Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Gaia’ Category

Army approves atheism-themed concert at Fort Bragg

Posted in Anti-Christ, Atheism, Babylon, Current Events, Days of Noah, Discerning the Times, Gaia, Humanism, New World Order, Paganism, Post-Modernism, prophetic, Signs of The Times on August 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »

from Las Vegas Review Journal:

 A concert event organized by atheist, agnostic and other non-theist soldiers has been cleared by the Army to take place next spring at Fort Bragg, concert organizers and a spokesman for the post said Monday.

Organizers planned to hold the Rock Beyond Belief event this year, but they canceled after saying Bragg leadership was not providing the same support it gave to an evangelical Christian concert last fall.

Supporters hailed the Army’s decision.

“You know those goosebumps you get when your favorite song hits that sweet spot? I got those,” said Sgt. Justin Griffith, main organizer of the event and the military director of American Atheists, in an email. “I was overcome with joy and a sense of vindication.”

The plan is to have the event on March 31 at the main parade field at Fort Bragg, where the Christian-themed Rock the Fort concert was held. Famed atheist Richard Dawkins is scheduled to appear, along with musicians, speakers and other entertainment.

“This just might be the turning point in our struggle for acceptance,” Griffith said. “I mean it. I get letters daily from service members asking for advice on how to ‘do something like what’s going on at Fort Bragg’.”

Final approval for the event came last week, Bragg spokesman Ben Abel said. The festival will get the same treatment from Bragg that other groups receive, he said.

“Our logistical support will be the same as what we did for Rock the Fort,” he said, meaning Bragg will provide the venue, security and basic utilities. “That’s what we provide for any private organization.”

The event had its origin in the Rock the Fort concert last fall, which was organized by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Groups like Americans United for the Separation of Church and State opposed the event, saying it was an unconstitutional use of military resources aimed at winning converts to Christianity. Military leaders at the time said any private event, regardless of religious orientation, would receive the same level of support, and Griffith, stationed at Bragg, decided to take them up on that.

The initial Rock Beyond Belief concert was scheduled to happen in April, but Griffith called it off after saying Bragg leadership wasn’t offering the same support it had given to the Christian event, which Bragg leaders denied. There were disagreements over the venue, the potential size of the crowd and promotional materials, but especially on the subject of funding.

This time around, organizers of the secular festival raised $50,000 for the event, which will pay for speakers and entertainers and other expenses.

“There is no going back in to the ‘atheist closet,'” wrote Griffith, who has also organized a local chapter of Military Atheists and Secular Humanists for like-minded soldiers and veterans. “We’re going to be supported on post for the first time.”

Bragg, home to the U.S. Army Airborne and Special Forces, is one of the military’s largest bases. It has about 58,000 uniformed military personnel and roughly 13,000 civilian workers. The surrounding community, like much of North Carolina, is home to countless churches, including some with dedicated military ministries and pastors who participated in the Rock the Fort event.

But the Army’s decision to allow Rock Beyond Belief shouldn’t be seen as threatening to religious belief, said Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which had promised to file a lawsuit if the concert wasn’t allowed to go ahead.

“It’s not a victory for atheism or agnosticism over any type of religion, it’s a victory for the Constitution,” he said.

Weinstein, who is scheduled to speak at the event, said that while he’s happy with the Army’s decision, his group is waiting to make sure the concert happens as planned before celebrating.

“I’m going to believe it when I see it,” he said. “We’ve been down this path before. It reminds me of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown at the last minute.”

Read Full Post »

Air Force Academy opens outdoor chapel for Wiccans, Druids and ‘earth centred’ worship groups

Posted in abominations, Anti-Christ, Babylon, Current Events, Days of Noah, Discerning the Times, Gaia, Humanism, idolatry, Moonbats, Panentheism, Post-Modernism, prophetic, Signs of The Times on May 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

from The Daily Mail:

The face of the military is changing.

What used to be seen as a bastion for evangelical Christianity is now expanding its lists of faiths to include Wiccans and Druids.

At the Air Force Academy in Colorado, a prayer circle and veritable Stonehenge on the Rockies will now serve as a place of worship for the academy’s neo-Pagans.

The Colorado school has long faced criticism for only supporting evangelical Christianity.

Lt Gen Michael Gould, the academy’s superintendent, said before a ribbon cutting ceremony on the site on Tuesday: ‘This outdoor worship space is something we have created to help people of all religions.’

According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, the academy is home to about ten cadets who regularly attend ‘earth-centred’ worship groups which include New Age religion, paganism, Wicca, druids and ancient Norse beliefs.

Cadet Nicole Johnson, a member of the earth-centred group, told the Gazette: ‘This is very important for us, we didn’t have a place to call our own, to be outside in nature.’

Ms Johnson said she and the others had to meet in an engineering classroom before pushing for the construction of the Cadet Chapel Falcon Circle was erected on a 7,200-foot hill top that overlooks the main cadet chapel.

Major Joshua Narrowe, a rabbi at the academy, said chaplains signed off the earth-centred chapel and pushed for its construction. He said though they are not a big group, it is a religious need.

Last year at the academy, a cross which was made from rail road ties and erected at another outdoor site that was used for Wiccan rites sparked controversy.

And it appears they are not taking their chances with the pagan chapel either. Security is tight at the site and there are several cameras surrounding the circle of stones with several signs warning that it is under surveillance.

The Rev David Oringdreff, who heads a Wiccan congregation in Texas, offered prayers at Tuesday’s ceremony and said: ‘Nowhere except for the United States of America would this be possible.’

Read Full Post »

The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory

Posted in abominations, Babylon, Discerning the Times, Gaia, Humanism, Moonbats, New World Order, One World Government, Post-Modernism, prophetic, Signs of The Times on February 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

from American Thinker:

One of the primary pioneering theorists on apocalyptic global warming is Guenther Schwab (1902-2006), an Austrian Nazi.[i]  In 1958, Schwab wrote a fictional novel built off of Goethe’s (1749-1832) Faustian religious play entitled “Dance with the Devil.”  While a few scientists since the late 1800’s had contemplated the possibility of minor global warming coming from industrial pollution, Schwab used Goethe’s dramatic approach to convert the theory into an apocalyptic crisis.  The book outlines many looming environmental emergencies, including anthropogenic global warming.  Guenther Schwab’s very popular novel was an apocalyptic game changer.  By the early 1970’s, it had been translated into several languages and had sold over a million copies. 

At one point in his novel, Schwab opines on the fragile relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.   Assuming the planet has only about 100 years remaining, Schwab frets over the continuing rise of carbon dioxide that “will absorb and hold fast the warmth given out by the earth.  This will cause the climate to become milder and the Polar ice will begin to thaw.  As a result, there will be a rise in the level of the ocean and whole continents will be flooded.

“Schwab had been a strong nature lover since boyhood, and by the 1920’s he became very active in the emerging environmental movement in Austria.  Later, he joined the Nazi Party.  While this may sound odd to many who have bought into the Marxian propaganda over the years that the Nazis were right wing capitalistic extremists, greens who signed up for the Nazi Party were actually very typical of the day.  The most widely represented group of people in the Nazi Party was the greens, and Guenther Schwab was just one of among many.  The greens’ interest in lonely places found a solitary niche in the singleness of Adolf Hitler, who ruled the Third Reich from his spectacular mountain compound, high in the Bavarian Alps called the Berghof.  In English, this could easily be translated as Mountain Home, Bavaria.

After the war in the 1950’s, Guenther Schwab’s brand of environmentalism also played a fundamental role in the development of the green anti-nuclear movement in West Germany.  The dropping of the atom bomb and the nuclear fallout of the Cold War helped to globalize the greens into an apocalyptic ‘peace’ movement with Guenther Schwab being one of its original spokesmen.  The unprecedented destruction in Germany brought on by industrialized warfare never before seen in the history of the world only served to radicalize the German greens into an apocalyptic movement.   Their hatred toward global capitalism became even more vitriolic precisely because the capitalists were now in charge of a dangerous nuclear arsenal that threatened the entire planet. 

Later, Guenther Schwab joined the advisory panel of “The Society of Biological Anthropology, Eugenics and Behavior Research.”  Schwab was especially concerned with the burgeoning population explosion of the Third World that he was sure would eventually overrun Europe.  By advocating modern racial science based on genetics, Schwab believed that the population bomb, together with its associated environmental degradation, could be averted.  Here, Schwab shows his basic commitment to the Nazi SS doctrine of ‘blood and soil’ — an explosive concoction of eugenics and environmentalism loaded with eco-imperialistic ambitions that had devastating consequences on the Eastern Front in World War II.
The success of Schwab’s book helped him to establish an international environmental organization called “The World League for the Defense of Life.”  Not surprisingly, Werner Haverbeck, former Hitler Youth member and Nazi environmental leader of the Reich’s League for Folk National Character and Landscape, later became the chairman of Schwab’s organization.  In 1973, Haverbeck blamed the environmental crisis in Germany on American capitalism.  It was an unnatural colonial import that had infected Germany like a deadly foreign body. 

Both Schwab’s organization and Haverbeck were also instrumental in establishing the German Green Party in 1980.  Such embarrassing facts were later managed with a little housecleaning and lots of cosmetics, which was further buoyed by characterizing such greens as extreme ‘right wing’ ecologists — a counterintuitive label that continues to misdirect and plague all environmental studies of the Third Reich.  Worst of all is that Haverbeck’s wife is also a Holocaust denier.

Long before Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,” green Nazi Guenther Schwab played a large role in catalyzing the frightening theory of global warming.  With no small thanks to Schwab, the Great Tribulation of Global Warming was ushered into the modern consciousness behind the collapse of the Millennial 1,000 year Third Reich.  There is therefore a swastika in the German woods that needs to be closely watched here. 

Read Full Post »

Not Prana

Posted in abominations, Apostasy, Buddhism, Discerning the Times, Gaia, Hinduism, Humanism, idolatry, Panentheism, Post-Modernism, prophetic, Religious Babylon, Signs of The Times on January 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

from Herescope:

The Holy Spirit as Personal Comforter

The idea of “practicing the presence of God” is meaningless. Do we also practice the omniscience of God; or perhaps, we need to practice His omnipotence? – Pastor Ken Silva

The point in this quote above is well said. As various forms of mysticism invade the evangelical church today, heresies about the nature of the Holy Spirit and His actions, are running rampant. Evangelicals are being told that in order to connect with the divine, they must meditate, contemplate and practice various new/old forms of mysticism. This has no biblical foundation, but rather more closely approximates the views and practices of eastern meditation. In fact, those of us who formerly practiced Transcendental Meditation in its many manifestations easily recognize this heresy — and the dangers of connecting with the spirit world. But our prior experience in this realm doesn’t mean that the warnings we issue will be heeded.

These two quotations below illustrate the mindset of eastern mysticism:

Prana is a subtle invisible force. It is the life-force that pervades the body. It is the factor that connects the body and the mind, because it is connected on one side with the body and on the other side with the mind. It is the connecting link between the body and the mind. The body and the mind have no direct connection. They are connected through Prana only.

Yoga works primarily with the energy in the body, through the science of pranayama, or energy-control. Prana means also ‘breath.’ Yoga teaches how, through breath-control, to still the mind and attain higher states of awareness. The higher teachings of yoga take one beyond techniques, and show the yogi, or yoga practitioner, how to direct his concentration in such a way as not only to harmonize human with divine consciousness, but to merge his consciousness in the Infinite.

The eastern worldview errs by attempting to connect with the divine through various mystical activities. The eastern mind uses meditative mechanisms to encounter the world of the spirit and become one with it. In the corruption that is called “Christian mysticism,” the Holy Spirit becomes confused with a “force,” something that can be manipulated by mystical pursuits in order to achieve a higher order of spirituality.

The Holy Spirit is downgraded from a Person in the Trinity to becoming a means of “connection” to spirituality itself, often presented as a chief “spirit” among many in the modern pantheon. The locus shifts to the person meditating and their own subjective spiritual experiences. The meditator mistakes experience for the Divine; a fool’s gold shining in the rays of self absorption which substitutes for the “gold tried in the fire” (Rev. 3:8).

While enmeshed in the eastern mindset, then, it is difficult (if not impossible) to view the Godhead according to Scripture.

In contrast to the seductions of these errors, we offer a solid biblical refutation by J.C. Philpot, in a selected excerpt from “Meditations on the Person, Work, and Covenant Offices of God the Holy Ghost,” by J.C. Philpot (1802-1869), On Matters of Christian Faith and Experience, Vol. 1 (Old Paths Gospel Press) (406-466-2311), pp. 187-192). . . . .

read the full article here.

Read Full Post »

Planned Parenthood Dispenses With Science

Posted in abominations, Anti-Christ, Atheism, Babylon, Current Events, Days of Noah, Gaia, Humanism, Molech, Moonbats, Post-Modernism, prophetic, Signs of The Times, Socialism on October 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Christians are often accused of being hostile to science because we do not believe that human life is a random accident occurring in a vacuum. If you want to see hostility to science, check out what Planned Parenthood fiends are telling kids on college campuses:

The part where they compare a human baby to a virus is instructive. If you need an explanation as to how socialist dictators like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot have been able to kill innocent people by the millions, here it is. Progressives aren’t just hostile to science, but to the human race. Their ideology is not just wrong; it is straight from Satan!

Read Full Post »

The Presbyterian Church USA: Not Christian Anymore

Posted in abominations, Another christ, Apostasy, Babylon, Days of Noah, Discerning the Times, False Christians, Gaia, Humanism, idolatry, Moonbats, Panentheism, Post-Modernism, prophetic, Religious Babylon, Signs of The Times, Synchretism on August 26, 2010| 1 Comment »

from ChronWatch:

What would you think if you walked into a public hall, expecting to see a Christian worship service, and saw people prancing around in animal costumes? 

Lucky us, we don’t have to imagine such a thing. We can see the video, courtesy of Youtube.  In fact, you probably couldn’t imagine it.  You gotta see it to believe it.

We are talking about footage shot at the Presbyterian Church USA’s recent General Assembly. That’s a meeting where PCUSA delegates from all over the country gather to see how much harm they can inflict on their denomination.

But now let’s go to the videotape!

Exhibit A

This might easily be confused with out-takes from “The Wicker Man,” but it’s supposed to be the processional service that opens the Assembly’s proceedings.  Here we see Christians costumed as skunks, bison, raccoons, and other animals, all hopping about.  Over them towers a tall, creepy figure which may be intended to represent the current occupant of the White House.  Apologists for this scene say it’s just PCUSA’s way of paying homage to “native American spirituality,” more familiarly known as paganism.

 As shudderingly awful as this is, Exhibit B is even worse:

Here we have some enormous, goggle-eyed “puppets”–they look like something borrowed from a Mardi Gras parade–shuffling about, while a couple of dancers cavort all over the floor and someone sings an interminable hymn about “social justice,” more familiarly known as communism.

What’s with all the dancing, anyway? Do they get the head of John the Baptist when they’re done?

Not captured on videotape, but reported by eyewitnesses, were numerous “prayers” offered up to Mother Earth, “Goddess Sophia,” and several other non-Christian hobgoblins. We are not told whether the delegates also prayed to Baal, Ashtoreth, or Speedy Alka-Seltzer.  Occasionally the name of Jesus Christ was invoked as one of many gods.

In case these images alone fail to convince one that the PCUSA is no longer a proper Christian church, the actual work done by the delegates should close the deal.  Here’s what they accomplished:

*They rejected a definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, leaving the PCUSA without any definition of marriage at all.  Maybe they ought to buy a dictionary–or even a Bible, if they can stand the sight of one.

*They abolished fidelity and chastity requirements for church officers; so now a Presbyterian elder can rank below a politician on the moral totem pole. Who would have believed that was possible? You may get tossed out of Congress for propositioning an undercover cop in a public rest room, but if you’re an elder in the PCUSA, anything goes.

*They voted to spend $7-10 million to extend assorted benefits to church employees with same-sex “partners,” to be funded by mandatory payments squeezed from all PCUSA congregations, even the ones that are still Christian.

There was a lot of griping when they couldn’t quite swing the votes for a total commitment to homosexual pseudomarriage–but, hey, that just gives them something big to shoot for next year. There’d be even more griping if the General Assembly ever ran out of ways to insult God.

Now, if the GA delegates are not pagans, why do they do such a cracking good imitation of paganism? What’s the point of that?  It’s like pretending to be drunk in public.

Virtually invisible, but nevertheless present at the Assembly, were Christian delegates. What they were doing there, and what they hoped to accomplish there, stumps me.  Individuals, families, and whole congregations are fleeing the PCUSA in numbers that would gravely alarm the executives of any other kind of organization.  

But the PCUSA leadership acts like it sincerely believes that all it has to do to stop the bleeding is throw in a few more dancers, ring in a few more costumes, and find a few more imaginary gods to pray to. And if that doesn’t work, they can always go whole-hog for left-wing politics.

The only question left is this. Can any church’s leadership truly be that clueless, that wooden-headed, that welded to sheer folly?  Or are they only pretending to be so, and purposely trying to drive the PCUSA into extinction?

Only the costume rental company knows for sure.

Read Full Post »

What the Future “World Citizen” Will Look Like

Posted in abominations, Anti-Christ, Babylon, Current Events, Days of Noah, Discerning the Times, Gaia, Homosexuality, Humanism, Islam, Moonbats, Obamination, One World Government, Post-Modernism, prophetic, Religious Babylon, Signs of The Times, Socialism on June 22, 2010| Leave a Comment »

If you want to know what the average world citizen will look like then look no further than Kristiane Backer who scores a moonbat hat trick: an environmentalist Muslim spawned by the European version of the cultural cesspool MTV.

With all of the misinformation being spread by our current President, liberals and the liberal Mainstream Media in regards to Islam, Homosexuality, Global Warming and Rabid Environmentalism, in the not too distant future if you do not fit the ideology of this woman then you will be considered insane and very dangerous.

Read Full Post »

Blind ideology is dancing on the grave of reason

Posted in abominations, Another christ, Atheism, Babylon, Current Events, Days of Noah, Discerning the Times, Evolution, Gaia, Homosexuality, Humanism, Islam, Moonbats, New World Order, One World Government, Perplexity, Post-Modernism, prophetic, Signs of The Times, Socialism on May 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »

from The Australian:

IN Britain, the benefits of diversity are apparently boundless. Now that the Pagan Police Association has received government recognition, police officers can take a string of pagan festivals as official holidays.

These include celebrating the festival of lactating sheep, and drinking mead and dancing naked to celebrate the harvest. In court, pagan officers will be allowed to pledge to tell the truth not before God but by what “they hold sacred”, including, presumably, the Sun God or Kriss Kringle, the Germanic god of yule.

In Australia, as historian Keith Windschuttle has chronicled in his new book The Stolen Generations – volume three of his tireless evisceration of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History – the allegedly monstrous theft of 100,000 Aboriginal children by Australian officials just because they were Aboriginal never actually happened.

In the US, when a car bomb was planted recently in New York’s Times Square by a man later revealed to be a Muslim trained in bomb-making in Pakistan’s Waziristan region, there was an initial stampede to declare the attempted atrocity was unconnected to Islamic terrorism.

It was said to be most likely the work of a Tea Party member, right-wing militiaman or lone nut. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg even suggested the bomb could have been placed by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the healthcare bill or something”.

What has Britain come to when its police officers are given leave to dance about naked? How can generations of Australians have been taught the egregious falsehood of the Stolen Generations as fact? And how many times have Tea Party members or people opposed to a piece of legislation tried to commit mass murder against their fellow Americans, compared with the number of recent attempts by Muslim terrorists?

Such intellectual perversity can be understood only in the context of a far wider and profound retreat from reason throughout the West.

Across a broad range of issues, the progressive intelligentsia appears to have junked the rules of evidence, objectivity and rationality in favour of fantasy, irrationality and upside-down thinking.

Take man-made global warming, for example.

The belief that the planet is on course for carbon Armageddon is now embedded in Western politics. Yet the evidence that the climate is warming to an unprecedented and catastrophic degree just isn’t there. The seas are not rising, the ice is not shrinking, the polar bears are not vanishing, and there has been no significant climate warming since 1995.

Or take the Middle East. Israel is the victim of six decades of exterminatory aggression from the Arab and Muslim world. Yet it is Israel that is expected to make concessions to its attackers, who are said by the West to deserve a state of their own. Meanwhile, the US extends its hand of friendship to Iran, which is building a nuclear bomb to commit another Jewish genocide.

Closer to home, “minority rights” mean activities previously marginalised or considered transgressive are now privileged through “family lifestyle choice” or multiculturalism.

Dissenters from these creeds are socially and professionally ostracised. Academics are hounded as racists for upholding the true historic origins of Western civilisation. Scientists sceptical of man-made global warming find funding is withheld. And those sounding the alarm about the true scope of the Islamic jihad are demonised as warmongering neo-cons or part of a Jewish conspiracy.

Such irrationality, intolerance and, indeed, bigotry run counter to the cardinal tenets of a free society based on reason and the toleration of dissent.

This is because these dominant ideas are all rooted in ideologies: environmentalism, anti-racism, anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, egalitarianism or scientism, the belief that scientific materialism alone explains everything.

Rather than going where the evidence leads, ideology wrenches the evidence to fit a prior idea. Not only is ideology inimical to reason, it sacrifices truth to power as it attacks those who try to uphold reality in the face of dogma.

This is because the progressive mindset believes it is synonymous with virtue itself. All opposition is therefore not just wrong but evil. Since progressives also believe anyone who opposes them is a right-winger, it follows that all dissent is right-wing and evil, and so must be shut down.

In other words, these are not propositions to be debated in a rational way but are seen as self-evident truths with the infallibility of religious dogma.

They also smack of the political totalitarianism of communism and fascism, as well as resembling, ironically, the fanatical doctrines of militant Islam. Curiously, they also display religious motifs of sin, guilt and salvation. Odder still, they all exhibit features of millenarianism: the religious belief in the perfectibility of life through the collective redemption of sin. Contemporary secular ideologies identify the sins committed by humanity – oppression of the people of developing nations, despoliation of nature, bigotry, poverty, war – and offer salvation by a return to righteousness.

Thus the greens believe they will save the planet. The leftists believe they will create the brotherhood of man. The anti-Zionists believe they will turn suicide bomb-belts into cucumber frames. The atheists believe they will create the Garden of Reason. And the Islamists believe they

will create the kingdom of God

on earth.

Dissenters are dismissed because they deny the unchallengeable truths of anti-imperialism, environmentalism and scientific materialism. The explanation for the frustration of Utopia must therefore lie in conspiracies by the neo-cons or the Jews, Big Oil or the creationists.

The result is not merely that the West has become irrational. By turning truth and lies, victim and aggressor, justice and injustice upside down, it cannot even recognise, let alone deal with, the threats being mounted to its own values and civilisation.

With ideology eroding the principles of rationality and freedom, truth and justice on which it rests, the West is failing to understand what it is that it cannot understand, and so cannot grasp the mortal danger in which it stands.

Read Full Post »

Anglican Church in Australia argues for Families having fewer kids?!?!?

Posted in abominations, Another christ, Apostasy, Discerning the Times, False Christians, Gaia, Humanism, Molech, Moonbats, Post-Modernism, prophetic, Signs of The Times on May 10, 2010| Leave a Comment »

from The Sydney Morning Herald:

The Anglican Church wants Australians to have fewer children and has urged the federal government to scrap the baby bonus and cut immigration levels.

The General Synod of the Anglican Church has issued a warning that current rates of population growth are unsustainable and potentially out of step with church doctrine – including the eighth commandment “thou shall not steal”, Fairfax newspapers say.

In a significant intervention, the Anglican Public Affairs Commission has also warned concerned Christians that remaining silent “is little different from supporting further overpopulation and ecological degradation”.

“Out of care for the whole Creation, particularly the poorest of humanity and the life forms who cannot speak for themselves, it is not responsible to stand by and remain silent,” a discussion paper by the commission warns.

“Unless we take account of the needs of future life on Earth, there is a case that we break the eighth commandment – ‘Thou shall not steal’.”

The discussion paper, prepared in March, claims that federal government financial incentives encouraging childbirth should be scrapped and replaced with improved support for parents, such as leave.

Read Full Post »

Check the moral values: tin the tuna, eleven souls are lost

Posted in abominations, Babylon, Current Events, Days of Noah, Discerning the Times, Gaia, Humanism, Signs of The Times, Socialism on May 3, 2010| Leave a Comment »

from the Mail Online:

In among the pictures of manatees and blue-fin tuna — all doomed, we are told, because of the oil slick heading for Louisiana after the explosion at the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig —  you may just have seen one line: 11 workers died when the rig exploded on April 20th.

Or maybe you didn’t see the line at all. The environmentalists and their Democrat friends in Washington are so concerned about shrimp dying that the loss of 11 husbands, brothers and sons seems hardly worth mentioning. Certainly a confused seabird covered in oil touches more Green hearts than a picture of a grieving blue-collar widow outside a Gulf coast bungalow.

Yes, of course, the explosion is an enormous financial disaster — just ask any pension fund with a holding in BP — and a disaster for the wildlife, and for the people who must make their livings along the coast. But I would be willing to kill every gannet from Galveston to Pensacola if it could restore those 11 men to their families. There is worse heartbreak in this than just the loss of animal life and loss of share price.

One ought to remember, too, the heartbreak of the men who designed the rig. Usually I would only mourn the loss of a great church or an historic house by fire. But this rig was magnificent. For it to explode into an inferno — the flames were visible 35 miles away — list and sink, is a technological tragedy.

Deepwater Horizon was no mere platform of the kind we were used to in the North Sea. It was a floating rig. It had no anchors, it was not moored, yet it could operate in depths of 10,000 ft. What was described to me as a ‘triply-redundant computer system’ used satellite positioning to control powerful thrusters to keep it within a few feet of its correct location at all times.

All-in cost to BP of running it for just one day? Close to $1m — that’s £650,000. Everything about it was of the latest, most sophisticated technology. Yet somehow oil and gas got into the well-bore. Despite blowout preventers, dead-man systems, panic buttons, none of these safety mechanisms was activated. The blowout was just that fast.

Tomorrow morning, oil rig workers all over the world will wake up knowing all that — that there are some blowouts, some infernos from which technology can never save them. Yet they will still get up and start their work on the rigs. Technology is brilliant. But courage is even better.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: