Eco Sacrifice Is Closer Than You Think - Road to the Middle Class

WE WESTERNERS have been properly horrified in recent weeks as the Afghani courts have prosecuted the Christian convert Abdul Rahman and imams of the religion of peace have called for the apostate’s death.

“Philistine hypocrisy,” writes Spengler in Asia Times. It makes complete sense to kill the apostate, “for faith is life and its abandonment is death.” The last Christian heretic was executed in Spain as recently as 1826. In the United States we were killing Mormons as late as 1844. Then the real killing began as the modern secular religions spread across the world.

Between the 1920s and 1950s the devotees of the most successful religion in history, the Communists, were killing all the heretic kulaks and capitalist roaders they could find. The pagan Nazis had a go at killing all the Jews.

But now a new secular religion is gaining adherents in the Western world. It too believes that its faith is the key to saving life, not just human life but all life on the planet. It declares that we are all doomed by the coming apocalypse of global warming unless we repent.

Conservative politicians are beginning to take this religion seriously. President Bush has spoken about our addiction to oil and British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has installed a wind turbine on his London home.

The conservative media is also taking the religion of global warming seriously. The London Times and Daily Telegraph both ran opinion pieces April 1 on the religious nature of the global warming movement. As of old, its prophets warn us of the dangers of our luxurious times. They tell us, writes Matthew Parris, that

“Our age is not living as it should. The pursuit of riches has distracted us. Lives have been corrupted by lust, vanity, wastefulness and greed. We have become lazy and selfish. Our spirits are sick. And — count upon it — we shall be punished. One way or another we shall have to pay.”

These new Jeremiahs, prophesying that we are all doomed unless we repent, are the prophets of climate change, and they are calling us to sacrifice. They do not want us to sacrifice our first-born sons, not yet, but they do want us to sacrifice our big cars, our big houses, our meat, our fat, and our needless jet travel to faraway places.

Then there is Dr. Eric R. Pianka, a “University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert” who advocates “the elimination of 90 percent of Earth’s population by airborne Ebola.” At a speech delivered to the Texas Academy of Science and reported by Forrest M. Mims III “Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures.”

All religions have this theme of sacrifice and repentance, but one religion has finessed it in a brilliant way that few commentators have grasped. The concept starts in Genesis. Instead of making Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac God lets him sacrifice a ram instead, which you will agree is a much more sensible thing to do. The Jews developed this form of sacrifice into a fine art. The Temple in Jerusalem had a special drainage system to drain away all the blood when the rich brought hundreds of animals at a time to the slaughter.

But then came a radical change. About 2000 years ago in a confusing episode over which people still furiously contest, God said: Enough of all this wasteful sacrifice. Because I so love the world, I will sacrifice my own Son for your sins so you don’t have to sacrifice your sons or your livestock.

This Christian doctrine can have a practical effect. In China, when non-Christian villagers experience sickness or misfortune they often sacrifice their livestock to appease the evil spirits. But Christian villagers don’t sacrifice, for Jesus already died for their sins. They end up being more prosperous.

Of course, the eco-apocalyptics are not fooled by this. They are much too sophisticated to fall for the transparent and self-serving notion that God would sacrifice his Son for our sins. They demand the satisfaction of real sacrifice and real blood gushing into the gutters as in the old Temple in Jerusalem.

Some people have complained that the eco-believers are hypocrites and instead of sacrificing are buying expensive Prius hybrid cars, eating high-priced organic food, and are building huge eco-friendly mansions. But they are missing the point.

If the infidels of the world do not acknowledge the one true faith and worship the gods of global warming with sacrifice and true repentance in strict observance of the Kyoto rituals, shall we not have to kill them in order to “save the planet?”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Comments:

Posted by: Kelly McCune on 04/05/06 7:47am

Gobal warming is already happening. The icepacks in Greenland and Antarctica are already melting and the seas are rising and will continue to rise. This is not a religion. It requires no act of faith. These are demonsrable facts. Neither is overuse of fossil fuels a sin. It's consequences are not dependant upon offending diety. They are the result of too much CO2 and methane in our air. And nowhere in the bible do I read that Christ died to shield us from our own foolishness.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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