The only time progressive Democrats take a break from mocking, vilifying, and persecuting Christians is when they attempt to use the Bible to justify some element of their radical leftist agenda. In truth, though progressives claim to shun religion as the opiate of the masses (to quote their idol, Karl Marx), as a collective they actually practice a much more primitive form of religion than Christianity — a paganistic neo-Gaiaism in which they worship the Earth itself, rather than its Creator.

The earth is their goddess and their prophets are drawn from the political class. Remember Barack Obama claiming his nomination to the presidency would itself mark the day when the oceans would begin to recede and the earth would begin to heal? Please [ignore the hypocrisy of climate prophets like Al Gore and Obama living in massive mansions and traveling by private jet.

Recently, Democrat presidential candidate and self-proclaimed devout homosexual Christian Pete Buttigieg attempted to use scripture to justify Democrats’ radical global-warming agenda, declaring, “To me, environmental stewardship isn’t just about taking care of the planet; it’s taking care of our neighbor. … And the biggest problem with climate change isn’t just that it’s going to hurt the planet … it’s that we are hurting people.”

He continued, “The way I see it, I don’t imagine God’s going to let us off the hook for abusing future generations, anymore than you would be off the hook for harming someone right next to you. With climate change, we’re doing both.”

God will punish us for “abusing future generations”?

Really? If God is going to punish us for driving gas-powered cars, cooling our homes with air conditioning, and drinking from plastic straws, we shudder to think how His wrath will be kindled when we are punished for the 60,000,000 (and counting) preborn children we’ve slaughtered in abortion clinics since 1973.

But Buttigieg says that abortion until birth is morally acceptable because “there’s a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath.”

Really? What parts might that be? Certainly not the Book of Jeremiah, where the Lord declares, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.”

And it is hard to fathom God approving the death and dismemberment of an in utero John the Baptist, who “leaped” in the womb of Elizabeth, cousin to the Virgin Mary, when the preborn prophet heard the voice of the mother of the Son of God.

Democrats have long invoked Christ’s admonition to care for the poor as justification for their massive income-redistribution programs. Yet Christ’s exhortation that His disciples be charitable is an individual commandment, not a call for government programs.

Indeed, by definition, charity must be a voluntary individual act, done with cheerfulness. When the rich young ruler approached Christ, asking what he must do to have eternal life, Christ initially told him to keep the commandments. When the young man declared he had done so since his youth, Christ exhorted him to “go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor … and come and follow me.” The young man, unwilling to give up his wealth, “went away sorrowful.”

What didn’t happen next? Christ didn’t direct His disciples — or the Roman soldiers with legal authority — to accost the young man and take his wealth by force, and redistribute it to the poor and needy.

Democrats cheered heartily when the progressive Pope Francis claimed a religious imperative for open borders, but cast him aside when he condemned abortion.

This is why attempts by the “progressive” Left to co-opt the Bible to advance their political agenda fall flat. They not only don’t truly believe what it says, they are actively hostile to its teachings. They use it simply as a political tool against religious conservatives.

The Bible teaches us that man is God’s greatest creation, formed in His image. The Left believes we are an accident of evolution; the latest in a series of mutating species who once crawled out of the primordial slime. The Bible teaches us that man was given dominion over the earth, including the animals. The Left teaches human subjugation to nature.

The Bible commands us to “go forth, and multiply, and replenish the Earth.” The Left calls for the self-annihilation of mankind so that the other species may thrive.

Mankind is God’s greatest creation. God gave us self-awareness, reason, and emotion. He gave us an incredible intellect that has, in just a thousand years (a blink of an eye compared to the age of the earth), taken us from living in caves and huts, with lifespans of just a few decades, to a world where more information than is contained in all the earth’s libraries fits in the palm of our hands; where we travel around the world in less than a day, and have lifespans now approaching a century.

If climate change is truly a problem, we’ll solve it the same way we solved hunger, disease, and exposure to nature’s fury — by harnessing the collective power of the God-created human mind.

The Bible is given to man for his salvation, a guide to eternal life in the kingdom of God. Those who seek to twist it for political gains should heed the words of Simon Peter, who declared, “They that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”