A North Texas "ecovillage" as described in Story One of our Thursday Reading list; a 2017 piece from the Texas Observer.
Here is a question for you? Has environmental socialism transformed itself into a secular religion? And if so-- is the coronavirus the messianic prophet to their cause?
For weeks now I have seen (and published) the subtle stories as they have percolated through the press: Air quality improves here; water quality approves there. Meat and fuel production plummet. Even at ClaraVistaRevista.com, I personally did an essay on the surge of wildlife along the roads here in Puerto Rico. The none-to-subtle message is clear-- There is a way to save the planet! There is a way to save ourselves!
As we trudge through this year's Holy Week in a time when divine services are postponed indefinitely, and classical religions are either shamelessly ridiculed (or actively repressed). I can't help but wonder if those secular acolytes who protest for global peace, social collectivism, and environmental purity even remotely understand that they have themselves created a religion. And one every bit as dogmatic and faith-based as any other concocted by man.
I am not bashing dogma or religion; dogma serves to reduce complex theocratic ideas into tidy bites, and religion (if practiced faithfully) can provide serenity and stability. It is in this sense that I refer to the current gospel of environmentalism as a Cult of Eden.
Religion is based on faith. Certainly for centuries humankind tried to reconcile science, philosophy, and religion-- but for most of the world that ended in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in progressively incremental stages. Now for the most part, the religiously observant and scientifically aligned tend to either compartmentalize science away from religion in their minds, or adopt an agnostic spiritualism.
Not so for the environmental Cult of Eden where science (as they see it) is the dogma; technology, the serpent in the tree; and borders and markets, a post paradisaical Tower of Babble, leading us to division, strife, and apathy for our fellow man.
If environmentalism is a new religion, then in many ways the coronavirus may seem like a welcomed messiah. Like many a mystic death cult preceding it, the pain and suffering caused by this "Return to Eden" is never discussed or even considered. Returning mankind to a state of pre-industrial and pre-agrarian purity, would only be possible after the death of billions of people. The cruel irony of this religion (like many before it) is that to save mankind; mankind must first be eliminated, or at least thinned. Who is spared and who is culled in this secular rapture is unclear-- But if what I just described is not a death-cult dogma-- I don't know what is!
Like all religions there will be the zealous and the evangelical; the lapsed and the indifferent; the heretic and the apostate. And like all fundamentalist religions, the Cult of Eden has little mercy on the lapsed or agnostic. And for the apostates who advocate energy, markets and technology-- woe to them and a pox upon their house.
We are living in dangerous times. Not from a molecular ball of RNA packaged as a virus; but from a religious zealotry packaged as the path, to a scientific and secular utopia.
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