Climate Change as a New Religion?

Last updated on: May 1, 2014 at 12:08 pm by Star Foster

Climate Change as a New Religion? 2014-05-01T12:08:55-04:00 Star Foster

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David Solway calls climate science a “cult in religious dress.” And what kind of dress does it wear?

“Although the metaphors and, let’s say, cosmetic properties that cluster around the global warming delirium owe their provenance to Judeo-Christian devotional literature and puritanical conviction, the substance of the movement is essentially a form of pagan idolatry.”

Solway spells out his argument:

“[Climate science] has its high priests (Al Gore, David Suzuki, James Hansen, Rajendra Pachauri), its sacred texts such as computer models whose inconsistencies and disparities are blithely ignored by the myriads of true believers, its prevailing orthodoxies that cannot safely be questioned or violated, and its Second Ecumenical Council of the Global Warming Vatican (after Kyoto), known as the Copenhagen Climate Conference. Carbon taxes resemble the traffic in Indulgences during the Medieval era as energy sinners buy absolution from a profiteering clergy. A divinity called Gaia now receives the prayers and invocations of a vast sodality of devout worshippers.”

He continues:

“This appears to be the only way a secular culture which denies its heritage, yet cannot evade it, is able to justify and affirm its need for redemptive consummation, signifying a hunger for spiritual nourishment that goes otherwise unsatisfied. The urge to belong to something that is numinous, to form a community of believers, to parrot a confession and join a hieratic collective is almost impossible to resist.”

What do you think? Is he right? Is Gaia a “false false god (or goddess), utterly devoid of the values we affect to cherish and who confers neither obligation nor love upon us”?

Pagan

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