THE Christian people who have been writing letters to the Chronicle about abortion and euthanasia are to be commended for their love of human life. However, I would like to gently remind these good Christians that Christ told us to take the chunk of wood from our own eye before trying to remove the speck of dust from the eye of our brother.
We must remember God has made us responsible for the living world (Genesis 1:26), but the damage we are doing to it is killing far more of God's creatures, including humans, than abortion or euthanasia has ever killed.
Our ballooning world population and destructive consumer lifestyle have resulted in rapidly decreasing supplies of arable land, oxygenating forests, fresh water, and essential minerals. Population experts have warned that these trends will lead to the global collapse of our consumer economy in the 2030s, followed by the traumatic deaths of nine out of every 10 people by the 2050s. (tinyurl.com/tanuku).
The present focus is on greenhouse gases causing catastrophic climate change. To minimise the number of untimely deaths of our children, we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to about 7 billion tonnes a year, or one tonne per person.
New Zealanders are currently producing 17 tonnes per person, mostly from farm animals, travel, transport and home heating.
Instead of attacking caregivers who use euthanasia to give comfort to the dying or use abortion to keep existing children alive, it would be a lovely change if our armchair Christians wrote letters describing how they themselves have abandoned their Mammon-worshipping consumer lifestyle and reduced their production of greenhouse gases by changing to buses, bikes, a tiny home and homegrown vegetarian diet.
