Is environmentalism the new religion? (with 'Must See' Illustration!)

National Post - Canada ^ | Saturday, February 10, 2007 | Joseph Brean

[Convert]

I was thinking that it was the new inquisition!

IT IS! IT IS!

"THE ENVIROMENTALIST INQUISTION"

THAT IS GREAT - did you come up with that yourself?

[steelyourfaith]

ping

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

Dr. Orrell is no climate-change denier.

Well, thank Gaia for that... they'd have to apply the thumb-screws until he recanted, otherwise.

( /sarc )

[Philistone]

Soylent Green!

Let's feed the Carbon Dioxide spewing enviro-whackos to the muzzies!

[ChessExpert]

Thanks for the post. It is thought provoking. I agree with most, but disagree with some. There are many contributors. I agree with many of the contributions.

Vancouver-based author and mathematician David Orrell set out to explain why the mathematical models scientists use to predict the weather, the climate and the economy are not getting any better, just more refined in their uncertainty.
...
The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate.
...
When models about the future climate are in agreement, “it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the modeling community than it does about global warming and the economy.”

Bravo! I came to the same conclusion. My academic background is economics, but I’ve followed the global warming debate. Economists learned a little humility in the 70’s and 80’s. I remember a statement about one economist. “It’s a good thing he won his Nobel prize when he did in Forecasting. A year later, and he would have had to apply under Mythology.” Have climatologists learned anything from their seesawing predictions of global cooling, global warming, global cooling, global warming?

Dr. Orrell sketched the rise of “the gospel of deterministic science,” a faith system that was born with Isaac Newton and died with Albert Einstein.

Unfortunately, the gospel of deterministic science still reigns in many sciences, and science discussions. It seems that neural science takes the view that all is brain. Little, if anything, is mind. All is determined with all significant causation flowing one way from brain to mind. Implication - no free will. Newton would not agree, but his contribution in finding an orderly, clockwork universe has been misapplied.

Princeton history professor named LynnWhite wrote “By destroying pagan animism [the belief that natural objects have souls], Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects,”

Noted.

Joseph Brean (Journalist?) - Environmentalism even has its persecutors, embodied in the Bush White House attack dogs who have conducted no less than an Inquisition against climate scientists.

I think this story is basically backwards. Far more pressure has been brought to bear against “global warming deniers” than on those who go with the flow.

Joseph Brean (Journalist?) - It is in the schism that has arisen over whether to renew or replace Kyoto

Kyoto remains on the map. It is my understanding that the protocol was never adopted.

Joseph Brean (Journalist?) - This is not to say that fearing for the future of the planet is irrational in the way supernatural belief arguably is

Let me help you out Joe. Change it to: This is not to say that fearing for your soul is irrational in the way that fearing for the future of the planet arguably is.

All in all, not a bad article.

[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

......in its myths of the Fall and the Apocalypse, its saints and heretics, its iconography and tithing, its reliance on prophecy, even its schisms — the green movement now exhibits the same psychology of compliance as religion.

[e_castillo]

"did you come up with that yourself?"

Yes I did... I think... You know how that goes. I may have heard it somewhere but the feeling I have is that any Scientist that dares to question the latest fad is called a heretic.

[NYer]

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.

HOMILY OF HIS EMINENCE CARD. JOSEPH RATZINGER - Monday 18 April 2005

Catholic Ping List
Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Eeeeek! That's the scariest thing I think I've ever seen!

[kanawa]

A religion? Take a look at this table from Point Carbon and note the terminology...

[stfassisi]

Excerpt from
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/interelg/documents/rc_pc_interelg_doc_20030203_new-age_en.html

JESUS CHRIST
THE BEARER OF THE WATER OF LIFE

A Christian reflection
on the “New Age”


An extraordinary amount of energy has gone into the effort to overcome the division into compartments characteristic of mechanistic ideology, but this has led to the sense of obligation to submit to a global network which assumes quasi-transcendental authority. Its clearest implications are a process of conscious transformation and the development of ecology.(30) The new vision which is the goal of conscious transformation has taken time to formulate, and its enactment is resisted by older forms of thought judged to be entrenched in the status quo. What has been successful is the generalisation of ecology as a fascination with nature and resacralisation of the earth, Mother Earth or Gaia, with the missionary zeal characteristic of Green politics. The Earth's executive agent is the human race as a whole, and the harmony and understanding required for responsible governance is increasingly understood to be a global government, with a global ethical framework. The warmth of Mother Earth, whose divinity pervades the whole of creation, is held to bridge the gap between creation and the transcendent Father-God of Judaism and Christianity, and removes the prospect of being judged by such a Being.

In such a vision of a closed universe that contains “God” and other spiritual beings along with ourselves, we recognize here an implicit pantheism. This is a fundamental point which pervades all New Age thought and practice, and conditions in advance any otherwise positive assessment where we might be in favor of one or another aspect of its spirituality. As Christians, we believe on the contrary that “man is essentially a creature and remains so for all eternity, so that an absorption of the human I in the divine I will never be possible”.(31)

[Frank Sheed]

It is decidedly NOT a new religion. It is an offshoot of Pantheism (Gaia, Mother Earth) which pre-dated paganism. That is why some scholars argue that we have gone beyond paganism and are pre-pagan. Gads, even the Greeks worshipped gods instead of omnipresent, pulse-beating, "every atom within a living, breathing earth" as AlGort does.

It is very creepy to me. So is he, for that matter.

[MonicaG]

Good point (and good pic's). Although we think of the final Jonestown kool-aid disaster and cult-mentality insanity, Jones did advocate for the disadvantaged, and did a lot of service that showed he "walked the walk" and believed his talk, probably much more so than jet-fuel burnin' Gore. He had a lot of political backers, including but not limited to Jerry Moonbeam Brown, and did a lot "for the children," too.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"Environmental Inquisition" --- I see what you mean, and it's a good phrase--

My only regret is that it's kind of an insult to the real Inquisition, which Baylor University sociologist Rodney Stark and St. Louis Unversity historian Thomas Madden say had higher standards of procedural due process, more protection for the accused, higher rates of acquittal, and more lenient sentencing than any of the courts of Europe at that time.

That second link, especially, is worth a look.

It comes as a surprise to many, but the Inquisition was (from a historical point of view) a progressive force for rationality and justice in law: compared, as I say, to monarchial and feudal courts.

[Matchett-PI]

"I’m so pleased that this type of analysis of the modern environmentalist movement is beginning to show up in the media. There is a great amount of truth and insight in this article. People need to wake up to the fact that environmentalism is morphing into an apocalyptic faith devoid of facts based on traditional scientific method. The secular Left is promoting the movement as a substitute for religion which they have abandoned." ~ Unmarked Package

They're true believers - no doubt about it.

Eunuchs For The Green Kingdom
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1778309/posts

*

Star Tribune.com Minneapolis - St. Paul, Minnesota 2/8/07
Last update: February 07, 2007 – 9:24 PM
http://www.startribune.com/191/story/988141.html

Environmentalists have embarked on a secular crusade
By Katherine Kersten, Star Tribune

A recent issue of a magazine from one of Minnesota's Lutheran colleges features a picture of the campus pastor, wearing a beanie with a propeller on it. He is leading what the magazine calls a "congregation" of students in a dedication "service" at the foot of a giant new wind turbine that provides power to the campus.

At one point the pastor asked the students to raise their own miniature pinwheels. I could almost imagine them all being suddenly borne aloft by a gust of prairie wind during the closing verse of a great old Lutheran hymn.

Scenes like this are becoming commonplace, as environmentalism and religion intersect in ever increasing permutations. Last week, Catholic and Lutheran leaders joined polar explorer Will Steger and several scientists to lobby the Minnesota Legislature on what the religious leaders called the moral imperative of addressing climate change.

Wind turbines at Christian colleges, solar panels by church steeples and religiously inspired prairie restorations -- all are fine things. Christianity and Judaism teach that human beings have an obligation to be good stewards of the natural world and its resources.

Sometimes, however, it seems something more is going on.

We see it in the apparent eagerness of some "people of faith"' to embrace worst-case environmental scenarios.

We hear it in their crusading zeal as they proselytize others, for example, to attend a screening of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" in the church basement.

Environmental issues are complex, and often involve data that are open to different interpretations.

Yet in some religious circles, if you raise a skeptical question about, say, global warming (a highly debated subject), you are spurned as if you've committed heresy.

Robert H. Nelson, a professor of environmental policy at the School of Public Policy of the University of Maryland, has often rubbed shoulders with environmental true believers. In his view, contemporary environmentalism, in its extreme forms, has become a "secular religion." Nelson likens it, in important respects, to Christian fundamentalism of the sort derived from the Protestant Calvinism of America's Puritan ancestors.

Today's "environmental gospel" is best understood as "Calvinism minus God," says Nelson. In essence, it retells the biblical creation story in secular dress: Human beings were created in harmony with the world, but then were tempted into evil. Now they spread corruption and depravity, and, as a result, face disaster and perhaps the end of the world.

As environmental true believers see it, the Earth was originally a pristine Garden of Eden. Then the Fall intervened. Human beings embraced science and technology, and pridefully disrupted God's Creation. At the same time, human greed led to material addictions -- an echo of the Puritans' deep skepticism about money and wealth, Nelson points out. Today, many environmentalists regard an excess of consumption as one of the modern world's greatest sins, he says.

The result? Human beings now face retribution -- flood, famine, drought and pestilence. These, Nelson notes, are the "traditional instruments of a wrathful God imposing a just punishment on a world of many sinners."

Only a great moral awakening can save humankind. Who will redeem us? God's holy, self-appointed instruments -- his environmental prophets.

The environmental gospel has a strong appeal, especially for contemporary men and women who are turning away from traditional religion. The green crusade satisfies the universal human hunger for meaning. At the same time, it asks little of believers: no tough commandments about forgiving your neighbor or not coveting his wife. Instead, it offers rituals like recycling and (for those who aspire to sainthood) biking to work. The larger society will pay the serious costs of redemption.

There are more sensible approaches to environmental problems than the environmental gospel. Without viewing human beings as inherently wicked, or environmental problems as a righteous clash between good and evil, citizens and leaders could tackle environmental issues as public policy challenges whose solution requires a careful weighing of scientific data and the costs and benefits of various responses.

[ChildOfThe60s]

Facinating.

[stfassisi]

Look , they have a whole group of Evangelicals working with them.

Evangelical Environmental Network &
Creation Care Magazine
Global Warming
http://www.creationcare.org/resources/climate/

Including Rick Warren
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/national/08warm.html?ex=1171256400&en=d2c297203fb07bbe&ei=5070

[Convert]

"THE ENVIROMENTALIST INQUISTION"

Write a book or something

That is a great term

[Convert]

"Environmental Inquisition" --- I see what you mean, and it's a good phrase-- My only regret is that it's kind of an insult to the real Inquisition,

Yes, but the connation is perfect

[TruthConquers]

I was just telling my husband this, on the way to Costco this morning!