Clean Coal- It's Radical

Words lose all meaning sometimes.

My favorite oxymoron of late is "clean coal." Having had my childhood years in Ohio, where coal based electricity was common, I'm flabbergasted by this term. Would anyone care to inhale your daily supplement of mercury laced ash, courtesy of the local, coal-burning power plant?

The fresh water supply in Appalachia effects much of the country's water. Efforts to "clean up" coal rely on disposing what's left of the clean up (a variety of sludges) and this stuff trashes fresh water supplies, ground water, with high levels of toxins like lead and arsenic. It takes land and then ruins it for generations. Sort of the strip mining of the new century.

Makes you think about the way we use words in church, and how some may hear them as self-contradictory. Yet we go ahead and use them. Although most in the church don't hear it this way, virgin birth is by definition a paradox. How about "radical" used in almost everything the church does today? Which leads to the church of the extreme middle!