Happy Save Creation Day

As you may have noticed from past postings, I love empty holidays dedicated to important issues. International Fight Desertification Day was a blast. Save Creation Day, better. The Pope, in a move that seems a bit of a departure from his conservative nature (this is the Pope that brought back Latin, after all), is joining with hairy hippies from all over Italy in Loreto for Save Creation Day. His Popeness is urging people to save the environment and make the tough choices that are necessary to do so. Of course, given that birth control and overpopulation have nothing to do with environmental decay, there should be no calls of hypocrisy here. Oh, wait. Scratch that.

In all seriousness, I can't fault His ... what do you call him, anyway, eminence? ... for doing something like this - it's a good idea and anything that a Christian leader can do to encourage a little more "stewardship" and a little less "mastery" in the interpretation of Man's role toward nature is great. It just has to eventually come with the admission that some of the tough choices involve social change that may not fit too terribly well with a conservative view of the Bible. If this was John Paul II, I'd have no comment on the matter, because the last Pope was a relatively liberal one when it came to admitting that the church had to change to survive. He was the Pope that admitted how much sense Darwinian evolution made, and apologized for killing Galileo. But this is the Pope of robes and Latin and everything that has turned people away from Catholicism for the past half of a century. He is the definition of old school Catholicism, and I just don't buy it as much from him.

I also like the logic of encouraging environmental protection by giving away 300,000 recycled-plastic knapsacks at the event. Using recycled plastic to replace a product that would have been made with first-use plastic is environmentally friendly - creating a new product made out of recycled plastic is a net loss, because of the resources spent in recycling it. Anyway, rant over. No new writing news ... I'm waiting on a few stories, and I have a few that need polishing before sending them out, so hopefully I'll have more news soon.