Ten years ago I read a very lengthy column by Ian McFadyen “Our New Established Religion” in Quadrant where he compared the climate cult with organised religion.
Reading it again, it is a very dense essay but his overall concept and comparison is brilliant and his points well made.
Ten years on, I’ve cut it down and simplified his main points with my own insights, language and style.
Climate change or theology. Contrast and compare.
Religion runs on rituals and sacrifice — Things like prayer, confession, transubstantiation (where bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus) and years ago, sacrifice was feature of organised religion with animals and sometimes humans put to the torch to appease the gods. There were Papal indulgences whereby you paid to sin and then having paid, you were free to go about your sinning ways.
Nothing’s changed. The climate cult also runs on rituals and sacrifice.
The Papal indulgence equivalent in 2018 is the idea of a carbon tax, paid to assuage your conscience and to offset your climate sins. The cutting of our co2 emissions to please Gaia and the carbon gods is both a sacrifice and symbolism. Symbolism insomuch that it will achieve nothing (the Chief Scientist said exactly that) other than wrecking the economy and exporting jobs. That’s quite some national sacrifice. All pain for no gain. Importantly though, it will make believers feel smug and virtuous. Just like organised religion.
Of course such a national sacrifice will be an example, a beacon for other countries to follow. I suppose in that sense we are individually and collectively martyrs to the cause. And where would any decent religion be without its martyrs?
A speciality of organised religion is anxiety and guilt designed to scare the living daylights out of you —- You MUST repent and change your behaviour or be condemned to an eternity hell and damnation fire and brimstone and famine and pestilence, to keep you in line.
The religion of climate also relies on the drivers of anxiety, guilt and fear to make you conform —- Again just like organised religion, you MUST repent and change your behaviour or there’ll be famine and pestilence, the seas will rise and you’ll drown instead of burn in the fires of hell. Climate High Priest Tim Flannery, spake, and verily said unto us that “..the rains were never going to fall again and the rain that did fall would evaporate in the atmospheric heat even before it hit the ground..” Sound familiar.
Organised religion has a priesthood and only the priesthood back in the day possessed the knowledge drawn from the opaque, sacred scripts, indecipherable to the lay person.
The organised religion of climate also has a priesthood. We call them climate scientists and climatologists. These are the prophets and seers or the ancient Roman augurs of our time who look into the future. They too possess the knowledge drawn from sacred scripts as they write and talk a language of maths and graphs equally indecipherable to the lay person. The knowledge is developed as computer modelling that looks into the future to predict the weather and climate in 100 years.
Unfortunately, to date, their modelling has been entirely wrong.
Another feature of organised religion is the heretic. The non believers.
The climate religion and cult has them too. The heretics, (lay people and scientists) are the non believers. They are the are the deniers. They are cast out into the wildness and fed to the (metaphorical) lions. They become lepers in the own land. Persona non grata. (Think, Bob Carter and Peter Ridd of James Cook University who went off the climate reservation) Climate heretics and deniers are held up to ridicule, never to be published, spoken of or in an way acknowledged by their brethren in the scientific priesthood and community or their opinions sought by the gatekeepers of information and the High Priests of the media and the ABC.
Organised religion has heaven and hell complete with Satan who tempts and lures you into sin.
The organised religion of climate similarly has its own version of heaven and hell.
No climate heaven or utopia would be complete without its nemesis or climate hell, complete with its own set of demons. Again, demons whose desire and aim it is to tempt you to with cars and air conditioning. The fossil fuel demons are oil and mining. Particularly coal, aka, Big Oil and Big Coal. Worth noting that just as Satan inhabits the bowels of the earth that that is from where we extract coal and oil. Is there a link?
If you’re a scientist or a lay person or talk radio presenter who questions the climate orthodoxy or the climate hypothesis you are evil and are one of his minions, doing the work of Satan.
Messiahs and Saints —- The climate cult has them too. Think, Messiah, Al Gore and Saint, Tim Flannery as examples.
Crusades — Most definitely. After all what good is a religion without crusaders to promote, promulgate and inculcate the gospel.
The entire, global education departments from kindergarten through to university, the political class and as we read last week, the corporate boardrooms, are all crusaders for the cause along with sundry NGO’s and QANGOS and the likes of GetUp and others.
The Crusades in the name of the religion of climate are everywhere. Subtle and not so subtle and all pervasive. Corporations and individuals are forever virtue signalling and burnishing their climate credentials and alerting us to their environmental awareness with their climate symbolism and iconography. AGL “were gettin’ outa coal” and BP with their environmental green livery are just two examples. All self respecting businesses and brands promote and market themselves and their a products as being “environmentally friendly” as they labour the point about their carbon footprint in an endeavour to invoke feelings of anxiety and guilt on the rest of us.