| Floods are judgment on society, say bishops By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Sunday Telegrap
Last Updated: 12:13pm BST 01/07/200
The floods that have devastated swathes of the country are God's judgment on the immorality and greed of modern society, according to senior Church of England bishops.
The Bishop said pro-gay laws were to blame for the flood
One diocesan bishop has even claimed that laws that have undermined marriage, including the introduction of pro-gay legislation, have provoked God to act by sending the storms that have left thousands of people homeless.
While those who have been affected by the storms are innocent victims, the bishops argue controversially that the flooding is a result of Western civilisation's decision to ignore biblical teaching.
The Rt Rev Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, argued that the floods are not just a result of a lack of respect for the planet, but also a judgment on society's moral decadence.
"This is a strong and definite judgment because the world has been arrogant in going its own way," he said. "We are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation, as well as the environmental damage that we have caused."
The bishop, who is a leading evangelical, said that people should heed the stories of the Bible, which described the downfall of the Roman empire as a result of its immorality.
"We are in serious moral trouble because every type of lifestyle is now regarded as legitimate," he said.
"In the Bible, institutional power is referred to as 'the beast', which sets itself up to control people and their morals. Our government has been playing the role of God in saying that people are free to act as they want," he said, adding that the introduction of recent pro-gay laws highlighted its determination to undermine marriage.
"The sexual orientation regulations [which give greater rights to gays] are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God's judgment, which is intended to call us to repentance."
He expressed his sympathy for those who have been hit by the weather, but said that the problem with "environmental judgment is that it is indiscriminate".
The West is also being punished for the way that it has exploited poorer nations in its pursuit of economic gain. "It has set up dominant economic structures that are built on greed and that keep other nations in a situation of dependence. The principle of God's judgment on nations that have exploited other nations is all there in the Bible," he said.
He urged people to respond to the latest floods by turning away from a lifestyle of greed to instead live thinking of the consequences of their actions.
Global warming has been caused by people's lack of care for the planet and recent environmental catastrophes are a warning over how we behave, according to the Bishop of Liverpool.
"People no longer see natural disasters as an act of God," said the Rt Rev James Jones. "However, we are now reaping what we have sown. If we live in a profligate way then there are going to be consequences," said the bishop, who has previously been seen as a future Archbishop of Canterbury or York.
"We have a responsibility in this and God is exposing us to the truth of what we have done."
The Rt Rev Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, said: "We are all part of the problem and part of the solution. Instead of living as if we owned the earth we need to recover a sense of being participants in a web of life with responsibilities to other life forms and to our children."
The Bishops' warnings came as flood-hit communities were being warned to brace themselves for more torrential rain this weekend, with the Met Office issuing a severe weather warning for large areas of England and Wales, with up to 50mm (2in) of rain forecast
Category: Religion Title: The wrath of 2007: AMERICA is crying out for water Source:
independent.co URL Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2643033.ece Published: Jun 10, 2007 Author: Andrew Gumbel Post Date: [Today] by TLBSHOW Keywords: None The wrath of 2007
America's great drought America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still. From the mountains and desert of the West, now into an eighth consecutive dry year, to the wheat farms of Alabama, where crops are failing because of rainfall levels 12 inches lower than usual, to the vast soupy expanse of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, which has become so dry it actually caught fire a couple of weeks ago, a continent is crying out for water. In the south-east, usually a lush, humid region, it is the driest few months since records began in 1895. California and Nevada, where burgeoning population centres co-exist with an often harsh, barren landscape, have seen less rain over the past year than at any time since 1924. The Sierra Nevada range, which straddles the two states, received only 27 per cent of its usual snowfall in winter, with immediate knock-on effects on water supplies for the populations of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The human impact, for the moment, has been limited, certainly nothing compared to the great westward migration of Okies in the 1930 - the desperate march described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. Big farmers are now well protected by government subsidies and emergency funds, and small farmers, some of whom are indeed struggling, have been slowly moving off the land for decades anyway. The most common inconvenience, for the moment, are restrictions on hosepipes and garden sprinklers in eastern cities. But the long-term implications are escaping nobody. Climatologists see a growing volatility in the south-east's weather - today's drought coming close on the heels of devastating hurricanes two to three years ago. In the West, meanwhile, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests a movement towards a state of perpetual drought by the middle of this century. "The 1930s drought lasted less than a decade. This is something that could remain for 100 years," said Richard Seager a climatologist at Columbia University and lead researcher of a report published recently by the government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). While some of this year's dry weather is cyclical - California actually had an unusually wet year last year, so many of the state's farmers still have plenty of water for their crops - some of it portends more permanent changes. In Arizona, the tall mountains in the southern Sonoran desert known as "sky islands" because they have been welcome refuges from the desert heat for millennia, have already shown unmistakable signs of change. Predatory insects have started ravaging trees already weakened by record temperatures and fires over the past few years. Animal species such as frogs and red squirrels have been forced to move ever higher up the mountains in search of cooler temperatures, and are in danger of dying out altogether. Mount Lemmon, which rises above the city of Tucson, boasts the southernmost ski resort in the US, but has barely attracted any snow these past few years. "A lot of people think climate change and the ecological repercussions are 50 years away," Thomas Swetnam, an environmental scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, told The New York Times a few months ago. "But it's happening now in the West. The data is telling us that we are in the middle of one of the first big indicators of climate change impacts in the continental United States." Across the West, farmers and city water consumers are locked in a perennial battle over water rights - one that the cities are slowly winning. Down the line, though, there are serious questions about how to keep showers and lawn sprinklers going in the retirement communities of Nevada and Arizona. Lake Powell, the reservoir on the upper Colorado River that helps provide water across a vast expanse of the West, has been less than half full for years, with little prospect of filling up in the foreseeable future. According to the NOAA's recent report, the West can expect 10-20 per cent less rainfall by mid-century, which will increase air pollution in the cities, kill off trees and water-retaining giant cactus plants and shrink the available water supply by as much as 25 per cent. In the south-east, the crisis is immediate - and may be alleviated at any moment by the arrival of the tropical storm season. In Georgia, where the driest spring on record followed closely on the heels of a devastating frost, farmers are afraid they might lose anywhere from half to two-thirds of crops such as melons and the state's celebrated peaches. Many cities are restricting lawn sprinklers to one hour per day - and some places one hour only every other day. The most striking effect of the dry weather has been to expose large parts of the bed of Lake Okeechobee, the vast circular expanse of water east of Palm Beach, Florida, which acts as a back-up water supply for five million Floridians. Archaeologists have had a field day - dredging the soil for human bone fragments, tools, bits of pottery and ceremonial jewellery thought to have belonged to the natives who lived near the lake before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century. Environmentalists are not entirely upset, because the lake is notoriously polluted with pesticides and other farm products that then poison nearby rivers. River fish stocks in the area are now booming. Nothing, though, was so strange as the fires that broke out over about 12,000 acres on the northern edge of the lake at the end of May. They were eventually doused by Tropical Storm Barry last weekend. State water managers, however, say it will may take a whole summer of rainstorms, or longer, to restore the lake. The great Dust Bowl disaster The Dust Bowl was the result of catastrophic dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American prairies in the 1930s. The fertile soil of the Great Plains had been exposed by removal of grass during ploughing over decades of ill-conceived farming techniques. The First World War and immense profits had driven farmers to push the land well beyond its natural limits. When drought hit, the soil dried, became dust, and blew eastwards, mostly in large black clouds. This caused an exodus from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the surrounding Great Plains, with more than half a million Americans left homeless in the Great Depression.
Enjoy the weather
Tornadoes, Floods Pound Midwest U.S
March 30, 2007 4:52 p.m. EST
Julie Farby - All Headline News Staff Write
Oklahoma City, OK (AHN)-A slew of tornadoes hit the Midwestern part of the U.S., causing at least four deaths, as well as severe thunderstorms that produced golf-ball sized hail and threatened to flood several cities across 13 states.
The National Weather Service reported that some 65 tornadoes hit several states on Wednesday and Thursday including Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/700690550
1 Samuel 12:17-18 "... I will call unto the Lord, and he shall send thunder and rain; that ye may perceive and see that your wickedness is great... So Samuel called unto the Lord; and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day: and all the people greatly feared the Lord and Samuel."
Enjoy the weather as God destroys America Piece by Piece - section by section - for her sins which are many - this country is a cess pool filled with trash and the Good Lord is going to keep destroying It unless the nation and it's people repent
God destroyed the Bush Presidency, the republican party, New Orleans right before your eyes, and in 2007 you ain't seen nothing yet of the Power Of GOD -
TLBSHOW - DEC 10TH 2006
Now I have told you before it happens so that, when it happens, you may believe
.....
America, you were founded by your fathers – most of whom believed in Jesus as LORD.
You have been blessed and protected as few countries in history because of this.
Now you have turned against the God who has blessed you.
You have barred God’s Word from all public places of learning.
You have driven any mention of the Son of God from the public square. Even symbols of Him are no longer tolerated.
You have murdered millions of your unborn children on the alter of lust.
You have made what God calls an abomination socially acceptable – homosexuality.
Therefore your enemies are plotting your destruction on every side – and most of your people are not even aware of the danger they are in.
How The Mighty Have Fallen
By Hal Lindsey
12/6/2006
................ Best Pray and repent America - Turn To God, because what he has planned is Judgement on a sinful nation,,,,for a preview read the Bible and what happens to nations that turn away from God....
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