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Despite the santorum splattered about, the Pontiff of the Church Universal and Triumphant [EDIT: This is actually referring to the Roman Catholic Church, not the Church Universal and Triumphant] is going to agree with the climate change consensus in an encyclical to be released on Thursday. Early leaks give some idea of the content.
Pope Francis is preparing to declare humans as primarily responsible for climate change, call for fossil fuels to be replaced by renewable energy and decry the culture of consumerism, a leaked draft of his much anticipated statement on the environment suggests.
The source for this somehow concerns Australians, but we will take any indication of infallibility where we can get it.
So the humble submitter has to wonder, does this mean that climate-change deniers are now to be considered heretics, rather than just Petro shills or anti-environmental conservative conspiracy theorists? It does add a entirely new dimension to the debate, and I hope that God will forgive your Conservative asses for screwing up Her creation in the quest for profit.
UPDATE - janrinok 18 Jun 12:36UTC
is it possible to update/append aristarchus' post "Pope Affirms Anthropogenic Global Warming" (https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/06/17/0317256), as follows:
Update: The encyclical can be read and downloaded here.
I am not affiliated with the submitter, aristarchus, or the pope. I have a slightly paranoid reason for asking for this update; it is my experience that, whenever politically important documents are published, the actual document often gets overshadowed by an enormous load of blog commentary, providing a bit of "damage control" and "spin". It is my fervent opinion that the readership of Soylentnews deserves to read the actual source documents. (It's only 82 pages long, in this case, anyway).
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 17 2015, @04:40PM
It is a predicament for people who have used religion as armor against science. It has been effective for them to pound on the Bible and disparage eggheads. Now that the Pope, one of the prime symbols of their professed faith, has sided with science, their fallback position drops off to sects like the Westboro Baptist Church. Not the same.
There are very old strains of anti-Catholicism in America that they can and probably will fall back on now, but losing Rome costs them a lot of legitimacy.
This is a tectonic shift in the climate change debate.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @09:31PM
Over half the christians in the US are protestant. A significant number of them, probably at least a simple majority, consider catholics to literally be not christian. It is a crazy-ass thing when you first hear it, but it has to do with catholics having the pope (and the rest of the catholic church) getting in the middle of their "direct personal relationship with god." It just so happens that same simple majority are the ones most likely to deny the cause, or even existence, of climate change. So "losing rome" isn't really such a big deal to them.
(Score: 5, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 17 2015, @10:38PM
When one of these asks "Are you Christian, or Catholic", I usually respond, "Are you Christian, or a Protestant Heretic?" Then the usually accuse me of being a Papist, and maybe even a Manchurian Candidate from a Papist Sleeper Cell bent on replacing the King with a Catholic Monarch. I, in return, let on that I have many kegs of powder conveniently stored beneath Parliament. And then they say, "Remember Magdeberg!" Then I say. "You god-forsaken Pricillianists! And then they say. "But you're not even circumcised!" So it is not surprising we can't come to a consensus on climate change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2015, @04:24AM
Don't forget Nantes! 1685, you bastards, we remember!