In 2011, then-Czech President Vaclav Klaus noted:
“I’m convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon, global warming is not the real issue of temperature,” said Klaus, an economist by training. “That is the issue of a new ideology or a new religion. A religion of climate change or a religion of global warming. This is a religion which tells us that the people are responsible for the current, very small increase in temperatures. And they should be punished.”
Or at least made to confess!
As Jim Treacher writes: It’s a Cult: NBC News Wants You to Confess Your Climate Sins.
Do you ever get the feeling that climate change is a cult? Does it ever seem like its adherents are immune to reason as they vindictively lash out at anyone who questions their beliefs? Wouldn’t it be nice if they just left you alone and let you live your life?
Well, too bad. You live in 2019 and you use modern technology and conveniences. You eat food that actually tastes good. You’re guilty and you need to confess. Repent, sinner!
Treacher adds, “I submitted my own confession: ‘I work in an air-conditioned newsroom at NBC.’ They haven’t published it yet, but I feel better already.” Heh, indeed.™
Elsewhere at the intersection of confession and Gaia, ‘Absolute theological bankruptcy:’ NYC’s Union Theological Seminary students pray to plants:
“We are in the throes of a climate emergency, a crisis created by humanity’s arrogance, our disregard for Creation,” the statement continued. “Far too often, we see the natural world only as resources to be extracted for our use, not divinely created in their own right—worthy of honor, thanks and care. We need to unlearn habits of sin and death. And part of that work must be building new bridges to the natural world. And that means creating new spiritual and intellectual frameworks by which we understand and relate to the plants and animals with whom we share the planet.”
Encouraging churches to turn from “theologies that encourage humans to dominate and master the Earth have played a deplorable role in degrading God’s creation,” Union asserted that “we must birth new theology, new liturgy to heal and sow, replacing ones that reap and destroy.”
Read on for a pointed take on Union Seminary from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who taught there briefly in 1939 before returning to Germany to fight the Nazis, to discover that very little has changed at the Seminary since Bonhoeffer’s stay. Curiously, while both NBC and Union Seminary appear to be reading Ayn Rand’s The Return of the Primitive as a how to guide for life, neither organization is in any hurry to give up their own television broadcasting facilities and iPhones, respectively, and, as Treacher referenced, their air conditioning.
And finally, an exit question from Steve Hayward at Power Line that might explain both of the above stories, as well as the article we’ve mentioned several times here in the past week on New York’s increasingly insane education system by George Packer of the Atlantic: Does the Left Suffer from ODS (Obama Disappointment Syndrome)?
(Classical reference in headline.)
h/t ED