Community Christian Church of
Springfield, MO Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Noam Chomsky speaking on Democracy Now, December 5, 2016:
The threats and
dangers are very real. There are plenty of opportunities. And as we face them,
again, particularly the younger people among you, we should never overlook the
fact that the threats that we now face are the most severe that have ever
arisen in human history. They are literal threats to survival: nuclear war,
environmental catastrophe. These are very urgent concerns. They cannot be
delayed. They became more urgent on November 8th, for the reasons you know and
that I mentioned. They have to be faced directly, and soon, if the human
experiment is not to prove to be a disastrous failure.
There are 52 Sundays a year and I am speaking either here or
somewhere 51 of those Sundays except for the years when it has been 52. I’ll
probably make it 52 more often if I can find a church in a tropical scuba
diving location that will invite me to speak once a year.
I keep that schedule not simply because, as my former spouse
like to say, “I believe that the whole world has a right to my opinion,” but
because I have a lot that I believe needs to be said on a whole host of social
justice situations in the world. And, as has been true for most comedians in
the world, Donald Trump is supplying me with an endless amount of material to
address. I have no confidence in his claim that he is going to make
America great again but you have to admit, he has made Saturday Night Live
great again.
We have never tried to create a topical index to my sermons
and that would be a great project for some enthusiastic volunteer to take on
but I probably come pretty close to hitting 40 different topics in every fifty
sermons.
One of the people whose work I really admire and who I am
glad to think of as a friend in this effort to create progressive religious
content is Michael Dowd, the author of Thank God for Evolution. Michael’s
wife, Connie, is a both a scientist and a kind of organizer and manager for
Michael. Years ago, the two of them decided to give up on settled careers or
even home ownership and they have devoted themselves to working on a single
topic, the environment.
They travel all over, speaking, doing research, and
organizing events to promote environmental awareness and to try to shift our
society’s priorities and practices towards a more sane and sustainable
relationship with the earth. It is not that he is indifferent about the
problems of poverty, racism, gender discrimination, addiction, domestic
violence, or the prospects of international warfare but they have decided that
they are going to do one thing and one thing only.
Michael is a fireball of energy and he will regularly call,
sometimes at very inappropriately late hours of the night, asking me to review
a series of lectures, videos, or articles he is set to release. Peer review is
important and a sadly overlooked step among a lot of religious writers, and
I’ll confess that reviewing Michael’s materials has been very educational for
me. I am always enriched by getting to see what he is working on, of course,
Michael, if you are listening, if you would get it to me a couple weeks before
you need to publish it, I would find that to be much more helpful. But for
Michael, the world is almost literally on fire, As Chomsky noted in his
December address.
Our environment is at a tipping point and dramatic action is
needed, right now. Even if the human race suddenly ceased to exist, if the
burning of oil and coal stopped right now, the oceans would continue to rise
over the next 200 years by as much as 25 to 40 feet.
You might wonder why he and Connie don’t just strike off on
a Al Gore styled education mission but for Michael this is distinctly a
spiritual issue. He wears a green clergy shirt with the white collar when he
speaks in churches now and he bills himself as an environmental evangelist.
One of the things I have come to see from my interactions
with him is that traditional religion has been a part of the problem and it is
difficult to see that people will change their relationship to the earth until
they are able to change their religious perspective.
While you find some suggestions of reverence for the earth
in the major western religions, most of what you see is fear of nature and a
need to dominate it. The forms of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism that push
relevance off into a transcendent other-world after-life diminish and undermine
the importance of this world and this life.
Progressive religious thinkers are increasingly willing to
stress evidence based faith rather than maintaining fealty to ancient
pre-science texts and belief systems. We are in a position to change the way
that religious people view and treat the earth but, and here is the really hard
thing, this is the most complex and difficult problem we face. And because it
is complex and doing anything about it is almost impossible on an individual level,
people lose interest quickly…. Climate change is boring and therefore it is
ignored.
As I have heard Michael say, “I drove here in a car tonight
to tell you how wrong it is to drive cars.” One of the most frustrating
things to me about religious people is that we are so often satisfied with
symbolic gestures.
Religious people will drop to their knees and pray about
things when we need to be praying with our feet and hands. We light candles and
obsess about changing our language when real action is called for.
People of conscience will keep their thermostats a little
lower in the winter and a little higher in the summer when we need to be
putting solar panels and wind turbines up everywhere. We will recycle our
plastics, aluminum, and paper when anyone who thinks about it for a moment can
easily see that the process of sending big trucks through neighborhoods picking
up old newspapers and milk cartons does much more environmental damage than
just throwing those things away.
We should stop using crude oil to make plastics and cutting
down forests to make paper when we can replace both products with hemp, which
is cheaper, sustainable, and biodegradable. We just have to get some pig-headed
politicians to understand that growing hemp is not tantamount to legalizing
marijuana … although we should do that too.
We keep debating fuel efficiency when we just need to stop
using gas for fuel in our cars. The nation of Israel tried a very noble
experiment in the past decade in which they proposed to replace all of their
gas burning cars with electric cars. They overcame the limited battery life
problem by designing cars with drop out battery packs. When you were getting
low on electricity, you pull into a battery exchange station; they drop out the
depleted battery pack and pop in a charged one.
One day soon, battery technology will be much better, but
even with existing technology, this system could work. It failed, as many
environmental efforts do, because people were not ready to invest in change,
even for a better future for themselves.
The free market does not always work, especially when it
comes to sacrificing profits for long range environmental accomplishment. This
is what we are facing now with our much too business friendly President who has
appointed Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, to be the director of the
EPA. There have been few people in America who have hated the EPA more than oil
friendly Scott Pruitt and he has been appointed to pull the teeth of the agency
to allow coal, oil, and gas businesses to accelerate their destruction of the
planet, all in the name of profit.
We saw the coming shift in values clearly portrayed in the
Trump administration’s quick approval of the Dakota Transfer Pipeline’s plan to
put a crude oil pipeline under the Missouri River on Standing Rock Sioux land.
I had predicted that this would happen but it is happening purely for immediate
economic gain. The pipeline will eventually leak because that is what pipelines
do. There have been more than 800,000 gallons of oil leaked just in North
Dakota over the past five years. It is what pipelines do. But we are placing a
major source of agricultural and drinking water in America at risk for
short-term profit.
Native American spirituality tends to talk about a
seven-generation perspective.
Even though their primitive technology did not pose anything
like the risk of our industrialized era, they knew to treat nature in a way
that preserved it for those who would come long after we are dead. The images
of the remaining water protectors being removed from the Standing Rock camp at
gun point this week speaks to what is truly sick about our current view of such
basic things as land, water, and air. Dozens of this generations most valued
spiritual leaders now face up to five years in prison for simply slowing down
the construction of this stupid, stupid, pipe-line.
We must not be demoralized or defeated by this absurd abuse
of the earth. And, folks, we must not placate ourselves with symbolic gestures.
We feed the poor every week, for years we fed the unsheltered homeless at
Bill’s Place and now we are taking meals to the victims of domestic abuse at
Harmony House. But I want you to hear me say this very clearly: charity is not
the solution to poverty. Charity is a spiritual practice that helps us to
deepen our awareness and commitment to compassion but it is not a solution to
anything. We have to change the system that creates so much poverty.
There is no justifiable reason in the 21st
century for there to be either hunger or homelessness. The problem, as Dorothy
Day said, is our acceptance of a stinking rotten economic system. When we make
meals for battered women and frightened children, we have not solved the
problem, we have just become more aware of how much we need to change our
society.
We should be careful about our own carbon footprint. We
should try to use less fuel and we should be conscientious about recycling,
shopping for locally produced goods and foods.
But such things are symbolic. They are teaching tools but
this is not the solution to the problem. The solutions to the big problems are
right in front of us. We can move cargo off of our interstates and onto our
railways. We can rebuild our mass-transit system. We can mandate a switch from
gas powered to electric cars. We can generate all of the power this country
needs through wind and solar if we just decide to do it.
I believe that the technology for renewable energy will
improve but it won’t improve much until we commit to using it. As long as the
market place makes our decisions for us we’ll keep cutting down our forests,
burning coal and oil, we will continue to pollute our rivers, foul our air, and
spoil our land.
I am not ready to write a eulogy for the earth or to give up
on the future of the human race. I want the great, great grandchildren I will
not live to see to have clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet in which
to live. It is time for a resurrection in our world…. Not a resurrection to
eternal life in heaven but a resurrection of a sane faith that knows that water
is worth more than profit, and air is not for sale. I am begging you not to
either give up or to be satisfied with symbolic gestures. What we need now is a
revolution and we must not be satisfied with anything less.
