A friend sent this piece on global warming denier, amateur scientist and state representative, Mike Beard:
He lectured his colleagues on global warming. He told the committee members that the planet’s troposphere over the tropics was not warming. He is not afraid of CO2 and he’s not afraid of coal. […] Beard believes that “God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.”
I’m no biblical scholar, but if there’s another word in the Bible that fits God better than “capricious”, I don’t know what it is. And if God isn’t “capricious”, then maybe he just enjoys fucking humanity in the ass with his big old God cock every other Thursday right after he ties one on at the corner bar.
Setting aside the sex habits of our Heavenly Father, the fact remains that the troposphere is warming, and the precipitation that we’re having can be tied back to global warming, no matter what some cow state Bible banger “believes”.
Update: More Jesus, MD images here.
Suck It Up!
Wait? I thought God was a vengeful God. How does he know God just won’t say “fuck it all!”?
beltane
Mike Beard must be from Teletubbie land and not earth. His beloved Bible is full of natural catastrophes and disasters.
“Capricious” was how the ancient Greeks used to describe their gods. They were light years ahead of our fundamentalist idiots.
Joseph Nobles
God’s cock isn’t as big as He likes to pretend.
Thomas
Oh jeez. What’s most annoying about this is deniers are given a platform to espouse this nonsense and placed on equal footing with actual climate researchers, over 90% of which agree there is a problem.
Bizono
Hopefully after God finishes f**king humanity in the ass, that grand sodomizer will turn himself and his followers into a pillar of salt.
LGRooney
Didn’t good ol’ TJ say that the god of the bible was a psychopath? Or was it someone else?
Superluminar
God made algore fat. QED, muthafuckers, QED.
John Emerson
Beard is using EXACTLY the argument parodied by mick Jagger in “The Girl with the Faraway Eyes”. EXACTLY:
I was driving home early Sunday morning through Bakersfield
Listening to gospel music on the country radio station
And the preacher said, “You know you always have the
Lord by your side”
And I was so pleased to be informed of this that I ran
Twenty red lights in his honor
Thank you Jesus, thank you lord
God is taking care of us so we can do any goddamn thing we want. From time to time in the course of my life I’ve run into Christian ex-cons and petty criminals for whom Jesus was a get-out-of-jail-free-card, and they’re a major factor in today’s Republican Party.
I’m not kidding: revivalism and the prosperity gospel. Look at Issa, a two-time felon. We’re all sinners, you see, but good Republican Christians repent…and repent…and repent… and then sin one more time. Whereas liberals are proud and godless and do what they think is right.
No, it’s not parody. I’m not exaggerating.
(I changed one word in the lyric. Guess which one.)
Elizabelle
@John Emerson:
country?
PurpleGirl
it does seem that the fundies are expecting that any day now the oil wells will be refilled, coal fields will be refilled, all the minerals will be replaced. All the stuff we’ve used (and used up) will be replenished. And we can start over again.
Those people are idiots.
Mark S.
I don’t know why you think God is capricious. Sometimes He wants to kill you for no reason but is satisfied if you throw a foreskin at him. Other times He orders you to perform a census and then punishes you when you obey Him.
greennotGreen
The Bible also says, “What you sow, you shall also reap.” I would say that events following that rule are the opposite of capricious. I am not an adherent of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but I think I’m correct in saying that the Bible generally gives humans responsibility for the Earth, and it also teaches that our actions have consequences. Denying global warming because God is not “capricious” is part of the same kind of theology that leads Bible-thumpers to commit adultery, lie, do drugs, get in the pulpit on Sunday morning and cry that we’re all sinners, but by God’s mercy we are all saved, praise Jesus. No, dude. What you sow, you shall also reap.
R-Jud
If Old Testament God really was my father, I would be calling DCFS on his ass at the first opportunity.
kdaug
Just happens there’s a new animated short that explains this whole phenomena.
(Recommend in HD).
cathyx
Why doesn’t he just go with; It’s God’s will that the Earth heats up and humanity is destroyed. It’s not our fault. That way everyone could be happy.
klem
boy, you woke up on the wrong side of the bed didn’t you?!?
niknik
Isn’t it about time we start feeding these people to lions again?
Discuss.
Southern Beale
This is interesting to me. In Genesis it says that God gave man “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
That’s an interesting concept. For over a century most Christians have taken this to imply stewardship: husbandry, good care and keeping. It’s what inspired John Muir and St. Francis of Assisi. Sadly, since Christianity got corrupted by political and capitalistic interests, it has taken on a new meaning: no longer does “dominion” mean stewardship, now it means rape, pillage and plunder. There’s this idea that God will swoop in and make everything alright: he wouldn’t have given us all this coal and oil if he didn’t mean us to use it, right?
Well … he also gave us wind and sunshine and geothermal energy and tidal power and the brains to figure out how to harness those energy sources, too. Why is one more important than the other? Because of the demon whispering in your ear, Mr. Politician? Maybe?
I’m going to have to do some kind of post on this. The thing about religious arguments is that if your worldview and politics is informed by the God thing, then you have to recognize what the concept of God giving you dominion means. It means he’s ain’t gonna step in and make it alright. It’s ours and if we fuck it up, well, that’s our problem. That’s what free will is all about. That’s why we have the parallel trajectories: we have the free will to make colossally stupid human mistakes, and we also have God showing us the better way. The choice is ours which path we take.
Superluminar
Ok, just read the linked article, there was soooo much win especially in the comments:
well yes, I too rest my case!
Dave
That may be the dumbest thing I have ever read. It is such a rejection of science and basic common sense…how?? How can someone believe that? The Earth is finite. Therefore, anything in it is finite as well. There’s no Space Oil out there to suck down once we’re tapped. When the coal is exhausted, there’s no Moon Coal to go after.
Pococurante
Umm wow. Little early to be getting on the booze hate. :-P
What’s the difference between someone who bases their belief in G-d on a dusty old book, and someone who bases their disbelief on that same book?
Nothing: both are literalists.
Anyway to the point, the Kiribati also believe their islands will not be covered by the ocean because G-d already sent one flood and promised never another. Perhaps they and Mike Beard can work something out. I suspect their pre-Christian ancestors would have been more pragmatic and started building boats.
Tim O
I love when they say “CO2 is life!”
Here’s an experiment. Put a plastic bag over your head, breath deep, and savor the CO2. Have a buddy standing by in case you get too high on life.
cleek
seen any passenger pigeons lately ? dodos ?
greennotGreen
reply to Dave : Yes, but there might be unobtainium on the moon.
(Why didn’t my reply function work the first time? I think I want to invent a comment program that allows you to write comments on little slips of paper that you feed into a slot on the computer. I’m sure that would be foolproof.)
MattF
Well, y’know, there’s just too many Bad People who don’t belong to the Select Few. One of these days, Daddy will make them Pay, and then everything will be Hunky Dory.
Superluminar
fixed for improvement to human happiness
Mark S.
@Dave:
As Bill O’Reilly says, “Coal goes in, coal goes out, coal goes in, coal goes out.”
Also in the article:
Jesus, Alabama, just stick with football.
Xenos
@John Emerson:
There is a strong strain of grifterism in the evangelical world-view. Ask any Baptist what he thinks of the Assemblies of God, ask them both what they think of Mormons, ask all three what they think of Scientologists. And then let them project about Liberals, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and so on. They see grifters under every stone because their own churches are full of grifters, and they think their own grifting communities are the relatively honest ones.
And don’t even start with the intellectually dishonest ways they interpret scripture…
Xenos
@niknik:
PETA has been notified. They are not amused by your plan to give captive lions such a dangerously high fat diet.
Silver Owl
I guess he didn’t read part where he’s suppose to be the steward.
Gawd I’m so sick of lazy conservative man always making up bullshit excuses not to do shit about anything but give more money to their rich benefactors.
Nicole
@Pococurante: I think “Mastermix” is just trying to make sure Dan Savage notices his threads by using terms Dan comes across quite frequently in his work. ;) (Heh, I said, “comes.”)
It never fails to astound me how the media can get the public in a screaming, terrified froth over mosques at Ground Zero and deficits that sprung into existence when the nation elected a black man, and then actively work to quell justifiable concern over things we actually should be scared about, like global climate change and dwindling natural resources. But apparently low-flow toilets are an assault on our freeeeeedom.
Good Mother Jones article- very effective at giving one quick talking point about why excessive precipitation in winter actually further proves climate change. And makes me weep that we’re so stupid we think snow=cold. Antarctica is the world’s largest desert, for pete’s sake.
toujoursdan
According to GOP philosophy we shouldn’t help [lazy, irresponsible] poor people because that stifles initiative, avoids responsibility and creates a dehumanizing culture of dependency.
So why would they expect God to stifle our initiative, aid us in avoiding our responsibility and dehumanizing us instead of giving us the “tough love” they advocate??
I’m a Christian but I’ll never understand GOP or fundy thinking.
Southern Beale
@Tim O:
LOL LOL LOL
Goes to the “we won’t run out of anything” line of thinking too.
Mark S.
@Xenos:
Nice.
geg6
Dude. This made my day.
Dr. Dr.
Mike Beard is clearly not a biblical scholar. Every biblical scholar would clearly point out that we live in a fallen world. So things haven’t been running according to God’s origional plan for awhile now.
BigHank53
Gosh, we ran out of passenger pigeons, dodos, wooly mammoths, sabertooth tigers, and ivory-billed woodpeckers already. Guess you’re wrong, Reverend Beard.
Chris
I was going to post something about how the dinosaurs would be happy to hear that, along with the other (vast majority of) species that’ve gone extinct on this little planet of ours.
Then I remembered the canned response to that: God didn’t make a deal with the dinosaurs, but he made a deal with us (post-flood) that he’d never do that to us (again).
Like almost everything else for conservatives, they believe that they have a divinely ordained Chosen status that protects them from all the facts of life that vex other people.
p.a.
@cleek: thanks to this post, I think we have found a “Beard-ed” dodo.
WereBear
The thing about the Conservative Brain is that thoughts do not touch each other.
It is how they can blithely go about without noticing the glaring contradictions in every thing they do. And since they never, ever, make a mistake; all the screwups must be a Liberal’s fault.
Ash Can
@greennotGreen: @Southern Beale:
Exactly. Beard isn’t even using good theology for his self-serving justifications. The fact that he’s wrapping his bullshit in a cloak of religion just adds insult to injury to those of us believers who don’t believe that scripture exists for the sole purpose of justifying our personal opinions.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tim O:
Similar to my way to test how “flexible” the “Theory” of Gravity is. We’ll take some of these people who doubt “Theories” up in a helicopter, and they can use their “intelligent falling” to prevent any injury when we chuck them out while hovering 500 feet over an open field.
joes527
But there is a bright side. It seems that God likes unions:
http://media.journalinteractive.com/documents/02.16.11+Archbishop+letter.pdf
Gus
Hey, hey..at least my cow state hasn’t voted R for pres since Nixon. No other state can say that.
Villago Delenda Est
Two words:
Chuck Colson.
4jkb4ia
@Southern Beale:
Michael Lerner was gleeful about exploiting the second paragraph of the Shema to show that Hashem has really promised environmental consequences in at least one instance–
“He will restrain the heaven so there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce”. Part of the context is that the Land of Israel is dependent on rain and Egypt is not. So part of the confidence that climate change could not affect us is really wanting to be like Egypt where everything comes from the Nile.
Something should be said about this week’s parsha encompassing the Golden Calf and the idea that humans, even when given every benefit, are much more capricious with G-d than G-d is with them.
Not in this week’s parsha would be “The revealed sins are for us, but the hidden sins are for HASHEM, our God, forever, that we may do all the words of this Torah“, implying that getting accordance with law is the main purpose of everything.
AkaDad
God gave Mother Nature a sense of humor and Liberals clearly don’t get the joke.
4jkb4ia
Not “God of the gaps” exactly but “G-d is capricious because we don’t understand something” does have some resemblance to what you wouldn’t accept from Bill O’Reilly about a natural phenomenon….
Stefan
He lectured his colleagues on global warming. He told the committee members that the planet’s troposphere over the tropics was not warming. He is not afraid of CO2 and he’s not afraid of coal. […] Beard believes that “God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.”
You know, if this loon substituted the word, say, “Odin” or “my invisible rabbit friend Harvey” for “God”, everyone would see that’s he’s insane. But just let him sprinkle “God” throughout his sentences and he can say the most unhinged, unbalanced things and it’s OK because hey, it’s religion.
Stefan
He lectured his colleagues on global warming. He told the committee members that the planet’s troposphere over the tropics was not warming. He is not afraid of CO2 and he’s not afraid of coal. […] Beard believes that “God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.”
He might want to look up the story of Noah and refresh himself on what happens to life on Earth when God decides to say ah, to hell with it.
horse dave
We are doomed I tell ya doomed. With Beard’s type of thinking/leadership pervasive in one of two political parties, I don’t see any scenario for the US that is good.
@Thomas – Actually %97 of climate scientist with American Academy of Science (created by that RINO Lincoln) believe that the earth is warming. Of those over %90 believe it’s from human activities. This is a 2008 statistic. It’s probably higher now.
I really have to get out of this country for so many reasons.
S. cerevisiae
I read the comments to the linked article and it is encouraging to see the science defenders outnumber the deniers. If you want to see real knuckle-dragging troglodytes go read the comments at Yahoo, but not recommended unless you have a strong stomach.
JGabriel
mistermix @ top:
Sounds like Mr. Beard needs some remedial Sunday school teaching, starting with the Book of Job, in addition to his remedial science classes.
.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
“God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable.”
This is simply false within the Christian framework. See Genesis 6, Genesis 11, Matthew 24, the entire Revelation just for starters. Do these people even read the Bible?
Maybe you could blaspheme the Holy Ghost in your next post.
Svensker
@Southern Beale:
Nicely put.
My brother’s fave online mag, The American Thinker (sic), has an article today why global warming is a Nazi apocalyptic plot. Srsly. Sadly No has the link.
El Cid
Hey, just because God thought that world-wide genocide via drowning was the best way to deal with bawdy behavior he didn’t like, it doesn’t make him capricious.
After all, to the one family he let get on a boat while all the others got to see their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and children and everyone else be swallowed up in the cold waters and drift away and sink from the awful pain of lungs bursting with water, he showed them a rainbow, and said he’d never do that again.
What leader wouldn’t be admired for committing genocide and then following that up by showing some shiny colors to the one survivor?
If that’s not a promise that there’s no way we can ever fuck up a planet such that the conditions for our own existence and much animal and plant life becomes much more difficult, I don’t know what you people expect.
El Cid
@Svensker: I didn’t address the notion that apocalyptic rhetoric attaches itself to one particular scientifically-originating scenario or to one set of predecessors long predating Nazism, but I did outline the 1859 origins of scientific work regarding the effects on CO2 on atmospheric heat radiation emission and therefore global warming, and how industrial fossil fuel use increased the CO2 quantities.
1859.
There were a pretty large numbers of authoritarian, race and ethnic and national and sectarian superiority pushing philosophers and scientists back then.
Then again, both Hermann Goring and Al Gore were/are fat.
RalfW
This nutbag is by no means the only elected official who thinks god is putting more coal and oil under the ground for us to use.
This is their solution. Really. To pray for more gas.
Meanwhile, we’re told that inflation is about to run out of control because, wait for it, the price of oil may spike to $120/bbl. Guess what, Beard et al, oil will spike to $120/bbl and keep going because FSM hates you and has decided to put new oil under Tralfamadore or Beta Centuri or whatever, and not under Pennsylvania or even Saudi Arabia.
I have issues with Baltimore
So this troposphere thing is interesting, and I know a little bit about it (I specialize in *jovian* tropospheres, so take this with a grain of salt). There have been periods in Earth’s history where the planet has experienced “equitable climates”: where the temperature difference between the poles and the equator was very small. There’s some thinking, based on what we know about the Eocene period, that as we warm the planet, the troposphere over the equator won’t increase all that much, but the troposphere at the poles will increase dramatically. And, unfortunately, that’s what will do the most damage.
So, for now, consider buying up as much land as you can in Canada’s territories for your grandkids future temperate beach resort while the rest of the planet either floods or desertifies.
RSA
@PurpleGirl:
I understand that scientists have promising leads in the area of renewable loaves-and-fishes energy.
geg6
@Shoemaker-Levy 9:
It’s only blasphemy if you fall for the bullshit. If you don’t, it’s fucking hilarious.
sukabi
no matter what some cow state Bible banger “believes”.
you’ve got that backwards… it’s ‘no matter what some Bible state cow banger “believes”‘
Shoemaker-Levy 9
@geg6:
Don’t tempt him. He’ll do it thinking it’s a joke and then look what will happen.
daveNYC
@Tim O: Yep, or suggest that they partake of some of the other waste byproducts that their body produces.
DFH no.6
You know, for you several god-botherers here who are mortified by mistermix’s vulgar but very apt description of the Biblical god’s capriciousness and overall dickishness, I give you the inimitable Mark Twain:
“Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness… It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading, by contrast.”
And more succinctly: “If there is a God, he is a malign thug.”