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stephanie
02-03-2007, 01:48 AM
By J.R. Dunn
A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

SNIP:
The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West.

For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands.. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it's not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in "the rock higher than I" - a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy.


Despite the claims of our current crop of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, this is not simply brain-dead foolishness. Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don't yet understand. (A much wiser atheist, the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote in On Human Nature that he intended to demonstrate that religious belief played an evolutionary role and could thus be explained by Darwinism. That was thirty years ago - if he ever succeeded, I haven't heard about it.)


When religious belief is subverted, it does not, as Chesterton implied, simply vanish. It is almost immediately replaced by another set of beliefs on a similar level of abstraction and serving the same purpose. Sometimes it's an import, such as Buddhism or TM. Sometimes it's a creed deliberately created to serve a political agenda, as we see in Nazism and Communism. Sometimes it's the goofy SoCal syncretism currently expressed in Wicca and Neopaganism. ("If people seriously want to be pagans," the late Joe Myers, a Christian brother of my acquaintance once said. "They'd become Roman Catholics.") And sometimes they're a combination, a weird melange of ideas picked up from various sources that (and usually not coincidentally) also serve a political purpose. Which brings us to environmentalism.

That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils. (Let me pause here to sharpen a horn.)


Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse - and that's what global warming is all about.


In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns. It's environmentalism's major element of concern, its chief attraction, and the center of discussion and speculation, in much the same way that some Protestant variants of Christianity are obsessed above all with sin. So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other, covering every last aspect of the natural world. If one don't git ya, the next one will.

Green emphasis on the apocalyptic appeared early, accompanying the introduction of mass environmental awareness itself. Silent Spring, published in 1962, represents the first environmentalist scripture -- nothing other than a modern book of Revelations. Rachel Carson, a popular nature writer, was dying of cancer while writing the book, and Silent Spring became an outlet for her rage and grief. Carson predicted the imminent coming of a stricken world, a world poisoned by the synthetic products of the chemical industry, in which no birds sang and human children would not be immune. The early 60s were marked by fears of the consequences of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the suggestion that chemicals were just as deadly found a willing audience.


Pollution - a word that itself bears many religious connotations -- became a byword of the era. That fact that the phenomenon encompassed virtually every aspect of technical civilization including car exhausts, household plastics, and power generation, guaranteed it a good long run. Truly grotesque stories, ranging from dioxins eating sneakers from children's feet to hushed-up epidemics of cancer, made the rounds. None were anything more than grist for Snopes.com, and the promised chemical doomsday never arrived. But Carson's work set the pattern for all the environmental apocalypses to come.
The Rest at...
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/a_necessary_apocalypse.html

Dilloduck
02-03-2007, 07:54 AM
By J.R. Dunn
A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

SNIP:
The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West.

For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands.. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it's not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in "the rock higher than I" - a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy.


Despite the claims of our current crop of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, this is not simply brain-dead foolishness. Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don't yet understand. (A much wiser atheist, the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote in On Human Nature that he intended to demonstrate that religious belief played an evolutionary role and could thus be explained by Darwinism. That was thirty years ago - if he ever succeeded, I haven't heard about it.)


When religious belief is subverted, it does not, as Chesterton implied, simply vanish. It is almost immediately replaced by another set of beliefs on a similar level of abstraction and serving the same purpose. Sometimes it's an import, such as Buddhism or TM. Sometimes it's a creed deliberately created to serve a political agenda, as we see in Nazism and Communism. Sometimes it's the goofy SoCal syncretism currently expressed in Wicca and Neopaganism. ("If people seriously want to be pagans," the late Joe Myers, a Christian brother of my acquaintance once said. "They'd become Roman Catholics.") And sometimes they're a combination, a weird melange of ideas picked up from various sources that (and usually not coincidentally) also serve a political purpose. Which brings us to environmentalism.

That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils. (Let me pause here to sharpen a horn.)


Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse - and that's what global warming is all about.


In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns. It's environmentalism's major element of concern, its chief attraction, and the center of discussion and speculation, in much the same way that some Protestant variants of Christianity are obsessed above all with sin. So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other, covering every last aspect of the natural world. If one don't git ya, the next one will.

Green emphasis on the apocalyptic appeared early, accompanying the introduction of mass environmental awareness itself. Silent Spring, published in 1962, represents the first environmentalist scripture -- nothing other than a modern book of Revelations. Rachel Carson, a popular nature writer, was dying of cancer while writing the book, and Silent Spring became an outlet for her rage and grief. Carson predicted the imminent coming of a stricken world, a world poisoned by the synthetic products of the chemical industry, in which no birds sang and human children would not be immune. The early 60s were marked by fears of the consequences of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the suggestion that chemicals were just as deadly found a willing audience.


Pollution - a word that itself bears many religious connotations -- became a byword of the era. That fact that the phenomenon encompassed virtually every aspect of technical civilization including car exhausts, household plastics, and power generation, guaranteed it a good long run. Truly grotesque stories, ranging from dioxins eating sneakers from children's feet to hushed-up epidemics of cancer, made the rounds. None were anything more than grist for Snopes.com, and the promised chemical doomsday never arrived. But Carson's work set the pattern for all the environmental apocalypses to come.
The Rest at...
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/a_necessary_apocalypse.html

An excellent analogy ! Good find !

jillian
02-03-2007, 07:58 AM
Amazing what the right will buy. Ridiculous.

TheSage
02-03-2007, 08:02 AM
Amazing what the right will buy. Ridiculous.


Calling it ridiculous will simply not do, jillian. Environmentalism is a complete belief system, with an apocalypse, rituals, and unproven beliefs. It's amazing what idiots will buy.

Dilloduck
02-03-2007, 08:03 AM
Amazing what the right will buy. Ridiculous.

It certainly isn't the right that's buying into the environmental "apocolypse".

Gaffer
02-03-2007, 01:46 PM
Greenies and enviromentalists are all lefties Jill. They are part of your team.

Hugh Lincoln
02-03-2007, 03:15 PM
Interesting essay.

I am convinced that on so many issues of the day, motives for belief (or non-belief) figure bigger than the facts.

Liberals want to believe that 1) business is evil, 2) energy is evil, 3) humans have the capacity to control the world, 4) nature is a big neat-o thing that doesn't like people, who aren't a part of nature and 5) conservatives are evil creatures standing in the way of good things.

All this fits nicely with global warming. And I tend to think not even scientists are immune from this. They so desperately WANT IT TO BE TRUE that "evil greedy conservatives" are destroying "mother earth." It fits a sort of religious narrative in which, as the essayist implies, there will be apocalypse. They are the "sinners" in this story, while the liberals are the righteous believers who will be "saved."

Global warming may or may not be true... I'm just suspicious of the reasons for wanting to believe.

Dilloduck
02-03-2007, 03:23 PM
Interesting essay.

I am convinced that on so many issues of the day, motives for belief (or non-belief) figure bigger than the facts.

Liberals want to believe that 1) business is evil, 2) energy is evil, 3) humans have the capacity to control the world, 4) nature is a big neat-o thing that doesn't like people, who aren't a part of nature and 5) conservatives are evil creatures standing in the way of good things.

All this fits nicely with global warming. And I tend to think not even scientists are immune from this. They so desperately WANT IT TO BE TRUE that "evil greedy conservatives" are destroying "mother earth." It fits a sort of religious narrative in which, as the essayist implies, there will be apocalypse. They are the "sinners" in this story, while the liberals are the righteous believers who will be "saved."

Global warming may or may not be true... I'm just suspicious of the reasons for wanting to believe.

I think that was explained in the article

Hobbit
02-03-2007, 11:19 PM
Environmentalism also has an Eden (pre-industrialism when humans 'lived in harmony with nature) and a return to Eden for adherants to their dogma.

Despite it being a work of fiction, I think one of the most telling and interesting insights into the mind of a truly whacko environmentalist is Tom Clancy's "Rainbow Six." In this book, a group of environmentalists engineers an airborne strain of ebola brahma (cow ebola virus) that can infect humans and plot to spread it at the Sydney Olympics. They make a vaccine for themselves, but also make a fake vaccine that will spread the disease, so they can use it to accelerate the epidemic. Once the Earth is 'cleansed,' they can ensure that they and their children won't have to inherit a 'ruined' planet. The crooks are cold and cruel, kidnapping homeless men and singles to test the slow and incredibly painful virus, to make sure it's potent enough that there won't be enough survivors to rebel against them. They also talk about the mass extinction of man the same way I might talk about mowing the lawn.