The falsity of communal reassurance based on nothing

Love vs. aura of benevolence

To be "thought of" kindly by many and to "think of" them kindly is only a diluted benevolence, a collective illusion of friendship. Its function is not the sharing of love but complicity in a mutual reassurance that is based on nothing. Instead of cultivating this diffuse aura of benevolence, you should enter with trepidation into the deep and genuine concern for those few persons God has committed to your care.

Selah.

Thomas Merton

The crowded worship at the Church of Green

America's mea maxima culpa

Jonah Goldberg has penned a thoughtful piece called "Church of Green: America's Mea Maxima Culpa." In it, he confronts the rampant mysticism in the environmentalist movement here in America. He prophetically details environmentalism as a kind of religion. Or, to quote Glenn Reynolds, "A substitute therefor without the troubling discerning-God's-will-and-following-it part."

Jonah's words are worth hearing:

I admit it: I’m no environmentalist. But I like to think I’m something of a conservationist. No doubt for millions of Americans this is a distinction without a difference, as the two words are usually used interchangeably. But they’re different things, and the country would be better off if we sharpened the distinctions between both word and concept.

At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It’s a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. “If you look carefully,” author Michael Crichton observed, “you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.”

Environmentalism’s most renewable resources are fear, guilt, and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic past. John Muir, who laid the philosophical foundations of modern environmentalism, described humans as “selfish, conceited creatures.” Salvation comes from shedding our sins, rejecting our addictions (to oil, consumerism, etc.) and demonstrating an all-encompassing love of Mother Earth. Quoth Al Gore: “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

...

Environmentalists insist that their movement is a secular one. But using the word “secular” no more makes you secular than using the word “Christian” automatically means you behave like a Christian. Pioneering green lawyer Joseph Sax describes environmentalists as “secular prophets, preaching a message of secular salvation.” Gore, too, has been dubbed a “prophet.” A green-themed California hotel provides Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” next to the Bible and a Buddhist tome.

Whether or not it’s adopted the trappings of religion, my biggest beef with environmentalism is how comfortably irrational it is. It touts ritual over reality, symbolism over substance, while claiming to be so much more rational and scientific than those silly sky-God worshipers and deranged oil addicts.

It often seems that displaying faith in the green cause is more important than advancing the green cause. The U.S. government just put polar bears on the threatened species list because climate change is shrinking the Arctic ice where they live. Never mind that polar bears are in fact thriving — their numbers have quadrupled in the last 50 years. Never mind that full implementation of the Kyoto protocols on greenhouse gases would save exactly one polar bear, according to Danish social scientist Bjørn Lomborg, author of the book Cool It!

Yet 300 to 500 polar bears could be saved every year, Lomborg says, if there were a ban on hunting them. What’s cheaper — trillions to trim carbon emissions, or a push for a ban on polar bear hunting?

Plastic grocery bags are being banned, even though they require less energy to make and recycle than paper ones. The country is being forced to subscribe to a modern version of transubstantiation, whereby corn is miraculously transformed into sinless energy even as it does worse damage than oil.

Conservation, which shares roots and meaning with conservatism, stands athwart this mass hysteria. Yes, conservationism can have a religious element as well, but that stems from the biblical injunction to be a good steward of the Earth, rather than a worshiper of it. But stewardship involves economics, not mysticism...

Thoughtful words. Read it all, here.

This is a reflection of easy morality. Such doctrine allows the follower a guilt-assuaging code where he or she feels a sense of moral well-being because s/he is obeying the culturally inculcated mores regarding green doctrine; and yet, at the same time the tenor of the life is in rebellion against divine Law. In buying off their inner moral compass with replacement morality, they are deadened to actual moral relation to God. Relation to earth has replaced relation to Creator of earth; they can live as practical enemies of God [the person] because they now relate to a cultural concept of god -- a force, a spirit, an idea, but certainly not a Holy Person, pre-existent Creator.

It is part of a long war of rejection of the transcendent, holy Deity in favor of an immanent, manageable one -- one easily structured to our earthly and sexual desires. It's no accident that the ancient goddess worship that God judged so vehemently [in fact, He commanded that no prayers should be prayed for those involved in such destructive behavior, cf. Jer. 7:15] linked the sacraments of earth and sex: the ones who worshiped thus were just doing their duty for the environment! And it felt so good. So moral and intuitive and pleasurable!

So easily manipulated to fallen human desires: the Church of Green has been in operation for a long time. And it always ends offering its children to Molech in the name of earth-good.

I believe in conservation but I cannot believe in environmentalism, because I believe in God.

Selah.

To be a Christian...

Patrick O'Hannigan at Paragraph Farmer quotes Jennifer from Et Tu, in a post about waiting for a tow truck driver:

"To be a Christian is not to make God part of your story, but to realize that you are part of God's story."

Rich. Apt. Counter-intuitive for postmoderns. Definitely counter-zeitgeist. Truly prophetic.

Thanks, Jennifer! And Patrick!

Selah.

Postmodern eloquence

The use of language to obscure meaning

Ron Coleman on defining eloquence:

It is rather ironic how the definition of eloquence has devolved. It once meant a talent for powerfully, persuasively and elegantly communicating ideas. Now it is used to describe the use of pretty language to obscure meaning.

There are other words for that.

True. But the discussion needs to go a step further: The reason why the definition of eloquence has changed is that the definition of truth has changed. Most postmoderns [specifically, leftists] no longer believe that words reflect ultimate reality; therefore there is no contradiction when words only serve self-interest; scilicet, a speech is primarily judged by its presentation and not its inner meaning or metaphysics.

If you want to discover the real beliefs of BHO, don't look at his fine-sounding words; look at his actions. Look at his votes and non-votes, his long-term commitments, the staff and associates that he has chosen [before the glare of public attention surfaced]. Flee the rhetoric and look at the man, if you want to know the truth. A man is as he does. And such a look at BHO is very revealing...

p.s. I'll be posting more on the metaphysics of BHO, hopefully. Until then, look at the hard cold numbers: look at the votes, look at the hand-picked staff and relational commitments, look at his spiritual and political definitions [admittedly, a tough task, but the core is there... and it's not centrist, or even conciliatory, despite the smooth words].