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by Jack Dini

Do you want to position yourself as a humanitarian concerned with the grandest issue of the planet’s survival and capture the high ground as a defender of the interests of humanity? If so, embrace global warming. And if you seek even a higher level, allow global warming to be your new religion.




Why? In the words of Dean James P. Morton of the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, “the environment is not just another issue but an inescapable challenge to what it means to be religious.”(1) Global warming provides a cosmic scenario that has found expression in almost all religions of the world, from the Jewish legend of Noah and the Christian vision of the Apocalypse to the world-ending Ragnarok of the Norse sagas and the Teutonic Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods,” report Christopher Booker and Richard North.

They add, “The appeal of global warming is that it fits so neatly into the plot of a story with which everyone is familiar. Man in his selfish and reckless exploitation of the planet has committed a great and unpardonable sin, if not against God then certainly against Nature. Unless he repents and learns to mend his ways, he and all life on the planet will face unthinkable punishment. The seas will rage, on a scale never before known. Vast tracts of fertile land will be reduced to barren deserts. Nature itself will lie stricken before the onslaught. Billions of human beings will die.”(2)

Many religious leaders have joined the crusade. On June 15, 2001, the nation’s Catholic bishops unanimously approved a statement urging as a ‘moral imperative’ taking action to end global warming. “At its core, global climate change is not about economic theory nor political platforms, nor about partisan advantage or interest group pressures,” said the bishops. “It is about the future of God’s creation, and the one human family.” Several days before, the Greater Boston Coalition on the environment and Jewish Life released a letter signed by 19 local leaders, which said that the Bush administration’s energy plan “does not yet meet biblical standards for stewardship and justice.” It called on Jewish communities to “raise awareness of how fossil fuel use contributes to global warming.” (3, 4)

The religion of global warming is moving much faster than traditional religions. For example, as Ann Coulter observes, “It took the Catholic Church hundreds of years to develop corrupt practices such as papal indulgences. The global warming religion has barely been around for 20 years, and yet its devotees are allowed to pollute by the simple expedient of paying for papal indulgences called ‘carbon offsets.’” (5) As with the system of papal indulgences introduced in the late Middle Ages, anyone with enough money can buy their freedom from damnation by purchasing enough ‘credits.’ This gives them an official license to continue sinning, by emitting excessive amounts of carbon dioxide, regardless of what a corrupt sham the whole system has become.(6) I recently saw a one-act skit in Oakland, CA, highlighting the absurdity of this practice. In the skit, folks who wanted to commit adultery could do so providing they found someone they could pay to agree to not commit the same sin; a perfect analogy with the religion of global warming.

Carrying this a step further, the entire green lobby can be treated as a religion. Particularly in Europe, stories such as the myth of the Fall and the myth of the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment, no longer have the impact they once did. John Kay reports, “Environmentalism now fulfills for many people the widespread longing for simple, all-encompassing narratives. Environmentalism offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anti-capitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and socialism.” (7)

The leader of the movement, the sermonizer supreme, Al Gore, is even adoringly referred to by his flock as The Goracle. (8) And as John Fund observes, “I guess it was inevitable. The global warming hysteria for which Al Gore is the leading rabble-rouser has now taken on all the trappings of a cultish religion. Exhibit A: The Gaia Napa Valley Hotel and Spa in California has decided not to put the traditional Gideon Bible in the nightstand drawers of its rooms. Instead each will prominently display a copy of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth” (9)

Summary

Tom DeWeese sums it up well. “Global warming has become a new religion. No one is supposed to question whether it is a fact and the faithful have vowed to follow no matter what the true facts may show. Global warming is a theory, nothing more, and large numbers of scientists around the world are beginning to question its validity. There is no consensus of support.” (10) Within the past years, multitudes of peer-reviewed journal articles and at least a dozen books have provided sound evidence of this lack of consensus but you won’t find the books at your local bookstore. Try Amazon instead. Why? These recent books have the temerity to question ‘the doctrine.’ A good example is An Appeal to Reason by Nigel Lawson of the UK. This is his fourth book but he could find no British publisher. He reports, one rejection letter said, “My fear with this cogently argued book is that it flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy that it would be very difficult to fine a wide market.” (11)

DeWeese concludes, “The truth is there is no man-made global warming. There’s only the scam of an empty global religion designed to condemn human progress and sucker the feeble minded into worldwide human misery.” (10)

References

1. The Greening of Faith, John E. Carroll, Paul Brockelman, and Mary Westfall, Editors, (Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 1997), 4

2. Christopher Booker and Richard North, Scared to Death, (New York, Continuum US, 2007), 481

3. Michael Paulson, “Bishops say fighting global warming is a moral duty,” Boston Globe, June 16, 2001, Page A10

4. Bonner Cohen, The Green Wave, (Washington, DC, Capital Research Center, 2006), 161

5. Ann Coulter, “Gore’s Global Warming Religion,” www.humanevents.com, March 21, 2007

6. Christopher Booker and Richard North, Scared to Death, 402

7. John Kay, “Green lobby must be treated as a religion,” Financial Times, January 9, 2007

8. William Booth, “Al Gore, Rock Star,” www.washingtonpost.com, February 25, 2007

9. John H. Fund, “Guru Gore,” The American Spectator, 40, 52, June 2007

10. Tom DeWeese, “The New Religion is Global Warming,” Capital Magazine, February 16,
2005

11. Nigel Lawson, An Appeal to Reason, (New York, Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, 2008), ix
Jack Dini is a scientist and environmental writer in Livermore, California. He can be contacted by email at mailto:jdini@comcast.net

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