Worshipping the Weather

American Thinker ^ | December 14, 2008 | Larrey Anderson

[neverdem]

Everyone is religious. People will have their religion. The particular religion does not, necessarily, have to include worship of a god -- but it must include a dogma and rituals.

For many on the left, environmentalism has become a religion, no real surprise there. But the reason for the need of some religion, any religion, to fill the spiritual void on the left is rarely discussed. This article will examine some of the implications, and complications, of the new green creed -- which is, in fact, an ancient creed. It was once called "paganism."

Even atheists are religious. They have a dogma (God does not exist) and they have a vast number of rituals. (Most of their rituals involve lawsuits over the use of the term "God.") They have multiple proselytizing websites. They even have a church.

Their religion gives the atheists' lives significance. If there is no soul and no afterlife then this life is all that we have. To give meaning to meaninglessness, atheists occupy their time instructing non-atheists on the meaning of the meaningless. This is silliness, of course, but the religion of atheism gives a structure to its practitioner's otherwise admittedly pointless existence.[i]

Likewise environmentalism. Seen as a religion, environmentalism is Judaeo-Christianity turned on its Hegelian head. Traditionally religion posits an all-powerful God that saves a sinful humanity from itself through the intervention of a human clergy. 

In environmentalism, an all-wise clergy, composed of government bureaucrats and "scientists," saves the planet from a sinful humanity. In the green religion human beings are both God and the devil. We are righteous when we act in conformity with the establishment's dogma  -- and we are evil if we question it.

The most fundamental environmental dogma is that man is destroying the planet.[ii] The leading tenet of the environmentalists' dogma was simple. (It was simple until recent data that the planet is getting colder started pouring in.) The earth is heating rapidly and the increasing temperatures are caused by the man made release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The church of environmentalism has a long list of litanies and a parcel of penances for the faithful to perform as part of their daily ritual (cleverly termed "lifestyle"). The sacraments include buying the right light bulbs, driving the right car, reprocessing the garbage, using recycled products, purchasing from environmentally "friendly" businesses. The list goes on and on.

Just as faithful Catholics intone, "The body of Christ" when they partake of the Eucharist; devoted environmentalists chant, "We are saving Mother Earth" as they separate paper from plastic.

This church of the earth has a catechism for its young members. (Warning: the site for children that I have linked to in that last sentence is spooky.) The church has the green equivalent of tithing. (There are only three links in that last sentence. There are dozens of different green congregations that will gladly take their parishioners' money.)

The church even has indulgences. The worshippers call them "carbon credits." And when the indulgences are paid the believers' multiple sins against mother earth (exhaling is one of them) are forgiven. The followers have purchased the right to believe that they are not only saving the planet ... they are creating heaven on earth.

While the media and the left see environmentalism as hip, trendy, and "scientific," the religious aspect of the environmental movement is nothing but really real "old time religion." Jews and Christians call it "paganism."

The term "paganism" is quite appropriate. Pagan comes from the Latin paganus. A literal translation of the word would be "local yocal" or "hick." A paganus came from the pagus -- from out in the countryside or the "sticks."

The pagans were farmers. They were much more concerned about the harvest than they were about heaven. So they worshipped the weather.

Most of the very early agrarian religions were centered on "worshipping" or otherwise influencing the climate. Their gods and their sacrifices were weather related. What really mattered to these folks was a successful harvest, for without a bounteous yield of crops the afterlife would come ... and come quickly.

For millennia there were scores and scores of these fertility cults all over the world. Human beings need to be able to rely on predictable patterns of weather. We cannot survive, en masse, without a stable climate. So, over the ages, we have funneled lots of spiritual energy into trying to convince the gods, or the clouds, or the spirits, or mother earth to give us that much needed climactic stability.

The only thing that differentiates the modern environmentalist from the ancient pagan is that the environmentalist believes that the government is the god who can fix the weather.

Al Gore has famously claimed about global warming, "the debate in the scientific community is over." Al Gore may be many things to many people -- but he is not a scientist.

When a layman declares a scientific debate to be over, one of three things is possible:[iii] (1) the person is a prophet; (2) the person is ignorant and should be ignored by rational human beings; or (3) the person is insane and needs medical treatment.

It follows that someone who believes the layman's assertion is (1) a religious follower of the prophet, (2) someone whose need for a "moral" issue exceeds his or her capacity to reason, or (3) someone at least as delusional as the person making the claim.

There is no hard and fast evidence for the dogma of man made global warming. In fact, our planet appears to be cooling.[iv] It is time for the environmentalists to rethink their theology. Perhaps they already have. Barack Obama is now calling it "climate change."

Larrey Anderson is a writer, a philosopher, and submissions editor for American Thinker. His latest award-winning novel is The Order of the Beloved. His memoir, Underground: Life and Survival in the Russian Black Market, has just been released.

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[i] It took me several years to understand why atheists spend so much time trying to do the impossible, i.e., prove the negative claim that God does not exist. The non-existence of God is not a fact. It is a belief. Once I understood that atheism was a religion (a belief system) -- the obsession of atheists with the propagation of their dogma became easier for me to comprehend.

[ii] Notice when you read environmentalist literature that the sexist term "man" is used to describe negative impact on the earth by human beings, e.g., Man made global warming. This is part of the feminization and the paganization of the thinking of the left. The traditional male is evil. Mother earth is good.

[iii] For example, imagine I, a non-science layman, announced in this article that a cure for cancer has been discovered. No more scientific research is necessary. I declare that the debate about the cause of cancer is over. Cancer, I contend, is caused by allergies. The cure for cancer is the elimination of pollen. I call for a worldwide government imposed ban of all pollen producing plant life. I might be called many things for making such a claim. But "the man who cured cancer" should not be one of them.

[iv] Mars is also cooling.

[Porterville]

American Thinker?

WE at the FR have been calling it a religion since I’ve came here....

FR are trail blazers.

[Travis McGee]

When do we start tossing virgins into volcanos?

[bpjam]

I was just thinking....hmmm, I couldn’t have said that better myself.

But then, I’ve been saying the same thing since before Kyoto but then so has Rush.

[SierraWasp]

And GANG-GREEN EnvironMentalists are dumbass “Born Again Pagans!!!” (see my tagline)

[Bernard Marx]

When do we start tossing virgins into volcanos?

Where do you find any in our secular society? They've eliminated that hazard!

[devere]

This article is a fine accompaniment to Michael Crichton’s famous speech

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html

Thank you for posting it!

[headstamp 2]

“When a layman declares a scientific debate to be over, one of three things is possible:[iii] (1) the person is a prophet; (2) the person is ignorant and should be ignored by rational human beings; or (3) the person is insane and needs medical treatment.”

Priceless. LOL

[Grimmy]

rabid and irrational greenism was a pretty big part of the Nazi party’s attempts to redefine the world back in them days.

In the ‘60s, rabid and irrational commie bast**ds took up the cause as a cudgel to beat the evil capitalist economy with.

Subversives, destroyers and the useful idiots that always fall for such idiocy. That’s all that populates that stuff now.

[brwnsuga]

We have some friends that watch two things on the TV “the Weather Channel” and NASCAR... does that count for weather worship?

[SkipW]

It might be interesting if you Google Agenda 21. You will get a U.N. website that details what happened at the so called Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero in 1992. At that U.N. sponsored conference environmentalism was chosen as the tool to eliminate first the concept and then the existence of private property.

The idea is that only government should control property. ALL property should be owned by a global entity. I think the U.N. sees itself as that body.

In addition to the fully cognizant conspirators working to make this happen, there are millions of brain washed, fanatical drones who believe in this scam. They are true believers. There is tremendous danger involved when people who think that committing to a cause bigger than themselves elevates and frees them from their low opinion of who they are.

If you have not looked at the website I encourage you to check it out.

[jsh3180]

Semi-related commentary from the blog of Lubos Motl (The Reference Frame). Lubos is a former Physics professor at Harvard, now back in his native Czech Republic. He scoffs at the idea of anthropogenic global warming along with the President of his country Vaclav Klaus. ------------------------------------------------ Many environmentalists seem to think that their movement is cool, new, original, and thought-provoking. They think that their "modern" ideas were invented by their widely promoted icons. It is hard to believe that they think so but some of them probably do. Well, the reality is very different. Similar ideas have been around for centuries and their incorporation within the modern industrial society began roughly seven decades ago. Let me begin with the following quote: "We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole... This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of ******** ********* thought." Beautiful, isn't it? You may ask who wrote these sentences. Was it Jared Diamond in 2005? Or was it Al Gore in 1992? Or Rachel Carson in 1962? Or Alexander Ač in 2007? No, someone else was the author. It was Prof Ernst Lehmann, a leading German biologist. You may also want to know that he was the leading biologist of the Nazi regime and the asterisks above replaced the words "National Socialist". The words were written as early as in 1934 and I borrowed them from Peter Staudenmaier's insightful essay, Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents. In Staudenmaier's text, you will see that the Nazis were centuries ahead of the contemporary environmentalists in their own discipline. Of course, we're not talking about one biologist here. Like Rajendra Pachauri, Adolf Hitler was an avid vegetarian. His beloved German shepherd dogs had to become vegetarians, too. ;-) Organic farming in the Nazi Germany flourished and the country was the world's leader in this activity. SS leader Heinrich Himmler had his own organic farm and used the herbs to treat his favorite troops (Hitler preferred homeopathy to achieve the same goal). The national parks in Germany were expanding, especially in the "sacred forests". Medical experiments on animals were banned by Hitler himself. Unfortunately, the Jewish children were exempt. Incidentally, the previous two sentences are not unrelated. One of the most important Nazis' problems with the Jews was that the Jews were promoting the alienation of man from nature: they were "anti-natural". What a sin! We know quite many ideologues who criticize the "alienation" (and its proponents) even today: these ideologues usually no longer use the word "Jews" for the "anti-natural" people. You should also notice, as someone has quipped, that people who want to treat animals like humans also want to treat humans like animals - because these two assertions are logically equivalent. Himmler, the regime's chief mass murderer, was actually a strict animal rights advocate, too. He considered shooting birds or animals as "pure murder" and waxed lyrical about the ancient Germanic "respect for animals" that they may have borrowed from Buddhism. Himmler was impressed by the ancient Germans who put rats on trial and gave them a chance to improve their behavior. :-) The main person who prevented Hitler from imposing much more radical environmentalist regulations may have been Goering who liked fishing and shooting. Nevertheless, even Goering had to be politically "correct" in the 1930s so he assured Prussia that the years of maltreatment of animals under the democracy were over and anyone who flouted the Nazis' concern for animal rights would be imprisoned. Oh, he was so nice - almost as politically "correct" as Heidi Cullen. At this moment, many green hearts among the readers must feel very jealous but let me assure you that you first have to take over the military, police, and courts, and only later, you will be able to do the "great" things that your predecessors did in the 1930s. Hitler needed to abolish trade unions at the very beginning of his reign but there was one ban that was even more urgent and occurred earlier: in 1933, he passed the Enabling Act that regulated cooking of lobsters (this great friend of Nature hated their screams when tossed into boiling water). A few years later, hunting with dogs (and on horseback) was banned, too. -------------------------------------------------- He mentions a paper by Peter Staudenmaier, "Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and it Historical Antecedents" Here's a link to that paper, it's long but quite interesting: http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[RightOnline]

It’s all so very simple. By touting ‘love for the environment’ (something most rational people would not quibble with; we all want a clean environment), these morons can attack anything........religion, business, you name it.

Why? To disrupt our society and mold into what THEY want, pure and simple.

Of course, the idiotic media feed the frenzy.

[Izzy Dunne]

Even atheists are religious. They have a dogma (God does not exist) and they have a vast number of rituals. (Most of their rituals involve lawsuits over the use of the term "God.")

This is just as stupid and hateful as the "all Catholics are boy-buggering idol-worshippers" or "all Jews are long-nosed moneygrubbers" attitudes, and just as wrong.

[Future Snake Eater]

This is just as stupid and hateful as...

No, it's not.

[enviros_kill]

re: “The followers have purchased the right to believe that they are not only saving the planet ... they are creating heaven on earth.”

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An excerpt from a paper I wrote in 1994 on this subject:

“What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.” — from “The Road to Serfdom” by F. A. Hayek, 1944, p. 24.

The cruelest and most oppressive regimes throughout history have merged manmade religion with the power of the state. The high priests of Judea, Annas and Caiaphas, were instrumental in manipulating Pontius Pilate, a Roman ruler, to accomplish the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In this century, communism and Nazism have been hallmarks of oppression and untold suffering. These governments used a pseudo–science to give a veneer of respectability to ideological beliefs and provide a ‘rational’ basis for their acceptance. The Nazis (National Socialists) claimed that the science of genetics proved the Aryan race to have superior abilities. The communists claimed that “scientific socialism” (Marxism–Leninism) would end poverty and exploitation of man by his fellow man. The state religion in each case offered an escape from the manufactured ‘enemy’ by establishing a counterfeit moral ideal upon which tyrannical actions could be based. This counterfeit moral basis conceals the real evil about to be committed. These historical examples recall the philosopher George Santayana’s maxim, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”