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© 1999 Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes

On July 9 to 15, 1999, an international conference entitled "Spirituality and Sustainability" will be held in Assisi, Italy. It is designed to advance the idea of a spiritual global ethic system that is called the Earth Charter. For the first time since the days of Nimrod in Babylon, the Earth Charter represents an attempt by man to create a common, earth-based religion to unite all of mankind.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Maurice Strong, presently in charge of reforming the UN, are leading the drive to implement the pantheistically-based Earth Charter as a mandatory earth ethic.

According to 1997 Earth Charter documents, the Charter represents "the articulation of a spiritual vision that reflects universal spiritual values," whose objective is to implement "a radical change in humanity’s attitudes and values." It is being promoted as "a people’s charter that serves as a universal code of conduct for ordinary citizens, educators, business executives, scientists, religious leaders." When fully implemented, everyone, including pastors of Christian Churches, will be required to support these earth-based spiritual values.

The Earth Charter is the culmination of a process to make the environment a high priority within the UN that started during the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (the first Earth Summit). By 1987, a report from the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) called for "a new charter that would consolidate and extend relevant legal principles, creating new norms. . . needed to maintain livelihoods and life on our shared planet and to guide state behavior in the transition to sustainable development."

Using the motherhood concept of "sustainable development," the WCED also recommended that the new charter "be subsequently expanded into a Convention, setting out the sovereign rights and reciprocal responsibilities of all states on environmental protection and sustainable development." This treaty was written by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1995 in preparation for ratification in 2002. The treaty, the International Covenant for Sustainable Development, is binding and will cast the spiritual principles of the Earth Charter into international law as recommended by the WCED.

The IUCN serves as the principle environmental scientific advisor to the UN, and has either written or assisted in writing most international environmental treaties and agreements. Included in its membership are most of America’s major environmental groups as well as our federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Interior. These environmental groups and federal agencies are already collaborating to implement the treaty’s concepts of sustainable development.

The Earth Charter was originally to have been accepted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, but failed, in part due to the blatant pantheistic language of the Charter. Pantheism is the pagan belief that nature and the cosmos are god. Dating back to Nimrod and Babylon, pantheism is detested by God throughout scripture.

In 1993, Maurice Strong, founder of the Earth Council, and Mikhail Gorbachev, founder of Green Cross International, undertook the process of sanitizing the Earth Charter’s language to make it more "universally acceptable." Both Strong and Gorbachev have been guiding forces in the movement towards global government and religion. Strong is one of the key movers and shakers in the UN and IUCN. He was not only the Secretary General of the UN Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972 and Rio de Janeiro in 1992, but also played a key role in both the WCED and the UN funded Commission on Global Governance (CGG).

Strong is now in charge of all UN reform and is responsible for integrating the recommendations of the WCED and the CGG into a radically revised UN structure and charter. The Charter is scheduled to be implemented during the Millennium Forum in the fall of 2000. The CGG’s 1995 report, Our Global Neighborhood, provides the blueprint for the new world order based on global values:

"A global civic ethic to guide action within the global neighborhood and leadership infused with that ethic are vital to the quality of global governance.... Global values must be the cornerstone of global governance."

Like Nimrod’s efforts to unite the world in Genesis 11:1-9, the CGG’s report asserts that this ethic will be based on "a set of core values that can unite people of all cultural, political, religious, or philosophical backgrounds." Those who refuse to unite under these core values are to be labeled "intolerant" and vilified, according to the report.

Although toned down considerably in the most recent draft of the Earth Charter published in April, 1999, its pantheistic foundation is still intertwined throughout the text. The lead paragraph, for instance, states "Humanity is part of a vast evolving universe. Earth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life.... The protection of Earth’s vitality, diversity, and beauty is a sacred trust."

While this passage may be interpreted in many ways, to those holding these pantheistic beliefs, earth is in fact "alive" and can communicate with "advanced" humans through channeling. The "evolving universe" goes far beyond Darwinian evolution and is equivalent to reincarnation. As stated in the UN Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA), most pantheistic or traditional societies, have "considered certain species sacred... [and] are incarnations of, or in some way associated with, gods and deities, or how they have magical powers."

The draft version of the GBA is the UN document provided to the U.S. Senate in 1994 that was used to stop the ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity by revealing the enormous pantheistic agenda behind the treaty. The "unique community of life" referred to in the Earth Charter is further qualified by the GBA to include rocks as ‘beings’:

"Traditional [pantheistic] societies tend to view themselves as members of a community that not only includes other humans, but also plants and animals as well as rocks, springs and pools. People are then members of a community of beings — living and non-living."