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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Nancy Pelosi - Old Testament scholar (NOT!)

According to CNSNews, Nancy Pelosi quoted the Old Testament in her Earth Day Declaration.
"The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, 'To minister to the needs of God's creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.' On this Earth Day, and every day, let us honor the earth and our future generations with a commitment to fight climate change."
(Read the whole article)
This interested me for several reasons. What happened to the separation of church and state? How does Nancy Pelosi know so much about the Old Testament?

The last question took me to BibleGateway.com to see where that passage was located. After several searches with various combinations of words and in different versions, I came up empty.

So I searched Google for the direct quotation. It turns out that this is not the first time she has used this "quote". The Pelosi Op-ed on Dr. Martin Luther King Day contains the same words. I also found it in an October 2007 interview with Tavis Smiley. (No, I am not making that name up!) She even used the same quote in her Earth Day 2007 statement, the budget bill in 2005 debate and, evidently, her Christmas 2005 statement.

Same exact quote. And that was just on the first page of Google hits.

I also found the blog of Dr. Claude Mariottini - Professor of Old Testament, who confirmed my suspicions.
These are touching words. This biblical admonition is very important and highly relevant to the pressing issue of global warming.

Too bad this biblical admonition is not in the Old Testament.
(entire blog entry)

Thank you Dr. Mariottini (and others found in the Google search).

And I guess my questions about mixing church and state aren't a concern here. Unless you count the made up religion of environmentalism.

4 comments:

Dr. Claude Mariottini said...

Thank you Joel for you words. When people don't have much to say, the recycle their words over and over again as Nancy Pelosi has done.

It is easy to make up what the Bible says when you don't know what the Bible says. Pelosi's words say a lot about her knowledge of the Old Testament.

Claude Mariottini

lavelle55 said...

Well this wouldn't be the first time I heard of a politician using the scriptures like this to help them in their job description. Sad as it is, some people who voted for Pelosi pay little or no attention to the veracity of cases like this and believe it to be so.

Levi said...

LOL! Environmentalism is the made up religion? Compared to Christianity? HAhaha, how do you figure that? There have been biologists and physicists and weathermen and geologists and chemists gathering all kinds of empirical scientific date and conducting all sorts of important, revealing experiments for decades that inform environmentalism, Christianity has one book! One of those is a 'made up religion,' but it's not the one you think!

Haha, that's the funniest thing I've heard all week!

House of Leoj said...

You're right, Levi. My bad.

Environmentalism is a real religion. It's the science they use that is false.

BTW, that's 66 books, not just one. And the endorsement of the Creator of the Universe.