Climate change: why the about face?

The consensus among many COG pundits today is that climate change is a hoax, an example of left-wing lunacy. Mark Armstrong describes it as "the idiotic theory of man-made global warming." Even if there is climate change, it ain't nothin' to do with us.

But it wasn't always so.

At this very moment, in a world filled with revolution and dynamic changes, a veritable REVOLUTION IN WEATHER is occuring!

World temperatures are changing. The climate is warming up - causing drought in vast areas, with floods in others.

Why don't we wake up to the calamities we are bringing on ourselves!

Drought, floods, famines are the result of man's having turned from the ways of God. Man is bringing these sufferings upon himself.

(Herman Hoeh, "WEATHER Changes Threaten Disaster for U.S.A.", Plain Truth, January 1955).

Herman blamed farming practices and deforestation. If the science had pointed to carbon emissions in 1955, you can be pretty sure he would have lined up behind it.

Later that year Herman returned to the weather theme.

Despite the admissions of weather reporters and scientists, most news articles on weather are soft-pedalling the TRUTH. There is a definite campaign which aims at discrediting the real significance behind the weather changes. ("Worst WEATHER Ever!", Plain Truth, October 1955).

Would Herman be able to get these articles published in today's COG publications? You might think COG leaders would be tripping over themselves in their eagerness to proclaim that they had this 'prophecy' right many decades before it became an issue in the public mind. Yet they don't. I guess the 'talking points' have changed.

In these earlier times, the WCG beat the climate drum frequently. They may well have got that one right - though for all the wrong reasons. The question isn't so much whether Hoeh was correct back then, or whether he was just stirring the apocalyptic pot (I think it's clear it was more the latter); the issue is how and why most of the COGs have performed a massive double-flip and ended up in the climate change denial lobby.

Even in the 1984 50th anniversary issue of the Plain Truth Donald Schroeder was able to write:

Human activities have a part in causing changes in weather. In recent decades, scientists have begun to understand that industrial air pollution, harmful agricultural practices and deforestation are causing changes in local weather patterns. Man's burgeoning industrial activities and burning of coal and oil are significantly increasing carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, threatening to alter world weather patterns. ("CHAOTIC WEATHER: Return of the Dust Bowl", Plain Truth, February 1984.)

Since then an anti-science attitude to evolution seems to have transmogrified into an anti-science approach full-stop. As a result, the COGs are increasingly orienting themselves to a fearful, wingnut constituency (to call it 'conservative' is to do all real conservatives a gross injustice), and in those circles the idea of Global Warming is anathema.

Herman Hoeh might have been puzzled by that.


[This blog post doesn't deal with the facts of climate change, but if that's of interest check out this link to National Geographic.]

The Plain Truth on Race, 1964

Over at Living Armstrongism Redfox has an interesting post about current paranoia promotion in the Philadelphia Church of God over racial issues; PCG's False Prophecy of "Race War". Reading it I was reminded of the articles published in The Plain Truth in the 1960s. Perhaps the most disturbing example I've found comes from the pen of a certain Roderick C. Meredith, writing in the September 1964 issue.

The article, "CRISIS Flares into Bitter Racial REVOLT!" (emphasis in original) is anything but an objective, calming word on the subject. Meredith explicitly rejects the program of peaceful civil disobedience led by Martin Luther King, then under the sub-head "The Prophesied REVOLT of the Gentiles in Our Land" he makes some amazing statements after quoting Deuteronomy 28:43 [The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low]

"The Hebrew word here translated 'stranger' is clearly referring to the GENTILES or peoples of other races - who are living in the midst of modern-day Israel."

By "modern-day Israel" Meredith means the Anglo nations. By "Our Land" he means Anglo-Americans only. Where he went from there you can read for yourself in the clipping from that article.

Granted, this was the 1960s, these were less enlightened times and hindsight has 20/20 vision. Yet this same sabre-rattling logic seems to have been passed on like a virus into groups like the PCG. And what about the LCG and its ministry? Has the current Presiding Evangelist ever repudiated these statements?

Wouldn't it be interesting to sit down with Meredith now, all these years later, and ask "do you regret writing that? Is that the way you still understand those passages?" and maybe, just maybe, "would you like to offer an apology for what you wrote back then?"

There are many people who find it hard to accept that the Worldwide Church of God was ever racist in its teachings, or that BI was a fundamental part of that problem. That's not to say all members today share those views; many - perhaps most - absolutely don't.

Then again, some do, and that's a problem.

And honestly, can you separate out BI assumptions from Meredith's prejudices?