| Gore once claimed the biblical story of Cain and Abel was a parable about the dangers of pollution. Not original sin, not murder, not envy: pol-lution. "Indeed," he wrote in his magnum opus Earth In The Balance, the first instance of 'pollution' in the Bible occurs when Cain slays Abel." According to Gore, God was hopping mad about Cain polluting. Cain had "defiled the ground" with Abel's messy blood. Murder is one thing, but pol-luting really got God's goat. In Gore's view, the Bible inveighs against global warming and the internal combustion engine, but has nothing of any rele- vance to say on the matter of killing the unborn. p 157 |
| As it happens, the idea of social justice is inextricably linked in the Scriptures with ecology. In passage after passage, environmental degradation and social justice go hand in hand. Indeed, the first instance of "pollution" in the Bible occurs when Cain slays Abel and his blood falls on the ground, rendering it fallow. According to Genesis, after the murder, when Cain asks, "Am I my brother's keeper?" the Lord replies, "Your brother's blood calls out to me from the ground. What have you done?" God then tells Cain that his brother's blood has defiled the ground and that as a result, "no longer will it yield crops for you, even it you toil on it forever!" p 247 |
| Six Ways Coulter's words deceive readers and hide the deceptions from them: 1--She neglects to give full reference information. She has no footnote and matching bibliographical entry supplying readers with any additional information that could help them investigate the original sources. She should have given readers, --the page number from Earth In The Balance where Gore's claim can be found. --Genesis verse numbers that contain the story Gore refers to. Note: she has exploited a feature of the index of Earth In The Balance: it has no subject entries for either "Bible", "Cain and Abel parable", or anything else that would enable readers to easily locate it. In order to locate the words she quotes I had to needlessly waste a lot of my time (around 30 minutes) searching for the words. 2--She fails to tell readers that Gore quoted Genesis verses. Moreover, she failed to tell readers that Gore quoted God. 3--She falsely claimed that Gore claimed the story of Cain slaying Abel was about pollution. Gore merely says that the Cain and Abel story is one example of parts of the Bible that exhibit a linkage between two types of things: an idea ("social justice") and ecology (more specifically: an ecology-related subject). Additionally: --since Gore doesn't mention any other murders described in the Bible, Gore is obviously implying that other parts of the Bible that don't mention any murder also illustrate the same linkage between the idea of social justice and one or more ecology-related subjects. --surely every single verse of the Bible can be used as an example of the Bible linking several different idea--subject pairs together. It is clearly nonsense to assume that if an author cites a parable in the Bible as illustrating some kind of commonly-occuring link between and idea and a subject, that the author is hence saying that the "parable is about" the idea or the subject.. 4--She says Gore said that God was mad about Cain polluting. This is blatantly false, as anyone can see by reading Gores' words. Gore obviously says that God was mad about a murder. Gore even quotes God as scolding Cain for the murder. 5--Coulter falsely claims that Gore says that the blood had defiled the ground. Gore obviously attributes this claim to God, not himself. Gore paraphrases God as asserting to Cain that the blood had defiled the ground. Note: Gore is obviously implying that God's words are evidence that in the parable God had altered the fertility of the ground in some way akin to how a polluting substance would affect the same area of ground. Gore did not say that the blood itself was pollution, or that the spilling of the blood on the ground had polluted the ground. Gore obviously attributes a polluting effect not to the spilling of the blood, but to an action by God done to the ground where the blood had entered the ground. 6--Coulter misquotes the sentence by ending the words she quotes with a period -- falsely implying that she didn't cut off any words from that end of the quoted statement. She thereby has altered the sentence and hidden from her readers the fact that she altered the sentence. Failing to reveal with an ellipsis the omission of words is a blatant violation of standard editorial practices that are clearly described in books such as The Chicago Manual of Style. |
| This is what Coulter says on p 157 of Slander about what Gore claims about the Cain and Abel parable in Genesis: |
| This is what Gore actually says about that parable of Genesis: |