2007-06-26

Global Warming and Mortal Sin

The following article was copied from CommuterPageBlog, article dated June 21, 2007.

I was talking to a good friend about the impact of global warming on the next few generations and he shocked me by saying that he didn't care about what happened to future generations. He told me that global warming did not concern him because he would already be dead of old age when the bad things start to happen. He said he would absolutely not change his driving habits to save people in the near future.

Which brings me to an interesting point. Most believers know about the definition of a mortal sin. A mortal sin is one that is committed with foresight and planning and with willful intention, and that is severe in it's impact on another or others. For example, if a person plans to murder somebody and then carries it out, that is definitely a mortal sin. It means that person's chance of entering heaven in order to be with God are just about zero.

Now here is something that I have never heard any believer talk about: the concept of deliberately and with willful determination, seeking out to harm people of future generations with our actions of today. If a person is now actively seeking to cause global warming by their own personal actions, then that person will be guilty of willfully harming or even killing people in the not very distant future, even if that person is already dead. The reason this is so is because we have knowledge of our actions. If we did not have knowledge of our actions it would not be the same category of sin.

Past generations could not do the things to future generations that we are now capable of doing, because they lacked the technical ability to do so. We are in a very strange position. We, us, you and I, right now, are responsible for the very lives of near future generations. In other words, we have the power to kill those who are yet to be born. This is a very serious moral dilemma and is of deadly earnest.

If a person believes in the concept of eternal life and access to the kingdom of heaven, then that person must head the warnings which the vast majority of scientists are giving us now about our responsibilities for saving future life. This is no joking matter. If we choose to keep driving huge trucks to work and hundreds of thousands of people, for example, in Bangladesh die because of rising sea levels, which we caused by our deliberate actions, then we are one hundred percent responsible for their deaths. This means that we most likely will never enter the kindgom of heaven.

It is the moral responsibility of any believer to start fixing the current situation and with real actions, too. What can we do? Well for starters, we can drive to work with one other person. It's called compromising in order to save others. We must at least show that we are making an effort. If we do not make an effort then we will be found guilty. It really is that simple.

No comments: