For years I’ve mocked (actually, I’m more than half serious about it) the environmental movement as a religion, much as I describe atheism as nothing short of a religion, and liberals generally as the the church of liberalism. No, Ann Coulter didn’t inject that idea into my brain through her best-selling book “GODLESS”, but I figure the author of the book being discussed in the National Post article this morning read Ann Coulter’s “GODLESS” and has drawn some similar conclusions that she draws about “the church of liberalism”.
The front page of the National Post features a huge “religious” picture. In the picture, they depict Al Gore as either Jesus or an angel, which is more than a little disturbing to me, and the article’s author (perhaps in Freudian slippage?) causes further consternation with these words:
Is environmentalism the new religion?
Joseph Brean, National Post
In his new book Apollo’s Arrow, ambitiously subtitled The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, 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.
What he discovered, in trying to sketch the first principles of prophecy, was the religious nature of modern environmentalism.
This is not to say that fearing for the future of the planet is irrational in the way supernatural belief arguably is, just that — 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.
“Irrational”, hmm? Wow. How disgracefully condescending to Christians or any people of faith, Joseph Brean.
It goes on in a more favorable but unmistakably Ann Coulter’s GODLESS-like tone…
[…] It is there in the pious propaganda of media outlets like the, Toronto Star, which on Jan. 28 made the completely implausible claim that, “The debate about greenhouse gas emissions appears to be over.”
It can be seen in the public ritual of cycling to work, in the veneer of saintliness on David Suzuki
[whom I’ve taken to calling “The Prophet Suzuki”]
and Al Gore (the rush for tickets to the former vice-president’s upcoming appearance crashed the server at the University of Toronto this week), in the high-profile conversion (honest or craven) of George W. Bush, and in the sinful guilt of throwing a plastic bottle in the garbage.
Adherents make arduous pilgrimages and call them ecotourism. Newspapers publish the iconography of polar bears. The IPCC reports carry the weight of scripture….
It’s worth the reading because it’s a very short article, but watch for the condescension toward Christians and people of faith.
Better yet, spend your time reading GODLESS.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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