For atheists (this columnist's mob and guild), all Christians are equally mystifying. But some Christians are more equally mystifying than others. Roman Catholics are the most equally mystifying of all.
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For example, atheists are marvelling this week, how can it be that Tony Abbott, a conspicuous Catholic, can have global warming beliefs so totally at odds with those of the CEO of his faith, Pope Francis?
Abbott has just given a much reported, idiocy-pocked, banality-sprinkled speech in London, scoffing at climate change science. In this same week Labor leader Bill Shorten has deplored the Turnbull government's apparent plans to abandon a clean energy target. Shorten says this is the PM capitulating to Tony Abbott and other "knuckle draggers" of the coalition parties.
But back to the Tony Abbott/Pope Francis climate change schism and clash. Isn't it a hallmark of Catholicism, atheists ask, that rank and file Catholics defer obediently to the wisdom and the rank of the pope, the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church? (The pope has eight official titles and today's column will respectfully use some of the biggest and best of them.)
Did the Pope prick up his ears at reports of Abbott's speech, a delivery so at odds with his, the Pope's, 2015 encyclical titled Laudato Si? In Laudato Si, Francis insists that the scientists are right, that global warming is happening, that it is substantially mankind-driven and that we must act, now.
What if, now, Abbott is summoned to the Vatican to explain himself?
In one's mind's eye we see him ushered into the papal presence. In the long walk up to the papal throne one can see his, Abbott's, knuckles dragging on the Vatican's deep and sumptuous crimson carpets. They, the two pairs of the recalcitrant's knuckles, leave a parallel trail in the carpet's sumptuous pile, a bit like wheelchair tracks in snow.
Surely, at our imagined audience, The Successor of the Prince of Apostles will present the erring Abbott with a copy of his, His Holiness's, Laudato Si.
Earlier this year, the Pope handed a copy to the Kuckledragger In Chief, President Trump. But of course to present a novella-length read (Laudato Si is 38,000 words long) to Trump suggests a triumph of optimism over what's likely to happen. At 38,000 words, Laudato Si is longer than C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Trump, with the attention span of a soap bubble, is not a reader.
In our imagination we see Abbott, after our imagined audience, leaving the Vatican with a signed copy of Laudato Si. Will he read it? Probably not. A knuckle dragging man like Abbott reads what he wants to read and disregards the rest.
This seems a shame. Given the climate-based events of this week (including the Abbott speech, the political imbroglio over the abandoned clean energy target and the unprecedented fires in California) I have begun reading Laudato Si.
Once the atheist reader has forgiven it for one or two small, recurring errors of fact (for example, it says mistakenly that there is a God and that He made our planet) Laudato Si is a terrific and often very beautiful read. It bristles with sincere love of and heartfelt anxiety for our tender and fragile planet we are so sinfully buggering up.
The sensitively green St Francis of Assissi is recommended as our role model. "Just as happens when we fall in love with someone," the impassioned pontiff writes, "whenever he [St Francis] would gaze at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals, he burst into song, drawing all other creatures into his praise. He felt called to care for all that exists."
Such a conviction cannot be written off as naive romanticism, for if we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters …"
Thus far today's column has been spiteful to Tony Abbott. And so in a pathetic, token attempt to appear open-minded about him I point out that not all climate change deniers are necessarily knuckle draggers.
For example, few men have walked with their knuckles further from the ground than Aristotle, the towering philosopher and scientist of ancient Greece. In the latest online Lapham's Quarterly the cerebral Lewis Lapham looks at climate change denial - ancient and modern - and reflects that, "While today environmental scientists warn of rising sea levels, ancient Athenians worried that the sea was going to dry up."
"Any fluctuation in climate was understandably disastrous for an agricultural society, and natural philosophers took the issue seriously. Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus discussed permanent weather change …concluding that if the Cretans are correct about colder winters, a certain type of wind must be increasing in frequency.
''But Aristotle himself disagreed and argued against climate-change fearmongering in his geological treatise Meteorology, telling us we have nothing to worry about – climate is cyclical."
Perhaps Aristotle was right, then, in 350BC. But Lapham reminds us that today, according to NASA, 97 per cent of published scientists agree that global warming is occurring.
