source: Guardian
The New Atheists are a gaggle of writers wielding a literary cudgel against religion. From Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion to Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, it has become positively fashionable to be a member of the anti-God squad and to ridicule the religious.
Fair enough. I'm as atheistic as they come, so I won't be shedding a tear for Christianity, Islam, Judaism or the other superstitious sects that now find themselves under attack by intellectuals. And yet, I can't help feeling that the new atheists are rather spectacularly missing the point.
They are going after religions which, in the west at least, are in terminal decline, and whose influence is miniscule bordering on non-existent. At the same time, these atheists tend to buy into the cult of environmentalism, which is rehabilitating old religious pieties with a dangerously dramatic success rate.
Forget fundamentalist Christianity or Islam: environmentalism is by far the most influential death cult in existence today. It is inculcating in the masses the idea that the end of the world is nigh; that we shall we punished for our sins; that penance is our earthly duty; and that anyone who says or thinks otherwise is a "heretic" or a "denier" who should be held up to public ridicule.
The extent to which environmentalism echoes old religious values is striking. A key aspect of the monotheistic religions was their belief in an "end of days" scenario in which the world would go kaput and a new messiah would come to judge us harshly.
Many decades ago, this belief system had a deadening impact on people's lives. It encouraged fatalism, a conviction that mankind was not in control of his destiny. Our role was simply to be always on our best behaviour and await our fate at the end of time.
Today, it is environmentalists who make shrill warnings about the end of the world. In God Is Not Great, Hitchens attacks those religious fanatics who "beguile themselves and terrify others with horrific visions of apocalypse", yet he endorses the environmentalist outlook of planetary doom when he muses on "the death of the species and the heat death of the universe". If anything, his secular hellfire warnings are more terrifying than those propagated by the small religious rabble that still believes God is making his way to earth on a chariot of fire.
Green writer Mark Lynas has warned that Poseidon, the God of the sea, "Is angered by arrogant affronts from mere mortals like us. We have woken him from a thousand-year slumber and this time his wrath will know no bounds." Other environmentalists write of "Gaia's revenge" and of large sections of mankind being wiped out by floods and hurricanes (and swarms of locusts, no doubt).
These days it isn't traditional religions that frighten the populace senseless with hysterical stories about the end of life as we know it; it is environmentalists. It is the greens who instil in people that debilitating sense of "The End" and of man's smallness in the face of Gaia's/God's judgement. The greens have taken the place of the priests in spreading fear, fatalism and resignation over man's fate.
Environmentalists have co-opted the poisonous religious notion that a higher power shall punish us for our uncaring behaviour. The recent floods in England were described as a "warning" from nature, just as floods in biblical times were considered to be warnings - or stern tellings-off - from the almighty.
Last week, one writer said the floods were part of a "drumbeat of disaster" and argued "behind the gathering clouds, the hand of God is busy...." This was no religious crank writing in a millenarian rag. It was Jeremy Leggett, green businessman and former adviser to the government, writing in the Guardian.
No one listens to the priests or imams when they say mankind is corrupt and shall face the righteous fury of an angry God. But great numbers of people pay attention to the new priests of the environmentalist movement who have updated this nasty morality tale in secular/scientific lingo.
Not surprisingly, then, the greens have rehabilitated penance too. Today's trend for measuring everything we do by how much carbon it produces, and then offsetting the carbon by planting trees or making a donation to some carbon-neutralising charity, comes straight out of the Catholic tradition of confession.
When I was growing up a Catholic, we confessed our sins to a man of the cloth, who would then tell us how many Hail Mary's or Our Fathers to say if we wanted to cleanse our souls. Now we confess our carbon sins to carbon experts, who advise us how much we must put back into mother earth in order to neutralise our wayward behaviour.
The final component of the old religions was their demolition of dissent; now environmentalists write off certain individuals or groups as "heretics" or "deniers". The debate about the environment is peppered with religious language. Those who question the consensus are "deniers", a word once used to demonise those who denied the truth about God. Those who see the error of their ways and embrace environmentalism are congratulated for having "recanted" and "converted" to the true path.
Environmentalists have bastardised science as a gospel truth, which can be used to correct man's sinful behaviour. Science has traditionally remained always open to question, to ongoing falsification. Yet the science on climate change, we are told, is final and you deny its truth at your peril. Some green campaigners even wave placards saying "The scientists have spoken", a new secular version of "This is the word of the Lord".
In taking on the crumbling Christian churches or the last gasps of Islamic radicalism, the new atheists are attacking only the old, hollowed-out institutions of religion. They seem blind to the fact that backward religious sensibilities are being rehabilitated through the cause of environmentalism.
Today, the barrier to progress and rationality, to the advancement and betterment of mankind, is erected not by the discredited spokespeople of clapped-out religions, but by the numerous green John the Baptists warning of new era of doom.
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