The sacrifices Mother Earth requires of us...

(Tim: not for the squeamish) Back in the late seventies, my wife, Mary Lee, and I decided to have our first child at home. Not being lovers of hospitals, we figured childbirth was a labor best carried out in an environment where the mother would feel perfectly at home. Not being simps, though, we prepared as conscientiously as we could. Since our parents weren't on board, we contacted a family friend who was a renowned pediatric surgeon asking him what he thought of our plans. He said hospitals were for sick people and a home birth would be safer than a hospital birth. This did much to quell our loved ones' fears.

Next, we read every book and article we could get our hands on and enrolled in a course designed to prepare couples for a home birth. At the end of the course, husbands were to be capable of catching the child themselves if the doctor and midwife didn't show up.

This all happened in Madison, Wisconsin, so the other couples taking the course were not, shall we say, entirely normal. Nor were our instructors.

The doctor who helped teach the course had practiced in Santa Cruz prior to moving to Madison, and while in Santa Cruz had attended many home births. So there was a good bit of the northern California funkiness coming with him which, combined with the Madison east-side culture, reached critical mass within that group. One night when we got home after our birthing class, we were repulsed to find among the evening's handouts a recipe...

for placenta stew.

Mary Lee and I went on to have five children, three at home and two in a hospital (one was a breach delivery). And as the years have gone by, we've watched some of our family members chose home births, also. Staying out of the hospital is not the bleeding edge of hippiedom it was back in the seventies.

But leaving home births aside, I've often thought of the recipe for placenta stew as an illustration of the depths to which the Green, New Age, Al Gore, Environmental, Wicca, Gaia, Creation-Rather-than-Creator-Worshiping movement will lead us. The same men who gave us cannibalism have, during intervening years, marched on to present death as Nature's good to be hastened and embraced; sodomy and other sexual perversions as expressions of the gender diversity Nature bestows on Her children; sixty million abortions a year as the bloody sacrament of liberated womanhood; the slaughter of defective newborns and feeble elderly as a tough-minded embracing of Evolution's manifest destiny; nakedness in the shadow of the Burning Man effigy as a rite of Gaia; and on they march.

Who is their God? She is the Big Bang. She is Evolution. She is Punctuated Equilibrium. She is Progress. She is the Diversity of Species. She is the Rain Forest. She is Gaia. She is Mother Earth. She is Nature. She is Creation. She is Herself.

For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 1:25)

What do environmentalism, agnostic cosmology, evolutionary biology, the Burning Man Festival, Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize, and the Homosexualist Army all have in common? Each of them represents a single congregation united in defying the God Who created all things and one day will judge us by His Son.

What's wrong with Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize and its surrounding liturgy and worship?

It's wrong because it has nothing to do with stewardship, with guarding, protecting, and keeping this garden God made for us. We must "Save the earth," and the work that salvation requires of us is only the reasonable worship Mother Earth demands of those creatures fed at her breast.

Environmentalism, then, is the obeisance Mother Earth's cult leaders and priests demand for their god.

(Thanks to Joshua Smart who sent me this link to a placenta-eating thought experiment that got me thinking...)