An inconvenient truth...

A link to a story about a hotel that has removed the Gideon Bibles and replaced them with Al Gore's book "An Inconvenient Truth".

The saddest part of it all, perhaps, is that the Bible they got rid of is probably the most "green" book in existence, calling those who read it to a stewardship of the Earth as God's creation in which we are all merely tenants. Had those who currently practice environmentalism as a kind of religion actually bothered to open it and read they would have discovered it advocates letting the land rest from the stress of growing crops every seventh year, the sharing of our planet's resources with the poor, and calls us to hope for a day when the lamb and lion together possess the earth.. It admonishes us with the reality that we reap what we sow and bring upon ourselves the consequences of endless consumption. It calls those who have much to voluntarily give for those who have little and we are called to care not just for the planet itself but to love our neighbors as ourselves and live lives of peace and moral purity so we do not destroy our own bodies, the summit of creation.

What they will have missed is the context of it all, and context makes all the difference. There has never been anything wrong with the idea of conserving, of living as simply as possible, and seeking to move through our short time here with a minimum of impact on our island home in the depths of space. But its never an end to itself, it must live, like all things in a proper framework or suffer from a kind of faddishness which never transcends any moment in history. The Bible puts all things, including the way we live in our environment, in proper context, in right relationship with God and each other and the larger meaning of things. Absent that we go lurching from one movement to another, on scare to the next, one theory to whatever follows, ideas unrooted from the whole and ping ponging through history.

Years after the current environmental hysteria runs its course and "An Inconvenient Truth", if it exists at all, is relegated to the bargain rack at Half Price books, the original environmental book, the Bible, will still call us not to fear but to a reverence of God the creator and all He has made, to right relationships with each other and our Maker providing a larger and consistent whole which transcends us and any moment in history with something greater than any inconvenient truth, namely wisdom.

That all being said the good thing, of course is Al Gore's books can be recycled and used for Bibles. Imagine that.