collegekid, you're one of the most prejudiced people on this board.

Take a breath, dude.

Heh, what, me prejudiced? Well, maybe...but perhaps it's not prejudice, but healthy fear of idiots? I guess it depends on how you look at it.

looking in the mirror a lot then, CK???

Snort, chortle, hack *f---!*

Damn stuffy nose!

Heh, what, me prejudiced? Well, maybe...but perhaps it's not prejudice, but healthy fear of idiots? I guess it depends on how you look at it.

Evangelicals Urge Action on Global Warming

"With God's help, we can stop global warming for our kids, our world and our Lord"

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20060208125909990021

Newsweek
Feb. 13, 2006 issue - In a town where access is everything, the Rev. Richard Cizik's calendar would be the envy of even the hardest-hitting Washington player. One day last week his schedule included the National Prayer Breakfast with President George W. Bush, a luncheon with King Abdullah II of Jordan and a cozy evening reception at the home of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Between meetings, Cizik hobnobbed with U2 lead singer Bono, in town to advocate for Third World debt relief. Shaking the rock star's hand as eager senators circled for their photo op, Cizik managed to swiftly preach his own gospel. "Global hunger and global warming are inescapably linked. You know that," Cizik said. "Absolutely," replied Bono.
Cizik, who first arrived in Washington in 1980 as a foot soldier for the Moral Majority, is a self-described "Reagan movement conservative" and Bush supporter, who opposes abortion, gay marriage and embryonic-stem-cell research. He promotes those positions as vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the lobbying group that represents 30 mil-lion American Christians and more than 50 denominations. But in recent years, Cizik, 54, has also been at the forefront of a Biblically inspired environmental movement known as Creation Care, which holds that Christians have an obligation, described in the Book of Genesis, to "replenish the Earth" as God's stewards. "This is not a Red State issue or a Blue State issue or a green issue," Cizik says. "It's a spiritual issue."
And a controversial one. Until now, the movement has emphasized the individual responsibility of Christians to conserve. But this week a coalition of leading evangelicals will issue "An Evangelical Call to Action," asking Congress and the Bush administration to combat global warming by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions. "Christians must care about climate change because we love God the Creator," it reads. The challenge to the Bush administration-which rejects mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions as economically harmful-has caused a major rift within evangelical circles. Last week the president of NAE, the Rev. Ted Haggard, announced that the group would not endorse the document, since it was not unanimously approved by members. And Cizik says NAE executives instructed him to remove his own name from full-page newspaper ads promoting the "Call to Action."
Conservative critics of the document, including the Rev. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, say the global-warming science is inconclusive and the issue doesn't belong on the evangelists' agenda. "It's a distraction when families are falling apart and abortion continues as a great evil," says Tom Minnery, director of Dobson's political-action group. But the "Call to Action" has been endorsed by dozens of Chris-tian heavy hitters, including the country's leading megachurch pastor, the Rev. Rick Warren, as well as the presidents of major Christian colleges and denominations.
Roman Catholic and Jewish groups have also embraced the cause, but it's the evangelicals, with their close ties to the GOP, who "have the power to move the debate," says John Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. "They could produce policies more palatable to people who have not been moved by secular environmental groups." The eco-evangelists tend to favor market-based approaches. "We are all for doing this in the most efficient, technological way that creates jobs," says the Rev. Jim Ball, of the Evangelical Environmental Network, who helped draft the document.
Cizik, who came to believe the global-warming science only in recent years, says stirring the debate is his Christian duty. "Isn't it the task of the Biblical believer to warn society, not just about sin, but about mortal threats to our very being?" If it is, he's up to the job.
(c) 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

If I give you $10 will you go away?

Chipotle is owned by McDonalds, you grubby corporation lover. hahaha

Chipotle is owned by McDonalds, you grubby corporation lover. hahaha

Evangelist: 'What would Jesus drive?'
Drew graduate brings 'creation care,' a campaign against global warming, to the forefront

Sunday, February 12, 2006
BY ALEXANDER LANE
Star-Ledger Staff

The Rev. Jim Ball got his slight drawl from a childhood in the Deep South. He got his doctorate from Drew University.

And he got 85 other Christian evangelical leaders to launch a national campaign against global warming last week, a feat that just might make him the most important environmentalist of 2006.

The Evangelical Climate Initiative, which Ball organized with a handful of other like-minded Christians, declared the "basic task for all of the world's inhabitants" is to cut our emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

It is spreading the word in newspaper, television and radio ads, meetings with key legislators and events at churches and Christian colleges around the country.

That has irked some influential evangelicals, who sabotaged Ball's efforts to recruit the National Association of Evangelicals to the cause last month. But it has thrilled mainstream environmentalists and impressed many of Ball's friends and former colleagues at Drew and Montclair State, where he taught in the mid-1990s.

"We should be very, very proud of our graduate and what he's done," said Laurel Kearns, an associate professor of the sociology of religion and environmental studies at Drew, in Madison.

In the lobby of the Best Western hotel in Midtown Manhattan Friday, Ball and his wife, Kara, both wearing suits and digital watches, sat down after a television appearance to recall his New Jersey days, answer Christian critics and explain the brand of environmentalism he calls "creation care."

"Look what's going to happen to God's people. Look at what's going to happen around the world and to our kids," Ball said. "Look at the projections. Millions are going to die because of global warming. Those are people Jesus loves."


SAVING THE PLANET

Ball, 44, was born in Baton Rouge, La., but his family lived in several Southern states during his childhood. His father worked for the Social Security Administration, and his mother worked as an executive assistant at a junior college.

One of his few vivid memories from Baton Rouge, where he lived until age 4, was a hurricane thrashing his house, the fierce winds threatening to dislodge a window air conditioner and his father struggling to hold it in place. Later they sloshed through ankle-high flood waters.

Ball said he felt called to become a minister at 19. He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and a master's of divinity from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

A few years later, on Drew's campus, a fellow student told him she was interested in a "Christian approach to nature."

"I said, 'Why?'" he recalled. "'Are you meaning to tell me this ant here is more important than your son?'

"She said, 'Why don't you read the Bible in light of this question?'"

He did. Then he started reading about environmental degradation and came to appreciate its impact on the poor. Before long, he found himself in a national network of Christian environmentalists.

"At that time, being an evangelical and being concerned about the environment was still kind of almost crazy sounding, weird, new," he said. "People would say, 'I'm so glad I found other Christians who care about this issue.'"

After school, Ball was the climate-change policy coordinator for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. It's a largely secular crowd, and Ball said he viewed his time there almost as "cultural anthropology" -- an effort to understand how the other half thinks.

"It was very interesting to have a reverend working in our office," said Rich Hayes, press secretary for the organization. "He was focused on the science and studying it. But even at the water cooler his Christianity was something he would bring up on occasion in a way that was much different than what you would normally hear around the office."

Ball met Kara, also an environmentalist, at a Christian rock music festival. They live in Brunswick, Md., with a dog, three cats and an iguana. Since 2000, Ball has been the executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Evangelical Environmental Network, which was founded in 1994.

The network helped develop the Evangelical Climate Initiative. Ball is one of six designated spokespeople, along with the national commander of the Salvation Army, megachurch pastors in Florida and Minnesota, the president of Wheaton College in Illinois and the executive director of World Hope International.

Among the 80 other signatories is Rick Warren, best-selling author of the "The Purpose-Driven Life," popular televangelist Jack Hayford and David Neff, the editor of the conservative Christian periodical Christianity Today.


SUCCESS, AND A SETBACK

The nation's largest evangelical group, the National Association of Evangelicals, was set to endorse the effort until James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and a few other influential leaders asked it not to in a letter last month.

E. Calvin Beisner, associate professor of historical theology at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., helped organize the opposition group, which calls itself the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance.

"The big news is they couldn't get a consensus statement," Beisner said in a telephone interview. "The small news is, they did get the 86 who signed it."

Beisner is an adjunct scholar of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty, which is partly funded by Exxon. But he said the position does not pay, and that his opposition is rooted in doubts that humans are causing climate change, and a concern that anti-global warming measures could harm the economy, hitting the poor the hardest.

Ball called that "factually wrong." He said the First World's power grid was a bad model for developing nations to copy. In fact, portable solar installations and other renewable-energy options would literally decentralize power, he said.

"This is conservative," he said, growing animated. "Stop thinking it's the hippies that love this stuff. Get with it."

For too long, he said, it has been scientists, environmentalists and Democratic politicians sounding the alarm on global warming. Ball said he believed he and his fellow evangelical messengers would be more credible to Christians.

"They're going to say, 'Okay, this isn't a bunch of liberal claptrap cooked up by enviros to wreck the economy,'" he said.

Many of those enviros, however, are quite pleased to have prominent evangelists on their side. For years, they have found the millions of evangelical Christians in America to be a largely unreceptive audience.

"We don't have as much experience working together as we should," said Dale Bryk, who works on climate change for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "I think this is great."

As if to prove their conservative bona fides, the signatories to the Evangelical Climate Initiative lauded Christian efforts to "protect the unborn" and "preserve the family and the sanctity of marriage."

And though they favor mandatory, not voluntary, curbs on carbon emissions, they said the measures should be business-friendly and market-based.

Ball likes to turn the popular question "What would Jesus do?" into "What would Jesus drive?"

For his part, Ball drives a hybrid. But he showed little appetite for delving into a larger political discussion of, say, whether Jesus would cut taxes, or invade Iraq. And he would not say whom he voted for in 2004.

"The Evangelical Environmental Network is a nonpartisan organization," he said. "I don't disclose my own personal politics."



Alexander Lane covers the environment. He may be reached at alane@starledger.com or (973) 392-1790.