The Sins of Scripture (6 page)

The population of the world continues to explode today only in the third world, where poverty, ignorance and traditional religious teachings combine to produce a senselessly high number of births, a burgeoning that results in starvation and shocking rates of infant mortality. Relief efforts to feed these children, without a corresponding program of education and birth control, will only guarantee a population explosion in the next generation that will make infant mortality even worse. Unfortunately, that effort is periodically impeded by American politicians who seek the conservative religious vote by prohibiting funding that goes to any family-planning clinic where abortion or abortion counseling might be available, which of course includes almost every family-planning center in the third world.

“New occasions teach new duties. Time makes ancient good uncouth.”
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These words from James Russell Lowell, written in 1845, articulate a daring truth. The time has come for the Christian church in all its forms to recognize that its traditional negativity toward birth control has itself become immoral and that limiting births has become a new virtue. Religious teaching must turn from its fear-driven moralism and concentrate on deepening relationships, articulating a new, responsible human maturity and recovering the essential goodness of life. The day has arrived when people no longer believe that God commands them to “be fruitful and multiply.” This “terrible text,” this sin of scripture, has become a dated expression of an ancient survival fear and the literal understanding of the Bible that gave this verse its power must now be jettisoned.

Human survival means that human beings must cease our outrageous overbreeding and learn to live in harmony with this world, not as the dominators of its life, but as an essential part of a common and fragile ecosystem. Perhaps our hope now resides in our increasing fear. There are plenty of reasons to assert that this fear is rising. The question is, Will that fear be of sufficient magnitude to change the human habits of the ancient past? Time will tell, but to those fears we now turn.

T
he purpose of being fruitful and multiplying, according to Genesis 1:28, was to subdue the earth and to have dominion over all living things. This text set the stage for seeing the earth as the enemy of human beings. Increasingly we exercised that dominion, but today the earth is fighting back.

Traveling through Australia and New Zealand several years ago, my wife and I came upon a scene that was both ordinary and yet quite bizarre. In both countries we saw schoolchildren six, seven and eight years of age or so who were playing on the school grounds at recess. They were running, laughing and engaging in games of competitive skill. That was certainly ordinary; nothing unusual there. In both countries, however, we noticed that each child was wearing a wide-brimmed Australian-style hat. There is nothing quite so weird to the American eye as the scene of children running on a playground wearing not baseball caps or football helmets, but wide-brimmed, sun-shading Aussie hats. Upon inquiry about this strange scene, we were informed that these hats were now required by law. In both Australia and New Zealand children in the state-supported public schools must wear uniforms. The government had recently added to the mandated standard dress code these hats designed to screen the children from the harmful rays of the sun. Both nations are situated deep in the southern hemisphere. The ultraviolet radiation from the “hole” that has recently developed in the ozone layer over Antarctica is now believed to present a serious health danger to the people who live in the southern hemisphere. The farther south the nation extends, the greater the danger. Hats are therefore encouraged for adults in Australia and New Zealand, but they are required by law for the children. Welcome to the twenty-first century!

On the other side of the southern hemisphere, in the town of Punta Arenas, Chile, part of the regular curriculum for schoolchildren is instruction on how to survive in the sun. I cannot recall that being part of my curriculum as a child. Children in this town, however, live under the same thinning in the ozone layer that is above Antarctica. In Punta Arenas the population receives 40 percent more ultraviolet radiation than is judged to be normal or healthy. There are whole days in Chile when the population is told it is not safe to exit their homes during daylight hours. Some self-serving politicians and business leaders may still debate the causes of ozone depletion and global warming, but everywhere one looks, signs are apparent that something is terribly wrong.

I was not certain that people could be as blind to environmental reality as some seem to be until I read a report written in 2001 by a man named Hugh Morgan who was a spokesman for the Western Mining Corporation of Australia. He suggested, in his report, that those concerned about the environment are nothing but “communists who have been reinvented as ‘born again environmentalists.’” To Mr. Morgan they represent “a radical and uncompromising attack on Western traditions.”
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I was fascinated to notice that in this report, Mr. Morgan buttressed his argument by saying that what was at risk from the environmentalists was the Western tradition of building things which, he argued, was in response to the biblical injunction to “be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth.” Mr. Morgan does not yet seem to understand that the earth is now fighting back against human abuse, the most serious form of which is overpopulation. The first major battlefield in the war between overbreeding human beings and the environment we share with all other creaturesappears to be occurring in the ozone layer of the southern hemisphere.

The ozone layer is a band that varies between six and thirty miles up within the earth’s middle atmosphere. It is that shield which has made life possible on this planet. It both traps warmth and protects us from the killing rays of the sun.

The first warning about the thinning of this protective covering came as recently as 1974, when scientists discovered the effect of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), wonder compounds that were being used in refrigeration and in aerosol spray cans, among other things. Millions of tons of these chlorofluorocarbons had been sold and incorporated into products before the environmental danger was recognized. The fact that the thinning had become so noticeable that it is referred to as a “hole” in the Antarctica ozone layer became apparent in 1985. The finger of blame was soon thereafter, in 1994 to be specific, pointed exclusively at human beings. A NASA satellite provided the compelling evidence when it detected hydrogen chloride, a byproduct of chlorofluorocarbon decomposition, in the stratosphere. This charge became formal and official when a United Nations panel made up of twenty-five hundred of the world’s leading climate scientists from one hundred countries stated in 1995 that “discernible human influence” could now be documented in the global climate. This conclusion was based on the fact that hydrogen chloride came not only from the breakdown of the chlorofluorocarbons, which only humans can create, but also from the production of such things as aluminum, halogens, halons and the nitrogen used in fertilizers, all of which bear a uniquely human stamp. Chlorofluorocarbons have long lifetimes, ranging from fifty to several hundred years. They rise in the atmosphere until they, along with other human-produced chemicals, are broken down by ultraviolet radiation into chlorine and bromine, both of which have the capacity and the appetite to eat the ozone. Though minuscule when compared with the vastness of the ozone, a single chlorine atom can destroy up to one hundred thousand ozone molecules.
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It is not a fair fight.

In September of 2000 the “hole” in the ozone over Antarctica was said to have reached the size of eighteen million square miles, or six hundred thousand square miles bigger than it was two years earlier. To give my readers a point of reference to embrace this enormous number, the United States measures three and a half million square miles. Though there has been some evidence that the rate of the thinning of this “hole” has actually slowed down since 2000, there is no evidence that any recovery has begun. A thinning of the ozone layer over the Arctic is also visible but has not yet reached crisis proportions.

Nothing reveals better than this ozone problem the pressure of human population expansion together with the interdependence of our common environment. It also makes clear that in environmental degradation this world sometimes punishes the innocent rather than the guilty. The fact is that up to 90 percent of the human production of chlorofluorocarbons occurs in the northern hemisphere. Even more specifically, it occurs in a familiar band of latitude that encompasses the industrialized world, from Japan westward across Europe and into North America. These chlorofluorocarbons, once loosed in this industrial belt, travel toward the polar regions of our globe and sit within each polar vortex. The Arctic polar vortex is not as strong as the Antarctica vortex, since the atmosphere is warmer in the north because of heavier industrialization, so the Arctic region neither gets as cold nor stays cold as long as Antarctica. For that reason there is less ozone depletion in the Arctic. So while the industrial nations of the northern hemisphere are the prime polluters, the largest amount of ozone destruction takes place in the South Pole region! Another result of this same process is that every few years a chunk of Antarctica, typically the size of Rhode Island or Delaware, breaks off and floats away. The people who are first paying the price in this impending ecological disaster are the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere, particularly those nations that are nearest Antarctica. So children in Australia and New Zealand, Chile and Argentina receive regular instructions on how to survive an ozone “hole.” It is not exactly fair. The wealthy, developed nations of the northern hemisphere create for their people comfort and a standard of living known nowhere else in the world, and the citizens of the poorer nations of the southern hemisphere develop the skin cancers, the melanomas and the other results of our environmental excesses.
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This ozone thinning is not the only place where the price exacted for the rapid proliferation of the human species and the incessant desire on the part of the ever-larger numbers of people to wrest the good life from the created world is visible. Plankton, probably the most basic item in the food chain of animate creatures, has already been depleted by 6 to 12 percent in the waters off Antarctica and that rate appears to be accelerating.

Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is experiencing the shrinking of its ice cap at such a rate that it will disappear, except on older postcards, within fifteen years, says an environmentalist writer for the Reuters News Agency.
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It has already lost 80 percent of its ice cap since it was first surveyed in 1912. The glaciers around the world are also shrinking. It is estimated that by 2025 glaciers will have lost 90 percent of the volume they possessed a century ago. The largest glacier in Peru retreated fourteen feet a year twenty years ago. Today it retreats ninety-nine feet a year. In Austria the ski slopes in the Alps are closing due to the bareness of that country’s peaks. Melting in the Arctic region is so severe that the mythical Northwest Passage might become a reality. The Canadian government recently sent a military expedition into the Arctic to make sure that the nations of the world recognized Canada’s ownership of that area just in case a trade route someday opens through Arctic waters.

Ocean temperatures the world over are rising, ocean water is expanding, sea levels are rising and evaporation is accelerating. This means that more water enters the atmosphere, which in turn traps more heat, which means that the surface temperatures on the earth are also increasing. Since 1980 ten of the hottest years in recorded history have occurred, with the years 1997 and 1998 being the hottest on record. The heat wave that Europe endured in the summer of 2003 was so severe that thousands died from it. People in the midwestern part of the United States report that the annual tornado count in 1980 was between two hundred and three hundred a year. Today that count reaches a thousand per year and is regularly reported on television. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere prior to the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century was 275 parts per million. Today it is 360 parts per million. It is expected to be over 700 parts per million by 2050.

In the northern hemisphere spring now arrives a week earlier than it did just twenty years ago. The migratory patterns of birds and animals have begun to change. Eighty percent of the species, from tropical butterflies to arctic foxes, are forging new migration patterns that take them farther north. In Richmond, Virginia, the first sign of spring used to be the welcome return of the robins in late February or early March. In the year 2002, the robins did not leave Richmond at all, and by overstaying their welcome and wintering there, they created a pest problem for many residents. According to a Queensland, Australia, museum arachnologist, spiders in that area that normally breed once a year are now breeding three or four times a year and some are doubling their size and their life span. Banana trees are now known to flourish as far north as Boston, Massachusetts.

There will be effects of global warming on all life everywhere. No one will escape it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations has warned that rising global temperatures “will disrupt fishing, farming and forestry.” Global warming will “kill the coral reefs” found in the seas. It will cause ocean water levels to rise, “flooding coastal areas in China, Bangladesh, Egypt, the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay area.”
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Yet because these results do not come within the time frame of the next election, no political consensus builds in the developed nations of the world to force a preemptive strike against what increasingly looks like a coming disaster. Human beings seem to need a calamity of some sort to occur before they recognize the inescapable conclusion that overbreeding is not just an individual tragedy; it is a human tragedy and global warming is its first offspring.

Political leaders of the northern hemisphere’s industrial nations have been forced to admit this reality, in response to massive amounts of data, but they have now shifted their line of defense. They cite the swings in the earth’s temperature over the centuries that once gave us the Ice Age and suggest that we might be experiencing nothing more than a normal cycle of global warming and cooling that this planet has known before. It is interesting that no one in the southern hemisphere has been known to endorse this ostrichlike argument. In 2001, when President George W. Bush of the United States withdrew unilaterally from the Kyoto Treaty on the environment because it was not good for American business, he sent shock waves across the southern hemisphere. For this nation, which makes up 5 percent of the world’s population but uses 25 percent of the world’s resources and produces more trash and pollution than any other nation in the world, to take this stand was seen by the rest of the world as an act of arrogant irresponsibility. The fact that it was one of the first acts of his administration made it seem all the more pointed and all the more ominous. Mr. Bush was followed in this action by the head of the Russian government, Vladimir Putin, making the old Cold War competitor-nations new partners in the pending global disaster.
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Environmental arrogance seems to be higher among those who are the developed and thus the chief polluting nations of the world. Is it only a coincidence that they are also the nations most deeply shaped by the Christian religion? If these two things are related, can they also be unhooked? That will not be easy, for traditional attitudes within Christianity must clearly be countered before progress in this area can be made. We have cited the various texts in the biblical story that seem to validate exploitation, but can we go behind those texts and delineate the origins of those attitudes that came to be reflected in the texts? I think we can, but it will mean a journey far back into our religious history to a time before the Bible began to be written.