I have read few things that disturbed me more than:
The rights of nature is one of the fastest-growing environmental legal strategies of the past decade. Since Ecuador recognized the rights of Pachamama, the Quechua name for Mother Earth, in its Constitution in 2008, more than 500 laws on the rights of nature have been enacted around the world.
Which is from and article that I linked to yesterday.
Yes, America was founded on the concept of “rights” – rights granted by a Creator, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But to extend that concept from people to things and to do so without mention of a Creator is actually terrifying to me.
Environmentalism, from which such aberrant thought comes, is based on the notion that each action of man upon nature is somehow unnatural. When something acts in a unnatural fashion, it is no longer part of nature, but nature’s creator or controller. In other words, this extreme environmental position holds that mankind, when it acts upon nature, is some kind of god. And so, in granting “rights” to nature, we no longer position ourselves as recipients of God’s grace, but as god.
Our literature is full of times when mankind placed itself in the position of God, and in every such instance, the outcome is not good.
This idea is so anti-Christian as to be frightening. Jesus actually was God, but the Apostle Paul wrote of Him:
Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped…
Jesus eschewed His divine nature for the sake of mankind.
When God created us, we were created to have dominion over nature:
Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Now, while such dominion places upon us a burden to do well for the earth, it also places our “rights” as ruler above any such notion about that over which we are charged to rule. To grants “rights” to nature is to defy God’s created order.
This idea, of “rights” of nature, is a hideous abomination of thought. We are sinners, and here is a new and novel way to make that most apparent.
Thank God we confess when we go to church on Sunday morning.
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