After disparaging Pres. Obama’s religion in remarks to a tea party crowd in Ohio, GOP frontrunner Rick Santorum went on television yesterday in an attempt to walk back his statement that the president believes in “some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.”
Santorum said on the CBS “Face the Nation” program yesterday that he wasn’t questioning Obama’s Christian faith in claiming the president subscribes to a “phony theology,” the phrase he used in a speech to Tea Party activists in Ohio.
“I was talking about the radical environmentalists,” Santorum said. “That’s why I was talking about energy. This idea that man is here to serve the earth, as opposed to husband its resources and being good stewards of the earth, and I think that is a phony ideal.”
Climate science is a theology? Is Rick Santorum really that dumb? Well, yeah. Remember that Santorum was labeled the “Dumbest Member of Congress” when he served in the House in the 1990s — and just last month an aide to Sen. John McCain opined that “For pure, blind stupidity, nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member.”
There’s no doubt that Santorum is a climate-change denier. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Feb. 5, Santorum confirmed that he believes the science around climate change is a “hoax.” The next day, he offered more details about his views about the environment:
If you leave it to Nature, then Nature will do what Nature does, which is boom and bust. We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit…
We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through that course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create.
Santorum’s theory that good stewardship of the earth is defined as pillaging and polluting its resources in the here and now is apparently based on a fatalistic view of America’s future that he has gleaned from the Bible.
“Nowhere in the Bible does it say that America will be here 100 years from now,” Santorum said in an interview with the Associated Press during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1994.
The United States is not referred to at all in the Bible, the most recently written chapter of which — Revelation, the chapter in which the end of the world is supposedly described — was written in 95 CE, so about 1,900 years ago.
It should also be noted that Santorum’s views on climate change are heretical to his own church. In May 2011, the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a nonsectarian organization, issused a report [PDF] that said without qualification that climate change was real and called for immediate action to “reduce worldwide carbon dioxide emissions without delay … reduce the concentrations of warming air pollutants … [and] prepare to adapt to the climatic changes, both chronic and abrupt, that society will be unable to mitigate.”
