Rambling: Gulf Oil Spill & Worldview

During my blogging hiatus, a horrendous disaster struck in the Gulf of Mexico. An offshore oil rig exploded and sank, causing an oil well to leak huge amounts of oil into the water. Safety measures on the rig and safety measures on the pipeline leading to the rig both failed to prevent the oil from spewing out.
The owners of the well, BP, have tried for nearly a month, now, to close off the well, with no success. Various techniques that traditionally work in these situations have failed, and now BP is getting set to try a radical approach that, if successful will plug the well. This attempt has about a 60% chance of succeeding, according to their estimates.
The mainstream media, of course, immediately spend hours and hours lambasting the executives of BP and generally making all sorts of noise about the "horrendous damage" caused to the environment by the oil spill. What's sad is that in the midst of all of this "green" reporting, the ultimate tragedy of the lost lives of the workers on the rig is being ignored or minimized. Who cares if several people lost their lives? There are herons, cranes, and storks who are covered in oil!
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that it's a good thing to have those birds covered in oil. It's not. But the underlying worldview of the media is a secular, humanist, evolutionist midst that all life on this world is equally valuable and should be treated exactly the same way. In other words, this worldview says, "Animals are people, too."
The only problem with this, though, is that animals are not that. They are not people. From a Biblical point of view, they are something less than humans. They are creations of God, yes, and we should be doing what we can to treat them well, given that we humans are supposed to be stewards of the Earth. But they are not the same as people, created in the image of God. There is something unique about us humans. We think. We create. We build. Even a secular humanist has to admit that there is something special about this "animal" called "man." That something unique is what the Bible clearly identifies as the imago Dei in us. Too often, though, we dismiss it or ignore it, at our own peril.
For if God made us in His image, doubtless He also expects us to give account for how we treat that image. Given how nasty, rude, disrespectful, and terrible we are to ourselves and each other, I'd say that none of us can claim that we have rightly seen His image as we ought. We all justly deserve God's judgment. And that's where the Gospel begins. The bad news is that we deserve to be judged for not mistreating what God has made. The good news is that through trusting in Jesus Christ's work on the cross, we can be forgiven of such mistreatment (sin) and be restored to a right relationship with God. But now I wander too far from my point. I'll save that for another post.