercy and forgiveness is not just for those baptized Christians. It is for all humanity. There is always hope for survival, if not for the entirety of humanity, at least for each and every of humanities' members. Let us pray Francis is right.

Read and weep: "Climate Change Across the Map" NY Times 12/31/2015  p. 1
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This is not a promo for my book "Quantum Christ" but if you are interested:

http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html

Red State, Blue State and Le Miz

There was an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times (Saturday, 2/9/2013) today on the fact that soldiers on both sides of the Civil War read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in the trenches.  What follows is my comment.

The fact that Le Miz was popular in the camps and trenches of the Civil War is an ironic comment on the status of popular literacy today. The same comment ran through the "The Civil War" presentation by Ken Burns.

Today Congress is full of babbling idiots who dispute the elemental facts of science and deny both global warming and evolution which for all his tragic administrative failures is accepted by even Pope Benedict. There are repetitive stories of books being banned and textbooks being censored by Red state education authorities. In one state, there is a proposal to mandate the reading of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged which is the bible of a philosophy which is totally dismissive of the great ideals of equality which have governed this country since the Declaration of Independence and for which we fought the bloodiest war in our history – the Civil War.

This country is facing as great a divide as that of the Civil War. Not between free state and slave state, not even among classes of wealth, but among those who accept and understand that ideas progress as well as people and those who cling to an idealized vision the past, but do not learn from it.

The knowledge gap between Red states and Blue is the most invidious gap we face to day. The fact that soldiers on the line could read and relate to Le Miz during the Civil War is a witness to the fact that progress is not guaranteed.