Links tagged “religion”

With its own pieties, roster of saints and sinners, the climate movement, is becoming “the religion of choice for urban atheists. ” ... They may see themselves as avant-garde, but the greens have perhaps more in common with feudal clerics than they might suspect. Feudalism developed in an economic environment of extreme scarcity, something also embraced by greens.

Like the medieval church, the green movements benefits from enormous support from the wealthiest and most well-established elements in society. No surprise then that what is preached for the masses—for example tough restrictions on driving or energy consumption—rarely apply to or impact the well off and well-connected...

Like messianic preachers from the old religions, many climate activists, like medieval clerics, see human greed as the root of evil. They also look to impose penance through such things as not eating meat, something both older Catholics and aging hippies could recall with nostalgia. Perhaps less appealing, climate activists often follow procedures common to the Inquisition, from taking dissenters to court to seeking to banish different ideas even by legal means. .. 

Many greens have as little use for democracy or impartiality as would the Catholic Church of the 11th century; many see authoritarian regimes, like China, as better suited to meeting climate change than our querulous democracy.

Like the millenarians who feared the imminence of the “Final Judgement,” many greens oppose baby-making as a way to mitigate the evil of human existence.

"The catechism of environmental alarmism demands that we denounce the sinful nature of “destructive capitalism” for which punishment is not so much inevitable as it is richly deserved. If our disappearance from the planet is to be contemplated with complacence it is not because it is in any sense a realistic scientific scenario (or at least not until the sun becomes a red giant 5 billion years from now) but because it is the fate such extremists believe we deserve. The talk of extinction from those who accept the gospel of environmentalism is merely a new-age version of biblical warnings that First Temple–era Jews would be vomited out of the land of Israel if they worshipped false gods."

Governments face a choice between increasing their climate pledges or embarking on an “immoral” and “suicidal” path, UN secretary general António Guterres said on Wednesday...“To waste this opportunity would compromise our last best chance to stop runaway climate change. It would not only be immoral, it would be suicidal,” Guterres said. “This may sound like a dramatic appeal, but it is exactly this: a dramatic appeal.”