14 November 2009

God owns everything?

God owns everything. That is is the biblical view: “The earth is the Lord’s, and all it contains, the world, and those who dwell in it” (Ps. 24:1). God delegated ownership and dominion of property to his Image, man (Gen 1:26–28). God sanctioned the protection of private property in His law—the Ten Commandments—including a prohibition of theft (Ex. 20:15). Jesus (Matt. 19:18) and the Apostles (Acts 5; Eph. 4:28) upheld this law. [source]


What is expressed here is a very dangerous view. We now know that this planet earth is a symbiotic system with every parts linking to every other parts. The input is the sun's energy. Just as an example, consider water. Within this system, everything gets recycled. Waste water flows to wetland, plants and micro-organisms remove the pollutants and the water eventually flows to the ocean. Sun's energy evaporates the water to form clouds which float over to land and become rain to replenish the fresh water supply.

In the last 200+ years, we human have messed up the system. We have dug out a large fraction of all the stored carbon and emit them into the atmosphere. According to the bible, we own the earth and we can do every thing allowed by the out-of-date rules in the old books. Unfortunately, the earth's atmospheric cleaning systems - the rain forests - were being destroyed at the same time supported by the same out-of-date ownership concept. Large quantities of green house gas do not get removed in time and is building up rapidly. This concept of ownership is becoming a dangerous idea. The fact is man does not own the earth. We live on the earth. We depend on earth to provide us with air, water and food.

The above quote comes from the promotion of a book. When the underlying concept of the book is morally wrong, we don't need to read to book to know the conclusion it draws will not be sound.

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