And when he had opened the third and a half seal, I heard the voice of the third and a half beast say, "Get thee a load of this."

And I looked, and behold a green horse: and his name that sat on him was Warming, and gore followed with him. And power was given unto them over the climate of the earth, to heat or to freeze, to destroy with the tempest or the lack of tempest, with flood and fire or drought and ice, and with exceeding tedium.

Hallelujah! The Southern Baptists have finally found themselves an issue in which they can be praised of men!

You see, unlike those of some other denominations, the leaders of the Southern Baptists have maddeningly asserted that marriage is between a man and a woman just because what they call the Word of God says so, and whom the call the Son of God said it, too.

If that wasn't bad enough, they also refused to exempt acts of homosexuality from Biblical injunctions against sexual immorality in general.

Plus, they state outright that personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord is the only way to salvation. As if they forget there are other religions out there!

Such stridency is just out of step with these modern times, and nonbelievers throughout America let them know how wrong they are. The idea of a Creator God setting the rules is just too old school. God needed to get with the times, and the Baptists were standing in the way. Why couldn't they just see that Jesus was a nice man who told people to pay their taxes and give to the poor (and if you vote for the right "liberal" you can do both at the same time?

Don't underestimate the effects of these secular outcries against the Southern Baptists. They found them quite upsetting. After all, didn't Jesus tell his disciples that if they played their cards right, the world would welcome them with open arms?

So it is with palpable relief that the Baptist leaders announced their fealty with their co-religionists in the global warming creed. They did so in a declaration released Monday, March 10. The declaration appears weighted according to three principles: Biblical stewardship, prudence, and caring for the poor.

The stewardship issue and caring for the poor hinge upon the climate-change problem being as bad as the regnant superstition holds. It is clear, however, that the most important philosophy expressed in the Baptists' declaration is that of prudence – which is a real shame, in that the document relies on a most imprudent definition of the term.

"It Is Prudent to Address Global Climate Change," the Baptists declare, begging the question. Their next sentence reveals that they are not ignorant of the question; they acknowledge uncertainty over "whether global warming is occurring and, if it is occurring, whether people are causing it."

Nevertheless, after a chain of logic alternatively politic and torturous, they conclude, "Humans must be proactive and take responsibility for our contributions to climate change – however great or small." (Yeah, verily – all change hot and terrible, we bad men made it all.) But they do so on the basis that this is "a position of prudence."

One would have to exhaust an entire unabridged Webster's worth of adjectives in declining relevance before one would venture to call going along with the current mass hysteria concerning climate change "prudent." Considering that research has showed that all countries doing everything according to the Kyoto Protocol 100 percent for 100 years would reduce the estimated continued warming by a small fraction of a degree Fahrenheit (see Thomas Wigley, “The Kyoto Protocol: CO2, CH4 and Climate Implications,” Geophysical Research Letters, July 1, 1998), that doing so would cause unfathomable damage to economic systems the world over, that wealth is the surest means for a society to manage a natural disaster with minimal loss of life immediately and in the recovery period, and that the science regarding man-made global warming is far from settled (indeed, more significant challenges are raised nearly every day) – prudence does not blithely walk past such things.

Southern Baptists and others looking for a prudent manifesto on addressing climate change – not to mention one that also takes into account the needs of the poor – should see the Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations of December 13, 2007, signed by 100 scientists and economists, including some members of the UN's vaunted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That letter urges the UN to steer away from the quixotic pursuit of "fighting" climate change via governmental policies and advocates instead "the need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation."

The maxim "Look before you leap" is prudent. The panicked "Do something!" is not. And a leap of faith is Biblically prudent only when that faith is in God, not men.