Tennessee Eagle Forum Newsletter
 June 17, 2015
Inside this issue
  Vatican Adviser Says America's Founding Document Is Outmoded, Reveals Global Game Plan  
 



The plan is quite simple. And it should scare you.

Top Vatican adviser Jeffrey Sachs says that when Pope Francis visits the United States in September, he will directly challenge the "American idea" of God-given rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

Sachs, a special advisor to the United Nations and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is a media superstar who can always be counted on to pontificate endlessly on such topics as income inequality and global health. This time, writing in a Catholic publication, he may have gone off his rocker, revealing the real global game plan.

The United States, Sachs writes in the Jesuit publication, America, is "a society in thrall" to the idea of unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the "urgent core of Francis' message" will be to challenge this "American idea" by "proclaiming that the path to happiness lies not solely or mainly through the defense of rights but through the exercise of virtues, most notably justice and charity."

In these extraordinary comments, which constitute a frontal assault on the American idea of freedom and national sovereignty, Sachs has made it clear that he hopes to enlist the Vatican in a global campaign to increase the power of global or foreign-dominated organizations and movements.

Sachs takes aim at the phrase, which comes from America's founding document, the United States Declaration of Independence, that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

These rights sound good, Sachs writes, but they're not enough to guarantee the outcome the global elites have devised for us. Global government, he suggests, must make us live our lives according to international standards of development.

"In the United States," Sachs writes, "we learn that the route to happiness lies in the rights of the individual. By throwing off the yoke of King George III, by unleashing the individual pursuit of happiness, early Americans believed they would achieve that happiness. Most important, they believed that they would find happiness as individuals, each endowed by the creator with individual rights."

While he says there is some "grandeur in this idea," such rights "are only part of the story, only one facet of our humanity."

The Sachs view is that global organizations such as the U.N. must dictate the course of nations and individual rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. One aspect of this unfolding plan, as outlined in the Sachs book, The End of Poverty, involves extracting billions of dollars from the American people through global taxes.

"We will need, in the end, to put real resources in support of our hopes," he wrote. "A global tax on carbon-emitting fossil fuels might be the way to begin. Even a very small tax, less than that which is needed to correct humanity's climate-deforming overuse of fossil fuels, would finance a greatly enhanced supply of global public goods." Sachs has estimated the price tag for the U.S. at $845 billion.

In preparation for this direct assault on our rights, the American nation-state, and our founding document, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon told a Catholic Caritas International conference in Rome on May 12 that climate change is "the defining challenge of our time," and that the solution lies in recognizing that "humankind is part of nature, not separate or above."

The pope's expected encyclical on climate change is supposed to help mobilize the governments of the world in this crusade.

But a prestigious group of scholars, churchmen, scientists, economists, and policy experts has issued a detailed rebuttal, entitled, "An Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change," pointing out that the Bible tells man to have dominion over the earth.

"Good climate policy must recognize human exceptionalism, the God-given call for human persons to 'have dominion' in the natural world (Genesis 1:28), and the need to protect the poor from harm, including actions that hinder their ascent out of poverty," the letter to Pope Francis states.

Released by a group called the Cornwall Alliance, the letter urges the Vatican to consider the evidence that climate change is largely natural, that the human contribution is comparatively small and not dangerous, and that attempting to mitigate the human contribution by reducing CO2 emissions "would cause more harm than good, especially to the world's poor."

The Heartland Institute held a news conference on April 27 at the Hotel Columbus in Rome to warn the Vatican against embracing the globalist agenda of the climate change movement. The group is hosting the 10th International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C., on June 11-12.

However, it appears as if the Vatican has been captured by the globalist forces associated with Sachs and the United Nations.

Voice of the Family, a group representing pro-life and pro-family Catholic organizations from around the world, has taken issue not only with the Vatican's involvement with Sachs, but with Ban Ki Moon, describing the two as "noted advocates of abortion who operate at the highest levels of the United Nations."Sachs has been described as "arguably the world's foremost proponent of population control," including abortion.

 

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  An Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change  
  By Cornwall Alliance
April 27, 2015

Your Holiness:

April 27, 2015-As world leaders contemplate a climate agreement, many look to you for guidance. We commend you for your care for the earth and God's children, especially the poor. With this letter we raise some matters of concern that we ask you to consider as you convey that guidance.

Much of the debate over environmental stewardship is rooted in a clash of worldviews, with conflicting doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation. Unfortunately, that clash often works its way into the very conclusions of environmental science. Rather than a careful reporting of the best evidence, we get highly speculative and theory-laden conclusions presented as the assured results of science. In the process, science itself is diminished, and many well-meaning moral and religious leaders risk offering solutions based on misleading science. The effect, tragically, is that the very people we seek to help could be harmed instead.

This is especially tragic since science itself arose in Medieval Europe, the one culture nurtured for centuries in the Biblical picture of reality that encouraged the scientific endeavor. This truth is commonplace to a wide and diverse array of historians and philosophers of science. As Alfred North Whitehead elaborated:
"The greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [was] the inexpugnable belief that ... there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind? ... It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. ...

In Whitehead's estimation, other religions' ideas of a god or gods could not sustain such an understanding of the universe. On their presuppositions, any "occurrence might be due [as with animism or polytheism] to the fiat of an irrational despot" or [as with pantheism and atheist materialism] "some impersonal, inscrutable origin of things. There is not the same confidence as [with Biblical theism] in the intelligible rationality of a personal being."

In short, the Biblical worldview launched science as a systematic endeavor to understand the real world by a rigorous process of testing hypotheses by real-world observation. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman explained "the key to science" this way:
In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is-if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

 

 

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Pope Francis warns of destruction of Earth's ecosystem in leaked encyclical
16 June 2015

Vatican condemns early release of document in which pontiff calls on people to change their lifestyles and energy consumption or face grave consequence
 

Pope Francis will this week call for changes in lifestyles and energy consumption to avert the "unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem" before the end of this century, according to a leaked draft of a papal encyclical. In a document released by an Italian magazine on Monday, the pontiff will warn that failure to act would have "grave consequences for all of us".

Francis also called for a new global political authority tasked with "tackling ... the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions". His appeal echoed that of his predecessor, pope Benedict XVI, who in a 2009 encyclical proposed a kind of super-UN to deal with the world's economic problems and injustices.

According to the lengthy draft, which was obtained and published by L'Espresso magazine, the Argentinean pope will align himself with the environmental movement and its objectives. While accepting that there may be some natural causes of global warming, the pope will also state that climate change is mostly a man-made problem.

"Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods of production and consumption to combat this warming, or at least the human causes that produce and accentuate it," he wrote in the draft. "Numerous scientific studies indicate that the greater part of the global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases ... given off above all because of human activity."

The pope will also single out those obstructing solutions. In an apparent reference to climate-change deniers, the draft states: "The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions."

     
Whodunit playing out as Vatican reels from encyclical leak
By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press

VATICAN CITY - There's something of a whodunit going on in the Vatican to discover who leaked Pope Francis' environment encyclical to an Italian newsweekly, deflating the release of the most anticipated and feared papal document in recent times.

L'Espresso magazine published the full 191 pages of "Laudato Si" (Be Praised) on its website Monday, three days before the official launch. The Vatican said it was just a draft, but most media ran with it, given that it covered many of the same points Francis and his advisers have been making in the run-up to the release.

On Tuesday, the Vatican indefinitely suspended the press credentials of L'Espresso's veteran Vatican correspondent, Sandro Magister, saying the publication had been "incorrect."

Magister told The Associated Press that his editor, not he, obtained the document and decided to publish it.

"I just wrote the introduction," Magister said in a text message, adding that he had promised the Vatican to keep quiet about the scoop.

In the draft of the encyclical, Francis says global warming is "mostly" due to human activity and the burning of fossil fuels. He calls for a radical change in behavior to save the planet for future generations and prevent the poor from suffering the worst effects of industry-induced environmental degradation.

Several Vatican commentators hypothesized that the leak was aimed at taking the punch out of Thursday's official launch of the encyclical, in which the Vatican has lined up a Catholic cardinal, an Orthodox theologian, an atheist scientist and an economist to discuss the contents.