This Friday marks one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar. To the believer, Good Friday marks the day that Jesus Christ died for sinners. He laid down His life to pay a price He didn’t owe, but a price we could never pay.
        To Christians, this is our Day of Atonement and our Passover—all rolled into one on the same day. To put it in religious jargon, the death of the Lamb of God brings forgiveness of sins for those who believe.
        In short, Good Friday is the day when we honor the self-sacrifice of Christ on the cross on behalf of sinners.
        But wait.
        There’s something else to commemorate this year’s Good Friday, says a group of liberal religious leaders in the Episcopal Church.
        We should also honor Mother Earth.
        It turns out that Holy Week this year coincides with the celebration of Earth Day. So to these religious liberals, they can spend time not only contemplating the Passion of the Christ, but also the passion of the earth.
        The Episcopal Church’s office of Economic and Environmental Affairs notes that the faithful should not only remember the crucifixion, but also recycling and the need to combat global warming and the necessity to reduce carbon emissions.
         Mike Schut, a Church spokesman, said, “On Good Friday, the day we mark the crucifixion of Christ, God in the flesh, might we suggest that when Earth is degraded, when species go extinct, that another part of God’s body experiences yet another sort of crucifixion—that another way of seeing and experiencing God is diminished?”
        You can’t make this stuff up.
         Here we have lip service to a high holy day in Christianity, yet they put the theory of man-made global warming essentially on the same level as Jesus on the cross.
         Schut called the falling of Earth Day this year within Holy Week, “specifically on Good Friday, a profound coincidence.” He added, “To fully honor Earth Day, we need to reclaim the theology that knows Earth is ‘very good,’ is holy. When we fully recognize that, our actions just may begin to create a more sustainable, compassionate economy and way of life.”
         So I suppose for some of their followers, they can pay homage to Christ for His ultimate sacrifice or they can reflect on what they can do to recycle more effectively.
         Take your pick.
         I suppose the one redeeming aspect of this story—no pun intended—is that it does show that for many, global warming has become a type of religion.
         This whole thing is also amazing to me because I don’t even buy the premise.
        Oh, I believe we should be good stewards of the earth. Don’t litter, that sort of thing. But man-made global warming? Is it not a bunch of hot air?
        It’s hard to believe that people still believe in anthropogenic global warming. In late 2009, a big hoax surrounding the subject was uncovered. A multitude of emails were revealed—secret communiqués from scientists that documented that some of the key scientists advocating the theory of man-made global warming were allegedly tinkering with the data.
        I spoke recently with Brian Sussman, a TV meteorologist who doesn’t believe in man-made global warming. He wrote the book Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam.
        We spoke about these email leaks. They came from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. (Sussman said he thinks they were leaked by someone inside—not hacked by someone on the outside).
        In any event, he told me, “in the CRU, we had emails with names attached from people who really made it clear that the temperature record of the earth had been manipulated. They made it very clear that deniers like myself, they were trying to keep out of major scientific publications, we weren’t allowed to publish anything in some of these various research journals.”
        Sussman summarizes the upshot of all this: “We can no longer trust the temperature of the earth. It’s being so seriously compromised by people with an agenda.”
         So to put the celebration of Earth Day with grave concerns over global warming at the same level of Christ crucified seems terribly misguided to me.
        However well intentioned some of these Episcopal leaders may be, it seems that they continue to allow themselves to fall prey to an ongoing hoax, while trivializing the commemoration of the greatest act of love in history.
        Kyrie Eleison.
        Lord, have mercy.