HUMANITIES

Global Warming, Climate Change, Eco-disaster…whatever you call it, it’s a hoax. The Global Warming Alarmists have fooled the media, but they have not fooled me. I don’t believe Human Released CO2 is a major contributor to temperature change on this planet.  However, those with big egos are convinced that we evil humans, with our electricity, and horseless carriages, and domesticated cow farts, are irreversably changing our planet forever.  I don’t have a problem with this….I have MANY problems with this.

My argument against Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is filled with common sense issues that any non-scientist should be able to understand.  I understand that it’s too much for a politician to follow, but anyone else with a 5th grade education should get it.

1. The Climate has always “changed”. Never in recorded history has the climate remained constant.  30-40 years ago, some scientists were concerned about Global Cooling, the last few decades have seen that change to Global Warming…and now that it’s been cooling againg for 10 years, it’s Climate Change.  Fancy how they keep moving the target.  They’ve finally hit it on the head.  The climate will ALWAYS change, regardless if we act or not.  Again egos….how can one believe we can put a thermostat on our atmosphere when we can’t control the smallest of mother nature’s forces. Can anyone make a thunderstorm?  How about a rainstorm for droughts, or a dry spell for flooded regions.  Can anyone change direction of a tornado, or a hurricane?  Can you make it snow (And I don’t mean the resorts’ snow machines), or make it stop snowing?  Can you create Arctic Ice or stop a volcano?  Can you explain ALL facets of our environement which you so confidently think we can control?  The answer to ALL of these questions is NO! Why on earth is it possible to control temperature through CO2 control alone.  It’s a ridiculous argument.
2. I don’t believe our temperature data is complete with all of the abnormalities in collecting the data. There are 1221 USHCN climate stations in the USA.  Anthony Watts created the project http://www.surfacestations.org to compile data on each of the weather stations throughout the US.  What he huas found is startling.  A HUGE number of these temperature devices have been placed in locations that could never give an accurate picture.  In Forest Grove, OR, you can see their weather station less than 10 ft from a building (that stores heat in it’s bricks, and releases it at night), it’s next to a window air conditioner unit that blows hot air on it all sunmmer long, and nearby parking lots that also store heat in the day and release at night.  Even more amazing are the examples when we have documented construction near a station.  Anthony DIRECTLY coorelates a new parking lot with temperature increase for that station.  BUT it’s being BLAMED on CO2!  The records are unreliable, and shouldn’t be trusted.
3. CO2 is their only enemy. Wonderful carbon dioxide gets the blame for all of it.  Without it, all animal and plant life would cease.  With it, we all flourish.  History shows CO2 levels lagging behind temperature rises (by about 800 YEARS!).  But now we’re told it’s the CO2 that drive the temperature.  That’s bass ackwards.  There must be something else at work.  I believe the Marxist, anti capitalist, environmental (anti-human) movement has found their golden goose egg.  By controlling all forms of CO2, they can control ALL industry, driving, even exhaling….and hasn’t that been their goal from the beginning?
4. Ice levels are at the same level as 30 years ago. Go back one year when the alarmists were saying the Arctic would be ice free in the summer of 2008.  Well, that didn’t happen (their scenarios never do), and instead the sea ice levels ROSE to 1979 levels when we started recording them!  Remember that the year of 2008 saw the Polar Bear put on the endangered species list due to the diminishing sea ice.  It’s back, so can we take them off the list?  OR, maybe we should put seals on the list since the bears can get to them easier now.  So, how did the alarmists get it wrong?  For one, they thought “new ice” would melt faster than old ice.  BUT, they neglected to consider the effect of snow cover on the ice.  Since the temperature dropped quickly at the end of 2008, the new ice formed much MORE new ice since it wasn’t insulated with snow.  Ice grew at the fastest rate EVER recorded. I guess NBC missed the scoop on that one.
   
5. Speaking of NBC…the media is clueless. Their main goal is to get/keep viewers.  They’ve found the formula for success is to scare the pants off of everyone.  That makes people pay attention and watch the news.  To promote the iceless summer, and the impact of global warming, NBC News highlighted the penguins at the North Pole.  There’s only one ENORMOUS problem with this.  All 17 species of penguins live at the South Pole.  OOPS.  This could be brushed off as a simple error by an over zealous editor, or it represents the TOTAL lack of knowledge and responsiblity held by the media as it relates to our climate.  I believe the latter.
6. There’s not enough man-made CO2 to make a difference! Carbon dioxide emissions worldwide each year total 3.2 billion tons. That equals about 0.0168 percent of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration of about 19 trillion tons. This results in a 0.00064 percent increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number. The yearly increase is many orders of magnitude smaller than the standard deviation errors for CO2 concentration measurement.  97% of CO2 is from natural sources. Only 3% is produced from human activity. When you take into account that all CO2 makes up only .033% of the TOTAL atmosphere, you realize that our addition is minuscule at best.
7. Computer models are not accurate. Not a single dire prediction made by James Hansen 20 years ago has come true.  The computer models have predicted it all wrong.  Remember the Hockey Stick that started it all?  It has been THOROUGHLY debunked.  We can’t predict weather more than a few days in advance, but the alarmists have some magical computer that can see 100 years into the future.  BS.
   
8. Who decides where to set the thermostat? While some in Siberia might welcome some warming, those in the Middle East might prefer some cooling.  Who gets to decide the perfect global temperature?  Al Gore?  The UN?  The Marxists?  Greenpeace?  Silly rabbit, Mother Nature does.
   

49% pray for guidance daily just 7% do not pray for guidance.

Forty-four percent (44%) of America’s adults attend Christian church services at least twice a month, and 92% of these regular churchgoers believe the God of the Bible is the one true God.

A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that another six percent (6%) of adults attend church about once a month, 17% attend occasionally, and seven percent (7%) profess a religious belief other than Christianity.

As Christmas approaches, 18% of regular churchgoers read the Bible daily, 32% read Scripture several times a week, and 20% about once a week. However, 26% say they rarely or never read the Bible. Thirty-seven percent (37%) reflect on the meaning of Scripture in their lives on a daily basis.

Forty-nine percent (49%) pray to seek guidance on a daily basis and 43% pray to confess sins daily. Just seven percent (7%) say they don’t pray for guidance at all in a typical week, and 13% don’t pray to confess sins.

Fifty percent (50%) of regular churchgoers attend a regular Bible study or participate in some other small-group activity within the church. Sixty-five percent (65%) volunteer for some form of service activities.

Thirty-seven percent (37%) say that, over the course of the past month, they have had a meaningful discussion about their faith with a non-Christian.

Sixty-two percent (62%) of regular churchgoers consider themselves to be born-again Christians. This figure includes 91% of Evangelical Christians, 63% of other Protestants and 25% of Catholics.

Among those who are not “born-again,” 37% say someone in their church has talked with them about accepting Christ as their Savior over the past month.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of regular churchgoers are women, 44% men. Women tend to attend more, volunteer more, pray more and read the Bible more than men.

Forty-one percent (41%) of regular churchgoers are under 40 years old, 38% are between 40 and 65, while 22% are 65 or older.

Sixty-six percent (66%) are white, 17% African-American and 17% some have some other racial or ethnic background (primarily Hispanic). Catholics claim a much larger share of the Hispanic population than Protestant denominations.

Politically, 41% of regular churchgoers are Republicans, 34% are Democrats, and 25% are unaffiliated with either major party. Fifty-six percent (56%) are politically conservative, 23% moderate and 20% politically liberal.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) are married, and 36% currently have children living at home.

Thirty-eight percent (38%) earn less than $40,000 annually; 40% earn between $40,000 and $100,000, and, 15% earn more than $100,000 annually.

Fifty-three percent (53%) are college graduates, and another 22% have attended college.

Thirteen percent (13%) work for the government, 18% are entrepreneurs, and 26% work for someone else in the private sector. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are retired, and 16% are out of the paid work force for some other reason.

Sixty-one percent (61%) say their church does an excellent job helping them understand the Bible in depth while 27% rate their church as good in this area. Just seven percent (7%) give their church a fair rating and two percent (2%) say poor.

A few days ago I had the distinct privilege of visiting the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, where I learned a few things, as I always do at great museums.  I was puzzled by Goya’s painting of St.  Jerome as an ascetic in the desert, because he depicts that intellectual giant as something of a demented fanatic.  But I was also struck by the description accompanying a 19th-century painting of some peasants.  It pointed out that artists of that period often portrayed peasants because of the notion, current at that time, that the common people possessed some special wisdom.

That idea no doubt had its most immediate roots in the “noble savage” motif of the previous century, and of course with Romanticism came the theme of humankind in its relationship with nature.  The peasant was in closer contact with nature than the elite city dweller in the nature of the case, and nature for the Romantics was something alive and revelatory.  Just think of the “pathetic fallacy,” according to which nature could suffer or rejoice with people.  “It was a dark and stormy night . . . .”

But the theme goes back much farther than that.  Moses spends forty years in the sophisticated court of the Pharaoh, but comes into contact with Yahweh only in the wilderness after forty years as a shepherd.  David is called to be king as a young shepherd who has gleaned great wisdom in the fields around Bethlehem, which is where the New Testament then says the Savior was born, and that to a simple artisan and his wife.  To see what the New Testament thinks of the wisdom of simple folks, just look at Mary’s song in Luke 1:46-55.  It is a masterpiece of literary form, and I would dearly love to see it in what was probably the original Aramaic.  The first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel read as if they were translated from Aramaic or Hebrew, and some serious scholars theorize that Mary wrote them and handed them to Luke.  After that, Luke begins writing the polished Greek that one would expect of a more conventionally learned person.

Nor did the idea of peasant wisdom escape the artists of the Baroque and Counter Reformation periods.  In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes presented us with Don Quixote’s armor bearer, Sancho Panza, who has been called one of the greatest men created by man.  Don Quixote admits that he envies Sancho’s ability to recite the Spanish proverbs that encapsulate the wisdom of the ages for the illiterate (as has been well described by the great Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella), and near the end of his adventures Don Quixote himself utters the famous line, “There are no birds this year in the nests of yesteryear.”

In the United States we have our own tradition of the unlearned but wise thinker.  Abraham Lincoln, among other presidents, came from simple and undistinguished stock, and it wasn’t so long ago that Eric Sevareid brought to our attention our “longshoreman philosopher,” Eric Hoffer, whose ideas I find immensely useful in analyzing today’s sociopolitical situation.

One of my favorite stories I cannot document, but I am assured that it is true.  It has to do with the University of Chicago Divinity School’s annual Baptist Appreciation Day.  One year it featured a picnic on the grass with the great theologian Paul Tillich as speaker.  Tillich, as I understand it, spent two hours proving that it is foolish to believe in the divinity of Christ.  When he was finished, he asked for questions from members of the clergy and their families below him.  An elderly black man stood up munching an apple and asked, “Mr.  Tillich, this apple I’m eating—can you tell me whether it’s bitter or sweet?”

“Of course I can’t,” retorted Tillich.  “I haven’t tasted your apple.”

“Uh, huh.  (Crunch, crunch.)  And neither have you tasted my sweet Jesus.”  The old man received an ovation and Tillich beat a hasty retreat.

It occurs to me, though, that our society may have come up with a dangerous twist on this issue.  A large percentage of the population distrusts, and even holds in contempt, the learning of the universities, and embraces instead whatever comes from the mouths of celebrities.  In one of his superb novels, Christopher Buckley has his protagonist’s car being passed on the beltway by limos occupied by the ambassadors of a couple of Hollywood stars, on their way to advise the president on foreign policy.  So much for peasant wisdom.

Even worse, in my opinion, is the tendency to “dress down,” with that phenomenon’s accompanying behavior, to the point that the young men in television commercials often look and act like blithering idiots who must have been found face down in the gutter in a pool of vomit.  In fact, I have called the tendency “gutter chic” for many years now.  If a man in a commercial, or in a popular sitcom, doesn’t look at least like an escaped convict, I suppose he isn’t credible.  At the same time, the same kind of people claim something like aristocratic status.  How about the T-shirts proclaiming that some uncouth person or group “rules”?  Just a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t you say?

One old saw that I wish people would once and for all recognize for what it is and laugh to scorn is the one about how the church is invalid and can be safely ignored because it has hypocrites in it.  Big discovery!  Those who use this excuse have obviously never read their New Testaments.  Otherwise they would have learned who it was who got Jesus condemned, namely the man reputed to be God’s maximum representative on earth.  Nothing new under the sun, says the writer of Ecclesiastes.

Oh, yes; and then there were the people in the courtyard who overcame Pilate’s initially correct verdict of innocence and forced him to violate Roman law by reversing his decision.  They had tried just about everything when one of them happened to hit Pilate’s hot button:  “He said was a king!”  Well, Pilate had already received a satisfactory answer from Jesus on that one, but since he was in big trouble with Tiberias, an emperor who was especially paranoid about treason and insurrection, he figured he’d better not let it get back to Rome that he had freed a pretender to the throne, true or not.

Then it was the turn of the rest of the mob.  Pilate realized he had one more card to play.  Since it was the Romans’ custom to release whatever prisoner the people wanted freed, he asked whether he should free their king.  Their answer is a classic of hypocrisy:  “We have no king but Caesar!”  They would have been only too glad to roast Tiberias over a slow fire, given the opportunity.

But the charge won’t die.  How many times have we seen television programs announced that are going to deal with the issue of how certain cynical power brokers in the early church managed to maneuver into the New Testament canon only the books that would serve their purposes, and to exclude those that would threaten their power?  If the early church leaders were like that, they were the dumbest people in the history of the world, because when they became bishops they made themselves stand out as prime objects for martyrdom.  Power doesn’t do one a whole lot of good when one is being torn to shreds by a hungry beast or burned at the stake.

The plain and simple fact about the formation of the New Testament canon is that from the beginning the church was virtually obsessed with admitting only books they were certain had been written by apostles or people closely associated with them.  The Gospel of Mark came into circulation early and was immediately accepted because the church knew Mark had long been in close contact with Peter.  (This is undoubtedly why Mark’s Gospel puts Peter down more than the others do; Peter wanted it known that he had failed and was repentant about it.)  In the second century a bishop produced a work that he placed Peter’s name on, clearly explaining that Peter had not written it.  Even at that, he was defrocked for his deed.

This is not exactly the work of a church deviously plotting to exclude from the canon legitimate works that were just as good and true as the 27 we have today, doing so because the rejected books had been produced by rivals for their power.

Something else that needs to be brought to light is the presupposition underlying all this stuff about rival Gospels and the like, which is that nothing supernatural was going on in those centuries—that the Christian movement was nothing more than a new religion invented out of whole cloth by a bunch of semi-literate people in a backwater province of the Roman Empire.  If so, it’s the greatest hoax ever perpetrated, and of course its first victims were its perpetrators, who were such complete fools that they willingly died for what they knew to be a lie.

The real hypocrisy here is on the part of those who refuse to take the history of the Middle East, Europe and Africa in those centuries seriously.

In the meantime, I’m never going to darken the door of a hospital again until they get rid of all the sick people in there.

Frustrated over a student who was bewildered on account of her bad grade and even more bewildered upon being told it was because she hadn’t read the text or taken notes in class, a colleague of mine in sociology remarked, “These kids don’t even understand process.”  That was in 1972, and it looks to me as if the phenomenon is a good deal more prominent now.  For that matter, back in 1927 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (now almost forgotten because he was overly conservative) predicted that succeeding generations would enjoy the benefits of a liberal democracy without taking into account what it had cost their forebears.  Ortega said they would take it for granted that the benefits of democracy were theirs in the course of nature.  Ominously, this was nine years before the unspeakable horrors of the Spanish civil war.

He was right.  This postmodern generation tends to reject history in general, and is thereby in danger of fulfilling the prophecy of Will Durant:  “Those who do not know history are forever condemned to repeat it.” History is written by the winners, we’re told, and the implication is that it is therefore invalid.

Colombian author Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal once said, “History is written by the winners.  We losers write poetry.”  Shortly thereafter he was thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge and barely escaped with his life.  I’m anxious to see how the winners, i.e., the Colombian oligarchy, write that up, and what his “poetry” on the issue looks like.

So for this generation the lessons of the past are not lessons at all.  As a San Francisco high school instructor put it, “We don’t teach facts.  We teach concepts.”  The problem is that in such a case any idea of the past whatsoever is as good as any other.  A mind-boggling case in point is that of a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara who remarked to my hypocrisy.com colleague Richard Cochrane that he was going to vote for Obama because he could be counted on to change the policies that caused us to drop atomic bombs on Japan so Japan had to retaliate by bombing Pearl Harbor.  These, he said, were the same policies that led England to invade Germany and cause World War II to break out in Europe.

Well, at least the chowderhead believes in cause and effect.  Just has it backwards is all, but you can’t expect too much these days.  Many in his generation have lost touch with that esoteric concept.  (Why doesn’t someone put billiards in the curriculum?)  Also in Santa Barbara, I noticed a large banner in a private school that read, “Actions have consequences.”  What a novel concept to teach the kids!  Living in the South as I now do, I marvel at the number of people, and mostly people who can’t afford it, who smoke.  The facts are out there:  cause, smoking; effect, early death.  But facts don’t have much impact on this generation.  As another professor put it, there are no facts.  There are only opinions.  That goes for process and cause and effect as well, one presumes.

Perhaps this is why a writer in the Atlantic a few years ago introduced the term “apocalyptic nihilism” to the magazine’s readers.  He had heard it voiced by social workers dealing with a rash of senseless teenage killings in Vermont around that time.  The kids said they were murdering people just to get their names in the news.  They felt that the world has no future, and therefore they have no future, so why not at least attract some attention?

We’re getting chillingly close to the attitude of Albert Camus’s protagonist, Meursault, in The Stranger.  Meursault sees no continuity, no process, no cause and effect in one’s acts.  He makes love to the same woman once a week, but is mystified by the question whether he loves her.  He is equally bewildered when people are offended by his lack of emotion at his mother’s wake.  Finally he kills a man in cold blood on a beach, and when he is put on trial he has no idea why.  But then, a couple of decades later, Thomas Pynchon’s narrator in Gravity’s Rainbow deals with the case of the classic paranoiac, who feels everything is connected and organized with regard to him- or herself.  Then he offers, “There is . . . also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”

I’m not so sure.  In this election campaign it looks as if millions are in love with one image or another, without considering what the real issues might be, which means a lack of consideration for the effects that might follow the cause of electing only an image.  Both presidential candidates are promising change, but that’s just a bit hypocritical.  It’s a little like saying, “I promise that if you drink Liquid Plum’r you’ll get a real flavor sensation.”  In either case you just might not like it.

Me?  When I’m watching the World Series on television and a manager goes out to confer with his pitcher and catcher I’m afraid they’re talking about me.

In his Eclogues, Virgil painted a picture of Elysian Fields where all was perfect.  His shepherdesses were all what we might call perfect 10s, and the shepherds who courted them were hunks with perfect manners.  The scene was known as a locus amoenus, a pleasant place.  In the Italian Renaissance, the poet Petrarch revived the form, and in Spain Garcilaso de la Vega also wrote sonnets in such a style.  The problem, as one bright observer pointed out, is that if one of the sheep smells, the entire scene disappears.

The fact is that Plato’s realm of Forms was being imposed on the material world.  All that heavenly perfection was being projected into what we all know is an imperfect setting.  Platonic thought was one of the aspects of the Classical world that were revived in the Renaissance.  Everyone knew Petrarch’s idealized landscapes and characters were impossible to find on earth, but they could nonetheless be experienced as literature.

Well, almost everyone knew it.  At one point in his wanderings, Don Quixote decides he will go mad and become a shepherd.  It goes without saying that his lady love, Dulcinea, who in real life is a peasant who smells of garlic, is the one he chooses to pine for.  As he establishes himself in the countryside, he meets some real shepherds and experiences their “crude hospitality.”  They are good people, but they do not fit in the world Don Quixote desires to experience.

It is but a small leap, then, to what was going on in Roman Catholic theology in those days.  It too was Platonic, based on a philosophy called realism, which was almost diametrically opposed to what is called realism today.  It held that an institution such as the Church was characterized by an ideal, Platonic perfection independent of the nature of its constituent elements.  Thus, the ultra-Catholic Dante could place some popes in the lowest regions of hell, even as, in their role as popes, they were considered to be perfect.  The point was that the Church and the papacy were viewed in terms of the realm of Forms, not in their material-world imperfection.

The philosophical debate in the time of the Reformation, then, was between the Roman Catholics’ realism and the nominalism of the Protestants.  To the Protestant mind, if the preponderance of elements constituting an entity are rotten, that entity itself is rotten and needs to be reformed.  The Catholics countered that the Church was perfect even though, for example, many Scottish priests were saying mass while seriously drunk, and a cardinal in Rome boasted that on account of his many conquests he had had upwards of 160 children born in one year.  “Of course the earthly representatives of the Church are imperfect.  They are material beings, and sinful in the nature of the case.”

It is out of nominalism that the observation  arises that if one sheep stinks the entire pastoral world disappears.

In our day we may be engaged in a perilous return to realism in the Medieval sense.  Certain automobiles that used to represent the height of elegance but are now engineered badly and built worse continue to be the standard against which other technological items are judged.  No one says, “This is the Lexus of attack aircraft.”  After a certain prominent televangelist fell and it was revealed that he was a smashing hypocrite, huge numbers of his followers remained faithful to him, saying, “Oh, but he’s done so much good.” Sure, for his own bank account.  It was notable that when the monster Stalin died, large numbers of Russians wept at the country’s loss.

The tendency is particularly frightening in politics.  There are those who would vote for their chosen  party even if a revived Joseph Stalin were its candidate.  In a day when only something like 43% of our country’s voters feel moral values are important in a candidate, one wonders to what extent we’re buying into the old philosophy that a party and its candidates are perfect in Plato’s realm of Forms, even when, as beings in the material world, they have been proven to be a pack of scoundrels.  It may not be just blind loyalty.  What is at work here just might be a revival of Medieval realism.

Of course, there is also a flip side to this.  Many of us have bought into the notion that our presidential candidates must be squeaky clean.  We even purge certain facts from the records of our Founders, who are then free to live in that realm of Forms where all is perfect.  That means we have unrealistic expectations of anyone in our age who wants to occupy the exalted seat of the presidency.  Perhaps the exposure of their imperfections to public view is what has made the majority decide that morals are not important at all.

This morning, when I realized that the milk for my cereal didn’t smell very good, I didn’t conclude that milk is perfect even when its earthly, material manifestation smells like a sheep.  I poured it out and went for a new bottle.  I’m a hopeless nominalist.

Religious hypocrisy is nothing new, of course, nor is it a rare aberration, since religion represents power, and power attracts the unscrupulous.

That does not mean religion itself is at fault.  Asked about hypocrites in the church, Billy Graham confronted his questioner with the fact that, if he learned he had been given a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, he probably wouldn’t reject twenty-dollar bills from then on; he would just be more careful not to take the phony ones.

The fact is, it’s pretty hypocritical to reject religion because the church has phonies in it.  That’s like rejecting democracy because a lot of politicians within the system are corrupt.  (As Sir Winston put it, democracy is the worst form of government in the world—except for all the rest.)

Perhaps the greatest example of hypocrisy in the Hebrew Scriptures is the case of King David in his sordid affair with Bathsheba.  When asked by the prophet Nathan what should be done about a rich man who has stolen a poor man’s beloved, and only, lamb, David explodes in fury, promising severe punishment.  Nathan coolly tells him, “You are the man.”  Perspective is a hard thing to have to face when you’re guilty of adultery and a cover-up involving murder.

The New Testament too has plenty of hypocrisy to tell us about.  How about Jesus’ enemies, who, hearing that Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead, decide to kill him?  No challenging the veracity of the story, no questions about how God might want them to respond to such a miracle, just a decision to kill, as Peter expresses it soon afterward, the author of life.  That makes about as much sense as some of the blather coming out of this presidential campaign.  Did you know, for example, that Sarah Palin studied in Moscow?  (Never mind that it was Moscow, Idaho.)

And isn’t it touching to hear the proponents of abortion on demand feigning concern about whether Palin would have enough time to care for her baby if she were vice president?

Still, it seems much of today’s most ground-shaking hypocrisy is coming out of what Christians tend to call the visible church (as opposed to the true church within it).  A pastor I know was forced to deal with a conspiracy to convert his Presbyterian church into—get this—an Arminian dispensationalist charismatic Baptist church.  (If you don’t know what those terms mean, suffice it to say they are quite foreign to Presbyterian tradition and would make John Knox turn purple.)  The pastor asked one of the leaders of said conspiracy, “When you became a member of this church you swore to uphold its constitution, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You lied, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes.”

“When you became an elder you again swore to uphold that constitution, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“You lied again, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What does that make you?”

. . . . . . . . . . .

Here’s an a fortiori argument:  How shall we then classify the majority of delegates to the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (hereinafter PCUSA), who, having sworn that same oath, bypassed the neat Aristotelian chain of authority that is supposed to structure the denomination’s decisions and procedures?  The Book of Order clearly states that authority moves up the scale from the local church sessions to the presbyteries to the synods to General