The student is trying to ingratiate herself with you, Professor Scriblerus. It’s a common enough trick, although it only seems to work on particularly vain instructors.

Then were you being fair to the discussion of Calvinism and its influence in America, because, as you know (or should know if you are teaching students about the Reformation), Calvinism extends beyond Calvin? And since you are the one who is telling the students what to think, well, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The extention of Calvinism into the secular world and its influence on American culture and how most Americans think has been verified in many mediums (McGrath does a good job of it, if you want a good source).

We will only do this when you stop slinging the term “Calvinist” around so ignorantly. I actually excerpted some of your posts for a test for a Reformation class that I teach and, after having the students read Luther, Calvin and other reformers, asked them to critique the posts.

As one of the students commented after she took the test, “nobody is that stupid, are they?”

Let’s get a couple other things right:

-The dinosuars died out 65 million years ago, and the extinction is pretty universally agreed to have been the result of a major asteroid impact in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula — nto climate change. (We’re overdue for a massive asteroid impact, given historical trends, but that’s overdue in a statistical sense, so take it for what you will.)

-Given that we’re only 10,000 years into the current interglacial period, and we still have lots of glaciers, it’s possible that we simply haven’t finished warming yet.

-Within the last few million years, during which the continents have been in pretty much their modern positions, we have had periods in which the earth was warm enough that there were no glaciers at all — we’re not there yet by a long shot.

-While many suggested moves towards reducing CO2 emmisions could perhaps be achieved at the cost of 1% of GDP, if you’re right about the scale of the problem (that it could cause 5% to 20% to mitigate the effects once they take place) then those 1% actions wouldn’t be nearly enough to stop or even much slow the trend.

-The reason why population control and environmentalism are so often tied is that in the US and Europe, per capita CO2 production has leveled or dropped over the last decade or two. The problem is that the population here is still rising (unlike Europe) and so our total emmissions are going up. Without population control we’d have to take measures that would bring per capita CO2 production down below what China currently has, if not lower. And so most of the claims that greenhouse gasses would be relatively easy to address are centered around serious attempts at reducing population growth, and eventually shrinking the world population.

Remember Belloc:
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!

Ready…FIRE!…Aim…

Isn’t this the same Church that invented MONASTICISM? The same one that historically valued chastity and celibacy over the connubial state? The same one that, with Francis of Assisi consecrated “Holy Poverty”? The same one that promoted fasting and abstinence as the most appropriate way of doing penance? The same one that created Lent as a means of connecting sacramental reality to the reality of SCARCITY in the natural environment? The same one that proclaimed man’s responsibility for STEWARDSHIP over a fallen and wounded and materially impoverished world?

Your heresy is called “Americanism,” Iraneus, and your spurious “Catholicism” is closer to the dubious Christianity of the heretic-Founders of America’s ersatz republic than it is to Francis of Assisi’s.

I like how you left out the medieval optimum and little ice age. Also, how in the world does one capture “global” temperature? Oops, I forgot that there’s “consensus”.

Even NASA got caught posting incorrect temperature reports, that once again proved that the 1930’s contain most of the hottest years on record:

1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939

So much for the idea that the science is without error…