Because radical environmentalism has now become a pseudo-religion, it has plenty of zealots who will crusade for their grandiose schemes. And because it is a counterfeit of biblical Christianity, the very thing which Christians cherish they tend to hate, and vice versa.
So if men and women are the crown of creation in the Judeo-Christian worldview, you can expect to see human beings given short shrift in the radical Green religious causes. And while humanity is denigrated, nature is elevated. I have documented this plenty of times, and there is never a shortage of new examples of this.
Consider what Bolivia, the UN, and other loony tune greens have been up to lately. Take for example this news item: “Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving ‘Mother Earth’ the same rights as humans – having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.
“The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to ‘dominate and exploit’ – to the point that the ‘well-being and existence of many beings’ is now threatened. The wording may yet evolve, but the general structure is meant to mirror Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.
“That document speaks of the country’s natural resources as ‘blessings,’ and grants the Earth a series of specific rights that include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution. It also establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature’s complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state.”
The article continues, “The application of the law appears destined to pose new challenges for companies operating in the country, which is rich in natural resources, including natural gas and lithium, but remains one of the poorest in Latin America.
“But while Salon said his country just seeks to achieve ‘harmony’ with nature, he signalled that mining and other companies may come under greater scrutiny. ‘We’re not saying, for example, you cannot eat meat because you know you are going to go against the rights of a cow,’ he said. ‘But when human activity develops at a certain scale that you (cause to) disappear a species, then you are really altering the vital cycles of nature or of Mother Earth. Of course, you need a mine to extract iron or zinc, but there are limits’.”
And lest people are tempted to think that this is all being argued on legal and political grounds – or even scientific grounds – the religious component of all this is glaringly obvious: “In indigenous Andean culture, the Earth deity known as Pachamama is the centre of all life, and humans are considered equal to all other entities. The UN debate begins two days before the UN’s recognition April 22 of the second International Mother Earth Day – another Morales-led initiative. Canadian activist Maude Barlow is among global environmentalists backing the drive with a book the group will launch in New York during the UN debate: Nature Has Rights.”
That there are pantheistic, New Age and other religious components to all this is quite clear. What is supposed to be a debate mainly settled by the merits of science has really become a mumbo-jumbo of esoteric religions and syncretistic New Age beliefs.
Gaia worship, Mother Earth religion, and green spirituality are all blending into a major world religion, which is also looking at a major world government to enforce all this nonsense. The religious overtones of this totalitarian impulse are even more closely seen in the incredibly bizarre comments made by one of Australia’s leading big cheese environmentalists.
Tim Flannery has come out with all sorts of weird green nonsense of late, but his most recent utterance may well take the cake. It can be seen and heard in the second link below. But what he is basically calling for is a statist, globalist world government to enforce radical green spirituality.
Andrew Bolt pretty well summarises this green rant: “Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery expands on his wild new theory of the ‘growth of a super-organism’ – a world in which we have ‘global community with a common set of beliefs’ so that we are ‘a regulating intelligence for the planet’, leading ‘to a stronger Gaia’.
This, he explains, will have us living in ‘a super-organism’, living more interdependent lives with less ‘individual competence’ – like ants, he says. At times Flannery’s vision sounds dangerously like a totalitarian, even fascist one, in which the individual is subordinated to the ideology, the collective, the fatherland. In which a human is no more than an ant. This is a man the Gillard Government has paid $170,000 to teach us to follow its global warming faith.”
Again, here we have an environmentalist who is supposed to be presenting us with objective, scientific facts, but is instead pushing this new green religion big time. As already noted, the secular left has long ago declared its hatred of the Judeo-Christian religion.
But that has not left it without religion. It is now embracing big time the radical and irrational religion of green spirituality. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so too in the world of ideas. When we reject biblical Christianity, we have to replace that hole with something. Green religious fanaticism is nicely doing the trick.
As Chesterton long ago remarked, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” That is certainly the case here.
http://www.canada.com/news/world/document+would+give+Mother+Earth+same+rights+humans/4597840/story.html
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/flannery_explains_his_vision_for_us_ants/
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