Liuan Huska shares six postures to help Christians respond to the cries of creation. With the Spirit’s help, one day the Earth will no longer groan, but sing.
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A beautiful post. I reminds me that creation care is largely a justice issue as the poor and disadvantaged are often the most affected, and Micah 6:8 reminds us that justice is something that is required of us by God.
A blessed read…But!..where is the hope? Hope is things expected Liuan. It takes engineering to design a solution, to design hope. Christ Engineered a solution to death by the Spirit. Now it is up to us to Engineer a solution through the Spirit to Anakainoo this dying Earth. He is giving us an opportunity to work with him and restore his Garden as good stewards in the Spirit in preparation for his return…gardeners of two or three with LOVE in their hearts for his Fathers children and he will be amongst us.
You understand what needs to be…let’s start a drawing on a napkin of solutions you desire, we all desire regardless of our beliefs, a base line all of us on Earth can adopt.
Nice! Term limits for our politicians and laws someone with an basic education can read would go a long way to saving the environment. A socialism that is based on a flat tax* would also ensure that citizens hold their governments accountable because someone else isn’t paying for it. People who are involved are more responsible and make better real world decisions, including those decisions about the environment.
(*)If the majority of voters believe that a certain percentage of their income is what is needed to fund social programs, then that is what everyone pays. With some exception for those below a poverty line, but I’m not sure how that should be factored or how people below that line would count as a voter. People smarter than me can work it out. The thing that is important is that voters are counting the cost and holding their representatives accountable. It’s not a majority of voters deciding for a minority to pay for something that sounds like a good idea.
Where I do my conservation work one of the most impacted groups is those with allergies to pollen, specifically scotch broom pollen. We estimated once that there could be twenty billion scotch broom plants on the sandspit, which is mind-boggling. thanks to climate change they are blooming both earlier and later, with some plants blooming twice in a year now!
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Those won’t make a bit of difference so long as the candidates we’re able to vote for are chosen by the very tiny minority who provide the vast majority of campaign funds. IIRC the figures are: the 0.25% most wealthy provide over 90% of all campaign funding/spending; the 0.05% provide about 80%. What this means is that unless a potential candidate can be counted on to make the wealthiest few happy, they’re not likely to even get on the ballot.
The U.S. is thus a democratic republic with a plutocratic filter.
The only way I can see to make a dent in that would be an amendment that declares that only living human citizens and legal residents have political rights: since donating to campaigns is a political right, then all the money from corporations, unions, churches, etc – in fact from any entity not specifically formed of individual citizens and/or legal residents banding together unanimously for a specific political purpose – would be shut out. The reason that would make a big dent is that much, possibly most, of the money coming from the wealthiest few isn’t actually coming from their own pockets, it’s coming from corporations they control.
A second dent could be made by excluding outside money from state races, allowing only the residents of a state to be part of that state’s political process.
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- As an aging U.S. citizen, I’m well aware of the common sentiment that “there ought to be a law against telling me where I can spend my money, … as always, within limits, of course.”
- As a former Internal Revenue Service Agent, it was and is my non-scientific observation that one of the quickest ways to change how I spend my money is to eliminate the tax reduction of my expenses. Forget about telling me I can’t spend my money, just eliminate the the tax reduction of “spending” it by donating it to religious or political organizations when they use it to increase their political clout.
- Wanna put a dent in how much I donate? Deny a tax reduction for the donation. I can still donate to my heart’s content as long as I have any to donate, but what I decide to donate will change somewhat until my accountant and/or I figure out a clever way to benefit from the donation.
- An early story I heard as a new I.R.S. employee was about a tax return audit of a man’s “contributions to a church that he was identified being an “upstanding member and contributor to.” His documented contributions, confirmed by cancelled checks written on a personal checking account to his church” demanded, as it were, closer investigation. So the Revenue Agent asked the church’s preacher about the generous taxpayer’s role in the church and was told all of the useful things the contributor did within and for the church. Among the contributor’s primary functions was “bag man”,to wit: after the Sunday’s offerings were collected, they were taken to a back room and counted. then bagged for transfer to the church’s bank account. Inspection of the church’s confirmed that the total amount of offerings collected on Sunday were deposited in the church’s bank account. However, … inspection of the generous bag-man’s bank records confirmed that exactly the same amount of total offerings were deposited in the bag-man’s personal bank account on Mondays and then withdrawn from his account and deposited in the church’s bank account, … to the penny. The clever contributor-bag man was depositing the church offerings into his bank account, and then writing a personal check for the same amount into the church’s bank account, … and getting a tax-reducting benefit for the transactions.
That’s not even relevant to most taxpayers thanks to the “reform” that increased the standard deduction. If we want to encourage charitable giving, the standard deduction should be moderate but the individual exemption should be high.
Creative. I encountered something similar but on a small scale; an elder every now and then instead of cashing a check would count out cash from the offering and write a check to cover it, thus avoiding a trip to the bank. It was absent-mindedness that led him to include all those checks in his total giving, and probably not enough for the IRS to worry about anyway.
Then there was the deacon who could write checks for the church who used that to pay himself for all the materials he bought for doing grounds work, then donated the check right back. He said it made doing his taxes simpler.