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| Competence vs. Manliness | $10,000 Checks Won't End the Plague of Truculence |
Eco-Sacrifice is Closer Than You Think
by Christopher Chantrill
April 02, 2006 at 8:38 am
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.
To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.
To email the author, click here.
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
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
Hugo on Genius
“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up
rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
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
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
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
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
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