Alarmism is Godless apocalypse

WAVES and waves of alarming news are now bombarded on us. Global warming is leading our planet to a meltdown. Increasing population is primary cause of global warming and world poverty. We are running out of energy, running out of water, running out of land, of this and of that, etc.

This seems to be today’s version of the apocalypse. It attempts to disclose a massive future disaster if nothing is done in the mold of a worldly, that is, Godless vision. It’s not a divine revelation, but a so-called scientific revelation. It’s now engaged in Goebbels-like propaganda of “inconvenient truths.”

The funny thing is many people are actually buying these pieces. And they come from all places—the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant, the sophisticated and the simple, the whites, the blacks and the in-betweens, etc.

Still, we can find a few who have held on—not so much to mere facts and data as to beliefs backed up also by scientific evidence—parrying the persistent blows and shellings from powerful men and groups. They can be called “remnant”, the few who remain faithful to God’s word even if immersed in worldly knowledge.

They have called this phenomenon as alarmism. It is exaggerating and puffing things up with the intention of scaring people and herding them to a corral of pre-meditated options that usually take away the crucial faith and moral element.

Of course, the phenomenon thrives because of a synergy of favorable factors, a perfect storm of sorts. With our technological and scientific progress, we can now know a lot about the material and temporal aspects of our world.

It’s now easy to come up with a plethora of data to support any idea at all. Thus, ideological groups of all colors can go a long way in pursuing their agenda. They have perfected the art of propaganda, and so you see and hear them almost everywhere.

The spiritual and supernatural tone of people’s thoughts, let alone, society is systematically eliminated. Things are kept in the strictly material or earthly level. One is regarded weird if he strays from this loop.

Then, we also have many people who are in varying degrees of ignorance, confusion, error and in varying situations of pressure and harassment. Not well-grounded on their faith, let alone in their spiritual life, they are vulnerable to the machinery-driven scare campaign.

Even the UN is hell-bent to convince everyone about global warming, in spite of serious misgivings also from serious scientists who disagree with this fuss about global warming and overpopulation.

I was amused to learn that UN officials are now planning to launch a “shock treatment” approach to the skeptics of global warming. I thought it is supposed to hear all sides of an issue. It just cannot go on with a certain position if the reservations of the other side are not adequately resolved.

The funnier recent development is the attempt to link population with global warming and poverty. Again? This is a rehashed Malthusian scare, long ago debunked but now resurrected, riding on the current intrigue provoked by the global warming issue.

I notice that this overpopulation scare and myth gets a life whenever some issue that manages to catch world attention erupts. Poor parasite! It can not stand on its own merits. It has to use other issues as its crutch.

The problem with the overpopulation people is that they reduce the issue into a matter of numbers alone, and their remedies are formed strictly along the lines of what is practical, but not moral.

All these cases of alarmism only reflect the state of non-faith in the world. There’s exaggerated reliance on the human sciences and technologies, on ideologies and other strictly human and material means.

The inputs of faith like prayer, sacrifice, virtues, sacraments, etc., are ignored, as if these have no place in any decent discussion of problems and issues among us.

We may already be knocking at the doors of the ultra-modern world insofar as the human sciences and technologies are concerned. But with regard to faith, I think we are still in the stone age, an anomaly that cries to heaven for correction.

Definitely, an evangelization attuned to this predicament is a must. We have to find ways to show the linkages and connections between faith and our most modern developments. There are such ways. We just have to use them!