Competing Superstitions Over the Magic Buggy Whip Industry

Seems the freakazoids are claiming their invisible sky wizards for both sides of the mountaintop removal debate, which should be all the proof you need that nothing poisons a debate like superstition.

“Mountaintop-removal mining blasts away our souls, blasts away our communities, the souls of the workers who are doing the work and our cultural and natural heritage,” said the Rev. Robin Blakeman, a West Virginia minister and environmental activist.

But a different view prevailed on a recent wintry Sunday at First Baptist Church in Pikeville, a congregation replete with miners and those in coal-related businesses who say they “thank God we've got the coal.”

That would be the same mythical deity that has been used in the mountains for three centuries to justify every crime and social injustice, from child abuse to exploiting miners to murdering union organizers.

God “wouldn't have put the coal and the other minerals here if it wasn't for the use of man,” said church member Virgil Osborne. “But he expects us to be a good manager, good stewards of what he gives us.”

The use of coal has galvanized fierce debates worldwide over its environmental and economic effects, from local mountain communities to the policy-making corridors of Frankfort and Washington.

But religious values are flowing through these debates as well — and they're being waged here in the heart of the Appalachian coal country.

The area is steeped in a Christian heritage, attested by the modest steeples that poke through the trees at almost every turn of the winding mountain roads. Some of the churches represent Baptist, Pentecostal and Holiness movements rooted in the mountains, while others have links to more prominent national denominations such as Southern Baptist and Presbyterian.

All are deeply embedded in a culture and economy that is defined by its century-old coal industry.

Both sides — and those in between — cite as pivotal passages from the biblical creation account in which God commands humans to “work and take care of” the earth and to “subdue” it, exercising “dominion … over every living thing.”

They speak of a spiritual duty to strike a balance between jobs and nature, but they see that balancing point at different places.

Read the whole thing.

You wanna debate jobs and drinking water, fine. But when you break out the Bronze Age fiction, you're pretty much proving you deserve the lethal fate the coal companies have planned for you.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.