Religion Turns Green

It’s remarkable how you can do more and more things online. Paying bills, for example, can be “paperless.” With the stroke of a few computer keys, you can pay all your bills without the use of mail, paper or pens.

The self-consciously “green” love to brag about how they’re going paperless. But what made this possible: The righteous condemnation of capitalism and profit spawned by the “green” movement? Or did capitalism itself make it possible?

Remember that the Internet as we know it did not come about because of a government directive or a National Technology Board who decided it would be so. Nobody who works in the government would ever show such creativity, and no politically motivated body would ever care about financial profit. Politicians only care about the “profit” of naked power. It’s sad, it’s infuriating, but it’s also a little humorous to watch educated people go through their lives with an air of sophistication and self-satisfaction for being “green” when, in fact, the very things that made that “greenery” possible or meaningful are the very things that whole ideology condemns at the core: capitalism.

If the green movement had its way, government would so heavily tax and restrict the use of all human energy that it would no longer be possible to worry about being “green.” Instead, mass numbers of people would revert to earlier, more primitive human concerns: Warmth, shelter and survival. If the government outlawed or (in effect the same thing) made energy use too expensive for many to enjoy, as with the Obama-supported cap and trade bill, we would soon revert to a far less comfortable time than the advocates of environmentalism enjoy. The fact that the vast majority of Americans, including the self-important and liberal “green” types, go about the business of filling their gas tanks, expecting and demanding reasonably priced heat and electricity, turning on air conditioners when it’s 100 degrees (or even 80 degrees) outside, and gladly flying on airplanes to reach their destinations quicker — all of this makes me smile at the irony of people who do the very opposite things from what the ideology they so fondly support tells them to do.

It’s a confession not only of their hypocrisy and pseudo-sophisticated ignorance, but also of their horrific and unexpressed self-hatred. “Please, please don’t hate me for living in a comfortable and sane, civilized world when I deserve no such thing. Here, look at me — I watched Al Gore’s movie and I’m green. Please like me!” Perhaps this is why liberals, including ‘green’ ones, become so hostile and indignant at the suggestion that anyone would dare disagree with them, or not see the world in quite the way they do. It rocks their whole fragile self-image to the core.

I have heard environmentalism and the ‘green’ movement described as ‘urban religion’ and I agree. Not all of it occurs in cities, so my preferred term is: ‘Liberal religion.’ One does not have to be a fan of old-time fundamentalist Christian religion in order to oppose liberal religion. In fact, they’re two sides of the same coin. If anything, liberal religion is even worse because it purports to be based on science, fact and reason, when in fact it’s all based on wishes, feelings and large-scale hypocrisy.

A traditionally religious person will say, ‘The sun is out today. It’s my wedding day. God loves me.’ The rational person will ask, ‘But what about the good people on whose wedding day it rained? Does God not love them?’ No answer is given. Likewise, the liberal person looks at the weather report and notices that it’s a higher than average temperature today. ‘See?’ the liberal green religionist will say. ‘That’s proof of global warming.’ To which the rational person will ask, ‘But what about last winter? There was record cold and record snow. Is that proof of global cooling?’ No answer is given. I make no distinction between the madness of the traditionally religious fool and the madness of the contemporary religious fool. It’s all foolishness.

This is why the environmentalist movement has won many battles and, even with the new Republican Congress, will win some more as Obama goes to town using the EPA (an agency created by the “conservative Republican” Richard Nixon back in the 1970s, by the way) to impose energy taxes and restrictions on the population. In the end, human beings (aside from a few genuinely suicidal ones) are all the same. They don’t want to go backwards. Sadly, the majority of them will support, flirt with, or skim the surface of ideologies that would return all of us to the stone age in a matter of a decade, if we allowed it — whether those ideologies are based on religion or socialism, which is nothing more than secularized religion.

In the end, people need and want to be comfortable, to thrive and survive. When push comes to shove, they’ll reject the ideology of environmentalism, in practice, as much as they scream “I’m green!” in the process.