As the late Michael Crichton observed in 2003, “I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form:”
You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of theenvironment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain*, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christis the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them.
These are not facts that can be argued.
These are issues of faith.
And that faith must not be questioned. Or as the Daily Caller reports, “Environmentalists to news networks: cover climate change more, skeptics less:”
Invoking news coverage of recent extreme weather events, environmentalists are urging the public to sign a petition to pressure major television networks to do more coverage of climate change.
The petition, by the League of Conservation Voters, is aimed at executive producers of nightly news programs for major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — who the groups say don’t focus enough news coverage on climate change issues and, when they do cover the issue, portray the issue as a “two-sided debate” by featuring climate skeptics.
“What’s almost worse is that when these networks have covered global warming, they have often treated climate change as a ‘two-sided debate’ rather than what it really is: an issue in which there is overwhelming scientific consensus,” writes Vanessa Kritzer, online campaigns manager for the League of Conservation Voters.
“By bringing on climate-denying politicians and pundits, and giving them as much ‘expert’ status as actual climate scientists, the networks perpetuate the false debate that polluter-funded think tanks have instigated to cast doubt on whether we should take action to address the climate crisis at all.”
In 2007, a headline at Editor & Publisher, a house organ for the print side of the MSM advised its readers, “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”
Come to think of it, perhaps the world’s shortest blog post would list what topics the MSM does cover objectively.
I’m drawing a blank — let me know in the comments if you can think of any.
Related: “The Economist Breaks with the Climate Orthodoxy,” Roger L. Simon notes. That won’t comfort the faithful very much.
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